In each poem he recalls in quasi-religious terms, and with important variations, a conversion experience of dramatic suddenness and intensity which condenses the decisive change of direction that he described in his letters to Godwin in early 1812: from the life of privilege into which he had been born, and its accompanying restrictions, to an existence dedicated to free enquiry and general justice.

But the pre-eminent theme of his autobiographical narratives and lyrics is the quest for love. In exploring the – sometimes highly charged, entangled and painfully fraught – personal experiences that define its course, he represents himself both directly in the first person and in various fictional guises. The latter include the tragic figures of the revolutionary Laon in Laon and Cythna, the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo and the doomed patriot and lover Lionel in Rosalind and Helen (1818). The personal lyrics, many never intended for publication, include those addressed to his first wife, Harriet, in which love is invoked as incitement to virtue; those written to Mary in which love is the condition of mutual creative endeavour; the playful and flirtatious songs composed or recycled for Sophia Stacey (for whom see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’); the passionate exaltation of Epipsychidion; the late lyrics taking Shelley’s troubled attachment to Jane Williams as their subject; and those like ‘On a Dead Violet: To —–’ or ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’, which frankly confront love’s exhaustion and death. A technically accomplished and deeply unsettling example of this engagement with love’s extinction is ‘Time Long Past’, one of three poems that Shelley inscribed in a pocket diary which he presented to Sophia Stacey on her departure from Florence for Rome at the end of December 1819. A mordant recasting of a familiar theme from the lyric repertoire, regret for the passing of a love that was too delightful to endure, these plangent verses (see also here) are a tour de force of lyric craftsmanship.

Time Long Past

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead

         Is Time long past.

A tone which is now forever fled,

A hope, which is now forever past,

A love, so sweet it could not last

         Was Time long past.

There were sweet dreams in the night

         Of Time long past;

And, was it sadness or delight,

Each day a shadow onward cast

Which made us wish it yet might last—

         That Time long past.

There is regret, almost remorse

         For Time long past.

’Tis like a child’s beloved corse

A father watches, till at last

Beauty is like remembrance, cast

         From Time long past.

A close reading of the three stanzas underscores the truth of Wordsworth’s assertion – in a consideration of major contemporary poets, including Thomas Moore, Walter Scott and Byron – that ‘Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style’.41 The eighteen lines count only four rhymes, the title itself occurring six times in the body of the lyric, each occurrence subtly individualized by the addition of a single monosyllabic word. The strict economy of means and the formal patterning rein in the familiar conversational quality of both language and syntax by, as it were, compulsive returns to the three emphatic stresses of the title. Rhetorically, each stanza consists of two statements, both concluding with a variation on the title, the first expressing prosaically, and without strict adherence to any prosodic scheme, a condition for which ‘time long past’ functions simply as a temporal adverb; the second, rhythmically varied in each case, also leads back to the title-phrase, which echoes all previous instances of itself and yet is both grammatically distinct and significantly distinguished in meaning from them. The bitter and shocking image of the dead child and grieving father in the third stanza cruelly realizes the ominous suggestions in the ‘dear friend dead’ and ‘shadow’ of stanzas 1 and 2, jarring with the conventional idiom of erotic complaint that has governed the poem till then by introducing a detail borrowed from Shelley’s personal life, the death of his three-year-old son, William, in June 1819. The sense of ‘remembrance’ in the penultimate line, an act of recollecting the dead, encompasses lost love and lost child as well as the process of memorializing them in the poem itself – an artful instance of carrying the tensions implicit in a traditional lyric topic to their limits and beyond, and of the power of lyric poetry at its best to create much from little. To read Shelley’s poems on erotic themes in broadly chronological order, together with the rapturous celebration of both individual and cosmic love in Acts III and IV of Prometheus Unbound, is to follow one of the most distinctive and absorbing sequences on love in English poetry.

The finely tuned verbal music and masterful versification which Wordsworth admired, and which complement the copiousness and variety of Shelley’s poetry, make an appropriate vehicle for the intensity and precision of his response to the things of the world. This ‘animation of delight’, in the phrase of the Earth regenerated by Love in Prometheus Unbound IV.322, is the expression of the sensual – at its highest pitch erotic – energy that quickens that response at its most memorable and characteristic. The resultant visionary quality of Shelley’s verse typically remains anchored to its source in natural experience. In The Witch of Atlas, to take the example of that ‘visionary rhyme’ (as Shelley describes it in line 8), the speaker interrupts the description of the hearth in the witch’s cavern to reflect on a neglected source of loveliness:

Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is—

   Each flame of it is as a precious stone

Dissolved in ever moving light, and this

   Belongs to each and all who gaze upon.

              (here)

The process of creative observation is unfolded before our eyes in a reciprocal movement from fire to gem and back again, from the fluidity of motion, to the brilliantly fixed, to dissolution – suggesting a perpetual negotiation between the flame and the jewel, between the natural and visionary planes of reality. One could hardly find a more appropriate guide to the creative reading of Shelley’s poems than this display of the discovery of a beauty that is open to all.

NOTES

For bibliographical details of the abbreviated references Letters, Poems, Complete Poetry, Prose Works and Prose, see Abbreviations.

1     William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 649–51 and Appendix 9.

2     Stephen Behrendt, ‘Shelley and His Publishers’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 83–97; Letters II, pp. 372, 387–8, 395.

3     Leigh Hunt, ‘Young Poets’, The Examiner (1 December 1816, 19 January 1817), in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) – hereafter Critical Heritage; Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

4     Reprinted with some modifications and additions as a note to Queen Mab, VII.13 (p. 94).

5     Letters I, p. 540, II, p. 326; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94), VI, p. 76.

6     Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. F.