Red-Headed

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was born at Field Place, Sussex. Although energetic, imaginative & mischievous as a child he was eventually educated at Eton & Oxford. At Oxford he read radical authors such as Paine & Godwin & in March 1811 was summarily rusticated (expelled) for distributing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism with his friend T.J. Hogg. He was drowned in August 1822 when his small schooner the 'Ariel' sank in a squall. To her dying day Mary Shelley believed the design of the schooner was a flawed one & the Royal Navy were responsible in part for not making this known about the design of the class of boat, which was originally designed for the Admiralty & abandoned by it after only a short time. Many nautical experts are now of the opinion that the design was unstable in squalls & sudden storms. Although there is an argument for dwelling on his intellectual arrogance, abstraction & often nauseating self-pity, Shelley was an incredibly original & imaginative writer. His hatred of injustice & oppression are evident in much of his poetry. This is ably interspersed with an admirable intellectual courage & often wickedly mischievous sense of humour.

Ozymandius

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and depair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This poem was printed in The Examiner by Hunt in January 1818. He had recently finished work on at least a couple of his long narrative projects. It was written in 1817 however, after Shelley had been reading the Hymns of Homer & the Iliad. Mary Shelley noted that he seemed to have lost his eager spirit which, 'believed he could change things for the betterment of mankind', & had become rather contemplative. He seemed to find great solace in the classics. He did not excel in the sonnet as a form, possibly because of his temperament, which seemed to dislike the discipline of imposed forms of any description. The sonnet itself has been criticised by many as not being totally successful as a poem, but it is possibly one of the most famous of any of his works. I think that its brilliance as a poem is in the fact that he presents the irony of the statue of the famous king (Ramses II) instead of taking an ironical tone in the narrative itself. And because of this I think we can overlook such tautological phrases as 'the decay of that colossal wreck'. It is in essence an Italian sonnet but with an odd almost unique rhyme scheme.


Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. He is considered to be one of the most important & influential of Russian poets & writers. In fact many Russians believe that their literature did not start until Pushkin. Not unlike Shakespeare in England he set a standard of beauty in the Russian language that has never been surpassed. After a brief flirtation with the pre-Decembrist revolutionaries in 1820 he was exiled in disgrace. With the failure of the Decembrist’s uprising in 1825 & the succession of a new Tsar he gained his freedom. He was married to a young society beauty in 1831. The marriage was not a happy one & his wife shared little of his artistic & intellectual talents or interests. She loved fashionable society & the intrigues of the Imperial Court. Pushkin could ill afford this way of life & many courtiers looked down on him because of his less than prestigious background. Many of his contemporaries were jealous of his genius & started a vile campaign to slander him. This culminated with a vitriolic attack by the Baron Georges d’Anthes, a French royalist in the Russian service, who suggested rumours of an improper liaison between the Tsar & Pushkin’s wife. Duty bound to defend her honour he fought a duel with the aforementioned Baron. Fatally wounded Pushkin died on the 29th of January 1837. His death was mourned throughout Russia as a national disaster.

The Pushkinian sonnet was used by him in his allegorical narrative poem Eugene Onegin. Each stanza was comprised of a sonnet with an ABABCCDDEFFEGG rhyme scheme. Each line has 4 iambic feet (8 syllables) & to cap it all lines 1, 3, 5, 6, 9 & 12 have feminine rhymes the rest being masculine. The iambic tetrameter sounds odd to English speaker’s ears.

Verse one, Chapter five

That year the season was belated
and autumn lingered, long and slow;
expecting winter, nature waited -
only in January the snow,
night of the second, started flaking.
Next day Tatyana, early waking,
saw through the window, morning-bright,
roofs, flowerbeds, fences, all in white,
panes patterned by the finest printer,
with trees decked in their silvery kit,
and jolly magpies on the flit,
and hills that delicately winter
had with its brilliant mantle crowned -
and glittering whiteness all around.


The peculiar sonnet/stanza form employed by Pushkin (this particular one from chapter five of Eugene Onegin) was possibly developed by the author by the influence of the contes of La Fontaine who had influenced so many other Russian poets. Notice that even in translation this sonnet is punctuated almost like a prose piece & has a predictable advance in flow & scan. If you read carefully you will notice a spin or eddy type effect mid-way through the piece before its inevitable conclusion. This was compared by the Russian writer Vladimir Nabakov with the effect that a painted spinning ball or top has. It certainly gives the sonnet a strange almost psychedelic feel.


Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94) was the sister of D.G. & W.M. Rossetti. She shared many of her brother's intellectual & literary interests from a very early age. Unfortunately ill health (which later developed severely) ended her career as a governess. Her engagement to one of the original Pre-Raphaelite painters, James Collinson, ended in 1850 when he rejoined the Catholic Church. Her devout High Anglicanism, which bordered on Tractarianism, was a large contributing factor to this event. Her work ranges from fantasy to ballads, sonnets & religious poetry. In fact she wrote many religious sonnets in later life. She has often been compared to Emily Bronte for her sense of melancholy which could sometimes border on morbidity. She was a favourite of Queen Victoria & would have certainly been the first female Poet Laureate after the death of Tennyson. This would have set an important precedent. Unfortunately she developed a fatal cancer in 1891 with which she succumbed to three years later. Of the seven Poet's Laureate that have followed Alfred Lord Tennyson, none have been women*.

**Carol Anne Duffy, CBE, FRSL, succeeded Andrew Motion as poet laureate on the First of May 2009.

After Death

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
'Poor child, poor child:' and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.




Bibliography:

William Shakespeare: Anthony Holden, Little Brown & Company, 1999.
Shakespeare: Ivor Brown, Collins, 1951.
The Sonnets: William Shakespeare, Everyman, 1991.
Shelley's Poetical Works: OUP, 1940.
The Critical Sense: Prose & Poetry; James Reeves, HEB, 1991.
The Metaphysical Poets: Ed, Helen Gardener, Penguin Classics, 1986.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature: Ed, M Drabble, OUP.
Nihilists: Ronald Hingley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.
Eugene Onegin: Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston, Penguin Classics, 1979.
The Romantics on Shakespeare: Ed; Jonathan Bate, New Penguin Shakespeare library, 1992.