Shelley’s Lyricism. Shelley’s genius was essentially lyrical, and he reigns supreme in the vast domain of lyricism. The lyrical mood predominates in all his works. His moods, impressions, thoughts and emotions embodied themselves naturally in verse. In lyric, as E.W. Edmunds remarks, Shelley is among the greatest poets of the world because of the purity at once of his melody and of its inspiration. his lyrics we find and abundance of rich music of the most exquisite tone. “Shelley’s lyricism,” says Prof. Cazamian, “is incomparable. In no other do we find the perfect sureness, the triumphant rapidity of this upward flight, this soaring height, the super terrestrial quality as well as the poignant intensity of the sounds which fall from these aerial regions. Truly never was the soul of a poet so spontaneously lyrical “ Everything with Shelley is the occasion for a musical stir, since his powers of feeling are the keenest attuned and most delicate of his age. The susceptibility of his physical and moral organism is such that his work bears throughout the diffused traces of a kind of psychological morbidness. The tone of Shelley’s poetry is not that of a voluptuous sensuality, but of a keen aspiration, in which mystical desire, with its anguished pangs and spiritual raptures, transcends the joys and sufferings of ordinary mankind. “Shelley remains, above all, a lyrical poet, the greatest that England or perhaps modern Europe has produced.” His influence on the poets of the succeeding generation was very great. Browning and Tennyson came strongly under his spell. Alastor, Epipsychidion, and Adonais are the longest and most elaborate of Shelley’s personal poems. In them he utters his deepest and most personal feelings as lyrically as in the Ode to the West Wind or the Lines Written in Dejection at Naples.
Word music as well as the music of sound are noted characteristics of Shelley’s verse. The subjective note or personal element– a description of personal feelings and emotions, joys and sorrows—- enters largely into his poetry. Shelley either blends wails of personal despair with some aspect or phenomenon of Nature, or colours Nature with his own mood of joy or sorrow. A good example is the Ode to the West wind. His total identification of self with the thing he describes is a unique feature of his lyricism. Here also the Ode to the West Wind is a good example:-
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit ! Be thou me. impetuous one!
As Stopford Brooke writes : “He passes from magnificent union of himself with nature and magnificent realisation of her storm and peace to equally great self-description, and he mingles all nature and all himself together, that he may sing of the restoration of mankind- Shelley’s love-lyrics portray a variety of moods and emotions. But running through them all is the note of ideality– the pain of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire, the craving for a relation that should satisfy the highest needs of human nature and a spirit of self- immersion and self-effacement. Unity of thought and emotion which is an essential condition of a good lyric is perfectly achieved by Shelley. Spontaneity of utterance marks all his verse. In none of his poems is there any sign of strain or effort. He sings ‘in profuse .strains of unpremeditated art,’ and this is why he is called the most poetical of poets.”
Shelley holds a very high place in lyric poetry. In lyric, he is among the greatest of the world, because of the purity at once of his melody and of its inspiration. Whatever art he brought to bear upon his poems, he never allowed it to descend into artifice; he sang the truth as he saw it and felt it, with a sincerity quite unsurpassed; and when the chaff has been winnowed from the grain in his works, there remains an abundance of rich music of the most exquisite tone, according to E.W. Edmunds.
“Lyrical poetry is, in the main, the expression of personal mood or feeling, and the essential qualities of mind of a writer of lyrical poetry are extreme sensitiveness, great emotional and imaginative power. Shelley possessed each of these qualities in an unusual degree,” says Newton.
Clutton-Brock has pointed out that movement is his chief means of expression and even of representation. No poet has succeeded so perfectly in welding music and thought- of
synchronizing, as it were, the vibrations of rhythm and emotion. His lyrics are also marked by spontaneity and ease. No praise would be excessive for the ecstasy of feeling, the lightness and grace, the felicity of phrase, the glorious melody, and the verbal magic of such poems, for example, as To a Skylark, The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, the Ode to the West Wind, and Lament.
Stopford A. Brooke says that some of the lyrics are purely personal; some, as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle together personal feeling and prophetic hope for mankind. Some are lyrics of pure nature; some are dedicated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty (Ode to Liberty); others are belong to the indefinite passion he called love, and others are written on visions of these “shapes that haunt Thought’s wildernesses.” They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible, lyrical poetry we possess. “Shelley’s love-lyrics are often of elusive kind, and are generally sad. ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou,’ and ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight, and’ O World ! 0 Life ! 0 Time !‘ are perhaps the extreme expressions of his temper.”
“By far the greater number of Shelley’s lyrics express some sadness : ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou Spirit of delight.’ ‘How am I changed my hopes were once like fire. The flowers that smiles today, tomorrow dies’ ‘Far, far away, 0 ye, ‘Halcyons of Memory” are typical poems. The poet sings his melancholy, making no attempt to discover why
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight.
Where so much is perfect expression, it is hard to choose, but perhaps the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples are the most beautiful rendering of this mood. Nature brings no peace to him, as she did to Wordsworth. The bright skies, blue isles, and snowy mountains but remind him that he has neither hope nor health,” nor peace within” “nor calm around.” It is the same situation in his other lyrics; the wind “moans for the world’s wrong” the moan is a lady “sick and pale,” even the happy notes of the lark remind the poet that his own song cannot make the world listen. Love brings to him the bitterest disappointments. “Send the stars light, but send not love to me,” is his prayer.
I would not be a thing- enough
Of we it is to love;
he sings, and the thought of many poems is compressed in the lyric ‘When the lamp is shattered.’ The most ethereal of English poets, he loves to write of the heavens, of light in all its forms, and of the flowers. Shelley makes nature ghostly: it is a spirit that he seeks behind the cloud and the rain .The Skylark illustrates aptly this point; the poet’s spirit pours itself out in stanza after stanza all illustrating one idea; the bird is likened to a poet, a maiden in her bower, a glow worm, and a rose The Ode to the West Wind is perhaps the best of all his lyrics. Though his melancholy appears here also, the song ends in an unusually hopeful strain. “Exquisite in its imagery, emotional, and yet restrained to an unusual degree, this is one of the treasures of English literature.” The rhythmical structure of the West Wind should be studied as a typical example of Shelley’s power to make the moment of verse embody its mood. In this ode, the impetuous sweep and tireless overflow of the terzarima, ending after each twelfth line in a couplet, suggest with wonderful truth the streaming and volleying of the wind, interrupted now and then by a sudden full. Likewise in The Skylark, the fluttering lift of the bird’s movement, the airy ecstasy and rippling gush of its song, are mirrored in the rhythm in a thousand subtly varying effects. And such a poem as To Night (“Swiftly walk over the western wave”) marks perhaps the extreme limit of the romantic divergence from eighteenth century strictness of form; but it obeys higher law than that off regularity, and with all its way wardness it is as perfect in shape as a flower, as Dr. Reed points out.
George Saintsbury observes : “What the subject was mattered very little (to Shelley); extravagantly revolutionary ideas in politics religion, and morals, dramas, songs, and mystical adaptations of classical myths—all turn to a glorious effect of poetry, often indistinctly outlined, but always bathed in splendid hazes of light and colour…
“If there is any drawback to this characteristic (of unsubstantiality), which certainly makes Shelley, like Spenser, rather a poet’s poet and lover’s poet than one for the average person, it must necessarily show less in short lyrics, where solid substance is not expected, And few competent critics deny that, taking volume and quality together, Shelley is the greatest lyric poet in English, if not in the world’s literature, But even his wife complained of a certain want of human interest’ in some of his work.
Shairp avers: “Other lyric poet sing of what they feel Shelley in his lyrics sings of what he wants to feel. The thrills of desire, the gushes of emotion, are all straining after something seen after but unattained, something distant or future; or they are wails of passionate despair, utter despondency for something hopelessly gone. Yet it must be owned that those bursts of passionate desire after ideal beauty set our pulses a throbbing with a strange vibration, even when we do not really sympathize with them. Even his desolate wails make those for a moment seem to share his despair who do not really share it. Such is the charm of his impassioned eloquence, and the witchery of his music.”
