Percy Shelly Flashcards
Poet of “Mutability”?
Percy Shelley
Year “Mutability” Published?
1816
Genre of “Mutability”
Lyric
“Mutability” Base Meter
Iambic Pentameter
What does mutability mean?
it means to change
What is mutable in “Mutability”?
the human mind / a thought we have no control over can cause/draw away our focus and happiness
What different things does Shelly compare humans to in “Mutability”?
compares people to restless clouds. Clouds speed brightly across the sky but disappear at night, presumably like a human life. The persona then compares people to lyres, stringed instruments, that are always playing different tunes based on different experiences
What is the eternal human condition in “Mutability”?
eternal human condition of change, in other words, to be mutable. This is both a natural condition, such as the clouds that are one minute here and the next minute there, “restlessly speeding, gleaming, quivering, and streaking across the dark night” only to be soon thereafter “lost for ever,” on the one hand, and a human-caused phenomenon, such as a lyre, “whose strings give a various response to various blasts” and on which no new “modulation sounds like the last.” The point is that all things, natural or created, are always changing. Nothing is constant.
Poet of “Ode to the West Wind”?
Percy Shelley
Year “Ode to the West Wind” Published?
1820
Genre of “Ode to the West Wind”
calls itself an Ode but doesn’t have an irregular form / also a sonnet cycle/invocation
“Ode to the West Wind” base meter
iambic pentameter - some pentameter lines have an extra syllable
What does “Ode to the West Wind” suggest about nature?
Shelley draws a parallel between the seasonal cycles of the wind and that of his ever-changing spirit. Here, nature, in the form of the wind, is presented, according to Abrams “as the outer correspondent to an inner change from apathy to spiritual vitality, and from imaginative sterility to a burst of creative power.”
Thematically, then, this poem is about the inspiration Shelley draws from nature.
Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination
What does “Ode to the West Wind” suggest about religion?
The “breath of autumn being” is Shelley’s atheistic version of the Christian Holy Spirit. Instead of relying on traditional religion, Shelley focuses his praise around the wind’s role in the various cycles in nature—death, regeneration, “preservation,” and “destruction.”
What is Shelly asking of the wind in “Ode to the West WInd”?
it’s a prayer, but he’s addressing the West Wind - asking for inspiration to write poetry
The thematic implication of nature in “Ode to the West Wind”?
The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.
Poet of “Mont Blanc”?
Percy Shelly
Year “Mont Blanc” Published?
1817
Genre of “Mont Blanc”
Irregular Ode
“Mont Blanc” Base meter
Iambic pentameter
What is Shelly comparing in “Mont Blanc”?
the power of the mountain against the power of the human imagination
Summary of “Mont Blanc”
In five stanzas, a first-person poetic persona addresses the mountain in its sublime majesty. In the first stanza, he considers “the everlasting universe of things” that he infers from observing nature. Human thought in comparison is feeble, gaining its splendor from the natural world that it thinks about. The second stanza focuses on the mountain itself, with its crags, trees, and ice, but together something huge and sublime; it is dizzying, too big even for independent thought to capture it. The feeling that he cannot comprehend it all continues; as he works to take it all in, the serene mountain awaits, unmoved. He is tempted to resort to mythology but realizes that nature is too strong for that, for merely human things. The wise see nature’s reality. In the fourth stanza, he expands past the mountain to more of the natural world, which persists long past any human life; we do not have access to that raw immortality. Nature’s power, or the mountain’s, is like an unstoppable glacier. In the last stanza, he turns his eyes back to the mountain’s features, finally concluding that the spirit of nature is in the mountain, which finally teaches him that knowing such things fills his mind with a welcome, silent solitude.
What does Shelly suggest is the relationship between the human mind and the universe in “Mont Blanc”?
the poem discusses the influence of perception on the mind, and how the world can become a reflection of the operation of the mind. Although Shelley believed that the human mind should be free of restraints, he also recognised that nothing in the universe is truly free; he believed that there is a force in the universe to which the human mind is connected and by which it is influenced. Unlike Coleridge, Shelley believed that poets are the source of authority in the world, and unlike Wordsworth, believed that there was a darker side of nature that is an inherent part of a cyclical process of the universe
What does the mountain represent in “Mont Blanc”?
the poet’s relationship with history. The poet is privileged because he can understand the truth found in nature, and the poet is then able to use this truth to guide humanity. The poet interprets the mountain’s “voice” and relays nature’s truth through his poetry. The poet, in putting faith in the truth that he has received, has earned a place among nature and been given the right to speak on this truth.
Poet of “Adonaise”?
Percy Shelley
Year “Adonaise” Published?
1821
Genre of “Adonaise”
Pastoral Elegy
What is significant of a Pastoral Elegy?
Shelley is deeply versed in this genre / An elegy is intended to mourn someone who has passed - a formal and sustained lament / Pastoral elegy represents the poet and one he mourns as shepherds - developed set of elaborate conventions - border on ridiculous - he picks this style because it gives him ability to create grandeur - allows him to build up emotions throughout poem -it may seem strange that Shelley should choose to lament Keats death in such an artificial and constrained format as the pastoral requires. If his feelings of grief were genuine, one might ask, why not have expressed them in plain, or at least far less contrived terms. The pastoral allows the poet to exercise, nevertheless, the option of poeticizing the event. From that perspective, Shelley, who was quite capable of using a wide range of poetic styles and expression, was first of all doing his fellow poet a high honour by eulogizing him in a structure unique to poetic discourse
“Adonaise” Base Meter
Spenserian stanza: Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single ‘alexandrine’ line in iambic hexameter
Who did Percy Shelley write “Adonaise” for?
John Keats after his death
What does Shelley mean by “Nought we know, dies” in stanza 20? and what does die?
Nothing dies he says and we know that, he is talking about the circle of life - nothing we know dies, it just recycles / what does die is the human mind
What metaphor does Shelley use in “Adonaise” about the living and dead?
“We decay like corpses in a charnel house” (tenor = living / vehicle = bodies in charnel house) We are decaying like the dead and like the dead have worms consuming them, we have our loss of hope and concerns eating us up
Who does Shelley blame for the death of Keats in “Adonaise”?
Shelley blames Keats’ death on literary criticism that was recently published (see lines 150-53; he was unaware that Keats was suffering from tuberculosis). He scorns the weakness and cowardice of the critic compared with the poet, echoing his famous essay providing “A Defense of Poetry.”
When and how does the speakers spirit change in “Adonaise”?
In stanza forty-one, the poem takes a major shift. The narrator begins to rejoice, becoming aware that the young Adonis is alive (in spirit) and will live on forever. We see the Romantic notion that he is now “one with nature,” and just as other young poets who have died (Shelley lists them), their spirits all live on in the inspiration we draw from their work and short lives. Even so, Keats is a head above the rest. - You will remember Keats when looking at nature because he changed nature and our perception of it
Author of “A Defence of Poetry”
Percy Shelley
Year “A Defence of Poetry” Published
1840
Genre of “A Defence of Poetry”
Essay / Almost like a Prose Poem
“A Defence of Poetry” Base Meter
N/A
What does this essay say about imagination?
It says imagination brings unity / we actively adjust to find harmony - we create harmony through our imagination to create and make sense / Poetry is the imagination - able to take that crap and make something beautiful from it / imagination is the great instrument of moral good - allows sympathy / way poetry brings good is through imagination - not a matter of saying how to behave but enlarging sympathy
What is the function of poets in “A Defence of Poetry”
the poet is able to create pattern / poet uses metaphor to unify and connect different parts of the world / poets keep language alive through metaphor and creating new value and meanings / “poets … are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society…”
What does Shelley mean by comparing the poet to a nightingale in “A Defence of Poetry”
the nightingale doesn’t sing for us, sings for itself and we overhear it
What does Shelley believe poetry has the ability to do in “A Defence of Poetry”?
People are refined by works like Homer - attract attention and innate desire - come to want to imitate and become refined - same role is played by poet / trying to fight against idea that poetry should TEACH others how to obey / poetry defamiliarizes / way poetry BRINGS GOOD is through imagination creating sympathy /he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person
