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ABSTRACT
This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.
Notes
Except where otherwise stated, quotations are taken from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), with line numbers cited parenthetically in the text. Quotations from manuscripts in the Bodleian Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the Morgan Library and Museum are given here by kind permission. Pagination of facsimile editions of these manuscripts is given parenthetically (BSM and MYR). Shelley’s idiosyncratic spelling and ampersands are preserved, as is British spelling in quotations from British publications.
1. Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, January 11, 1822, Letters, vol. 2, 374.
2. Quoted in Blind, “Portraits in Words—XXVII,” 196–97.
3. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (3.3.150–51). Trelawny, as reported by Blind, claims that Shelley behaved as though hearing the lines for the first time, but Shelley had vacillated between writing a play on Troilus and Cressida and one on Charles I during the latter part of 1821. He opted for Charles I. The second scene of the resulting fragment, “Charles the First,” drafted entirely during January 1822, contains speeches reminiscent of passages of Troilus and Cressida.
4. OED 3, jingle, v. 3 a and b.
5. A quick search in the union catalogue COPAC for books with jingles in the title between 1800 and 1850 turns up several printings of Jingles, or, Original rhymes for children, edited by Mary Pelham, pseud. of Sir Richard Phillips (1806); Nursery Jingles, or Rhymes for the Young (ca. 1818–21); London Jingles and Country Tales for Young People (ca. 1820); Nursery Rhymes, Tales, and Jingles (1844). <https://copac.jisc.ac.uk/search>. Accessed October 11, 2018.
6. Swift, Works, vol. 9, 400.
7. Shelley to Thomas Medwin, April 16, 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 183–84.
8. Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 6, p. 152, written reverso (BSM, vol. 5, 316–17).
9. Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 64r (BSM, vol. 21, 19).
10. Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4, f. 46r (BSM, vol. 3, 184–85); text from Shelley, Poems, vol. 2, 354–61.
11. This is not the only purpose of Spenserisms in Shelley. In “Letter to Maria Gisborne” they establish a tone of friendly intimacy between equals with shared tastes in reading.
12. Text from Shelley, Complete Poetry, vol. 3, 326; hereafter CPPBS.
13. Hogg, Life of Shelley, vol. 1, 19.
14. Shelley, Poetry and Prose cites OED, “want” sb 1 and Curt R. Zimansky (371n). But the dialect sense seems to have been more common in the west of England than the south.
15. Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library (Pfz Shelleyana 1082).
16. Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 29–30.
17. Dibdin, English Fleet, 40; Anon., Hive of Harmony, 35.
18. Pointed out in Shelley, Poems, vol. 4, 84.
19. Anon., Mother Goose’s Melody (1817), 14.
20. Text transcribed by me from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, p. 200 (BSM, vol. 14, 208–9). It slightly differs from the received text. In “Shelley’s ‘Dirge for the Year’,” Irving Massey gives an acute account of counter-currents in the poem.
21. Pointed out to me by Michael J. Neth.
22. The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829), a respectable, carefully produced edition, although pirated. It contains the first collected edition of Keats. “The Months” was published in Sara Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons in Verse (1834; 1839).
23. Barker, Flower Fairies of the Autumn (1926), n. pag. Her “Flower Fairy” children’s books (still in print) consist of botanically faithful watercolors of British flowering or fruiting plants, each with its fairy, and a poem on the facing page. The Shelleyan influence apparent in some of the verse of Barker (1895–1973), a devout Anglican Christian and artist-writer in the tradition of Kate Greenaway, testifies to the pervasiveness of Shelley’s lyrics within the reading canon of bookish middle-class children of her generation, but also, perhaps, to the fact that Shelley himself wrote fairy poetry, such as “I am drunk with the honey wine” (1818) and “Ye goblins black” (1822), and sang in the persona of Shakespeare’s Ariel in “With a Guitar. To Jane.” (also 1822).
24. “Lattice to Let” (1921), republished in Life from the New York Tribune over the name of C. L. Edson, journalist, poet, and member of the Lotos Club; also said to have been written by the vaudeville actor and songwriter Frank Crumit for the young Broadway star, Lotus Robb. Crumit wrote “The Prune Song” (“No Matter How Young a Prune May Be, It’s Always Full of Wrinkles”) (1928).
25. Shelley, Poetical Works, 2d ed., 320; Shelley, Relics of Shelley, 80.
26. See, e.g., “A hater he came and sat by a ditch.” “It seems that Hunt and Shelley were talking one day (probably in or about 1817) concerning Love-Songs; and Shelley said that he didn’t see why Hate-Songs also should not be written, and that he could do them; and on the spot he improvised these lines of doggrel [sic]”; Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Rossetti, vol. 2, 532, 602. Other impromptus include “What Mary is when she a little smiles” (1815), “On her hind paws the Dormouse stood” (1815), and “Now Heaven neglected is by Man” (1818), all in the Longman edition (Shelley, Poems).
27. Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, p. 185 (BSM, vol. 18, 222–23).
28. Bodleian MS Shelley e. 4, f. 47v (BSM, vol. 3, 190–91). The rhyming dictionary in Trusler’s Distinction (1783) lists folly, Polly, jolly, colly, Dolly, holly and volley as rhymes for melancholy.
29. Bodleian MS. Shelley d. 1, f. 104v (BSM, vol. 4, Part 2, 20–21).
30. Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc,” 47–48.
31. See Michael O’Neill’s discussion of the veil/evil anagram, actual and implied, in Prometheus Unbound, especially 3.3.62: “veil by veil, error and evil fall” (All-Sustaining Air, 113).
32. Anon., comp., Temple of Fancy, 16.
33. The riddle was one of a series of exercises testing understanding of basic climatology. I have forgotten the textbook’s name (and the other non-poetic exercises).
34. My text, from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 7 (BSM, vol. 2, 196–99), with some accidentals taken from Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824). Admittedly, to call this an enigma is a little tendentious, since Mary Shelley edited it from what was evidently a very rough draft, now lost, and the integrity of the text is not completely secure. The Longman editor suggests that the stanzas might be differently arranged (Shelley, Poems, vol. 3, 218–19). Nevertheless, it is hard to see how Mary Shelley’s ordering of the material, as it survives, could be improved on.
35. Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 3, 135, 299.
36. Desmond King-Hele considered the meter the “weakest feature” of “The Sensitive Plant” and cited A. Clutton-Brock and Robert Bridges in support (Shelley: His Thought and Work, 233). I am among those who disagree, and consider not only that the meter is perfectly adapted to Shelley’s purposes but also that its handling is a tour de force.
37. “The Inchcape Rock” was first published in the Morning Post in October 1803, and collected, along with “God’s Judgment on a Bishop,” in Southey’s Minor Poems (1815). See Southey, Letters #1341 n. 5 (July 1807). http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.1341.html. Accessed October 11, 2018.
38. Quarterly Review 21 (April 1819): 471.
39. Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 1 May 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 191.
40. Text from Shelley, Poems, vol. 3, 278–80.
41. Newton and Cowper, Olney Hymns, 146.
42. Keach, “Rise Like Lions?”; http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj75/keach.htm.
43. Cameron, Shelley, 343.
44. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 195–96.
45. Boyle, “Shelley and Newspapers,” 74.
46. Galignani’s Messenger, 23 August 1819, 3–4.
47. Boyle, “Shelley and Newspapers,” 75.
48. All examples from Fuller, Gnomologia (1732; new ed. 1816), unpaginated.
49. MS. Pierpont Morgan MA 408, f. 9v. Substantively identical to the version in Halliwell’s 1842 collection, Nursery Rhymes of England.
50. Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 15, p. 23 (BSM, vol. 7, 50–51); “J——” is almost certainly Joshua.
51. Deuteronomy 12:3: “ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.” Daniel 4:14: “Hew down the tree, and cut off his branches, shake off his leaves, and scatter his fruit.”
52. Shelley, Notebooks, vol. 1, 170.
53. My transcription from Huntington MS. HM 2176 f. 7v rev. (MYR, vol. 6, 352–53).
54. Shelley, Poems, vol. 3, 192–93.
55. Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 12, p. 63 (BSM, vol. 18, 88–89).
56. My reading text, derived from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 37r (BSM, vol. 1, 208–9).
57. Curran, Life of Curran, vol. 1, 210n–12n.
58. Thomson, Original Irish Airs, 24–26.
59. Beethoven’s arrangements are currently (2018) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR5iS71vK4M; “If sadly thinking” is also included in Charles Phillips’s Recollections of Curran, 23.
60. Byron imitated Curran’s verses in Stanzas (“Could Love for ever”), but “Time is flying” is closer to Curran than to Byron. There is no evidence that Shelley ever saw “Could Love for ever,” which, although composed in 1819, was not published until 1832 (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 4, 506).
61. Shelley to John Gisborne, Letters, vol. 2, 435–36.
62. The sense of being at a risky crossroads emerges even more strongly from “Time is flying” if, as I conjecture in the forthcoming vol. 7 of CPPBS, the poem was provisionally completed by a jotting on the last page of the “Triumph of Life” MS, marked with a small cross: “Alas I kiss you Jane.” (Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 52v; BSM, vol. 1, 268–69).
63. “To Wordsworth” (pub. 1816), 12.
64. H. Buxton Forman glossed this (1877) as “Peter made songs, not that were sweet to all the land, but that were simply sweet,—sweet to the heart and understanding,—sweet as late pipkins to a mountain Cotter,—and that these songs were for all the land” (Forman, Shelley’s Poetical Works, vol. 3, 208). He rightly distinguished between the inclusivity of Peter’s songs and the actual audience for them, but may have misread “pipkins late” (jugs that Peter had formerly made) as “late pippins” (late season apples).
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Nora Crook
Nora Crook, Jamaican by birth and upbringing, is a graduate of Cambridge University and Professor Emerita of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She has published widely on Romantic Period subjects. She is general editor of the novels and miscellaneous writings of Mary Shelley (1996, 2002), and has edited two of Shelley’s draft notebooks (one with Timothy Webb) for the Garland series Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (1986–1997; general editor, Donald H. Reiman). She received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America in 2006. Currently, she is co-general editor of the Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (3 volumes published of 8 planned), with special responsibility for volumes 7 and 8, containing Shelley’s posthumously published poetical writings.