Through Whose Lips

Percy Bysshe Shelley?s Ode to the West Wind is a poem about the power of the poetic/prophetic voice. It was written and published while Shelley was abroad in Italy. Because of his distance from London, Shelley was forced to relinquish some of his control over his poetry. When published, the poem was packaged with the play ?Prometheus Unbound,? along with eight other poems. It sold poorly. Scholars have attempted over the years to bridge the distance that Shelley could not. They have tried to discern Shelley?s original intentions, before they were obscured by the 1820 edition.

Percy Bysshe Shelley?s poem, ?Ode to the West Wind,? takes transmission seriously: its language often resembles to a call-to-arms directed at its audience. In the last quatrain of the poem, Shelley addresses the West Wind,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth.

I find that this poem is, in many instances, concerned with the transmission of the poet?s words to his audience. This passage merely typifies this. The metaphor of an ?unextinguish?d hearth? shooting ?ashes and sparks? initially seems a curious one; so, too does the verb, ?scatter,? seem an odd choice. As a result, the poet?s voice seems unconcerned with a systematic dispersal of his words to his audience. The voice sounds resigned to a transmission outside of its own control. And yet, the metaphor also emphasizes the ?fire? of the poet?s words. There is an inexorable quality inherent to the poem?s language, a definite faith that the poet?s words will reach mankind. This faith is justified by the fact that ?Ode to the West Wind? did reach mankind. As one Shelley biographer writes, Shelley?s poem ?Ode to the West Wind? has been memorized ?by a million schoolchildren.? However, as I will show, the poet?s audience was several steps removed. How did ?Ode to the West Wind? get out to its audience? This paper intends to detail its composition and publication history.

In many respects, the publication of ?Ode to the West Wind? is a story of distance broached, often ineffectively. The poem was published in England in 1820, and yet Shelley was abroad at the time; in fact, he had been abroad for several years. He left England, never to return, in March 1818. In addition, he and is family were constantly moving about the Continent, ?living variously at Milan, Leghorn, Venice, Rome, Naples, Leghorn again, Florence and Pisa.? News reached him slowly, and his poetry returned across the same distance just as slowly. In this state of isolation from the publication process, Shelley would produce ?such different works as ?Prometheus Unbound,? ?The Mask of Anarchy,? the ?Ode to the West Wind,? and ?A Philosophical View of Reform,? besides a number of minor tributary poems.? All of these were sent back to England to be published, a tortured process which required drafts to be sent back and forth by ship. Duncan Wu observes, ?most of his poems were printed incorrectly, often because, being out of England, he was unable to supervise their production.? This must have frustrated Shelley, but he seems to have learned to live with it. As Neil Fraistat notes, Shelley was ?ambivalent? about having his works pirated. This may have resulted from his relative impotence in the matter.

Beyond fears of poorly printed copies and pirated versions of his poetry, Shelley must have been acutely aware of the dangers of publishing. A British court ruled, in the years before he went abroad, ?that a man who had written ?Queen Mab? could not be a suitable father.? This poem was Shelley?s greatest success, and yet it also brought this upon him. In addition, the court reminded the poet of the possibility of being prosecuted for blasphemous libel. Yet, at the time Shelley was writing ?Ode to the West Wind,? he was also ?still having his work produced at his own expense.? In other words, in spite of the risks, he still considered publication important enough to fund it himself.

Shelley was writing in the midst of a swirl of concerns over the publication of his poetry. Shelley wrote the poem in late October in 1819. This was a little over a month after he penned ?The Mask of Anarchy.? This latter poem was written in a feverish state, following the massacre at St. Peter?s Field on August 16, 1819. It was also held up by his publisher because of fear of being thrown in jail. Shelley was composing poetry amidst concern over who had control over publication of his works. Besides the two children lost in the custody case, Shelley?s son William had died earlier that year. And Shelley was expecting the birth of another child in October 1819. Shelley was convinced that Keats? premature death was, at least partially, caused by a particularly harsh review of his poetry. He obviously had faith in the power of publishing.

October 25th in his journal Shelley copies stanzas one, two and three into his notebook. The drafts ?were scattered through not one but several notebooks.? The evocation of the scattered dead leaves is obvious, linking the difficulties of publishing with the language of the poem. In Shelley?s notebook the first three stanza?s appear in a form closely resembling the published version. They appear together, drafted in pencil, ?occupying the greater part of five pages.? Comparing the published poem to these drafted lines, I find fifteen lines that underwent substantial revision before they were published. The punctuation is missing in some instances, but that is to be expected.These do not include punctuation changes or the alterations of a single, inconsequential word (such as, ?O?). The meter and the rhyme is in place, as is the form of repeated sonnets.

The first seven lines of Stanza One are almost identical to the lines that were published. However, line eight of the draft reads, ?Like a dead body in the grave, until . . .? In the printed version the line reads, ?Each like a corpse within its grave, until . . .? Apparently the grave-image was fixed in his head, but at some stage Shelley determined that the language needed tweaking. The last four lines of the pencil-written draft of Stanza One read:

With radiant flowers & living leaves
The atmosphere investing plain & hill
O spirit which art moving every where
Destroyer & Preserver hear O hear (!

In the published version the lines are:

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

The finished version deepens the description of the wind. It also aligns the poem further with the force of the blowing regenerating wind.

In Stanza Three of this draft, Shelley wrote, ?Thou who hast wakened from his summer dreams . . .? In the published version the tense has changed. The line now reads, ?Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams . . .? It is a minor change, but it lends a specificity to the ?waking? that Shelley is describing. The tone of the Stanza shifts slightly, and several lines are revised to agree with the change towards emphasizing the singularity of this ?wild wind.?

It is unclear how many more times Shelley was able to work on these lines. Clearly, it was fewer than he would have liked. Lawrence John Zillman describes the publication process of a Shelley poem. First there are rough drafts, followed by a ?fair copy? of the poem; third, Mary Shelley transcribes the fair copy; fourth, the transcribed lines are sent to the publisher; fifth, ?preliminary proof-reading? is done as the lines are set in the press; lastly, these printed sheets are sent to Shelley for an authoritative proof-reading. As Zillman notes, this last step was skipped with the 1820 edition of ?Ode to the west Wind.? In fact, Shelley does not read the published version until a year after he created it, in October, 1820.
Shelley was resigned to this lack of control, though it evidently frustrated him. He wrote to his editors, in a letter dated November 10, 1819,

As to the printing of the ?Prometheus,? be it as you will. But, in this case, I shall repose on trust in your care respecting the correction of the press; especially in the lyrical parts, where a minute error would be of much consequence. Mr. Gisborne will revise it; he heard it recited, and will therefore more readily seize any error.

The care for the most minor of details is obvious, and yet he must reconcile this with an apparent urgency to publish the work. So, he relies on a person who has ?heard it recited.? This seems almost a comical substitution, and was obviously the best option Shelley could see.

Even with all this difficulty, the ?Ode? was finally published, along with the play ?Prometheus Unbound,? and other poems in 1820.. The collection took its title from the play, and none of the poems were advertised, except in the table of contents. Five-hundred copies of the text ?Prometheus Unbound? were produced during the Romantic Period. It sold for 9 schillings.

The title page of ?Prometheus Unbound,? the play with which ?Ode to the West Wind? was packaged, was published in 1820. The title of the play is in the largest text, at the top of the page. The subtitle is ?A Lyrical Drama In Four Acts With Other Poems.? Shelley?s name is featured somewhat prominently just below the center of the page, though the text-size is much less than the first two lines of the title. This suggests that the reference of the title was considered a greater marketing tool than the author?s name. Below his name there is a latin phrase printed in tiny font. It translates, ?Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, hidden under the earth?? It is a line of Shelley?s. In this way he places his concern for transmission, his concern for proper publication right on the title page.

The book was published in London by ?C AND J OLLIER VERE STREET BOND STREET? in 1820. The ?Ode? is the fifth of nine poems that are listed under the heading ?miscellaneous poems,? in the edition. The poems followed the lengthy play, and none of them came close to its length. And the ?Ode? was buried even further beyond this. It did not sell well, and was still available in 1824. This was unusual, as William St. Clair writes.

Shelley?s other books (besides the controversial ?Queen Mab?) had, by the time of the poet?s death, ceased to be available at all. Most of them, whose first and only editions had consisted of 750 copies or less, had lain in the warehouse, been remaindered, or sent for trunk lining. In the 1820s, however, stimulated by the interest in ?Queen Mab,? pirate editions of the rest of his works began to appear at cheap prices.?

Mary Shelley, P.B. Shelley?s wife, published several editions after Shelley died. They were published in 1824 and 1839. These were the first concerted efforts to make up for the incompleteness of the publication process. These works were subsequently pirated. However, Mary Shelley did not intend merely to repair the works of her husband, but also to repair his reputation. Subsequent scholarship has focused on revealing Percy Bysshe Shelley?s original and complete intentions, through close readings and extrapolations from his notebooks. These efforts are retarded by the madness of the notebooks, the starts and stops of the thought-process, the multiple languages overlapping one another, the poor state of the pages. Yet, diligent efforts continue to be made. This recent scholarship seems to take its cue from the first passage quoted in this paper, as if Shelley were addressing literary sleuths and not the West Wind. He said, and scholars have taken to heart, ?Scatter . . . through my lips to unawaken?d earth.?

Works Cited

Forman, H. Buxton, Ed., Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 1, Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1911.
Fraistat, Neil, ?Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,? PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America; May94, Vol. 109 Issue 3, p409, 15p, footnote 23, source: Academic Search Premier.
Fuller, Jean Overton, Shelley: A Biography, London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1968.
Garnett, Richard, Ed., Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884.
?Ode to the West Wind,? Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan Wu, Editor, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 859-861.
?Percy Bysshe Shelley,? Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan Wu, Editor, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 819-822.
Rogers, Neville, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Rovira, James, ?An Egoist Reading of Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound, Drew University, 2000, http://artisanitorium.thehydden.com/nonfiction/litcrit/Prometheus_Unbound.htm, accessed, 4/20/05.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Shelley: Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems (1820), London: Humphrey Milford, 1923.
St. Clair, William, The reading nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Tomalin, Claire, Shelley and His World, London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd.,1980.
Zillman, Lawrence John, Ed., Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound: the Text and the Drafts, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968.
Zillman, Lawrence John, Ed., Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959.

P.B. Shelley, ?Ode to the West Wind,? Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan Wu, Editor, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 859-861. Claire Tomalin, Shelley and His World, London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd.,1980, 90. ?Percy Bysshe Shelley,? Romanticism: An Anthology, Duncan Wu, Editor, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 821. Wu, 821. Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, 249. Wu, 822. Neil Fraistat, ?Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,? PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America; May94, Vol. 109 Issue 3, p409, 15p, footnote 23. William St. Clair, The reading nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 319. Jean Overton Fullerton, Shelley: A Biography, London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1968, 241. St. Clair, 319. St. Clair, 319. Rogers, 26-27. Tomalin, 90. Rogers, 197. Rogers, 13.

1. Buxton Forman, Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 1, Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1911, 163.

Forman, 163. Shelley, Wu Anthology, 859. Forman, 163. Shelley, Wu Anthology, 859. Forman, 163. Shelley, Wu Anthology, 859. Lawrence John Zillman, Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound: the Text and the Drafts, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968, 3. Lawrence John Zillman, Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959, 8. ?A letter to Edmund Ollier,? Richard Garnett, Ed., Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884, 137. St. Clair, 650. Shelley, Shelley: Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems (1820), London: Humphrey Milford, 1923. St. Clair, 650. St. Clair, 320. Fraistat, 409-410. Fraistat, 410-411. Zillman, Shelley?s Prometheus Unbound: the Text and the Drafts, 3-9. Shelley, Wu Anthology, 859.