Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, the others being Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Towards the end of Shelley’s life he suffered from depression. His marriage to his second wife, Mary, had broken down and he was attracted to the wife of his friend Edward Williams — a relationship that clearly couldn’t be pursued. This poem describes his feelings of despair during this period. Shelley died by drowning in a boating accident on the lake at Lerici in Northern Italy. It is not known if this was an accident or suicide.

Romantic Poetry

A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to the poet Wordsworth. Shelley, however, was concerned with regeneration of his spiritual and poetic self, and regeneration of Europe politically. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England.

Themes
Shelley’s usual themes — the heroic role of the poet; the Poetic Imagination; the Power of Nature — are absent here. Though it is a poem of despair, it can usefully be studied in conjunction with his
happier poem To Jane: The Recollection. His depressed moments, it seems, were relieved by interludes of pleasure.

Structure

The two five-lined stanzas encapsulate Shelley’s despair, despite or because of their briefness. The first two lines of both stanzas are shorter, broadly iambic trimeter; that is, three pairs of unstressed followed by stressed syllables to form a metrical foot or iamb. They are followed by two lines in iambic pentameter, that is five pairs of syllables. The last line of each returns to trimeter.
The rhyme scheme in both is AABAB

Language
Shelley’s most notable characteristic, his use of capitalised abstract words like ‘Love’, ‘Hope’, ‘Desire’, is absent here. Though he refers to ‘life’ and ‘world’ and ‘time’‘ they are not capitalised, as if the spiritual powers he normally perceived behind the phenomena had lost their impact. He does refer to the seasons but again in a subdued and negative way.