Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/388

358 genius—quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind, but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted, even as transcendently as the author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written as a warning—not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth, or with Coleridge (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal;—it contains something of criticism on the compositions of those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written: and, though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry—so much of himself in it—that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.

[Composed during Shelley's occupation of the Gisbornes' house at Leghorn, July, 1820; published in Posthumous Poems, 1824. Sources of the text are (1) a draft in Shelley's hand, 'partly illegible' (Forman), amongst the Boscombe MSS.; (2) a transcript by Mrs. Shelley; (3) the editio princeps, 1824; the text in Poetical Works, 1839, 1st and 2nd edd. Our text is that of Mrs. Shelley's transcript, modified by the Boscombe MS. Here, as elsewhere in this edition, the readings of the editio princeps are preserved in the footnotes.]

, July 1, 1820.

spider spreads her webs, whether she be In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree; The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves; So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, Sit spinning still round this decaying form, From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought— No net of words in garish colours wrought To catch the idle buzzers of the day— But a soft cell, where when that fades away, Memory may clothe in wings my living name And feed it with the asphodels of fame, Which in those hearts which must remember me Grow, making love an immortality.


 * Whoever should behold me now, I wist,

Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart