Shelley, draft of The Witch of Atlas
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In this section:
- Shelley and Oxford
- Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin
- The Young Shelley
- Shelley and Mary
- Frankenstein
- Shelley's Notebooks
- Shelley, draft of Queen of the Universe
- Shelley, A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote
- Shelley, draft of Laon and Cythna
- Shelley, draft of Ozymandias
- Shelley, draft of Julian and Maddalo
- Shelley, draft of Epipsychidion
- Shelley, fair copy of Ode to the West Wind
- Shelley, draft of The Witch of Atlas
- Shelley, fair copy of A Defence of Poetry
- Shelley, fair copy of A Philosophical View of Reform
- Shelley's vellum-bound notebook
- Shelley’s Last Days
- Mary Shelley in England
- William Godwin & Mary Shelley
- Mary Shelley, Editor
- The Poet's Son & Daughter-in-Law
- The Shelley Sanctum
Shelfmark: MS. Shelley adds. e. 6 [p. 85 rev.]
Credit: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Object details
1820
Description
Writing in ottava rima, the verse form of traditional seriocomic Italian poetry, and of Byron’s Don Juan, Shelley creates a light-hearted ‘visionary rhyme’. The witch is a supernatural being of surpassing beauty. Tiring of her home in the Atlas Mountains, she travels around the globe in ‘the fairest and the lightest boat / Which ever upon mortal stream did float'. Her companion on her journeys is a winged hermaphrodite being she has created herself out of fire and ice. The witch's 'choice sport' is to glide down the Nile to its delta, and pass with light feet 'through the peopled haunts of humankind'. Looking upon mortals in their sleep, she sees straight into their souls and writes 'strange dreams upon the brain'. The witch plays similar 'pranks' upon the gods, but, writes Shelley, that is a subject for another poem.
Shelley wrote The Witch of Atlas in just three days, and the relative ease with which he composed is seen in the original draft shown here. 'Light the vest of flowing metre / She wears', Shelley writes of the witch in his dedication to Mary; he compares his speedy creation with Wordsworth's Peter Bell, a poem of 'slow, dull care' which was nineteen years in the making. The supernatural and mythological subject matter of The Witch of Atlas, the exotic locations, and the swift, playful movements of the witch provide a kind of showcase for Shelley's consummate lyrical skill. The witch's river journeys have also prompted him, in the passage shown here, to sketch one of his most evocative representations of boat, river and sailor.
Transcript
A windless havenbeneath whosetranslucent azure floor
The stars burned unfathomably glowed
With tremulous stars immeasurably [lay]
sparkled
And round whichabout the solid vapours hoar
Built on the level waters, to the sky
Based
Lifted their dreadful crags, & like a shore
Of snow-bright mountains inaccessibly
Hemmed with caverns & [ ]in caves & precipicesgrey
[A ] & Many a baystill creek &
And [top ling] crags
And whilst the outer lake, beneath the lash
Of the wind’s scourge, writhedfoamed like a wounded thing
And the incessant hail with stony clash
Levelled the [murm ]
TorePloughed up the troubledboiling waters & the wingflagging
Of the [wild]roused cormorant in the lightning flash
Looked like the fragment of a
wreck some wind- wandering
Fragment of the
[Form]Fragment of inky thundersmoke – [this] haven>br />
Vapour
Was as a gem, to copy Heaven engraven
The With
Canopus & his crew, laythe Austral lake
And other whiles the lady
And[Or] when the wearymoon was in the wane
Or in the noon of interlunar nights
wild lady-witch in slumber
The winged lady [and] not trance cd not chaincontain
Her soulspirit, but she sailed forth under the
lights
Of shooting stars, and [hail] the accustomed train
and bade extend amain
down
His storm outspeeding planes the hermaphrodite
down [th ]
And the austral [ ] would speed her way
Whe[n]re like a meadow which no scythe had shaven
which
Or rain had ever bent, or wind had shaken
The Ætheopian lake lay paven
With the Antarctic constellations
Which wind hadrain cd never ben[d]t, & sun stars [ d] [storms] cd shake
With the Antarctic constellations paven
TheCanopus & his lay the Ætheopian lake
And she wouldbuild herself a wind less haven
Out of the clouds whose moving [turests] make
The barriers The bastions of the weststorm while thru the sky
The spirits of the tempest murmured by.
Owners
Percy Bysshe Shelley; (1822) Mary Shelley; (bequest, 1851) Sir Percy and Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1889) Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1899) John C.E. Shelley (later Sir John Shelley-Rolls); (gift, 1946) Bodleian.
References
Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, V (1997), ed. C.A. Adamson, esp. pp. 176-9.
Comments