Shelley, draft of Epipsychidion
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
Object details
1820-21
Description
Shelley published Epipsychidion (from the Greek words epi, upon, and psychidion, little soul) anonymously in 1821, but soon asked his publisher to withdraw it. He may have feared that readers would interpret the poem biographically. He himself called it ‘an idealized history of my life and feelings’, and connections can certainly be made between the poem and his life at the time of its composition. Shelley, Mary and Claire Clairmont had befriended Teresa Viviani, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the governor of Pisa, who had placed her in a convent; Epipsychidion is dedicated to ‘Emilia V------, now imprisoned in the Convent of ------’. Shelley's and Mary's marriage had been under strain; in Epipsychidion the poet's love for 'Emily', an ideal figure, is compared with the dead state of marriage, 'the weariest and the longest journey'.
In the central section of Epipsychidion the poet narrates his personal history, describing in a series of planetary images the 'many mortal forms' in which he sought 'The shadow of that idol of my thought'. Shown here are the lines describing 'The cold chaste moon', whose light 'warms not but illumines': 'And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed: / Alas, I then was not alive nor dead'. Is the moon to be read as Mary Shelley? 'Oh my beloved Shelley – it is not true that this heart was cold to thee' Mary wrote in her journal shortly after the poet's death. 'I am said to have a cold heart', she wrote to Byron in February 1823, 'there are feelings however so strongly implanted in my nature that to root them out life will go with it'.
Transcript
When a deliverance shone on me
When from a mighty star again
Beamed on me; one stood upon my path, who seemed
As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed
As is the cold
cold Moon
eye of light to the
changing moon whose changes everrun
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun;
The cold chaste moon; the Queen of Heavens bright isles
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
But changes
But which though transformed
Which
She led me – and oh anEndymion
Into a Who
And ever is transformed
That wandering shrine of soft but icy flame
Which ever is transformed yet still the same
And warms not but illumines; until light
Seems seems in her lightuntil light
Of that her sweet young & fair
As if she were the spirit of that sphere
She covered me from as that the night
hid me as the moon may hide
the [ ] shadows [ ] light
From thy own darkness and theand with with gentle
Of smiles
Led From its own shadows; and withleashed in the light
until all was light
Of her sweet smiles, I,[went]like a fawn
Followed her through the for
And loved
Between the Heaven & Earth of my still mind –
As as a cloud charioted by the wind
She led me to a cavern in that wildwood place
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers like thatthemoon
Waxing & waning o’er Endymion
And I was her
And Death & Life, two twins infants
masked in two infan
And then as I loved rose Life & death,
at her silver voice, came Death
Like infant twins, & swiftly past beneath
The [ ] of the
I as her shadow image
My spirit like her shadow in the sea
And was I was laid asleep, spirit & limb;
And all my being became bright or dim.
As the moon’s image in the summer sea
Such power her countenance had wrought on me
According as she smiled or frowned on
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, VI (1992), ed. C.A. Adamson, esp. pp. 306-9.
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