Mary's copies of Shelley's poems
Mary Shelley
Object details
1823-4 (with additions of c. 1839)
In this section:
1823-4 (with additions of c. 1839)
In preparation for her edition of Shelley’s posthumous poems Mary transcribed many of the poet’s shorter lyrics and fragments into this notebook. Among the pieces shown here is her transcription of a fragment from 1816, which she would publish as ‘To William Shelley’. The neatness of the transcription contradicts what Mary went through when editing this, and other poems. In going through Shelley’s manuscripts she found herself re-living old tragedies, and it made the work exhausting. Towards the end of her 1839 edition of Shelley’s works she wrote: ‘Recurrence to the past, full of its own deep and unforgotten joys and sorrows, contrasted with succeeding years of painful and solitary struggle, has shaken my health. Days of great suffering have followed my attempts to write, and these again produced a weakness and languor that spread their sinister influence over these notes.’
Mary gave this notebook a title page. Beneath the title – ‘Poems and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley’, she wrote two quotations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the first of which was printed on the title page of Posthumous Poems :
In nobil sangue vita umile e queta`
Ed in alto intelletto un puro core;
Frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore,
E in aspetto pensoso anima lieta
[In noble blood a humble and quiet life, with a high intellect a pure heart, the fruit of age in the flower of youth, and with thoughtful aspect a happy soul.]
Ma ricogliendo le sue sparte fronde
Dietro le vo pur cosi passo passo ––––
[but that, gathering up her scattered leaves, I still follow her step by step]
[p. 48]
Time is flying
Joy is dying,
Hope is sighing
--------------
The rude wind is singing
The dirge of the music dead,
The cold worms are clinging
Where kisses were lately fed.
--------------
Through mossy sods and stone
Rain and streamlet, hurry down
A coming song, a rushing throng
Beneath the vault of heaven is blown
Sweet notes of love, the speaking tone
Of this day of Paradise
Resound around; beneath, above,
All we hope and all we love
Finds a voice in the sweet strain
Which wakens hill, and wood and vale
And which Echo like the tale
Of old –––––––
[p. 49]
Methought I was a billow in the crowd
Of common men, that stream without a shore,
That ocean which at once is deaf and loud
That I, a man, stood amid many more
[the four lines above are cancelled with a single vertical line]
--------------
Thy little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore,
The twinkling of thine infant hands
Where now the worm will feed no more,
Thy mingled look of love and glee
When we returned to gaze on thee
These footsteps on the sands are fled
Thine eyes are dark– thine hands are cold
And she is dead and thou art dead –––––––
---------------
He wanders, like a day appearing dream
Through the dim wilderness of the mind,
Through desart woods and tracts, which seem
Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined
---------------
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.
I. Massey (ed.), Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s fair copy-book. Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 9 collated with the holographs and the printed texts (Montreal, 1969); Petrarch translations from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. & ed. R.M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
© Bodleian Library 2010
Site by Surface Impression
Bodleian Libraries
Broad Street
Oxford
OX1 3BG
Comments