雪莱 英国文学五讲 西风颂

英国文学第五讲（雪莱）

March, 2012 Part I Introduction about Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

1811: Is expelled from Oxford and elopes with Harriet Westbrook

1818: Leaves England for Italy, never to return.

1819: The great year: Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and some of his

best lyrics, including Ode to the West Wind.

1820: Settles in Pisa and its vicinity; the “Pisan Circle.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, although a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life and thought, emerged from a solidly conservative background. His ancestors had been Sussex aristocrats since early in the seventeenth century; his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, made himself the richest man in Horsham, Sussex; his father, Timothy Shelley, was a hardheaded and conventional Member of Parliament.Percy Shelley himself was in line for a baronetcy and, as befitted his station, was sent to be educated at Eton and Oxford. He was slight of build, eccentric in manner, and unskilled in sports or fighting and, as a consequence, was mercilessly baited by older and stronger boys. Even then he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man?s general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression. He describes the experience in Dedication to Loan and Cythna (later called The Revolt of Islam):

So without shame, I speak:—“I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies

Such power, for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and strong still tyrannise

Without reproach or check.” I then controuled

My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

At Oxford in the autumn of 1810 Shelley?s closest friend was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a self-centered and self-confident young man who shared Shelley?s love of philosophy and scorn of orthodoxy. The two collaborated on a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism,which claimed that God?s existence cannot be proved on empirical grounds. Shelley refused to repudiate the document, as demanded by the authorities; to his great shock and grief, he was peremptorily expelled, terminating a university career that had lasted only six months. This event opened a breach between Shelley and his father that widened over the years.

Shelley went to London, where, eager for a test of his zeal for social justice, he took up the cause of Harriet Westbrook, the pretty and warmhearted daughter of a well-to-do tavern keeper, whose father, Shelley wrote to Hogg, …has persecuted her in a most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her to go to school.”Harriet threw

herself on Shelley?s protection, and “gratitude and admiration,” he wrote, “all demand that I shall love her forever.”He eloped with Harriet to Edinburgh and married her,against his conviction that marriage was a tyrannical and degrading social institution. He was then eighteen years of age, and his bride, sixteen. The young couple moved restlessly from place to place, living on a small allowance granted reluctantly by their families. In February 1812, accompanied by Harriet?s sister Eliza, they traveled to Dublin to distribute Shelley?s Address to the Irish People and otherwise take part in the movement for Catholic emancipation and for the amelioration of the oppressed and poverty-stricken people.

Back in London, Shelley became a disciple of the radical social philosopher William Godwin, author of the Inquiry Concerning Political Injustice. In 1813 he printed privately his first important work,Queen Mab, a long prophetic poem set in the fantastic frame of the journey of a disembodied soul through space, to whom the fairy Mab reveals in visions the woeful past, the dreadful present, and the utopian future. Announcing that “there is no God!”Mab decries institutional religion and codified morality as the roots of social evil. She prophesies that, under the rule of the goddess Necessity, all institutions will wither away, and humanity will return to its natural condition of goodness and felicity.

In the following spring Shelley, who had drifted apart from Harriet, fell in love with the beautiful Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Acting according to his conviction that cohabitation without love is immoral, he abandoned Harriet, fled to France with Mary (taking along her stepsister, Claire Clairmont), and—still acting in accordance with his belief in nonexclusive love—invited Harriet to come live with them in the relationship of a sister. Shelley?s elopement with Mary outraged her father, despite the facts that his theoretical views of marriage had been no less radical than Shelley?s and that Shelley, himself in financial difficulties, had earlier taken over Godwin?s very substantial debts. When he returned to London, Shelley found that the general public, his family, and most of his friends regarded him not only as atheist and revolutionary but also a gross immoralist. When two years later, Harriet, pregnant by an unknown lover, drowned herself in a fit of despair, the courts denied Shelley the custody of their two children. Shelley married Mary Godwin and in 1818 moved to Italy; thereafter he saw himself in the role of an alien and outcast, scorned and rejected by the human race to whose welfare he had dedicated his powers and his life.

In Italy he resumed his restless existence, moving from town to town and house to house. His health was usually bad. Although the death of his grandfather in 1815 had provided a substantial income, he dissipated so much of it by his warmhearted but improvident support of William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and other indigent pensioners that he was constantly short of money and harried by creditors. Within nine months, in 1818-19, Clara and William, the beloved children of Percy and Mary Shelley, both died. This tragedy threw Mary into a state of apathy and self-absorption that destroyed the earlier harmony of her relationship with her husband and from which even the birth of another son, Percy Florence, could not entirely rescue her.

In these desperate circumstances, in a state sometimes verging on despair, and knowing that he almost entirely lacked an audience, Shelley wrote his greatest works. In 1819 he completed his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound, and a fine tragedy The Cenci.He wrote also numerous lyric poems; a visionary call for a proletarian revolution, The Mask of Anarchy; a discerning and witty satire on Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third; and a penetrating political essay, A Philosophical View of Reform. His works of next two years include A Defence of Poetry;Epipsychidion, a rhapsodic vision of love as a union, beyond earthly limits, with what the title identifies as “the soul out of my soul”; Adonais, his noble elegy on the death of Keats; and Hellas, a lyrical drama evoked by the Greek war for liberation from Turks, in which he again projected his vision of a coming golden age. These writings, unlike the early Queen Mab, are the products of a mind enlarged and chastened by tragic experience, deepened by incessant philosophical speculation, and richly stored with the harvest of his reading—which Shelley carried on, as his friend Hogg said, “in season and out of season, at table, in bed, and especially during the walk,” until he became one of the most erudite of poets. His delight in scientific discoveries and speculations continued, but his earlier zest for Gothic terrors and the social theories of the radical eighteenth-century optimists gave way to an absorption in Greek tragedy, Milton?s Paradise Lost, and the Bible. Although he did not give up his hopes for a millennial future (he wore a ring with the motto Il buon tempo verrà—“the good time will come”), he attributed the evils of present society to human?s own moral failures and grounded the possibility of radical social reform on a prior reform of the moral and imaginative faculties through the redeeming power of love. Though often represented as a simpleminded doctrinaire, Shelley in fact possessed a complex and energetically inquisitive intelligence that never halted at a fixed mental position; his writings reflect stages in a ceaseless exploration.

The poems of Shelley? maturity also show the influence of his study of Plato and the Neoplatonists. Shelley found congenial the Platonic division of the cosmos into two worlds—the ordinary world of change, mortality, evil and suffering and the criterion world of perfect and eternal Forms, of which the world of sense-experience is only a distant and illusory reflection. The earlier interpretations of Shelley as a downright Platonic idealist, however, have been drastically modified by modern investigations of his reading and writings. He was a close student of English empirical philosophy, which limits knowledge to valid reasoning on what is given in sense-experience, and within this tradition he felt a special affinity to the radical skepticism of David Hume. Shelley was indeed an idealist, but as C. E. Pulos has shown in The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Skepticism, his was “a qualified idealism,”holding provisionally to the ideas envisioned by an imagination that transcends experience, but refusing to assert that these ideas are anything more than high possibilities. As Shelley wrote, we quickly reach “the verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.” Many of his major poems express his sense of the limits of certain knowledge and his refusal to let his intuitions and hopes harden into a philosophical and religious creed. To the skeptical idealism of mature Shelley (see, for example, the

notes to his great lyrics from Hellas), the hope in the ultimate redemption of life by love and imagination is not a certainty but a moral obligation. We must, he asserts, cling to hope because it contrary, despair about human possibility, is self-fulfilling, by ensuring the permanence of conditions before which the mind has surrendered its aspirations. Hope does not guarantee achievement, but it keeps open the possibility of achievement and so releases the imaginative and creative powers that are its only available means.

When in 1820 the Shelleys settled finally at Pisa, he came closer to finding contentment than at any other time in his adult life. A group of friends, Shelley?s “Pisan Circle,”gathered around them, including for a while Lord Byron and the swashbuckling young Cornishman Edward Trelawny. Chief in Shelley?s affections, however, were Edward Williams, a retired lieutenant of a cavalry regiment serving in India, and his charming common-law wife, Jane, with whom Shelley carried on a flirtation and to whom he addressed some of his best lyrics and verse letters. The end came suddenly, and in a way provisioned in the ecstatic last stanza of Adonais, in which he had described his spirit as a ship driven by a violent storm out into the dark unknown. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams were sailing their open boat, the Don Juan, from Leghorn to their summer house near Lerici, on the Gulf of Spezia. A violent squall blew up and swamped the boat. When several days later the bodies were washed ashore they were cremated, and Shelley?s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near the graves of John Keats and William Shelley, the poet?s young son. He left unfinished The Triumph of Life, which was a new departure that, in the estimation of many readers, promised to be his greatest poem. Byron, who did not pay moral compliments lightly, wrote to John Murray at the time of Shelley?s death: “You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.”

To many critics of mid-twentieth century (and despite the reverence toward him of W. B. Yeats, an admitted master of poetry these critics most admired), Shelley was a favorite resort for supposed examples of intellectual and emotional immaturity, shoddy workmanship, and incoherent imagery. In recent years, however, he has been the subject many sympathetic critics, whose studies have clarified the complex and coherent structure of his symbolism and have increasingly confirmed Wordsworth’s recognition that “Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.” Shelley?s expansion of the metrical and stanzaic resources of verse is without recent parallel in the history of English literature. Furthermore, his successful poems show an astonishing range of voice, from the controlled passion of Ode to the West Wind, through the calm and heroic dignity of the utterances of Prometheus, to the approximation to what is expressible in the description of Asia?transfiguration and in the visionary conclusion of Adonais. Most surprising, for a poet who almost entirely lacked an audience, is the assured urbanity, the effortless command of the tone and language of a cultivated man of the world, exemplified in the passages that Shelley wrote all through his mature career and especially in the lyrics and verse letters that he composed during the last years of his life.

(from Norton Antholgy of English Literature,Sith Edition, V olume II, M. H. Abrams, General Editor, W. W. NORTON & COMPANY . New York . London ,1993) Part II Study of the poem “Ode to the West Wind”

Notes:

雪莱在1819年写了不少战斗性的政治诗，这首《西风颂》也是其中之一。但这首诗不仅是一首政治诗，也是雪莱最好的抒情诗之一，无论思想内容上还是艺术形式上都是如此。

“This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that shirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose tempe-rature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains”(Shelley?s note)

As in other major romantic poems—for example, the opening of Wordsworth?s Prelude, Coleridge?s Dejection: An Ode,and conclusion of Shelley?s Adonis—the rising wind, linked with the cycle of the seasons, is presented as the outer correspondent to an inner change from apathy to spiritual vitality, and from imaginative sterility to a burst of creative power that is paralleled to the inspiration of the biblical prophets. In Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and many other languages, the words for wind, breath, soul and inspiration are all identical or related. Thus Shelley?s west wind is a “spirit”(the Latin spiritus: wind, breath, soul, and the root word in “inspiration”), “the breath of Autumn?s being,” which on earth, sky, and sea destroys in the autumn to revivify in the spring. Around this central image the poem weaves various cycles of death and regeneration—vegetable, human and divine.

Shelley?s fourteen-line stanza, developed from the interlaced three-line units of the Italian terza rima (aba bcb cde, etc), consists of a set four such tercets, closed by a couplet rhyming with the middle line of the preceding tercet: aba bcb cdc ee.

1.Referring to the kind of fever that occurs in tuberculosis.

2.the west wind that will blow in the spring.

3. A high, shrill trumpet.

4.The fragmentary clouds (“leaves”) are torn by the wind from the larger and

higher clouds (“boughs”), which are formed by a union of air with vapour drawn up by the sun from the ocean. “Angles”(line 18) suggests the sense:“messengers,”“harbingers.”

5. A female votary who danced frenziedly in the worship of Dionysus

(Bacchus), the Greek god of wine and vegetation. As vegetation god, he was fabled to die in the fall and to be resurrected in the spring.

6.Clouds.

7.The currents that flow in the Mediterranean Sea, sometimes with a visible

difference in colour.

8.West of Naples, the locale of imposing villas erected by Roman emperors.

“Pumice”: a porous volcanic stone.

9.Shelley once observed that, when reflected in water, colours are “more

vivid yet blended with more harmony.”

10.The vegetation at the bottom of the sea . . . sympathizes with that of land

in the change of seasons (Shelley?s note).

11.The Eolian lyre, which responds to the wind with rising and falling

musical chords

12.A reference to the “clarion”of lone 10, as well as an allusion to the last

trumpet of the apocalypse in Revelation 11. 15.

《西风颂》

一

哦，狂暴的西风，秋之生命的呼吸！

你无形，但枯死的落叶被你横扫，

有如鬼魅碰到了巫师，纷纷逃避：

黄的，黑的，灰的，红得像患肺痨，

呵，重染疫疠的一群：西风呵，是你

以车驾把有翼的种子吹送到

黑暗的冬床上，它们就躺在那里，

像是墓中的死穴，冰冷，深藏，低贱，

直等到春天，你碧空的姊妹吹起

她的喇叭，在沉睡的大地上响遍，

（唤出嫩芽，像羊群一样，觅食空中）

将色和香充满了山峰和平原。

不羁的精灵呵，你无处不远行；

破坏者兼保护者：听吧，你且聆听！

二

没入你的急流，当高空一片混乱，

流云像大地的枯叶一样被撕扯

脱离天空和海洋的纠缠的枝干。

成为雨和电的使者：它们飘落

在你的磅礴之气的蔚蓝的波面，

有如狂女的飘扬的头发在闪烁，

从天穹的最遥远而模糊的边沿

直抵九霄的中天，到处都在摇曳

欲来雷雨的卷发，对濒死的一年

你唱出了葬歌，而这密集的黑夜

将成为它广大墓陵的一座圆顶，

里面正有你的万钧之力的凝结；

那是你的浑然之气，从它会迸涌

黑色的雨，冰雹和火焰：哦，你听！

三

是你，你将蓝色的地中海唤醒，

而它曾经昏睡了一整个夏天，

被澄澈水流的回旋催眠入梦，

就在巴亚海湾的一个浮石岛边，

它梦见了古老的宫殿和楼阁

在水天辉映的波影里抖颤，

而且都生满青苔、开满花朵，

那芬芳真迷人欲醉！呵，为了给你

让一条路，大西洋的汹涌的浪波

把自己向两边劈开，而深在渊底

那海洋中的花草和泥污的森林

虽然枝叶扶疏，却没有精力；

听到你的声音，它们已吓得发青：

一边颤栗，一边自动萎缩：哦，你听！

四

哎，假如我是一片枯叶被你浮起，

假如我是能和你飞跑的云雾，

是一个波浪，和你的威力同喘息，

假如我分有你的脉搏，仅仅不如

你那么自由，哦，无法约束的生命！假如我能像在少年时，凌风而舞

便成了你的伴侣，悠游天空

（因为呵，那时候，要想追你上云霄，

似乎并非梦幻），我就不致像如今

这样焦躁地要和你争相祈祷。

哦，举起我吧，当我是水波、树叶、浮云！我跌在生活底荆棘上，我流血了！

这被岁月的重轭所制服的生命

原是和你一样：骄傲、轻捷而不驯。

五

把我当作你的竖琴吧，有如树林：

尽管我的叶落了，那有什么关系！

你巨大的合奏所振起的音乐

将染有树林和我的深邃的秋意：

虽忧伤而甜蜜。呵，但愿你给予我

狂暴的精神！奋勇者呵，让我们合一！

请把我枯死的思想向世界吹落，

让它像枯叶一样促成新的生命！

哦，请听从这一篇符咒似的诗歌，

就把我的话语，像是灰烬和火星

从还未熄灭的炉火向人间播散！

让预言的喇叭通过我的嘴唇

把昏睡的大地唤醒吧！要是冬天

已经来了，西风呵，春日怎能遥远？

查良铮译