Another new year approaches. Socialist activists, bloggers, Facebook addicts and habitual tweeters, contemplating the road ahead, may well feel despondent as this year draws to a close. What have we got to look forward to? A Tory government? A Labour government? A Tory-LibDem, or a Labour-LibDem, or a Tory-UKIP (or even a Labour-UKIP) coalition? More war, more racism, more privatisation, more inequality and poverty, worse health? Is there any chance we can do anything about even some of these disasters?

Don’t know. But if that’s how some of us feel, we’re not the first; we almost certainly won’t be the last. I discovered that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley felt something of the same frustration, not to say despair. He found a way through it and I thought perhaps that might – just about, with a following wind – tempt us to take some careful steps forward. In my case, though, I think I might need more than a following wind. But, then again, the wind is what Shelley is going to talk to us about. In fact, that’s who he talks to. What was he like?!

When Shelley heard, on 5 September 1819, of the Peterloo massacre, by the yeomanry, of unarmed demonstrators on the outskirts of Manchester, he was (as he put it) “asleep in Italy”. He quickly woke up. On the 6^th he wrote in a letter: “… the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins.” He began to write The Masque of Anarchy, “the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English”, says his biographer Richard Holmes.[1]

It wasn’t published. The editor of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt, was afraid he would be prosecuted and spiked the poem. That fear was certainly not misplaced: in the aftermath of Peterloo, Sir Francis Burdett had sent an open letter of protest to the press and was found guilty of seditious libel. Mr Justice Best had warned the jury that if they found his writing was “an appeal to the passions of the lower orders of the people, and not having a tendency to inform those who can correct abuses, it is a libel.” Richard Holmes comments: “In other words, if [it] was addressed to the working classes, it was libellous.”[2]

In October, Shelley read what amounted to a personal attack on him in the shape of a review of his poem, The Revolt of Islam, in the Quarterly Review. There was no real criticism of Shelley’s poetry as poetry. The attack was on his ideas, “political, social, religious and sexual”[3]:

“Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws … he would abolish the rights of property … he would overthrow the constitution … he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles … marriage he cannot endure …”[4]

As for Shelley’s espousal of love as “the sole law which shall govern the moral world”, the Quarterly Review claimed not to know what kind of love he meant:

“We are loath to understand it in its lowest sense, though we believe that as to the issue this would be the correctest mode of interpreting it. But this at least is clear, that Mr Shelley does not mean it in its highest sense: he does not mean that love, which is the fulfilling of the law, and which walks after the commandments, for he would erase the Decalogue, and every other code of laws.”[5]

The article concluded by abandoning all pretence of being a review and settled for what looks like envious personal abuse. Shelley, it said, had a “proud and rebel mind”, but

“Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of mighty waters closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him: – for a short time are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard … and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin – finally he sinks ‘like lead’ to the bottom, and is forgotten. So it is now in part, so shortly will it be entirely with Mr Shelley.”[6]

Shelley pretended not to be affected, but rather to be “amused … with the finale”. Yet, says Holmes,

“the criticism was also working more slowly, at a deeper level of Shelley’s mind. Shelley went for walks along the banks of the Arno thinking of everything that the Quarterly attack represented, thinking of his own exile [in Italy], his ‘passion for reforming the world’, his apparent impotence to help the downtrodden people of England, the disasters of his private life and inevitably, at 27, the beginning of the end of his youth. He had noticed, with a slight shock, that he already had premature threads of grey hair. Yet everything was still to be done.”[7]

In the end, after much frustration, he wrote his next great poem, Ode to the West Wind, in which he defeated the brooding despair that threatened to overcome him. The poem, he said,

“was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno … on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours that pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.”[8]

In the poem he describes the “wild west wind” as it drives the leaves, the seeds, the buds, into the air; it is a “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere”; it is the “Destroyer and preserver”. Then he calls on its power to halt the slowing down of his own powers and move him out of his despair:

“If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!

 

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth

And by the incantation of this verse,

 

Scatter, as from unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

 

Make of it what you can. Here comes 2015. And a happy new year to all our readers.

 

[1] Holmes, R. (1987), Shelley: The Pursuit, Penguin Books, London, p. 532.

[2] Ibid., p. 539.

[3] Ibid., p. 543.

[4] Cited, ibid., p. 544.

[5] Cited, ibid.

[6] Cited, ibid., pp. 544-545. As Shelley would drown in a storm off the coast of Italy in 1822, Holmes calls the water images in the review a “curious premonition”.

[7] Ibid., p. 546.

[8] Cited, ibid., p. 547.