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Structure, Symbol, and Theme in “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald H. Reiman
Donald H. Reiman*
Affiliation:
Duke UniversityDurham, North Carolina
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Extract

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 404 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 A Survey of English Literature: 1780–1830 (Second Edition, London, 1920), ii, 194–195. Although there exists no complete explication of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” useful information and incidental criticism can be found in notes to the complete editions of Shelley's poetry (especially that by C. D. Locock); in selections edited by Newman Ivey White (The Best of Shelley, New York, 1932), Ellsworth Barnard (Shelley: Selected Poems, Essays, and Letters, New York, 1944), Frederick L. Jones (Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems, New York, 1956); in biographies by Carl Grabo (The Magic Plant, Chapel Hill, N. C, 1936), Newman Ivey White (Shelley, London, 1947), Edmund Blunden (Shelley: A Life Story, London, 1946); and in critical studies by Carlos Baker (Shelley's Major Poetry, Princeton, 1948), Peter Butter (Shelley's Idols of the Cave, Edinburgh, 1954), Milton Wilson (Shelley's Later Poetry, New York, 1959), and Desmond King-Hele (Shelley: His Thought and Work, London, 1960).

2 Although we have very scant information about the composition of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” we know that it was begun at Este early in October 1818 and completed at Naples sometime before 20 December 1818, during most of which period Shelley was occupied either in society (with Byron and the Hoppners in Venice, 11–31 October), in travel (from Este to Rome, 5–20 November and from Rome to Naples, 27–29 November), or in sight-seeing. Mary Shelley tells us that “‘Rosalind and Helen,’ and ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills,’ I found among his papers by chance; and with some difficulty urged him to complete them” (Poetical Works, ed. Mrs. Shelley, London, 1839, i, xi). Shelley himself alludes to the poem only in the “Advertisement” to the Rosalind and Helen volume and in two letters: to Peacock, April 1819, and to Ollier, postmarked in England 3 August 1819 (The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian Edition, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, London and New York, 1926–30, x, 48, 63).

3 Cf. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 314–315. Cf. also Shelley's lyric “Time,” which begins, “Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,” {Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London, 1934, p. 637. All quotations and references to Shelley's poetry are to this edition [Poetical Works].) I shall confine my discussion to the particular manifestations of the boat-sea-voyage-island complex of symbols in “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” and their appropriateness as vehicles of the poem's theme. For the persistence of this symbolic complex throughout Shelley's poetry, see Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant, and Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford, 1956).

4 Cf. “Julian and Maddalo,” ll. 315–319, 494–499.

5 Newman Ivey White apparently believes (Shelley, ii, 41) that ll. 62–65 apply to Shelley but that ll. 47–49 do not. This leaves as a problem the antecedent of “what” in l. 65. “What now moves nor murmurs not” must be the “unburied bones” of l. 60 and thus those of ll. 47–49. For White's earlier view, which more nearly corresponds to mine, see The Best of Shelley, p. 478. Other suggestions for interpreting the passage can be found in The Explicator: by the Editors (i, October 1942, 5), who follow White's Best of Shelley, and by Louise Schutz Boas (iii, November 1944, 14), who thinks that the “wretch” who is the subject of the lines is Frankenstein's creation, dead and abandoned in the Arctic wastes.

Donald H. Reiman

“Lines Written among the Euganean Hills”

6 Shelley, ii, 41.

7 Cf. “Julian and Maddalo,” ll. 320–337, where a less restrained recounting of griefs is prepared for by the dramatic character of the speaker.

8 Cf. Shelley's “Proposed Letter to the Editor of the Literary Miscellany” in answer to Peacock's “The Four Ages of Poetry” (March 1821): “He would extinguish Imagination which is the Sun of life, and grope his way by the cold and uncertain and borrowed light of that moon which he calls Reason, stumbling over the interlunar chasm of time where she deserts us, and an owl, rather than an eagle, stare with dazzled eyes on the watery orb which is the Queen of his pale Heaven” (Julian Edition, x, 246).

9 Cf. “Julian and Maddalo,” ll. 76–79.

10 Cf. Shelley's letter to Peacock, 8 October 1818: “I had no conception of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, passionless lust, and all the inexpressible brutalities which degrade human nature, could be carried, until I had lived a few days among the Venetians” (Julian Edition, ix, 335). Cf. also Shelley to Peacock, 6 November 1818, on the country between Este and Ferrara: “Every here and there one sees people employed in agricultural labours, and the plough, the harrow or the cart drawn by long teams of milk white or dove-coloured oxen of immense size and exquisite beauty. This indeed might be the country of Pasiphaes” (Julian Edition, ix, 338).

11 Cf. Prometheus Unbound ii.iv.110: “All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.”

12 Paradise Lost xi.829–838. Although Byron used “sea-mew” in “Childe Harold's Good Night” (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto i), there seems to be no connection between his and Shelley's use of the term beyond what is probably a common debt to Milton.

13 By “anarch” Shelley designated, as Ellsworth Barnard says, those rulers who “desecrated and trampled under foot the laws of that spiritual world to which man's higher self aspires” (Shelley's Religion, Minneapolis, 1937, p. 243). By “Celtic” Shelley did not mean what Matthew Arnold meant or what we mean by the word. The OED records a sharp distinction between the classical and modern meanings of “Celt”: in earlier Greek writers the term was “applied to the ancient peoples of Western Europe.” Whether or not “Celt” had by his time achieved wide currency in its modern, ethno-linguistic sense, Shelley clearly uses it to designate non-Graeco-Roman peoples to the north of the Mediterranean basin. That is, Celts were barbarians beyond the pale of the classical culture that was Shelley's ideal.

Cf. Shelley's other three poetic uses of “Celt” or “Celtic”: “Ode to Naples,” 1. 173, where the “Celtic [Austrian] wolves” will flee from the “Ausonian [Italian] shepherds”; Prometheus Unbound ii.iv.94, where the Celt and the Indian represent the farthest poles of humanity, both geographically and culturally; and “Euganean Hills,” l. 223, where “Celt” refers to “the Austrian soldiery” (See A Lexical Concordance to … Shelley, compiled by F. S. Ellis, pp. 94–95). Cf. also Shelley to Peacock, 8 October 1818: “A horde of German soldiers, as vicious and more disgusting than the Venetians themselves, insult these miserable people” (Julian Edition, ix, 335).

14 See the headnote to the poem, Poetical Works, p. 554. The manuscript of these lines (which were, of course, already an integral part of the completed version that Shelley sent to Ollier for publication) is now in the Yale University Library, as part of the collection of Professor C. B. Tinker (see The Tinker Library, New Haven, 1959, p. 382).

15 Julian Edition, x, 12. Cf. Shelley's other remarks to and on Byron during the months before and during the composition of “Euganean Hills”: Julian Edition ix, 299, 301–305, 325–328, 334; x, 8, 10–11, 12–13; “Julian and Maddalo,” Preface and 11. 48–52.

16 Preface to “Julian and Maddalo”: “He [Maddalo-Byron] is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country [Venice]. But it is his weakness to be proud.” Mary Shelley later wrote of Shelley: “He had never read ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ but I have heard him say that he regulated his conduct towards his friends by a maxim which I found afterwards in the pages of Goethe—‘When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved’” (Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mrs. Shelley, London, 1840, xxiv).

17 See n. 9 above. Cf. also Shelley to Mary, 20 August 1818: “You everywhere meet those teams of beautiful white oxen, which are now labouring the little vine-divided fields with their Virgilian ploughs and carts” (Julian Edition, ix, 323).

18 As has often been pointed out, Shelley borrows Sin and Death from Paradise Lost and the game at dice for a man's soul from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

19 Although textual emendation without manuscript authority is a dangerous practice, I am inclined to accept C. D. Locock's conjectural emendation of “might” to “night” at the end of l. 266. Shelley was plagued throughout his stay in Italy by inaccuracies in his published poetry that resulted from his being unable to read the proof sheets. That the Rosalind and Helen volume was no exception we can gather from his letter to the Olliers, 6 September 1819: “In the ‘Rosalind and Helen,‘ I see there are some few errors, which are so much the worse because they are errors in the sense. If there should be any danger of a second Edition, I will correct them” (Julian Edition, x, 79).

20 Cf. Preface to “Julian and Maddalo”: “His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and, instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength.”

21 Cf. The Triumph of Life, ll. 416–423. Shelley wrote to Peacock, 16 August 1818: “The weather has been brilliantly fine; and now, among these mountains, the autumnal air is becoming less hot, especially in the mornings and evenings…. We see here Jupiter in the east; and Venus, I believe, as the evening star, directly after sunset” (Julian Edition, ix, 321).

22 Cf. Shelley to Hunt, April 1818: “no sooner had we arrived at Italy than the loveliness of the earth and the serenity of the sky made the greatest difference in my sensations—I depend on these things for life; for in the smoke of cities and the tumult of human kind and the chilling fogs and rain of our own country I can hardly be said to live” (Julian Edition, ix, 293–294), and Shelley to Hogg, 21 December 1818: “It will be difficult however to live contentedly in England again after the daily contemplation of the sublimest objects of antient art, and the sensations inspired by the enchanting atmosphere which envelopes these tranquil seas and majestic mountains in its radiance” (Julian Edition, x, 8).

23 In 1822 Shelley recorded the death of another brief moment of peace and calm. See “Lines written in the Bay of Lerici” (Poetical Works, pp. 673–674), especially ll. 22–29.

24 The Metres of English Poetry (London, 1930), pp. 39–40.