5385: Response One, Shelley

The work we are doing in this class seems very foreign to me (pun intended). So, for now, I will try to respond to some of the tropes we discussed in class on Monday:

What struck me most is the way “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” does not move. The poem, clearly, begins on a rather somber note: “the mariner, worn and wan,/Never thus could voyage on--/Day and night, and night and day,/Drifting on his dreary way” (3-6). (Even a phrase that initial seems positive, such as “Sun-girt City, thou hast been/ Ocean’s child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day,”-- implying that previous times were not darker days—hardly reads as entirely positive. The city, in its less dark days, was still “Sun-girt”… girdled, laced, bound) (17-15). By the end, it makes a play at lifting toward something more comfortable, more optimistic: “the light and smell divine/ of all flowers that breathe and shine:/We may live so happy there” contrasts greatly from the image of a skull and bones lying on the shore (350-52). However, this location is non-space, “far from passion, pain, and guilt” (345). While Shelley infiltrates the preceding images with a sense of the Italian space, directly mentioning Venice and Lombardy, building architecture into the landscape of his lines (towers, cities, columns, domes), the last section offers no concrete sense of place. The stanza is peppered with abstractions: “healing Paradise,” “Spirits of the Air,” and “the breath of life,” just to name a few (355, 353, 367).

I say all of this because I came into today’s reading anticipating a very positive image of Italy and a deeply prejudiced view of Italians. Though the initial reading of the poem, as I said, seems to bend up toward a more positive image, Shelley separates it entirely from the Italian space he has already created in the text. Italy—and perhaps, even broader, any concrete, living location—is not redeemed in the end. Both it and the people diminish as the poem descends toward lofty, unanchored local. Readers leave the poem with a sense of nostalgia for the worn mariner trekking through the “sea of Misery,” for the opening scene in which we thought he might venture somewhere more uplifting.

(Side note: I was super excited when I read “We may live so happy there,/That the Spirits of the Air,/Envying us, may even entice/To our healing Paradise/The polluting multitude” because I have an absurd love for “Annabel Lee,” and that section sounds very much like: “The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,/Went envying her and me—Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,/In this kingdom by the sea)/That the wind came out of the cloud by night,/Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee”—and was quite upset when I realized that Shelley was clearly not riffing off of Poe, but “Annabel Lee” was published years later. I wonder if Poe was referencing Shelley?)