Percy Shelley’s “England in 1819” is an undeniably political poem:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

The political resides in the subject matter of the sonnet[1]: Shelley’s moral disgust with the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, his (not uncommon) hatred of George IV, his condemnation of the debaucherous Regent, his horror at the Anglican establishment and the failure of the Parliament to enact statutes that would diminish their hold on the nation. Shelley here speaks of public matters with a public voice, to a public that, had it been published as Shelley had hoped, by Leigh Hunt, would have been read with approval by those who already agreed, and with loathing by the Tory critics who despised Hunt’s radicalism. It would have had much the impact of a popular meme circulated in a left-leaning echo chamber of today’s social media. Its being political, while indisputable, raises an anxiety foreign to Hardy’s poem (as discussed in my previous post), which did not purport to comment on matters beyond its own occasion: can it be said to have any political worth if it has no political power?

Shelley, who was carried to excess in declaring poets the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind” at the end of his “Defence of Poetry,” articulates elsewhere in that piece the labor that this poem might be seen as undertaking: poetry, he writes, “marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.” It does so by the power of the imagination, which he sets against “reason”: “Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole.” This points a way forward: it has power to shape the imagination that underlies political power. But such a claim, if we take the shaping power to be an actual presence in the world, would need to be assessed historically, and Shelley’s poem went unpublished until after his death, in 1839, some twenty years after its events; Victoria was on the throne, the Chartists were rising, and the reform bill of 1832 had marked a significant, if incomplete, shift in the nation’s politics. We can read Shelley’s poem as a political poem, but cannot, I think, in any simple way, appreciate it except as a poem: an attempt at reconciling the actual, the possible, and the right at the same time as (by means of) an attempted reconciliation of language, imagination, and judgment that is the poem itself.

This does not, though, mean effacing its political value. Rather than asking how the poem enters into the political arena, we can ask how the poem becomes an arena in which political actualities, possibilities, and ideals are brought into a stable union: how it “subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.” It makes a bid to exemplify what such a reconciliation might be, for the imagination, for judgment, and within language. Being a poem, it both is an actual object and knows itself to be a fiction, unable to perform the change it would have, and its rightness consists in this self-understanding.

What does this look like in the poem itself? It begins with the first line, which is both a description of King George III but also alludes to Shakespeare’s tragic Lear, who was old, mad, despised by his daughters, dying, and figuratively blind (as opposed to Gloucester’s literal blindness). “An” both reduces George III to a contingency (one of many, just another instance, nameless, replaceable) and also opens the poem to the status of fiction (“Once upon a time, there was a king), which jars against the title’s historical exactitude. In both the allusion and the article, the poem acknowledges itself as a fiction, a product of the imagination, but also subordinates the king to the standards of the imagination: he is not tragic like Lear, we are to feel his distance from the sublimity of that drama. Nor is it irrelevant that Lear is a drama, since this poem is about political inaction: the inert passivity of the ruling powers that “drop, blind in blood, without a blow” never finds a main verb, if we respect the full stop at the end of sestet; but the lack of verb is not felt as an absence, since it is a list, and when we do arrive at “are graves” it does not provide closure so much as a new opening in the syntax (“from which”), as graves themselves open at the resurrection. The absence of a main verb is eclipsed by its being a list: these things simply “are,” as is confirmed by that same verb when it does arrive. 

But something more complicated is happening in the poem, since verbs attach, in subordinate clauses, to so many of the objects in the list: “Princes…who flow”; “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know | But leechlike…cling | Till they drop”; “starved and stabbed”; “to all who wield” which we might hear as taking as its object the  “golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,” though this phrase also stands alone; and “a senate…unrepealed.” On the one hand, as a list, with subordinate clauses characterizing each of the items in it, the lack of a main verb until the penultimate line’s “are graves” syntactically stifles any single action uniting the poem; on the other hand, each of these items in the list is characterized by an action of its own, and the list is quite busy; but then, to return to the first hand, the lack of a main verb makes each of these activities, presented as a subordinate phrase, dwindle, so that the movement of each phrase is toward an anticlimax that is registered in the perfect “till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.” In that line, we find exemplified the dispassionate hatred of lifelessness that the poem refuses to endow with vivacity. It feels like something we would find in Alexander Pope, the poem diminishing the object of its hatred so that it can be sneered at with the clipped, tongue-tripping aside of “blind in blood.”

 Throughout the sonnet, much is happening, but nothing really happens, and this can be read as an indictment of the parasitic and pathological stagnancy of the institutions that Shelley criticizes. (Even when the people are “starved and stabbed,” no agent is named, even though Shelley knows who he would blame; in this case, the passive voice does not evade responsibility but refuses to attribute strength to those whom Shelley portrays elsewhere as lacking the vigor of life). But this absence of meaningful action can also be read as an acknowledgment of poetry’s limitations: it can unite these into itself, but what it can make them do, or do to them, is confined to “are graves”: metaphor-making, the power of the imagination to draw attention to the “similitude of things,” as Shelley writes in “Defence of Poetry.” The poem can indict, but here, unlike in his apology, Shelley knows that poets cannot legislate; this poem has no choice but to leave “Time’s worst statue, unrepealed.” 

What the poem can offer is hope. Hope here is private and public, political and personal. It is genuine hope because the poem does not attempt to justify it; it is hope as fantastical as a belief in resurrection, but this is what makes it powerful; it requires a rejection of what Shelley felt too many of his contemporaries believed to be the nature of things. Suitably, the final rhyme between “may” and “day” hearkens back to the word “prey,” but that word has been redeemed in memory: from the carcass that it implies, the word “pray” is recalled, albeit without the dogmas of Christianity. In some of Shelley’s poems, the vagueness of “a glorious Phantom” may be thought detrimental to the eschatological horizon; but here, the vagueness feels entirely right. It is set against the limpid specificity of what has come before, and so in its vagueness it acknowledges that the object of hope must be left undefined, and perhaps that the Phantom is hope itself, glorious because it is born out of injustice and misery. That it is hope rather than something simply hoped-for is expressed in the range of the cornerstone of the poem: the word “may.” 

“May” is itself a phantom, containing both a sense of possibility (what could happen) and also permission; in either case, it points elsewhere, but also recognizes that what is possible might not come to pass and that what is permissible depends upon a power to grant permission. The precarious nature of hope is built into the verb. If that phantom is itself hope, then what Shelley presents is a hope for hope, hope itself being at a remove in such desperate (but not despairing) times. Setting the verb as he does at the end of a line, the blank of the page becomes an emblem for the uncertain emptiness of the future: “may” is held in abeyance at what might come next, at what verb of action will be offered as the poem’s true culmination. It holds onto the line ending with a hope for something as yet unknown. Even when the uncertainty of what may happen is resolved by “Burst,” we are left in uncertainty as to what such bursting might be: the phantom may burst and then? In this most dramatic climax of the poem, the action is violent but brief, and nothing is said about what may happen to bring about a revolution in the state of affairs. Instead, the phantom will “burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.” The image is one of a lightning strike, not uncommon in Shelley’s poem; the phantom like a sudden flash of light will offer a brief illumination of the day. But is that not what Shelley’s own poem has done? Is the sonnet itself the glorious phantom that has emerged from the graves, but that is uncertain of its own capacity to illumine beyond itself? “Poetry,” Shelley writes in his “Defence of Poetry,” “is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” Here, the poem’s final exertion of imagination, the glorious Phantom, could be said to consume the poem in becoming a figure for what the poem does, even as the poem could be said to consume the scabbard of the nation, the grave from which it finds life, as the lightning finds its life in the tempestuous day that it illuminates. The statute is unrepealed, but implicit in the figure of the lightning bursting is a peal of thunder that the poem sounds; poetry can peal, but not repeal. The one is prophecy, the other legislation. 

We do not need to equate the phantom with hope to accept that what Shelley has done in these final lines is embodied hope in the poem’s wording at the same time as figuring hope in its images, and done so with the understanding that hope, like poetry, feeds on the realm of the actual but lives in the realm of the possible, aiming at a good that it need not have defined. Shelley’s poem answers, I think, to what philosopher Jonathan Lear describes in his Radical Hope, a book that recounts the demise of the Native American Crow tribe at a profound level of cultural erasure, focusing on the chieftain Plenty Coups:

Plenty Coups was able to lead himself and his people forward into an unimaginable future committed to the idea that something good would emerge. He carried himself and his people forward, committed to the idea that it was worthwhile to do so, even while acknowledging that his local understanding of the good life would vanish. This is a daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is. (100)

Such a commitment requires what Lear calls “a new Crow poet: one who could take up the crow past and–rather than use it for nostalgia and ersatz mimesis–project it into vibrant new ways for the Crow to live and be…the possibility for such a poet is precisely the possibility for the creation of a new field of possibilities” (51).  In “England in 1819,” Shelley does little to imagine “vibrant new ways” of living and being. Here, and elsewhere I think, Shelley writes at a further remove: he imagines the possibility of new possibilities, the hope for a reason to hope. In Jonathan Lear’s account, the “creation of a new field of possibilities” is the creation of a new field for action, a shared understanding that allows one to act with meaning and purpose in the world. Shelley leaves us short of identifying such meaningful political action, but his poem exposes that what passes as political action lacks meaning, is not truly anything happening at all, and cannot be until the nation restores its “perception of value” (“Defence of Poetry”). Such hope cannot but expand the realm of the possible, within which the political finds its horizons.