Shelley's miching mallecho

The always excellent Carol Rumen has chosen Shelley's 'To Wordsworth' published in 1816 as her poem of the week for the Guardian.

Wordsworth had written 'Peter Bell' in 1798 but published it only in 1819. It attracted execration from Hunt, Byron, Shelley- even Lamb, a friend of Wordsworth.

Was this a case of posh Southron bastids (Byron went to Harrow, Shelley to Eton. Both inherited titles) looking down on a plain Northern lad who had attended the local Grammar School & whose early Radicalism was tempered by common sense & such Christianity as is common amongst even commoners with little sense and less scholarship?

Shelley writes-

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

Pathei Mathos? No. Wordsworth learns from an artless child that 'We are Seven!' though Death is the double Sabbath of the workaday week of even the most heavily burdened. This is the doctrine of univocity unknown to Scholastic Dunces. 

The first mention of tears in Wordy has to do with the vapours of a female novelist slightly less vacuous than Shelley, Schelling, 

That things depart which never may return:

Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

Wordsworth was a poet of the people of the landscapes he describes. But they were his own people by birth or oikeiosis. Since those landscapes were relatively unpeopled. 'Nature' predominates. But Wordsworth isn't the poet of Nature anymore than he is the poet of Geology or Botany.

 Wordsworth, it seems, was given to peripatētikós- going walk about- and what he learnt while walking with and talking to the hoi polloi was that the true peripatetic pathei-mathos- the true pathos of such learning as is love- is that everything that departs returns, by the iron law of palingenesis or re-birth, richer for the change, and all Mourning itself dies along with Death at the time of the true Eschaton- the day of a Wrath not of some currently howling mob but the curtained, or mobled, Lord of all that is mortal.

Dreams may sometimes be sweet- even for those heavily burdened- but in this our common, intersubjective, 'world which is', the sad truth is that the 'sweet dreams' of the leisured aristocracy- even if they extend to chopping off crowned heads & enjoying a Saturnalia more splendid than that enjoined on visiting angels in Sodom- are very different from that of such lowly folk as populate picturesque landscapes & make them comfortably traversable for tourists, by their diligence & decency of character.

The fact is, for working class people (or declasse drinking class people like me) the world of Wordsworth's Preludes is

the world of all of us, and where

We find our happiness, or not at all.

There is happiness in knowing of God's Justice. Even if we are predestined for despair in this life and damnation ever after, some are not. Mum, Dad, Sister, Granny- Woofy the Dog- if even one wins hits the jackpot, there was for all, an albeit stochastic, Jubilee. 

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.

Whatever might be the woes of a wealthy Old Etonian due to inherit a Baronetcy, they were very uncommon indeed. Shelley lost nothing. He got a chance to put the boot into an older poet and gain some publicity for himself. Nowt wrong in that. Poetry simply doesn't matter enough for us to apply any sort of ethical standard to its practitioners. 

Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine

On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:

Shelley, mate, thou art writing fustian. Fuck is wrong with you?

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

Above the blind and battling multitude:

Like the mob that stormed the Bastille? Wordsworth went walk-about in France a year after it happened.  He wasn't the fucking Rock of Gibraltar repelling the forces of the Revolution. 

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —

Guys who inherit a shitload of money can be very censorious of those who rise by their own efforts. The truth is 'Liberty' is a set of Hohfeldian incidents or immunities which are costly to get remedies for under a vinculum juris. Productivity must rise if this is to happen

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

To mock, calumny and mock-crucify. 

Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.

Wordsworth outlived the little shit by 28 years. Apart from Ozymandias- actually written by some other dude but turned into great verse by Shelley- the Old Etonian died when he died. Wordsworth didn't. Cumbria didn't. It will be conserved as a corner in what is merely Cosmic. 

There is a 'babu' quality- Bengali 'ucchvaas'- to Shelley. He was influenced by fellow Old Etonian, Lawerences' 'Empire of the Nairs' & influence Bharati.

A temple elephant killed that Tambram shithead. I guess this shows his poetry was good. Mine isn't. The last temple elephant I met was very affectionate to me even though I, not Bharati, am a genuine drunkard. 

Still, like Wordsworth's Peter Bell's donkey, I'm safely stabled in St.Augustine's stable- or, to be more brutally honest about my IQ, a kitten swatting at Manjara Nyaya. 

This is from Shelley's prologue to 'Peter Bell the Third'

Peter Bells, one, two and three,

O'er the wide world wandering be. --

First, the antenatal Peter,

i.e the foetus created in 'antarabhava' or 'bardo'- i.e. subject to 'karmic' birth-determining particles or forces. This, in Hinduism, is the realm of the Gandharvas- with whom Vak- Speech- went off in vagabondage to create the various lyric forms. Shelley, like Southey or Moore, fed promiscuously on Sanskrit fewmets though, no doubt, they had Greek antecedents. 

Wrapped in weeds of the same metre,

The so-long-predestined raiment

Clothed in which to walk his way meant

This is Swiftian- Latinate & Ciceronian when it ought to be Clerical. Shelley goes astray when he quits Arcadian groves to pose as the Juvenal of the jeuness dorre. 

The second Peter; whose ambition

Is to link the proposition,

As the mean of two extremes --

        (This was learned from Aldric's themes) 

Henry Aldrich's outdated book on Logic (it follows Phillip of Spain) was used at Oxford- from which Shelley was expelled. In Cambridge- from which Wordsworth graduated- Isaac Watts's more recent book was used. 

                         

Shielding from the guilt of schism

The orthodoxal syllogism;

Don't try to be Swiftian if you don't fucking know Logic & Theology. Anglicans have no 'orthodoxal syllogism'. There were 39 Articles. The thing was Contractual, not Logicist. 

 

The First Peter -- he who was

Like the shadow in the glass

Shelley thought Wordsworth started off as a 'Rock'- (as in St. Peter being the rock on which built the Church)- and was a shadow in the dark glass of the Apocalypse. 

Of the second, yet unripe,

His substantial antitype. --

i.e. not a Platonic form but a concrete universal of the Coleridgian type- i.e. an 'educt of the imagination actuated by pure reason'. 

Then came Peter Bell the Second,

Who henceforward must be reckoned

The body of a double soul,

Coleridge had spoken of himself & the Wordsworths as three people with one soul. He also had a tri-partite theory of the soul. He truly was as boring as shit. 

And that portion of the whole 

Without which the rest would seem

Ends of a disjointed dream. --

This is Coleridge's 'esemplastic power' unifying thesis & antithesis in the manner of Schelling & Schlegel & the equally boring Shelley. 

And the Third is he who has

O'er the grave been forced to pass

To the other side, which is, --

Go and try else, -- just like this.

Drown yourself by all means you boring prig. 

Peter Bell the First was Peter

Smugger, milder, softer, neater,

Like the soul before it is

      Born from that world into this.     

i.e. the poet whose topic is otherworldly and fantastical.                               

The next Peter Bell was he,

Predevote, like you and me,

To good or evil as may come;

His was the severer doom, --

For he was an evil Cotter,

And a polygamic Potter.

Wordsworth decides to take a humble, human, theme for his poem. Peter Bell is a hawker. He is sinful. One day he comes across an ass which he beats so as to be able to ride away upon it. It does not budge. Peter sees that it is gazing at its owner- who has drowned. He fishes the corpse out of the water after which the ass is content to carry him away. Peter hears a scream from behind him. It is the dead man's son finding his corpse. Peter reflects on his hard-hearted & sinful life. He passes a Methodist prayer-meeting & his heart is touched by the preacher's words. The ass reaches the home of the dead man, whose wife is waiting for him. She learns that she is a widow, and her children orphans:

And now is Peter taught to feel
That man's heart is a holy thing;
And Nature, through a world of death,
Breathes into him a second breath,
More searching than the breath of spring

In other words, this rough fellow is on the path to repentance. Sadly, this does not involve his becoming an Old Etonian & inheriting a Baronetcy.

And the last is Peter Bell,

Damned since our first parents fell,

Damned eternally to Hell --

Surely he deserves it well!    

Because he doesn't inherit lots and lots of money. True, the fucker might get into a more profitable line of business & end up a very rich man. But he'd still be as common as muck- like Wordsworth who, when all is said and done, was a Grammar School oik.