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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Mrs. Shelley in her preface to her husband's collected poems remarked:
There are others, such as the “Ode to the Sky Lark,” and “The Cloud,” which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames.
1 That Shelley had not read Herrick would, even in the total absence of evidence, be hardly thinkable; and Marvell's poem was regularly prefixed to editions of Paradise Lost after its first appearance there.
2 The poem was assigned by Mrs. Shelley to the year 1820, but on the basis of Mrs. Shelley's statement in her preface (quoted above), and of style, William M. Rossetti in his edition of the poems (London, 1870, ii, 569) expressed the opinion that it belonged to a date not later than 1818.
3 After the edition of Herrick's poems by F. W. Moorman (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1915).
4 I am aware of but few other uses of this meter in English. Shelley's Arethusa, probably written in the same year as The Cloud (1820), has the same meter and the arrangement of lines in The Hag, not that in The Cloud; and Herrick wrote another poem with the title The Hagg in the same meter and obviously under the same inspiration as that quoted. The inspiration for both these products of the greatest of the Sons of Ben doubtless emanated from the following portion of a “Hags' Charm” at the beginning of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens (first pointed out to me by Professor John Livingston Lowes):
The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad, The dogs they do bay, and the timbrels play,
And so is the cat-a-mountain, The spindle is now a turning;
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole, The moon it is red, and the stars are fled,
And the frog peeps out o' the fountain; But all the sky is a burning …
Here the line arrangement, obviously, is that of The Cloud; and Jonson's verses may also have had their influence upon Shelley, at least to the extent of determining his verse grouping. There are here, indeed, certain verbal parallels to The Cloud not traceable in Herrick. Jonson's “burning” sky can be matched by Shelley's “burning plumes” of the sunrise and “burning zone” about the throne of the sun. Both poets treat moon and stars in a perhaps natural enough juxtaposition, but also with some suggestion of timid subordination of the latter to the former. It is perhaps not without significance that “mountain—fountain,” or “mountains—fountains,” was a favorite rime of Shelley's, used twice in the plural forms in Arethusa, and that mountains are four times referred to in The Cloud.
One clause of Herrick's The Hagg may, furthermore, have suggested the behavior of Shelley's moon and stars:
While th' Moone in her sphere
Peepes trembling for feare …
It may well be that Shelley recollected, consciously or unconsciously, all three of the early poems in this meter and shaped from this latter clause (which doubtless originated in Jonson's frog that “peeps out o' the fountain,” and perhaps also his timid stars) his own melodious and suggestive line, “The stars peep behind her and peer.” The meter may well have haunted his memory in terms of particularly happy phrases, especially where these entered into the rimes.
5 Shelley also uses “sea” in his rimes, and “Sky,” to be put beside Herrick's “skies.” Herrick's rime, it will be noted, is “arise—skies,” and Shelley (see below) makes rather significant use of the word “arise,” though he does not work it into his rimes.
6 N.B. Note 4 above.
7 Whether Herrick's “ Devili” that rides with his Hag is, like Shelley's “pilot,” a mere representative of the “Spirit that guides,” or whether it actually is that spirit is not altogether clear, and would have appeared just as ambiguous to Shelley as it does to the present-day reader.
8 After the edition of Marvell's Poems and Letters by H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927).
9 P.L., i, 14.
10 See the subject in the Encyc. Brit. (eleventh ed.) or Margoliouth's note (op. cit.).
11 Cf. with Marvell's lines P.L., iii, 41–55.
12 Indeed, this particular line might conceivably be scanned by itself as pentameter with its first two feet anapests.
13 Marvell's “delight and horrour on us seize” may possibly have some affinity to Shelley's “Our sincerest laughter/With some pain is fraught;/Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
14 Shelley's rime “springest–wingest–singest” may owe something to Marvell's more common “sing–Wing.”
15 Drawn by Marvell from Milton (see above), with whom it was a favorite word.
16 In his annotation of Paradise Lost (see The Complete Works of John Keats, ed. by H. Buxton Forman [Glasgow, 1901], iii, 264–265) Keats singled out for comment the phrase descriptive of how the birds after creation “With clang despis'd the ground” (vii, 422). This phrase may also have been specially noted by Shelley.
17 That Shelley was deep in Paradise Lost, and therefore in all probability in contact with Marvell's poem, both before and after he wrote his lyric in the spring of 1820 is attested by his reading from the epic to Mrs. Shelley on the evening of August 4, 1819 (Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [London, 1887], ii, 272), and by his instruction of Prince Alexander Mavrocordato in it at Pisa during the winter of 1820–1821 (ibid., p. 362).
