Jon Kerr's Tuesday Verse
Selections of Shelley’s Poetry & Prose
Tuesday Verse is a new feature of The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley that brings you close to his poetry and, occasionally, prose. Each Tuesday we will deliver to you a poem or excerpt of a poem which Romantic scholar Jon Kerr will offer some brief thoughts about. Jon will also pair the offering with an image that may offer some context. We welcome suggestions for future posts as well as your own ideas about what you think Shelley is trying to accomplish with his verse. Enjoy!!
Jon is a recently graduated from the University of Toronto with his PhD in English literature with a specialization in the Romantics. He is currently at Mount Alison University in New Brunswick, Canada on a post doc fellowship.
P.B. Shelley, “The Flower that Smiles Today” (1821-22)
Likely written in the final year or so of his life, “The Flower that Smiles Today” captures Shelley’s increasing preoccupation with the transience of life and its joys. The final years of Shelley’s life were marked by increasing difficulties, both personal and political: between 1816 and 1819, Shelley and Mary had lost three children, which brought growing strain to their marriage; at the early 1820s came with a series of critical setbacks to England’s reform movement that, just a few years prior, seemed on the verge of creating real change in the country. These issues hang over Shelley’s mutability poems like this one, which ponders how it is possible to survive particular joys—friendship, love, beauty—once we know we can never experience them again.
Some of you might also notice connections, both stylistic and thematic, with some of Byron’s poetry, which often ponders similar questions. Both the Byronic hero and the speaker of Shelley’s poem capture the zeitgeist of Britain’s revolutionary period as it gradually drew to a close: that is, both reflect upon the disappointed hopes that come to people (and societies) that once seemed destined to achieve great things.