Page:Essays and Studies

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

190

NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.

lips of Prometheus, that "it had become a curse:" the name of Christ.^[1] I for one could hardly bring myself to doubt that the reviewer of the moment had read aright. No other word indeed will give so adequate a sense, fit in so fairly with the context. It should surely be a creed, a form of faith, upon which the writer here sets his foot. What otherwise shall we take to be "the snaky knot of this foul gordian word"—a word which, "weak itself as stubble," serves yet the turn of tyrants to bind together the rods and axes of their rule? If this does not mean a faith of some kind, and a living faith to this day, then it would seem at first sight that words have no meaning—that the whole divine fabric of that intense and majestic stanza crumbles into sparkling dust, dissolves into sonorous jargon. Any such vaguer substitute as "priest" or "king"

↑ When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant that in an extant manuscript of this poem Shelley had himself filled up the gap with the word "king;" but this certainly did not appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the original reading, aware as I was of the excisions and alterations to which Shelley was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to submit his yet unpublished or half-published poems. I am now, however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended was between the "king" of this stanza and the "priest" of the next; though I still think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously impaired if we are to assume that the "foul gordian word" is simply the title of king, and not (as so much of the context would appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which might at the time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And this, with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we know that the creed of historical Christianity did always appear to Shelley. In this adoration of the personal Jesus, combined as it was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with Blake—the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so much in common.

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[1] When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant that in an extant manuscript of this poem Shelley had himself filled up the gap with the word "king;" but this certainly did not appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the original reading, aware as I was of the excisions and alterations to which Shelley was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to submit his yet unpublished or half-published poems. I am now, however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended was between the "king" of this stanza and the "priest" of the next; though I still think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously impaired if we are to assume that the "foul gordian word" is simply the title of king, and not (as so much of the context would appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which might at the time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And this, with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we know that the creed of historical Christianity did always appear to Shelley. In this adoration of the personal Jesus, combined as it was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with Blake—the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so much in common.

[1]