اإلتحاد الطالبي نسأل هللا الدعاء والتوفيق لصاحبته أم محمد اليافعي )زكاة العلم(

Transcription

1 اإلتحاد الطالبي "ما شاء هللا ال قوة إال باهلل" نسأل هللا الدعاء والتوفيق لصاحبته أم محمد اليافعي )زكاة العلم( Part (2): "Sonnet: England in 1819" and "To the Lord Chancellor" In the twentieth century, the political persona came to dominate the poet's reputation replacing the Victorian mythology. Shelley was the poet who had developed the passionate hatred and contempt for the class society and wrote against the social order. He is a Romantic poet from the second generation. His sonnet" England in 1819" provides a kind of journalistic report on the state of England in that era. Britain in that time was suffering from the economic recession which had begun after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. People had protested against the government and then they were suppressed leading to eighteen deaths and hundreds of serious injuries among the demonstrators. King George III has gone mad in old age and was hated by the people of England. The problem is, under that current system; the only thing to replace him with, when he dies, is a continuing monarchy under the king's son. These events incited Shelley to attack the monarch, the unformed parliament, the army and the law by using an angry radical political tone in his sonnet. Instead of celebrating the nature, Shelley uses a different tone in his sonnet "England in 1819". He tries to create better society because he is prophet from the nature and he has to talk about the inner self and the better life. He begins the sonnet with words such as old, mad, blind to criticize and insult the king and attack the government and the demonstrators who oppress the people and persecute اضطهذ them.his voice is loud and insistent, pausing between words for maximum rhetorical effect and violent metaphors leaving no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation. He describes how the people were suffering and even army was starving. He attacks religion and ends with saying that the life would be better with a glorious phantom. Shelley believes in change and he might refer to revolution against the government. The speaker thus has no faith left in the leading institutions in England; he condemns ذ ه the army, the law, religion, and the senate. The speaker goes into detail over the troubles in England: the madness and blindness of the King; the muddied genetic تشىي انىساث ت line that includes the Prince; the ignorance of the nation s Rulers ; and the tired and hungry masses انجائعت.انجماه ش Shelley also alludes again to 1

2 the Petrol Massacre همخ انى مزبحت انبىز ه (see The Mask of Anarchy ), calling the people stabbed in an untilled field. His disgust with the state of the nation is deepened with his use of imagery and metaphor ( dregs, muddy, leech, blood, sanguine ). The ruling classes are figured as blood-sucking leeches that are mainly parasites انطف ه اث on the people. The army is needed, yet it has turned against the people; similarly the laws are a two-edged sword, and even the religion of the rulers is Christ less and a tool of oppression instead of its opposite. The poem is angry and that is clear through the poems uncompromising ال هىادة "mad, dregs, scorn". In the first stanza, he illustrates that King George III is old, mad, blind and dying. Then he uses metaphoric device in "mud from a muddy spring" to describe the prince who succeeded the king because he came from the same muddy soil, which is his father. Then he uses simile in "leech-like" to describe the rulers as if they were insects sucking the blood of the people. In the second stanza, he talks about the common people who were starving from extreme poverty "starved and stabbed". He illustrates the army "liberticidal and prey" who is supposed to defend the people rights, but in fact the army was the source of suppression and killing. In the third stanza he refers to the corrupted church and the parliament who twisted the constitution in favor of the king "A senate, time's worst statute, unrepealed مبطم."غ ش Later on, the poet changes his tone. He expresses his hopes with a note of passion and optimism for revolution and reforms that a "glorious Phantom" may spring from this decay االوحالل and break the كسش سالسم انطغ ان tyranny. chains of Still, as Shelley often does, the poet ends in optimism. The last two lines optimistically yearn for revolution. Despite all of these corrupt establishments throughout the land, there is a تىق انى chance the people will rise up and a revolution of illumination اانتىى ش ت will calm the ruling class anarchist. The glorious Phantom" is like the recovery of reason and understanding that seems to call for revolution against the government and a call of liberty of England on a new basis of rationality and appreciation for nature and justice. Next, Shelley wrote" To the lord chancellor" after he had lost his children's custody. The custody claim was eventually heard in the Court of Chancery by Lord Eldon. He was successfully labeled as a dangerous and morally unsound, unfit to be a father. But the children were placed with a foster family rather than with their grandparents. The tone in the poem has a figure of the political radical fighting for freedom and against the tyranny انطغ ان of the laws overlaid by a picture of a distraught رهىل deprived of the rightful care of his children. The persona of the bitter, despairing father is a version of himself which Shelley constructed well 2

3 after the direct impact of the court hearing. Mary Shelley would build on this image in her 1839 notes on "To the Lord Chancellor" inviting us to read the poem as articulating the emotion of tragic loss. Our understanding of the politics of this poem and others is modified by a sense of their history, not just their compositional history, but the history of constructing Shelley the Romantic poet. "Sonnet :England in 1819" "To the Lord Chancellor" feature the figure of the poet in the voice of the accuser; they offer a satire of the establishment; Shelley the political radical 1- Political anger as channeled through the distance of geographic exile. 2- Shelly s depiction of England in 1819 is realistic in some respects. King George III had been declared insane in 1810 and was to die in January Shelly is an advocate داع ل of change and liberty, writing through personae and sympathizes with the working people then he declares about his optimism and hopes about change through revolutions. Persona of the bitter despairing father as a version of himself after the direct impact of the court hearing, he is an angry father and an unsatisfied citizen. "Ozymandias" and "Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon (1821)": Shelley was a Romantic poet from the second generation. He was concerned about the aspect and the impact of the nature power in the inner self and wrote poems in multi-characters and different tones. For example, he celebrates the nature and explores his imagination as a mythologize poet in" To the Sky Lark" and "Ode to the West Wind". He uses a political tone in "England in 1819" and "To the Lord Chancellor" as a voice of the accuser and offer a satire of the establishment. Moreover, Shelley's political concerns take on a wider historical scope, so he wrote "Ozymandias" in 1817, and then he wrote "Written on Hearing the News 3

4 of the Death of Napoleon (1821)"to combine these two aspects of Romantic awareness of history, and construct a new role for the poet as witness to historical process. In their approach to the lives of the great figures of the past, Romantic writers and artists often seemed to be in search of imaginative equivalents for the factual accounts being written by historians. The last two poems are consciously record and comment upon two world historical events, the collapse of empires and the historical dictatorial leaders "Napoleon" and "Rameses". Ozymandias is a sonnet, a poem with fourteen lines. It takes its inspiration from Shelley's encounter with a giant piece of Egyptian sculpture, the head, and the shoulder of Emperor Ramses. The sculpture's display in British Museum in London as an object of imperial origins and remind viewers both of Napoleon's imperial ambitions and of the British imperial power. انمكاوت sculptureضخم represent a figure of a worldly stature Both the poems and the colossal The two poems look back on emperors whose rule was marked by terror: Napoleon's.انذو ى ت fierce spirit rolled انشوح انششست in wealth and bloodshed انذماء,سفك and Ozymandias governed with a sneer ofسخش ت cold command. Their image of power is linked to ideas of ruin, fragmentation and erasure محو of past grandeur انماض.عظمت In "Ozymandias" there are three voices: the initial narrator, the traveler and the quoted words of Ozymandias the name Greek travelers gave to the Egyptian Rameses. It is concerned with fabled power. The "I" is presented as a listener hearing the traveller's tale. The second poem "The Death of Napoleon" is constructed as an interview in which the personified figure of Earth responds in this final stanza to earlier questions from the poet speaker. The narrating voice of the poem is confined at قتصش عهى the stage to passive, listening role. The function of the poems seem to be representing power on a grand scale واسع,وطاق but at the same time take a wide historical view of that power and record its limits. Shelley places وضع his fragments of Ozymandias in an imaginary landscape of long vistas آفاق a lost past " nothing beside remains". The statue of Ozymandias may be reduced to decay,االضمحالل its fragments almost lost in the desolate landscape مقفش,مىظش but the passions of the ruler still survive in his sculpted expression. The poems vision of political ambition as tyrannical and انطمىح انس اس مستبذة وعابشةtransitory is a kind of admiration for the glory of powerful figures whose memory will never be entirely effaced.تتالشى While Napoleon's empire may have disappeared, those people who follow him are invited by Earth to "mould" with its shame. The narrator تظم متشابكت his memory so that his hopes remain interwoven تشكم begins by challenging Earth, demanding to know if the world can continue now Napoleon is gone; "cants thou move, Napoleon being dead?" The Earth speaks through metaphors of renewal شى تجذ ذ shouts down the speaker's question, which might remind us of the qualified 4

5 optimism of the Ode to the West Wind". Shelley claimed that this witnessing role for the poet at a critical moment in English history was the most important of all. Shelley's focus on decay as the ultimate destiny of authoritarians rule was an oblique warning that Britain could expect the same if it did not change its ways and the might and majesty of a king do not last, only great art endures. Thus, Shelly s reputation is bound up in myth-making; and he is certainly mythologizing the role of the poet here. 5 Edward Gibbon One of the major historical works of the late 18 th century was Edward Gibbon s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ( ).Gibbons ideas about how an empire s immoderate greatness and progress led to inevitable fracture and decay reverberate through the vocabulary of the two poems. In this context, Shelly may have been suggesting in poetic terms that the political disruption in Europe in the years around 1820 was taking place in a historical period in which heroism and a search for ideals coexisted with crisis and the end of an era. "Mont Blanc" The poem was written by Shelley after he visited the Vale of Chamonix and Alps. The poem when he explores those extremes in search something beyond the ordinary. The irony of the poem is that the imaginative endeavor of the archetypal Romantic quester may well be the end in itself: the ideal is not necessarily attained. He is celebrating the beauty and the strength of the mountain. It s huge, strong and silent, behind this silent there divine and spirit there. These opening sections of the poem seem to show Shelly consciously creating a difficult and fragmented poetry, to embody the difficulty of the quest for the ideal. The experience of the تتعا ش convey a sense of the mutually coexisting قمت انجبم and the mountain peak انىادي ravine life., extreme possibilities and potential rewards of the Romantic انفىضى chaos بصىسة متبادنت Mont Blanc seems to conclude that the poet s role is to quest after extremes of mental experience, and uncover for others the ideals and ultimate truths inherent in them. The 1 st person speaker of Mont Blanc is constructed as just such a sensitive observer: the raw experience of the mountains he evokes in the first three verse paragraphs prompts his mind to the insights which them dominate the final two sections. In the opening verse, the river is compared to the fluid and changeable impressions of the outer world which flow through the mind. Their impact is alternately depressing and uplifting. The language of the high peaks teaches a simple and serene faith in nature: a faith which arguably displaces that of religious systems. In addition, there is a sense of the human mind,

6 conceived at this stage in abstract terms, is carried away by the force of the world around it. All these have origins in Shelly s life, whether projected in his own voice through letters or notes or verse, or recounted by others such as his friends, wife or literary executors. But none renders جعم his Romantic life into a single coherent story. This vision of the Romantic vocation suggests that such intellectual pinnacles exist to be scaled, through the creative power of the poetic imagination. "Ozymandias" and "Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon (1821) " Feature the figure of the poet as a historical observer; a witness on history. Rather than adopting a strategy of direct attack, Ozymandias offers a detached and seemingly objective scrutiny. The sonnet employs three levels of narration: 1- Ozymandias own words 2- Inside the traveler s story. 3- Inside The narrating I. - The effect is one of distancing, with no sense of Shelly himself as a dramatized presence in the poem. "Mont Blanc" Romantic poet's heroic quest for truth and the ideal through an encounter with the awe-inspiring landscape of the Alps. Shelly and his poet-speakers have featured in this chapter in a wide range of guises: (To a Sky Lark Ode to the West Wind) (The Mask of Anarchy Sonnet: England in (To the Lord Chancellor) Ozymandias (Written in Hearing the News of the Death of (Mont Blanc) 6

7 1819) Napoleon) The ethereal spirit The political protester The Angry Father and the Literary Intellectual The Witness to History and the Angst-Ridden Creative Artist The Quester after Ideals