SHELLEY, SWINBURNE, HOUSMAN —
AND MARY SHELLEY
1
The Times Literary Supplement of November 21, 1968 (pages 1318-19), discusses under the title, "Shelley, Swinburne and Housman", the famous eighth line —
Fresh spring, and summer and winter hoar —
of one of Shelley's most Shelleyan lyrics beginning, in its standard published form,
Oh, world! oh life! oh time!
The lyric consists of two stanzas, and the line in question which is in the second stanza is one foot shorter than the corresponding line in the first. The tale of the seasons is also short by one of them: namely, autumn. Critics naturally have asked: "Why the double discrepancy?" They have believed that either the poet himself created it or it is due to a mistake in printing.
W. M. Rossetti's collected edition of 1870 (volume 2, page 274) gives the line completed:
Fresh Spring, and Summer, Autumn, and Winter hoar.
The editor appends the note that he owed this "indisputable emendation" to the Shelley scholar, Frederick Gard Fleay. But in his edition of 1878 he reverts to the current text. For, in 1875 Swinburne ferociously pilloried the emendation as "this incredible outrage". Swinburne's comment on the line is celebrated for its note both of absolute certainty and of unreserved eulogy:
"If there is one verse in Shelley or in English of more
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divine and sovereign sweetness than any other, it is that in the Lament,
Fresh Spring, and Summer, and Winter hoar.
The music of this line taken with its context — the melodious effect of its exquisite inequality — I should have thought was a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to the eyes of all men whose ears were not closed against all harmony by some denser and less removable obstruction than shut out the song of the Sirens from the hearing of the crew of Ulysses."
Swinburne's word stood unchallenged until 1911. In that year A. E. Housman delivered the Inaugural Lecture as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. There we have what Henry Jackson described at the time as Housman's "trouncing of Swinburne in respect of a reading of Shelley". With less open ferocity but with devastating irony, the Cambridge Professor, himself no mean poet, made Swinburne's comment his target example of—in Jackson's phrase — "aesthetic criticism" and — in his own language — "the performance of the literary mind when, with its facile emotions and its incapacity for self-examination, it invades the province of science". Not that Housman accepted Ros-setti's reading or denied the exquisiteness of the "inequality" Swinburne had spoken of. He declared: "I may say in passing that I do not think Mr. Rossetti's verse a good verse, not worthy of Shelley; and I suppose that when Mr. Swinburne in his Essays and Studies [1875] spoke of Mr. Rossetti's deaf and desperate daring, he was expressing, in nobler language, the same opinion." Rossetti, we may adjudge, foisted on Shelley a lack of poetic sensibility and subtlety by making the line too much of a seasonal list. Doubtless there was a not unhappy balance — the extremes of the verse having two seasons with descriptive epithets and the middle portions bringing in a pair of seasons without them — but the common succession of the four parts of the year spoiled
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the whole phrase with a touch of obviousness. Housman could not help agreeing with Swinburne's condemnation of Rossetti, and yet be rebelled against him for — as he put it to his audience — "objections which you may call, as you please, scientific or pedantic". His case ran:
"Shelley's MS exists; and the inequality, though exquisite, does not exist in Shelley's MS. Shelley wrote with his own hand,
Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar...
The one verse in Shelley and in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other is the verse, not of Shelley, but of the compositor. Mr. Swinburne's veins were thrilled, and tears were drawn to Mr. Swinburne's eyes, by a misprint."
The version Housman put forward of the line is not unworthy of a poet like Shelley. The avoidance of the mechanical season-series is only the negative side of its virtue. The positive side lies in the fact that the couplings — "Fresh Spring and Autumn" at the start and "Summer and Winter hoar" at the end — have each a significant contrast: opposed or counteracting seasonal conditions are set facing each other. Again, while in the first pair the opening term of the contrast has an adjective to it, the closing term has an adjective in the second pair: thus a felicitous variety is present in the balancing sets of oppositions. Still further, this variety carries an important suggestion in its felicitousness on either hand because of its occurring within a mode of contrast. For, when "Fresh Spring" is opposed to "Autumn" and when "Summer" is counteracted by "Winter hoar", we do not need descriptive epithets for "Autumn" and "Summer": these two seasons are automatically implied to be, respectively, the reverse of "Fresh" and "hoar": we should understand Autumn to be something like "sere" and Summer something like "green" or "golden". Thus the omission of epithets is meaningfully justified.
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We feel convinced that if Shelley wanted to name all the four seasons he could never do it better than in Housman's citation. But did Housman settle the issue? When he made his pronouncement he thought he had done so. Being, however, a scrupulous and "scientific" scholar, he wished to give the proper reference for "Shelley's MS". That such reference was possible he felt sure. To the suggestion by the Oxford University Press in September, 1929, that his Inaugural should be included in a collected volume of his prose pieces, he mentioned in his reply that he was anxious to substantiate his claim which, according to him, had been inspired by his seeing, "not far from the beginning of this century,... in some literary journal... an autograph, or some early impression, of Shelley's O world, O life, O time..." He added that he could not trace the account and he would not permit the publication of his lecture because it contained "a statement which I cannot verify".
The Oxford University Press mobilised a number of Shelley experts to ferret out the basis of Housman's unverified recollection, which may be conjectured to have been some review of Thomas Hutchinson's Clarendon Press edition of Shelley in 1904. Not only did they fail: all further search also was discouraged by the report of a leading Shelley specialist, Roger Ingpen, to Frederick Page of O.U.P. that in "Sir John Shelley-Rolls's original MS of A Lament Shelley 'fair-copied' the stanza with the line concerned reading as in the traditional text, although an earlier version in the MS had 'Autumn' written above a heavily scored-out word, of which 'su — (probably summer) is visible'." Charles Williams of O.U.P. communicated to Housman the results of the inquiries. Housman replied, finally dismissing the Oxford project: "On the one hand I must thank and congratulate you, but on the other hand you have cooked your own goose, for Mr. Ingpen's report contradicts that on which I relied."
An article in the Times Literary Supplement of September 6, 1963, recounted the various diligent but unsuccessful efforts
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on behalf of Housman, and the issue of May 9, 1968, published the Inaugural from a typed transcript recently found among the papers of his brother Laurence. But in deference to the author's known scholarly conscience the Shelley-Swinburne passage was dropped. Later a complete text in book-form by the Cambridge University Press was projected for 1969. And in preparation for it John Carter and John Sparrow resumed the research. It is their discoveries that form the contents of the article I have mentioned at the beginning of mine.
These discoveries put a new complexion on the problem. For, they have proved Ingpen's report "incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading". A photostat reproduction of the page from which Ingpen was professing to transcribe is placed before us, and the two researchers' interpretation of this draft page is as follows:
"Shelley wrote the opening two lines of the second stanza at the foot of the page, just managing to squeeze in the third line at the bottom below them. After [autumn] in the third line there is an appreciable gap, in which Shelley, in paler ink than that in which he had written the rest of the line, wrote and then deleted what looks like gra. He then, it seems, copied out the whole stanza at the top of the page in the same pale ink as that in which he had written gra, still preserving the gap into which gra had been written. The difference between the two inks is not appreciable in the reproduction, but it is decisively plain in the original.
"What can one safely infer from this? First: that Shelley had not settled on a final version of the line. Second: that he had it in mind to insert something between summer and winter hoar. Third: that, while one cannot be sure that (as Rossetti emended) autumn would have been the word decided on to fill the gap, Swinburne was certainly wrong in regarding the line as complete without any such insertion. (It looks as if the poet at one stage toyed with the idea of inserting gray, to go with autumn, and then rightly rejected it as impossibly flat.) Finally: that the manuscript does not
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prove that Shelley regarded summer and autumn as alternatives and would not have included both in his final version of the line. True, he struck out summer, apparently in favour of autumn, in his first version of the line and reinstated it, without adding autumn, in the second. But the contents of the page were written down during the process of composition so roughly and rapidly that one must be chary of drawing precise detailed conclusions from the evidence they afford. One conclusion, however, seems certain: Shelley did not regard the line as metrically complete in the form in which it was so highly praised (particularly for its metrical beauty) by Swinburne."
Carter and Sparrow claim that their analysis "is confirmed by other surviving manuscripts of the poem about which Ingpen was misleadingly silent". Including the one already examined, the total number of manuscripts comes to three, two of them in Shelley's hand and one in Mary Shelley's. In the already examined manuscript there are two details of some interest though not bearing directly upon our problem. Shelley started the line originally with From and then cancelled the word. Instead of the opening Fresh which he ultimately put we see Green. In the next manuscript of Shelley's own — his final fair copy of 1821, according to Mary's chronology — the poet not only has a blank open space after summer but also leaves the space decisively wider. Sparrow and Carter comment: "there is room for a six-letter word at the least." Their suggestion evidently is that Shelley might have in the end put even autumn. And their general conclusion is: "Plainly, therefore, the poet himself regarded the eighth line as still incomplete when he copied the poem out for the last time (he died in the following year, 1822)."
On the remaining manuscript the authors write: "Mary Shelley, although she took liberties with the punctuation, was scrupulous in her transcription of the text itself: that she realised that the eighth line had never been finished is emphatically indicated by the fact that she doubled the width of the blank space — even though it meant crowding hoar
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right into the edge of the page."
Carter and Sparrow next remark: "Down to the last stage of its transmission in manuscript, then, the line preserves the crucial blank. Yet, on its first appearance in print [Posthumous Poems], in 1824, it is closed up so as to present the text in its familiar form. There are several possible explanations of this. Mary Shelley doubtless wished to publish a beautiful poem even though one line was plainly unfinished... Yet elsewhere in the volume we have noted more than a score of cases where she left a square-bracketed blank for a missing or undeciphered word; not counting more than half a dozen in The Triumph of Life, Shelley's last major poem... Why, one wonders, did she not do so here? Since she did not, we may suppose that she used her editorial discretion in deleting, whether in the printer's copy or in proof, the gap so carefully maintained in her own fair copy; perhaps she anticipated Swinburne in finding a special music in the assymmetrical line. Alternatively, the compositor in 1824 may have closed the gap wide though it is, without any warrant from the editor."
Now our authors return to Housman and continue: "If the last hypothesis were the right one, it would exactly substantiate Housman's conclusion [apropos of Swinburne] ... But even if the traditional reading was established deliberately by Mary Shelley, the evidence of the manuscripts substantially vindicates Housman. Shelley throughout intended a longer line (metrically matching line 3), and Housman was thus fully justified [contra Swinburne]...
"Housman, in short, was right, even though he could never find the evidence to prove it and therefore never published the argument."
2
Can we agree with Carter and Sparrow about Housman's position? I think they have overshot their mark.
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In the first place, it is perfectly clear from all the fair copies that, even if autumn might have been inserted in the blank, summer would always have preceded autumn. The blank is not before but after summer. So Rossetti's emendation would at most be supported and never Housman's adduced version. Such emendation Housman not only considered bad: he also considered it "unworthy of Shelley". What he believed Shelley to have written has not at all been vindicated. What might be credited is something which, in Housman's opinion, could never have been in Shelley's manuscript.
In the second place, even Housman's general idea that all the four seasons were enumerated by Shelley, in whatever order, is highly improbable. Shelley did not have to cast about for any word for the omitted season: autumn was always there and nothing else could have substituted it. If he never put it, it must be because he did not want it. Something else than the omitted season was his lure. Here the sole alternative is an adjective, short or at most about six-lettered, for summer to match his treatment of spring and winter. The quest exclusively for an adjective is indicated also by his actual toying with gray when he tried out autumn instead of summer. Sir A. Quiller-Couch's notion — pointed out by P. S. Falla in a letter to the T.L.S. of November 28, 1968, page 1338 — that Shelley intended to put a monosyllabic epithet after summer strikes one as quite correct so far as the point about the epithet goes and perhaps also in regard to the monosyllable.
In the third place, the chances of the printer having taken the liberty to close up the gap left by Mary Shelley are remote indeed. There is not merely the contrary evidence of all the numerous other gaps by him. There is also the fact, implied by Carter and Sparrow, that her blank here, like all her other blanks, must have been square-bracketed. It would have been impossible for the printer to ignore so explicit a direction. Our authors must not be allowed to give the impression that it was just a matter of ignoring a bit of empty
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space. We have to realise how astronomical are the odds against the printer's deleting an empty space in spite of the square brackets at either end. Hence, strictly speaking, Housman's attack on Swinburne is baseless: no compositor, no printer produced the exquisite inequality of the line. Nobody except Mary could have done it in the edition of 1824.
In the fourth place, on the testimony of Carter and Sparrow themselves, Mary has not been shown anywhere in her transcriptions to have gone against what she knew to be Shelley's own blanks. If in the printer's copy or in the proof she deleted, as she alone must have done, the gap preserved in her earlier transcription, there is only one conclusion possible. It is not that she anticipated Swinburne's ecstasy over the asymmetrical line, though she had a ear good enough. It is simply that she sincerely came to believe at the end that Shelley would not, rather than did not, fill the blank: it was some inspired instinct in Shelley that let the blank stand in spite of his conscious mind's technical concern to fill it. This mind was prompting him to find the word technically needed, yet he desisted from inserting any — even tentatively. And this desistance and not just the "impossibly flat" nature of gray after autumn may have been with him from the start. True, his blanks persist till the last; but that is because he could not come to a decision as between his conscious mind and his inspired instinct. Such must have been Mary's intuition immediately before the poem went to press. And it must have been strengthened by the idea that after all Shelley could not have found it so difficult to light upon an adjective for summer. He must have had several in his mind, but he committed none to paper although urged by formal considerations to do so. Something deeper than the latter and not any adjectival impotence made him — to use Arnold's piece of notorious picturesqueness — beat his wings ineffectually in the void persisting in his manuscripts.
The genuinely scientific view, vis-a-vis the manuscript and the final closing up of the gap, would be the very
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opposite of Housman's. Yet Housman, with the fine instinct that could offer so beautiful an alternative to Rossetti's version and with his own experience, recorded in another lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, of how poetry is a matter of inspiration, a power from some submerged part of the being that is master of one's conscious mind and can even achieve wonderful transfusions of feeling — "pure poetry" — which this mind can hardly understand, surely such a poet gifted with such critical sensitiveness should have been the first to share Swinburne's thrilling of the veins and drawing of tears to the eyes. And he would have done so, had he not been misguided in his memory. No Shelley authority could have given the version he quoted. Perhaps he came across a mention somewhere that at one time Shelley put autumn after spring but later retained summer. And he definitely might have seen Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley from the Originals in the Library of W. K. Bixby, Deciphered, Transcribed and Edited, with a Free Commentary by H. Buxton Forman, C. B., 3 volumes, Boston, The Bibliophile Society, 1911. After printing A Lament in its traditional form, Forman adds the note (Volume 1, page 201): "Though I have always resisted the insertion of autumn after summer in line 3 of stanza II, what I have gathered in handling these Note Books lends some colour to the suspicion that a word has dropped out of the line. I do not truly think anything of the sort happened, but, if it has, the loss must have been that of an adjective before summer — which I do not attempt to supply and would only accept on conclusive manuscript evidence." Housman, playing with the possibility — mis-guidedly encouraged by Forman — of a word-omission before summer, but disagreeing with Forman about its having been an adjective and aware that autumn was the missing season in the verse and even that Shelley himself had once brought it in, may have' surmised the true version to have been the one afterwards submitted in the Inaugural. By the time of the lectures he may have fallen into the error of believing he had read it in some literary journal.
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Our supposition acquires a bit of body from Carter and Sparrow's scrutiny of Housman's pencilled notes in his own copy of Shelley's poetical works: a volume in "Moxon's Popular Poets" series published by Ward, Lock and Bowden, without date (but after August, 1891, when Bowden joined the firm of Ward, Lock, and Co.), "unannotated edition, edited with a critical memoir by William Michael Rossetti". Among these notes, "two detect echoes from Goethe and Spenser, several remark metrical irregularities or faulty rhymes..." Three in all record variant readings. One of them, apropos of The magnetic Lady to her Patient, has textual variations pencilled in, with a reference given: "Athen. 12 Oct. 1907". The reference is to H. J. C. Grierson's recordings in The Athenaeum on the date cited from the Trelawny manuscript at Aberdeen. But there is no reference put down when he registers the "variant reading" of line 8 of A Lament. The text of the poem has Rossetti's original emendation. Here Housman entered the version he gave in his Inaugural as his "remembered" reading. When there is so important a change, we should expect from a scholar like Housman a naming of the source. The absence of it at so critical a point creates some sort of presumption that what he had entered was the version he thought more probable as Shelley's than was the Rossetti-emendation. Obviously he believed the line's inequality to be a mistake of printing and obviously too he rejected Rossetti; but there is no certainty that his substitute was drawn from any literary journal rather than being his own poetic conjecture.
The uncertainty is increased by the fact that assiduous combing of journals and original manuscripts has failed to reveal any basis for Housman's alternative to Rossetti. Thus his sarcasm at Swinburne's expense appears to be completely misdirected, a gaffe into which he was in all sincerity tricked by a lapsus memoriae. The only saving grace to it was that it provided us with such a fine Shelleyan invention.
However, even
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Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar
cannot equal in exquisiteness
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
which Shelley's creative unconscious, keeping the outer poetic craftsman at bay, managed to leave to posterity and which Mary in due time recognised to be the God-given Shelleyan music as distinguished from the man-intended strain that had threatened through that blank to vitiate it.
Carter and Sparrow take Swinburne to emphasise the metrical inequality of the line as its main cause of exquisiteness. But actually Swinburne writes of "sweetness" and "melodious effect" no less than of a technical difference perceived on taking the line with its context. Surely, by merely being four-footed when it was expected to be five-footed, the verse's inequality cannot become "exquisite". The surpassing loveliness which over-powered Swinburne lies in the way verbal and rhythmic suggestions make use of the metrical shortness. Every important word has a music of r-sound plus whatever other delicate or deep tones result from vowel or consonant combinations. This sound not only binds the line together with a lovely roll stirring the heart: it also meaningfully links up with the r recurring in the keywords of the next two lines:
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more — O never more!
The sound in question would be partly muffled by Housman's version, and the rhythmically significant reverberation in grief, more, never more would not be so absolute. In Mary's version, in addition to the metrical inequality of the line, we have the inequality of summer going without an epithet in contrast to spring and winter. This inequality does three
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things: (1) it avoids the somewhat mechanical adjectival activity which would have come in general, an adjectival triplication; (2) it saves winter hoar in particular from being duplicated by a preceding pair of noun and epithet in the same order; (3) it charges summer with an unspoken store of quality and gives it a strange emotional force as of a manifold significance held back from speech. And when our imagination is called upon to interpret the pregnant silence, our mind is brought to a concentration on the life, so to speak, of the solitary noun in a suggestive self-sufficiency. What would be the unuttered import of summer? The natural associations, of course, are sunshine and greenery and flowering and bird-song. But the vocable itself, unaided by a descriptive adjective, starts into a literal expressiveness: summer would be that which makes a sum of everything, a multiplicity and a totality which consummates all. It is the packed peak-point of the year's seasonal process. And its position in the very centre of the poetic phrase stresses the climactive fullness of its meaning. But to be a peak-point of centrality between spring and winter is, on the one side, to hold the former's essence raised up and completed and, on the other, to carry the essence of the latter, ready to be unfolded in a sloping down towards its complete manifestation. Summer bears, in its central summing, the actual acme of "fresh spring" and the potential plenitude of "winter hoar". It thus has not only the open extreme of spring's freshness but also the secret all-power to initiate winter's hoariness. As such, it subsumes the whole character of autumn, the movement of the change of sunshine, greenery, flowering and bird-song into Winter's clouded, bare and mute universality of snow.
A further imbuing of summer — because it is not trailed by a circumscribing description — with qualities connecting it to both spring and winter arises from spring being called "fresh" and winter "hoar". Summer, unqualified in itself, comes to be at the same time, by its collocation with spring and winter, something else than fresh and something else
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than hoar. In this role, it stands to spring not as its extreme nor yet as its contradiction and to winter not as its preparatory all-potentiality nor yet as its opposite, but as a variation from either. Varying from spring, it can point towards cloudiness, bareness, muteness, snow-whiteness. Varying from winter, it can tend towards the sunny, green, flowery, bird-songful. Hence the autumnal movement in the direction of winter is implicit in it in general by virtue of its acquiring attributes different from those specified in more or less mutual contrast for both spring and winter.
Here we must make an important clarification. Even granting the implication of autumn in summer and ultimately of winter itself by means of the verbal magic and mystery of the line's peculiar posture, how are we to visualise the autumn-winter Nature in the Nature-glory of summer? Is not the former characterised once for all by Shakespeare's imagery for himself in Sonnet 73? —
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Or else do we not have the last two parts of the year clearly distinguished from summer in Sonnet 5? —
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere.
All this is true, but there are other ways of looking at autumn or winter. Edna St. Vincent Millay is all in love with the former season:
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!
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Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour.
Here is Roy Cambell on the latter season:
I love to see, when leaves arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.
Shelley, in A Lament, was not seeing winter as a desolating and distressing phenomenon. Nor, when he first wrote autumn in preference to summer and called it gray, was he pinpointing a depressing Nature-mood. The implication of autumn that we have read in summer is not to be interpreted as the lurking shade of something regrettable. For, if anything in the line under discussion were such as to cause melancholy, the next two lines would not be:
The explicit winter and the implicit autumn, as much as spring and summer, figure in our verse as if they could be a source of delight: instead, they bring grief. Were they to Shelley what those stanzas from Shakespeare make them, it would hardly be a wonder if his heart were moved to grief by them. He is moved so because his heart is "faint", not because they are less than delightful in themselves. Every season is contemplated sub specie pulchritudinis: winter and autumn, in their individual ways, are seen under the aspect of beauty equally with spring and summer in theirs. A single loveliness deserving a response of delight runs variously through them all — but, alas, in vain for the poet, because, as the lines just preceding ours out it.
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Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight.
The poet's discontent does not abrogate the presence of the one beauty pervading the entire year in diverse fashions and essentially interfusing all the seasons. If, then, our line's verbal magic and mystery give us autumn within the aura, as it were, of summer, there should be no reason for surprise or scepticism.
To confirm still more our reading of Shelley's vision of a single loveliness from spring to winter, we have only to turn to a poem long recognised as a sister in spirit to A Lament. The poem is called Song and starts,
Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
There we have the lines:
I love all that thou lovest,
The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night.
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost...
Here are the seasons again. Spring is "the fresh Earth" dressed in new leaves. "The starry night" may belong to it or to unmentioned summer. Next is autumn with its evening as well as with its morning of golden mists. Next comes winter as represented by snow and the radiant multiform frost. All the seasons are phenomena of loveliness that are equally dear to the poet's heart. But the poem's beginning and ending tell the story of A Lament. The Spirit of Delight is addressed:
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Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
Tis since thou art fled away...
Thou art love and life! O come,
Make once more my heart thy home.
Perhaps a too practical intellect may protest: "Even though beauty is diversely pervasive of the whole year, and in that sense all the year's parts are essentially interfused, how can we overlook the diversity of pervasion?"
Well, the diversity itself is not so strictly distributed. We have drawn upon Shakespeare's Sonnets. Sonnet 28, after asking whether the poet could compare his friend to "a summer's day", has the descriptive account:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May...
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed...
Autumnal or wintry aspects of Nature are observed in the midst of May. And who has not heard of
The uncertain glory of an April day?
The phenomenon of cloudiness that is typical of autumn or winter can have its touch already in spring. Even for the over-practical intellect, there should be no fundamental difficulty.
To return to our analysis of Shelley's line. Summer's centrality in it has also a subtle bearing on the technical stance of the verse. Being a dissyllable, this noun renders the line a little longer than four feet, although still shorter than five. The corresponding line in the first stanza —
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Trembling at that where I had stood before* —
has ten syllables: now we have not eight but nine: the mer of summer is the extra half-foot. Our verse can be scanned with a modulation in the shape of either an amphibrach —
Fresh spring, | and summer, | and winter hoar —
or an anapaest:
Fresh spring, and sum|mer, and win|ter hoar.
Either scansion introduces, with the additional syllable, an emotional quiver, a tremble technically echoing the earlier corresponding verse's statement. The metrical exquisiteness of the line owes everything here to this appendage or pre-fixture: a perfect tetrameter would have been comparatively flat. But there is another effect too of the additional syllable. The former scansion gives us a slight overflow beyond the first two parts of the line as if there were a small extension beyond the first two seasons of the year. The latter scansion fills the line's second pair of parts with a little initial quickness as though a small leap were there within the period belonging to the year's second pair of seasons. In the one scansion the third season autumn, which is not named, is vaguely suggested by the overflow at the end. In the other this unnamed season is faintly indicated by the quick leap across at the beginning. Either as a dim presence after summer or as a hovering absence before winter, the tiny irregular-
* We may remark that the "had" here is rather strange from the grammatical point of view. There is no past tense or present perfect before this line. We should expect "have" as in the earlier version (T. L. S., Nov. 21 1968, p. 1319, col. 5, Note 5):
Trembling at those which 1 have trod before.
Besides, "had stood" is a little harsh in sound, particularly with "at that" shortly preceding it.
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ity of the tetrameter conjures up autumn. This conjuring up would be impossible if the metrical inequality as between the third lines of the two stanzas were clear-cut. Here again, in the matter of technique, the exquisiteness arises precisely out of the unexpected half-foot more. Arid the wonderful thing is that if Shelley had completed the pentameter by subjoining an adjective to summer, which would have got the missing half-foot in and made up the full tale of the ten-syllabled pentameter, one would have sensed the omission of autumn in the seasonal series. Only the irregular inequality — a hanging between two metrical patterns — can, from the side of the technique, render the naming of autumn unnecessary.
Possibly the query will be framed: "Suppose the pentameter had not been one with only ten syllables but carried, like the existing tetrameter, an extra half-foot. Would the omitted autumn have been conjured up then too?"
From the purely technical standpoint we may say "Yes". But here the basic question of form and content comes up in one aspect. The tetrameter's half-foot more was formed by the second syllable of summer with no epithet accompanying the noun. The half-foot more of the pentameter would be formed by the second syllable of a two-syllabled adjective of summer — as, say, in
Fresh spring, and summer golden, and winter hoar.
An adjective like "golden" or any other apposite one would define and limit summer; so summer could have no penumbra in which a season with a different quality might secretly exist. Then the omission of autumn would be glaring and constitute a defect. Not the extra half-foot alone but the proper phrase holding it is the all-accomplishing all-satisfying art-touch in Shelley's verse, turning what might have been a defect into an exquisite effect.
No, nothing else than the line as traditionally it has appeared — without any blank after summer to put us in two minds — can be the divine and sovereign poetry which
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Swinburne hailed. Lovers of literature cannot thank Mary Shelley enough for doing what she must have believed the true Shelley would ultimately have done if in 1822 that ill-starred boat had not capsized in the Bay of Lerici.
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