¹ The first full attempt at an interpretation of Epipsychidion appeared in John Tod-hunter, A Study of Shelley (London, 1880), pp. 229-253. Todhunter received suggestions in some of his identifications from William Michael Rossetti (pp. 245, 248); and his work exercised considerable influence on all subsequent studies. Neither Edward Dowden, Shelley (London, 1886), nor Stopford A. Brooke, in his Introduction to the Shelley Society edition of the poem in 1887, attempted any specific identifications. In the conclusion of “Shelley's ‘Julian and Maddalo’”, Gentleman's Magazine (Oct. 1887), pp. 329-342, Arabella Shore made some valuable suggestions, some of which were followed up in a brief article in Poet Lore in 1890, “The Story of Shelley's Life in ‘Epipsychidion’”, (pp. 225–233), by F. G. Fleay. In the same year Richard Ackermann in Quellen, Vorbilder, Stojfe zu Shelley's Poetischen Werken (Erlanger, Leipzig), pp. 27–28, began his study of the characters of the poem, and further suggestions were made in Helene Richter's Shelley (Weimar, 1898). Ackermann returned to his studies with his edition of Adonais and Epipsychidion (1900) and his Shelley, der Mann, der Dichter und seine Werke (Dortmund, 1906). The most com. plete of the German interpretations is a lengthy article by Armin Kroder, “Studien zu Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’”, Englische Studien, xxvii (1900), 365-396. In 1911, C. D. Locock in his edition of Shelley, ii, 453–459, summarized part of this previous scholarship and made a few suggestions. More recent interpretations are in Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work (New York, 1927), ii, 189-196; Floyd H. StovaU, Desire and Restraint in Shelley (Durham, N. C., 1931), pp. 273-276; Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1936), pp. 336-345; John Harrington Smith, “Shelley and Claire Clairmont”, PMLA LIV (1939), 788-797; Newman I. White, Shelley (New York, 1940), ii, 255-269.

² Letter to Byron, [? Oct. 21, 1822], Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederic L. Jones (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1946), I, 198: “There might have been something sunny about me then [i.e., when Shelley was alive], now I am truly cold moonshine.” Journal entry, Oct. 5, 1822, Shelley Memorials, ed. Lady Shelley (London, 1875), pp. 332–333: “Well, I shall commence my task, commemorate the virtues of the only creature worth loving or living for, and then, maybe I may join him. Moonshine may be united to her planet, and wander no more, a sad reflection of all she loved on earth.” This comment is quoted also by Hogg, Life of Shelley (London, 1858), I, vii-viii, from some fragments of a biography of Shelley begun by Mary. The third journal entry is that of Nov. 11, 1822, quoted in Mrs. Julian Marshall, Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (London, 1889), ii, 53: “A cold heart! Have I a cold heart? God knows! But none need envy the icy region this heart encircles; and at least the tears are hot which the emotions of this cold heart forces me to shed. A cold heart! yes, it would be cold enough if all were as I wished it—cold, or burning in the flame for whose sake I forgive this, and would forgive every other imputation—that flame in which your heart, beloved, lay unconsumed.” In some later lines of Epipsychidion (345 ff.), Shelley after having identified the Sun as Emilia Viviana (344), represents himself as being ruled by the “twin spheres” of the Sun and the Moon in terms such as to make the identification of Mary with the Moon inescapable.

³ Rossetti suggested to Todhunter that the “fair” and “wise” were probably references to the Boinville family, but he tangled up the relationships rather badly. Thus, while he correctly believed Cornelia to be included among the “fair”, he mistakenly identified her as the wife of Shelley's vegetarian friend John Frank Newton. (Mrs. Boinville, Cornelia's mother, was sister to Newton's wife.) The one who was “not true to me” he identifies as “Mrs. Taylor, a second daughter of Mrs. Boinville, with whom Shelley was hopelessly in love.” No second daughter of Mrs. Boinville is known to Shelley's biographers; so “Mrs. Taylor” is presumably Cornelia Boinville (Mrs. Turner) once again. That Shelley was attracted to Cornelia is true but his comments on her do not indicate that he was ever “hopelessly in love” with her or felt himself betrayed by her. (See letter to Hogg, Oct. 3, 1814, Harriet and Mary, ed. Walter Sidney Scott [Golden Cockerel Press, 1944], p. 39.) That these errors were Rossetti's and not Todhunter's is apparent from the fact that Rossetti in his Memoir of Shelley (London, 1886), pp. iv, 44, asserted that Cornelia was married to Newton, and in a letter to Garnett in 1872 takes “Mrs. T” and “Cornelia” to be two different persons—Letters About Shelley (London, New York, 1917), p. 44.1 presume that Rossetti communicated his theories orally or by letter to Todhunter as I find no previous work by Rossetti that contains them (Todhunter, p. 245). These views of Rossetti were widely accepted by subsequent scholars, even the non-existent Mrs. Taylor enjoying considerable popularity and appearing in Kroder, p. 385; Ackermann, Quellen Vorbilder Stojfe, p. 27, and Shelley, pp. 297-298; Locock, n, 456; Peck, n, 192. Richter, p. 496, and Kroder, p. 385, add Elizabeth Hitchener to the “wise”; and Richter suggests Mrs. Boinville as the one “not true to me” on the grounds that she became cool to Shelley after his union with Mary. Fleay, p. 228, followed Rossetti's suggestion of Cornelia as the one not true. Peck, ii, 192, follows the “Mrs. Boinville, Cornelia Turner, and Mrs. Taylor” pattern for the “fair” and “wise”, but suggested Harriet Shelley for the one not true. Stovall, p. 273, sees Harriet Grove among the “fair” and Elizabeth Hitchener among the “wise”, and thinks the one not true may be Cornelia Turner. White, ir, 262, sees Harriet Westbrook and Cornelia Turner in the “fair”, Elizabeth Hitchener and Mrs. Boinville in the “wise”, and Harriet Grove as the one not true.

⁴ Fleay (p. 226) pointed out that Shelley had used a line (“She whom I found was dear but false to me”) similar to the “not true to me” line in Epipsychidion with apparent reference to Harriet Grove in a cancelled passage in the Dedication to Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam). This parallel led Kroder (pp. 375-386), Locock (n, 456; i, 522), and White (n, 262) to believe that Harriet Grove was the one not true. A comparison of this cancelled passage with its final draft (Works, Julian Ed., 252,255), however, shows that regardless of whether Shelley intended the “false to me” reference originally to Harriet Grove, Harriet Shelley is undoubtedly included among the “false” of the final draft. There is, further, a special difficulty in accepting Harriet Grove as the untrue one of the Epipsychidion Une, namely that such an identification leaves the succeeding passage on the “hunted deer” crisis unmotivated:

Using lines 276–280 as a pivotal point, it is clear that the “hunted deer” passage must refer to the crisis in Shelley's life caused by the breakup of his marriage with Harriet, for this crisis immediately preceded his encounter with Mary (the Moon) and there is no other crisis in his life immediately preceding this encounter of which 'we have any knowledge; and if any other such crisis had existed in a life so well known as Shelley's we would have record of it. Lines 272–2 75, then, must refer to the winter and spring of 1814 when the marriage of Shelley and Harriet was clearly beginning to disintegrate (Harriet's trips away from her husband; Shelley's seeking refuge away from home with the Boinvilles; the quarrel over Eliza; Shelley's lonely poems to Harriet). In view of this reference, then, and as one gets the impression from the context—“Then”—that the “hunted deer” crisis was caused by the One who was untrue, the probability is that, even though Shelley may formerly have used a similar expression in relation to Harriet Grove, the reference here is to Harriet Shelley. Furthermore, in a biographical poem, one would naturally expect a specific reference at this point to Harriet Shelley; and if this line is taken as referring to Harriet Grove, then Harriet Shelley is presumably mingled in with the “fair”, which implies an inexplicable disproportion of emphasis. On the other hand Harriet Grove could well be included in such general reference.

⁵ The exact date we do not know; Claire first visited Emilia on Nov. 29; Mary and Claire together on Dec. 1; on Dec. 10 Emilia wrote Shelley a letter which indicates at least one visit from Shelley; so the initial visit recorded by Medwin must fall within those dates. Dowden, Shelley, ii, 370–373.

⁶ Shelley sent the poem to Oilier on Feb. 16, 1821 (Works, x, 236); hence it was written between the first visit in early December and Feb. 16.

⁷ Todhunter, pp. 244, 248, guessed the Comet to be Harriet Shelley, and was followed by Kroder, p. 390, White in his notes in The Best of Shelley (New York, 1932), pp. 503–504, and Grabo, p. 342. Harriet, however, could not be asked to “float into our azure heaven again” for the simple reason that Harriet was dead; and the context indicates an actual and not an ectoplasmic return. Furthermore, Harriet, while certainly “beautiful”, could under no circumstances, either as person or spirit, be conceived of as “fierce.” In 1887 Arabella Shore (pp. 336-337) first conjectured the comet to be Claire, and was followed by Fleay, 228–230; Richter, p. 498; Ackermann, Epipsychidion, p. xix, and Shelley, p. 298; Stovall, pp. 275–276; J. H. Smith, pp. 788-797; White, Shelley, ii, 266–267. Peck, ii, 193–194, pro- poses Sophia Stacy as the Comet but gives no evidence to support his view and what we know of Shelley's relations with Sophia makes the assumption ridiculous. Whether Richter came to her conclusion independently or knew of Shore's or Fleay's articles is not indicated. She simply states: “Th(f. comet is Claire.” No hint of this identification had appeared in previous German scholarship (Druskowitz, Ackermann). But as Shore's article had appeared eleven years previously and Fleay's eight, I presume that she was indebted to one or the other.

⁸ Fleay, Ackermann, Stovall (pp. 99–101, 275), and Smith consider that Claire is intended by both the Comet and the Planet-Tempest.

⁹ White (Shelley, ii, 608) points out also that as Shelley's “astronomical imagery throughout the poem is scientifically correct” he “could hardly have made the ignorant blunder of calling Claire both a Planet and a Comet.”

¹⁰ In addition to the Fleay-Smith and White theories, several others have been proposed. Todhunter, p. 248, thought the Planet might be the mysterious unknown lady who, Shelley informed Medwin, followed him to Naples, a suggestion followed by Kroder, p. 389, and Peck, ii, 192. White, however, has satisfactorily demonstrated the non-existence of this lady (i, 436–137). Richter (pp. 330, 498) suggested that the “Neapolitan child” might be the child of Shelley and the mysterious lady, and that this passage reflected those events; but she attempted no specific identifications. Ackermann, Quellen, Vorbilder Stoffe, pp. 27–28, suggested Fanny Godwin as the Planet but in his later works retracted this suggestion in favor of Claire.

¹¹ White, ii, 264–266.

¹² See also Peck, ii, 161–163, 193–194; almost all we know of the relations of Shelley and Sophia will be found in Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and His Friends in Italy (London, 1911), pp. 95–105.

¹³ White uses also two subsidiary arguments, the first based on an interpretation of internal evidence: “Shelley is plainly following a chronological series of events in which the episode of the Planet is the last Incarnate Sympathy before Emilia. This could only place the Planet in 1819 or 1820” (ii, 608). But Shelley does not state that he met Emilia immediately after the Planet; he states that after the Planet was “quenched” he went through a series of soul-shaking experiences—“a death of ice”, “earthquakes”—and that after this “at length” came upon Emilia. This could clearly, in a creative, symbolic treatment such as is Epipsychidion, cover a considerable time sequence.

The Dedication argument White supports by the contention that Julian and Maddalo, written in the fall of 1818, reveals Shelley first becoming aware of Mary's coldness. But even if one accepts White's argument (which, it seems to me, he has proved beyond any reasonable doubt) that the “death's dedicated bride” of that poem is Mary, it does not follow that Shelley's words to her (in the guise of the Madman) indicate a first awakening to her coldness. The Madman episode records a violent quarrel between the two which seems rather to indicate long-standing marital strains than any newly discovered incompatibilities. The castration fantasies of the woman (420-436), in fact, imply a frigidity extending back for several years of union. White is perhaps also somewhat influenced in his dating by his interpretation of the word “conceal” (319) : “Also, like the present passage, it is autobiography that Shelley thought concealed.” Shelley, however, does not mean that the events he is reflecting in the poem were themselves of a secret or “concealed” nature but simply that the words are concealing the events. The events may have been well known but he is treating them in symbolic fashion.

¹⁴ Stanzas vii-viii, xi. For further sentiments of affection for Mary, see also stanza i: “thou child of love and light”; stanza ii: “But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been”; stanza ix:

¹⁵ n, 607. White believes that Shelley is speaking throughout in his comments on Mary of the purely spiritual aspects of love, e.g. : “Whatever the meaning of this passage [the ”chaste cold bed“ passage] in terms of Shelley's life with Mary, it is of all things least likely to be physical, both because it was not true physically and because Shelley has given evidence again and again, both in the poem and out of it, that Epipsychidion is the history of spiritual not physical love. … The chasteness and coldness was spiritual and was not at first perceived because of the intense brightness of the intellectual light which Mary shed upon him” (ibid., p. 263). But this interpretation is clearly open to question. There is no evidence, nor could there well be any evidence, to show that Shelley and Mary were sexually compatible. On the contrary, their union was sufficiently filled with strains to make some degree of sexual incompatibility probable. Nor does Shelley say that Epipsychidion is the “history of spiritual” love only; he wrote to his friend Gisborne simply that it was “an idealized history of my life and feelings”, i.e., a picture of actual events and emotions treated in a symbolic creative medium (letter, June 18, 1822, Works, x, 401). Further more, in this particular passage the language itself has unmistakable sexual overtones.

Such phrases as “cold chaste moon”, “soft yet icy flame”, “chaste cold bed” (within which the poet “lies” “nor alive nor dead”), when applied by a man to his wife give the impression of sexual rather than spiritual coldness. Whether Shelley intended this meaning to be clear to his reader or even whether he was himself conscious of it we cannot certainly tell; but the mere choice of language reveals the existence of sexual thinking at some level of consciousness, and indicates a sexual frustration behind the thinking. And this, it is important to note, is true of the poem as a whole. Epipsychidion, even in its most Platonic passages, is essentially a poem springing from deep love starvation.

¹⁶ Letter from Claire Clairmont to Fanny Godwin, May 28, 1815, quoted in Mrs. Marshall, op. cit., i, 118. The argument for an affair between Shelley and Claire was first developed by John Harrington Smith, op. cit. White (i,694 et passim) disagrees that an actual affair took place but admits (ii, 267) that at least “on Claire's part it was attended by distinct emotional disturbance.” F. L. Jones in “Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont”, South Atlantic Quart., xxii (1943), 409–412, also argued against Smith's conclusions by attempting (unsuccessfully in my opinion) to show from the letters of Mary that she was not jealous of Claire. While Smith's view that Claire was one of the great loves of Shelley's life, affecting, in a major way, such poems as Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, and Epipsychidion, is difficult to sustain, and leads him, in my judgment, to some misinterpretations of these poems, it is hard to believe that Shelley and Claire did not have an affair sometime in the winter and spring of 1814–15, an affair, one would gather, attended by a good deal of rather immature super-emotionalizing. The Hogg-Mary affair of the same time was first revealed by White (i, 391–393), although he was not allowed to quote the letters which were his source of information. These letters were first printed in Harriet and Mary, ed. Walter Sidney Scott, pp. 42–56, and reprinted in Robert Metcalf Smith, The Shelley Legend (New York, 1945), pp. 146–163. Smith misdates the final letter in the series (p. 162) “January, 1818” for “April 26, 1815” (see Scott, p. 45).

¹⁷ Autobiography of Leigh Eunt (London, 1885), p. 237.

¹⁸ Peacock, Life of Shelley, ed. Wolfe (London, 1933), p. 347.

¹⁹ “Shelley”, by One Who Knew Him, Atlantic Monthly, XI, (Feb., 1863), 188.

²⁰ Rossetti, Memoir of Shelley, p. 69.

²¹ So far as I have been able to ascertain, it has not been previously suggested that Harriet was the Planet. Why so obvious an identification has not been made it is rather difficult to say. One reason has certainly been the reluctance of critics to believe that Shelley could have been aware of a coldness in Mary at a date so early as 1816 or 1817, a reluctance which existed even before White developed his theory (see, e.g., Kroder, op. cit., p. 389 f.) Another reason has been the interpretation of the influence of the Planet in a personal, romantic sense; “the Planet of that hour” has been generally taken to indicate a woman who by her personal attractions was reigning in the poet's heart, the “last Incarnate Sympathy before Emilia”, as White, for example, puts it (ii, 608). But Shelley means that the Planet was “of that hour” in the sense that her actions, not his feeling for her, were controlling the events of his life. In the concepts of astrology, which Shelley is here using, one need have no particular feeling for the planet which by its influence is directing one's destinies. As a result of this subjective interpretation the critics have perforce hunted for some woman in Shelley's life with whom he might at that time have been in love: Fanny Godwin, Claire Clairmont, the mysterious and (non-existent) lady of rank at Naples—and thought of the eclipsing of the Moon as indicating Mary's being thrust from the poet's heart by the new love and of the quenching as representing the end of the affair. (Since completing this article I have found one suggestion of Harriet as the Planet—in Stopford Brooke's selection of Shelley's poems (1880)—a suggestion apparently overlooked by subsequent critics.)

²² Works, ix, 218–219.

²³ Hunt, pp. 238–239.

²⁴ Page 187. See also p. 185, where Hunt speaks of Shelley's extreme “depressions” at the time and his need for “support and consolation.”

²⁵ Lines 484–535; see also the “trial” of Lionel for “blasphemy”, 11. 857–901.

²⁶ Dowden, ii, 67.

²⁷ Works, ix, 212.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 219. Shelley's letter to Eliza on Dec. 18, 1816 (Shelley's Lost Letters to Harriet, ed. Leslie Hotson [London, 1930], pp. 54-56), in which he assures her that he bears her “no malice”, does not contravene the evidence of the two letters quoted above. In a letter to Eliza, he would naturally not speak in the same terms as in a letter about her to others; and in this particular letter he had a special motive for restraint. His object in writing was to attempt to get his children back without a lawsuit. That he was guilty of some hypocrisy is undeniable but under such circumstances his conduct is neither inexcusable nor uncommon. We might note, too, that when he wrote to Eliza, her rôle as persecutor-in-chief had not become clear; but when he wrote to Byron, a month later (Jan. 17), it had. (The Bill of Complaint against Shelley was filed Jan. 8). Eliza, we may note, appears once more as the Avenging Demon in a letter from Mary to Amelia Curran, Sept. 18, 1819, in which, speaking of the importance of keeping the authorship of The Cenci anonymous, she commented: “With S[helley]'s public and private enemies it would certainly fall if known to be his—his sister in law alone would hire enough people to damn it” (Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Jones, I, 79). Mary was doubtless also echoing Shelley's sentiments in her postscript to her Dec. 17, 1816 letter: “How it would please me if old Westbrook were to repent in his last moments and leave all his fortune away from that miserable and odious Eliza” (ibid., p. 17); and see, too, her letter of Nov. 22, 1822 to Maria Gisborne (p. 206).

²⁹ Todhunter, op. cit., p. 248. Ackermann once thought Fanny was the Planet but later dropped this identification in favor of Claire. The conjecture receives some support from Shelley's statement in his Jan. 17, 1817, letter to Byron that the death of Fanny was “a far severer anguish” than that of Harriet. It is possible that Shelley believed this, but more likely that he wished to hide the depth of his feeling about Harriet in a letter to Byron. In any event, time was to show that while Fanny's suicide was a severe shock, it did not become a major tragedy in his life, one to haunt him to the end of his days, as did that of Harriet. It is unlikely, therefore, that Fanny occupies the main rôle in this key passage, but very probable that Shelley was thinking of her death as among the “storms.”

³⁰ I do not mean that Shelley's disturbance over the trial for and the loss of the children ceased on the day of the verdict. Here, as elsewhere, I use dates as approximations.

³¹ Jones, op. cit., i, 17.

³² Shelley's letters to Peacock in April 1818 (Works, ix, 295) and on Aug. Id, 1818 (ibid., pp. 319-320) show that he had begun to send the poem to the printers before he left England (March, 1818). Hence, it was probably completed in the main by that time. R. D. Havens argues plausibly that only the first 218 and last 79 lines were added in Italy in August, 1818—“Rosalind and Helen”, JEGP, xxx (1931), 218–222.

³³ Letter to Shelley, Sept. 26,1817 (Jones, i,31).

³⁴ Letter, Jan. 17,1817 (Works, ix, 219).

³⁵ Kroder, op. cit., pp. 388-389, first indicated a parallel between Rosalind and Belen and Epipsychidion.

³⁶ Mary Shelley, “Note on the Early Poems”, Works, ii20.

³⁷ In one respect the feeling of the woman in this intermediate crisis is closer to the Planet-Tempest passage than to the Moon passage. In Rosalind and Helen the woman says that her mind “grew sick with fear”, which is similar to the Moon shrinking “as in the sickness of eclipse” in the Planet-Tempest passage. This does not, however, warrant the conclusion that one should parallel these episodes but probably indicates only that both crises had elements in common in the nursing of the man and the anxiety of the woman.