Ministry of higher education, science and innovation republic of uzbekistan

8. ‘The Mask of Anarchy’.
As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew …
Sometimes called ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, this political poem was written in response to the above-mentioned Peterloo Massacre, when cavalry charged a group of some 60,000 protesters (some accounts put the figure as high as 80,000) in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester. The crowd were protesting over famine and poor economic conditions in the north of England in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. 15 people were killed, and hundreds injured. The nonviolent resistance to violent attempts at suppression, which underpins Shelley’s poem, would later influence Mahatma Gandhi’s own philosophy of nonviolent protest.
9. ‘To the Moon’.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
We think this little poem is a homage to, or recasting of, a sonnet by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who wrote a famous poem addressed to the moon. In Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Sidney’s alter ego asks the moon if it has such a pale appearance because it is sick with unrequited love. It takes the form of a fragment, in which Shelley addresses or apostrophises the moon and asks why it is so pale (much as Sidney does in his poem).
10. ‘Adonaïs’.
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: ‘With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!’
Shelley wrote this poem in 1821 as an elegy on the death of his friend and fellow Romantic poet, John Keats, who had died in Rome of tuberculosis, aged just 25. The poem is a pastoral elegy in the vein of John Milton’s Lycidas, and uses the nine-line stanza form known as the Spenserian stanza, borrowed from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Just over a year later, Shelley himself would be dead – when he drowned, he had a volume of Keats’s poems with him⁹.