Plot
The plot of The Witch of Atlas revolves around the travels and adventures of a mysterious and mythical Witch who lives in a cave on Atlas' mountain by a secret fountain and who creates a hermaphrodite "by strange art" kneading together fire and snow, a creature, Hermaphroditus, "a sexless thing", with both male and female characteristics, with pinions, or wings. A "fair Shape out of her hands did flow" because "all things together grow/ Through which the harmony of love can pass." In Greek mythology, Hermaphrodite was the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. The hermaphrodite is androgynous and synthesises the opposing and contradictory aspects of the creative mind. The hermaphrodite is both the companion and the servant to the Witch. The journeys consist of sailing in the air on an airship and in water on a boat, or pinnace. They travel from the Atlas Mountains to the Austral Lake to the Nile Valley. Nature is explored as are fire and electrical energy. The Witch begins her sojourn from the ancient northern Ethiopian city of Axume. Lake Moeris, an ancient lake southwest of Cairo, Egypt, is visited, as are the Mareotid lakes south of Alexandria. King Amasis of Egypt, Memphis, and the bull god Apis are invoked. The forces of creation and destruction are resolved. The objective is a synthesis or union of contradictions.
The Witch is the daughter of the Atlantides, who in Greek mythology are called the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Her home, the Atlas Mountains, are a range that stretches across north Africa, from Morocco and Algeria to Tunisia. Her "choice sport" was to "glide adown" the Nile River into Egypt and Aethiopia with "tame water-snakes" and "ghastly alligators". She observed mankind at sleep. Injustice and inequality were noted: "And pale imaginings of visioned wrong;/ And all the code of Custom's lawless law/ Written upon the brows of old and young." It is this oppression and exploitation that trouble mankind's existence: "'This ... is the strife/ Which stirs the liquid surface of man's life.'"
The "visionary rhyme" recounts the pranks the Witch plays on mankind. Like Shelley himself, the Witch was able to perceive the fears and desires of mankind: "In mine own heart I saw as in a glass/ The hearts of others." She is able to see the "naked beauty" of the human soul. The Witch gave a "strange panacea in a crystal bowl" to those who were the most beautiful and imparted "strange dreams" to those who were less beautiful. The Witch sought to change man's perception of death. Death was not to be feared. The Witch took a coffin and "threw it with contempt into a ditch." The grave was "as a green and overarching bower/ Lit by the gems of many a starry flower." She sought to make the world more just and fair by making "more vain" all those purposes which were "harsh and crooked". The "miser" would place "all his evil gain" on a "beggar's lap". The "scribe" would reveal his own lies. Priests would reject dogma and "old cant". The king would place an ape on his throne and dress him up in his vestments while a "mock-bird" repeated the "chatterings of the monkey". War would be practised no more as soldiers turned their swords into ploughshares on "red anvils". Finally, "timid lovers" would see the "fulfilment of their inmost thought." These are the pranks the Witch "played among the cities of mortal men." The Witch was able to envision and foresee a future Utopia for all mankind.
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
"To a Skylark" is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in late June 1820 and published accompanying his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound by Charles and James Ollier in London.
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from 10 September to 14 December in 1815 in Bishopsgate, near Windsor Great Park and first published in 1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend Thomas Love Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. It is considered to be one of the first of Shelley's major poems.
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats' death. It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's Lycidas. Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is modelled on ancient works, such as Achilleis, an epic poem by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Statius, and refers to the untimely death of the Greek Adonis, a god of fertility. Some critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in praise of Cornelius Gallus, as a model.
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 and published in 1817.
The Masque of Anarchy is a British political poem written in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley following the Peterloo Massacre of that year. In his call for freedom, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance.
Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes, published in 1813 in nine cantos with seventeen notes, is the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), the English Romantic poet.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
"England in 1819" is a political sonnet by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley which reflects his liberal ideals.
"A Defence of Poetry" is an unfinished essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in February and March 1821 that the poet put aside and never completed. The text was published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Its final sentence expresses Shelley's famous proposition that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni is an ode by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem was composed between 22 July and 29 August 1816 during Shelley's journey to the Chamonix Valley, and intended to reflect the scenery through which he travelled. "Mont Blanc" was first published in 1817 in Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, which some scholars believe to use "Mont Blanc" as its culmination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Michael O'Neill was an English poet and scholar, specialising in the Romantic period and post-war poetry. He published four volumes of original poetry; his academic writing was praised as "beautifully and lucidly written".
The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five.
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson was a collection of poetry published in November, 1810 by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg while they were students at Oxford University. The pamphlet was subtitled: "Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786. Edited by John Fitzvictor." The pamphlet was published by John Munday and Henry Slatter in Oxford and consisted of fictional fragments that were in the nature of a hoax and prank or burlesque.
The Triumph of Life was the last major work by Percy Bysshe Shelley before his death in 1822. The work was left unfinished. Shelley wrote the poem at Casa Magni in Lerici, Italy in the early summer of 1822. He modelled the poem, written in terza rima, on Petrarch's Trionfi and Dante's Divine Comedy.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, it arrived around 1820.
