Mary Shelley as Elegiac Poet: The Return and 'The Choice'

Abstract

Mary Shelley as Elegiac Poet:The Return and 'The Choice' Graham Allen The poem 'The Choice', along with 'On Reading Wordsworth's Lines on Peel Castle' and a fragment 'To Jane', was written into the back of the 'Journal of Sorrow' (Journal IV) that Mary Shelley kept in the first two years after P.B. Shelley's death. The way in whichthe poem was written into the journal is complicated. It appears to have been writtenin, then cut out, then restored again.1 Another version of the poem was left by Mary Shelley with the Hunts when she returned to England in 1823 and was first published by H. Buxton Forman in 1876 as The Choice: A Poem on Shelley's Death, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [etc.] (Literary Lives, iv. xxx–xxxi).In the journal entry before the three poemsare transcribed, the last entry of Journal Four, Mary Shelley speaks of winter passing anda rising of spirits 'from desperation to happiness'.2 It ascribes this feeling mainlyto 'affection' for Percy Florence, and it ends, incomplete, with the following: '[? ] [? ] I now returned to [? ] [? ]'.3 A careful reader of Mary Shelley learns to register these apparently pre-significatory moments when writing breaks down or breaks off. They are frequently, infact, moments when writing makes itself most visible. This is one such occasion. Since despite missing pages, lost links, evidential signs and signatures, the apparently pre-significatory '[? ] [? ] I now returned to [? ] [? ]' can be read as a telling authorial gloss on the poem which follows. 'The Choice', in both its Journal and Hunt/Forman versions, is about returning, about the return. It is elegiac, of course. As A.A. Markley notes, giving the poem in two brief pages perhaps the most serious critical and scholar attention it has yet received, it is also (at least in terms of its title) related to the tradition of 'Choice' poem stemming from Horace's Satire Book 2.4 Markley also notesthe poem's intertextual connection to poetryby P.B. Shelley, especially Epipsychidion, and Leigh Hunt's poem 'The Choice' published in The Liberal in the year (1823) in which Mary Shelley composed her poem of that title.5 More straightforwardly, the poem is about returning. The word 'return' is placed conspicuously, both in syntactical and lineal terms, at the end of the tenth line of the first twenty-line verse paragraph.6 The word return and the concept of the return are part of Mary Shelley's voice as a writer, part of what we might call her signature. We have in this word a sign (or clue) of the aesthetic complexity which lies behind such apparently confessional and 'personal' texts as 'The Choice'. In Matilda, for example, the word occurs frequently, merging with the theme of wandering and straying to generate a complex structure which revolves around Mathilda's overdetermined relations with her father and then Woodville.7 The father's return to his daughter turns out to be a wandering from her [End Page 219] (psychologically returning her to her mother). At the point of crisis, after the father's expression of illicit love, Mathilda imagines the father wandering for another sixteen years in Europe. Mathilda imagines saying to her father: 'Go, Devoted one, and return thus! – This is my curse, a daughter's curse: go, and return pure to thy child, who will never love ought but thee.'8 By this stage of the text, it is clear that for Mathilda every return is also a wanderingfrom her. It is interesting that in Valperga, as Euthanasia leaves Beatrice to visit a sick friend, we find exactly the same combination of returning and wandering: '"Go, kind friend", said she to Euthanasia, "go; but return again".'9 We can relate these fictional expressions of the ambivalent relation between wandering and returning (noting that this temporally non-linear sequence is part of the subject of this reading) to a very clear structure in Mary Shelley's thought immediately after the death of P.B. Shelley. She says to Byron in a letter posted around 30 March 1823: 'I wait withno pleasant expectation for the result of my father's deliberations – it little matters which way...