Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.