Notes
1] Shelley sent this sonnet to Leigh Hunt, the editor of The Examiner, on November 23, 1819, saying, "I don't expect you to publish it but you may show it to whom you wish." It was not published until Mrs. Shelley's collected editions of 1839.
1-2.:Dying king: George III, eighty-one in 1819 and dead the following year. His madness was permanent after November 1810, and necessitated the Regency Act of February 1811, by which his eldest son (described by a recent historian as "an aesthete decayed into grossness by habitual self-indulgence" and by Leigh Hunt as "a corpulent Adonis of fifty") became Prince Regent.
4-12] In addition to expressing Shelley's usual contempt for Regency, Church, and State, these lines make more specific complaints against current agricultural policy (7), against the misuse of the army against the people (8-9), as in the Peterloo Massacre of August 19, 1819, and probably against the use of government spies and agents provocateurs (10), like the notorious Oliver.
11-14] The sealed book and the revolutionary conclusion make passing reference to Revelation 5 and its sequel.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Mary Shelley (London: E. Moxon, 1839). PR 5402 1870 ROBA.
First publication date:
1839
RPO poem editor: M. T. Wilson
RP edition: 3RP 2.576.
Recent editing: 4:2002/4/24
Composition date:
1819
Form: Sonnet
Rhyme: abababcdcdccdd