Auguries of Anarchy: Shelley’s Invocation to the Environment in Times of Turbulence

By Tansy Troy

Fig. 1. Murder by Ranjan Kaul, acrylic on canvas, 48 inches x 60 inches, 2024

Last year in April, my daughter and I drove through the night to reach Ranjan Kaul’s solo show at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, and it is thanks to the paintings we found there that inspires me to write this piece.  As our home is in the high Himalayas, and as the season was somewhat turbulent, we were treated to dramatic electric storms all along the 17-hour drive down to the Plains on as (poetically) romantic a journey as one could wish for, illuminated and pitch dark by turn, as we precipitated down rough mountain roads flanked by jagged rock, and later, as the air grew warmer, serpented through whispering lychee, mango groves.

So, it was fitting that the exhibition, when we reached it, had a series of paintings inspired by late romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy.

Witnessing giant, vivid canvasses of smooth-faced Murder astride his white, blood-spotted horse, seeing Hope in a red dress outstretched before its hooves, along with verses from the poem deftly integrated into the paintings themselves, compelled a re-reading of Shelley, in particular, to ‘The Mask’, considering the poem in both its original historical context and in a contemporary one.

I discovered that the only printed version of the poem amongst my books of verse shipped from London almost a decade ago appeared in a childhood copy of The Rattle Bag, which was indeed the first book I ever came across this epic allegorical verse. The sensation of ‘going back in my own time’ to re-read this and other verses in the Romantic canon made me want to research Shelley’s earliest childhood too. Which influences had shaped that vivid, heightened intellect, that deeply scientific mind? Which images and sensations were engraved upon it at a pre-linguistic age?

I decide to begin in 1795 when Shelley is three years old. Coleridge and Wordsworth – widely considered to be the Fathers of Romanticism – have just met and become firm friends. At a certain point in their relationship, they dream of co-authoring a poem which will be even greater than Milton’s Paradise Lost. Coleridge envisages a poem that ‘would show the way to man’s redemption,' and although it could be argued that these two high Romantic masters never wholly achieved their vast and mutual ambition, I’d like to propose that perhaps Shelley, who seems in many ways to be Coleridge’s spiritual heir, may come somewhere close in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. 

Fig 2. The Nightingale, from Bewick’s Birds, 1798

Fast forward to 1798. Shelley is by now six years old and Coleridge’s birth son, Hartley, is less than two. Coleridge has just published The Nightingale, a poem in rapturous adulation of how a small bird can reinstate its original territorial claim over crumbling ruins, now given back over to moss and ‘wild with tangling underwood’.  He revels in the Nightingale’s song, declaring that:

‘In nature there is nothing melancholy

But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced

With the remembrance of a grievous wrong …’

Towards the end of this ‘conversation poem’, Coleridge recounts the story of how he had once comforted his baby son who had awakened in the night with a bad dream by taking him out into the orchard to hear the song of the nightingale by moonlight. His son’s cries immediately ceased as he became absorbed by the wonder of his environment and the poet concludes that:

‘… his childhood shall grow up

Familiar with these songs,

That with the night

He may associate joy.’

The very same year this poem is published, the woodcut maker Thomas Bewick publishes Bewick’s Birds, an immediate bestseller which sells a phenomenal 1,000 copies in its first year of print. Given that Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, encouraged her children to ride, hunt, fish and generally enjoy the Great Outdoors, I feel it is highly likely that such a family as hers would have had the means and inclination to purchase the two-volume bestseller, illustrating as it did both land and water birds of the British Isles’ 350 indigenous and migratory species of the time. If such a book were in the family, the illustrations would surely have etched themselves into the young Shelley’s imagination, rich and intriguing as they are with scenes of human-bird-animal interaction in the background or ‘tail pieces’ of many of its fine prints.

Time and distance from the UK inhibit my ability to verify this detail, but whether the young Shelley had access to Bewick’s Birds or not, it is highly likely that his early childhood wanderings in the English countryside would have laid the foundations for his sensibility towards all sentient beings, his subsequent vegetarianism and his wish for ‘no living thing to suffer pain.’

By 1810, Shelley has translated large sections of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis and in 1816, he meets Keats.  Three years later, Keats meets Coleridge, and that same year, writes his own famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.  So, it is hardly surprising that in 1821, Shelley uses the image of the Nightingale to describe the archetypal Romantic poet in his Defence of Poetry– though he does somewhat contradict Coleridge’s original tenant that nothing in nature ever feels melancholic.

‘A poet,’ claims Shelley, ‘is a nightingale who sits in darkness to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.’

It is almost as if there are three nightingales (Coleridge, Keats and Shelley), all inhabiting the same wooded grove and singing their territorial songs in riotous and unbounded joy as a form of resistance to the events of their times.

Things are about to get dark, however, and not in a gentle nocturnal sense.  In the same year that Shelley writes his ‘Defence’, the Manchester Riots — aka The Peterloo Massacre — incites Shelley’s protest poem The Masque of Anarchy. What has been referred to by English historian Robert Poole as ‘the bloodiest political event of the 19th century on English soil’ gives rise, in the two short weeks after the riots, to a poem which is in many ways as anarchic in its own right as the events which pushed it into verse form. In response to the unsheathed sabres of the 15th Hussars and their open attack on peaceful protestors, which left up to 17 dead (including a two-year old child, William Fildes) and up to 700 injured, Shelley puts his pen where his heart is, risking punishment for sedation (imprisonment or death).  There are some things, however, that no poet can bear to remain silent about.

Fig. 3. Hypocrisy, by Ranjan Kaul, acrylic on canvas, 54 inches x 66 inches, 2024

A modern reader may feel the brutality of the extended metaphors, for example, that of stanza V, are somewhat exaggerated as Shelley calls out Fraud in no uncertain terms. It is worth considering how modern-day readers feel about our own present-day dangers to young people. Shelley describes the children playing around the feet of the false-weeping Fraud as thinking ‘every tear a gem,’ and as a result, having ‘their brains knocked out’ by the tears as huge as millstones, heavy enough to crush a child’s skull.

Fig. 4. Fraud, by Ranjan Kaul, acrylic on canvas, 48 inches x 60 inches, 2024

While millstones may not evoke immediate danger in our own times, we might imagine the tears shed by Fraud as full with toxic metals, for example those found within mobile phone batteries and devices: lead, mercury, cadmium, nickel, antimony and arsenic.  Certainly, the fraudulent capitalistic ploys of manufacturers to furnish every young person with a touch-screen phone or iPad has the awful potential described to knock out and incapacitate the developing neural pathways of the next generation of young minds.

Shelley goes on to describe Hypocrisy personified and clothed ‘with the Bible’, riding on a crocodile.  Though India cannot be accused of clothing itself in a Christian narrative to protect its national interest, religion of one kind or another is certainly used to prop up extremist myths. How else could the killings and lynchings of the 21st century have taken place?  The casualty rates in the Gujarat riots of 2002 in which 2,000 Muslims were killed and 150,000 citizens driven from their homes far surpass the statistics of Peterloo, after all; the Delhi riots of 2020 and the Kisan riots in 2021 come close to sharing a similar level of total outrageous incomprehensibility.

Finally, Shelly’s masque brings us face to face with the true villain of the piece: Anarchy himself.

‘Last came Anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;

He was pale even to the lips

Like Death in the Apocalypse.’

Anarchy, according to the 1821 definition, would have meant, as now, ‘an absence of government, a state or lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power or even (more loosely), political disorder.’

Definitely, it would seem that Shelley viewed anarchy as the opposite of democracy and a form of extreme dictatorship: for on Anarchy’s brow is etched ‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!,’ begging the question as to whether these words are written onto Anarchy’s forehead or whether he actually does wear a mask (this is, after all, a wild Masquerade).

Anarchy is a skeleton – not even a human – the mere remains of a structure, dancing to the beat of his rabid public’s drum. On his journey to the Bank (of England) and the Tower (of London), Anarchy is met by Hope, though she looks ‘more like Despair.’  Hope petitions Anarchy with stories of poverty and malaise, possibly with the compassionate notion that there must be some good in every living being, even one who is clearly no longer human—  belief in the inherent benevolence of the universe, perhaps.

Fig. 5. Hope Confronts Anarchy, by Ranjan Kaul, acrylic on canvas, 48 inches x 60 inches,  2024

In a gesture that possibly inspired some of Gandhi’s peaceful protest tactics a hundred years later, Shelley makes Hope lie prostrate in front of Anarchy’s horse; and like any horse, sensible of its own survival, Anarchy’s horse refuses to tread on a human body, choosing instead to flee. Without his vehicle, Anarchy falls dead amongst the many he has murdered, and Hope is at liberty to call out to the surviving downtrodden masses in stanza XXXVIII:

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

YE ARE MANY— THEY ARE FEW.’

This anthemic call to action is repeated at the final stanza XCI, validating the powerful image of a great cat rising after sleep, re-energized by rest, strength rippling through its supine muscles. One can imagine if Shelley recited this poem aloud to an audience, by the final cry, members of that crowd would be standing up one by one to pledge allegiance to the cause of the downtrodden.

Fig. 6. Lion, from the workshop of Thomas Bewick, 1790

Equally arresting is the image of iron or steel chains being reduced to mere ‘dew’.  As this industrially constructed chain dissolves or transforms back to some more pliant substance, we are reminded of Coleridge’s wild underwood vanquishing the human-constructed castle, or of Ozymandias’s vast empire crumbling to sand and dust.  This leaves the reader with the optimistic hope of better times to come – the golden age which follows kalyuga, as it would be in Hindu cosmology, a philosophy that would seem to fit with Shelley’s hopes for evolutionary advance as described in ‘Hellas: Chorus’.

‘The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return.’

The interdependence between all life forms can be appreciated in Shelley’s 1820 homage ‘To a Skylark’.  The skylark, likened to a glow worm, in reality may have viewed a glow worm as prey. The skylark compared to a rose, could in turn have provided food for the glow worm. This kind of amorphous exchange between different genera offers a sense of cycle, of eventual return to dust and earth (incidentally, both words translate as ‘mtti’ in Hindi). It is this very earthing of image in metaphor which has, paradoxically, a profoundly liberating effect upon the upward trajectory of the poem, allowing it to rise off the page both rhythmically and visually, just like the bird it describes.

Fig. 7.  The Skylark, Bewick’s Birds, 1798

As well as the recurrent bird auguries in Shelley’s work, indeed in that of all the high and late Romantics, so too do snakes and serpents feature prominently.  Shelley returns to the most ancient, primal symbol of renewal and purification again and again, and it is perhaps extraordinarily poignant that the poet died at sea with Keats’ poem ‘Lamia’ in his pocket, in a book that would later help identify his mangled corpse. Though the Ancient Greeks developed the character of Lamia into a rather more complex kind of snake goddess, Shelley seems to have realized the quiet wisdom of snakes who cast off unnecessary, outmoded skin, as in ‘Hellas’: ‘The Earth doth like a Snake renew/Her winter weeds outworn.’

In a lesser-known fragment, ‘Wake the Serpent Not’ (circa 1817-9), the snake is described as a secretive guardian, silently watching over all the other creatures of his ‘deep grass’ realm.  There is a sense of care for all beings through this snake’s simple presence on Earth.  

‘Not a bee shall hear him creeping,

Not a mayfly shall awaken

From its cradling blue-bell shaken

Not the starlight as he’s sliding

Through the grass with silent gliding.’

Fig. 8. Maiden with Snake and Bird, from the workshop of Thomas Bewick, circa 1790

Through his many masked dances, his songs of protest, songs of joy, his whispered implorings, Shelley continues to speak to us of the urgent need to evolve, to heed the auguries of bird and bee and snake.  As he once listened to his Skylark, he compels us too to stop chattering and listen more deeply to the song of the Earth before it is too late. Already the uninhibited roar of forest fires, the overwhelming thunder of tsunamis, tidal waves, cloud bursts and broken dams, the moans and cries of displaced humans, birds and animals threaten to become the predominant song that nature sings in our sad times.

Shelley would want us to take heart, in spite of all the disaster, perhaps as a form of resistance to the events of our tumultuous times. For only by listening as carefully as Shelley listened may we too vanquish the anarchy of corporate greed, corrupt governance, hypocritical green washing, and ineffectual politics.  World, listen well now, Shelley might urge: our evolutionary survival may just depend on it.

References

1. The Rattle Bag, ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1982.

2. Quoted from an article by James Cambell, The New York Times, March 2007.

3. This verse quoted from The Faber Book of Beasts, ed. Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 1997

4. A History of British Birds (two volumes), Thomas Bewick, 1798

5. Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon, Random House, 2015

6. Prometheus Unbound, ed. Vida D. Scudder, published D.C. Heath & Co, Boston, 1897

7. Romantic Natural History blogs, dickinson.edu, 2011

8. Keats and Shelley:  Winds of Light, Keven Everest, OUP, 2021

9. A Defence of Poetry, www.poetryfoundation.org, 1798

10. ibid.

11. The Masque of Anarchy, with a preface by Leigh Hunt, published Edward Moxon, London 1832

12. Peterloo: The English Uprising, Robert Poole, OUP, 2019

13. Ibid.

14. The Shape of the Beast, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Inida, 2008

15. Shorter OED in two volumes, OUP, 1973

16. Simple-poetry.com

(All paintings cited in this essay are from the 2024 solo show titled “Within, Without”, by Ranjan Kaul at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.)

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Tansy Troy is a poet, performance storyteller and maker of bird and animal masks, which she shares with audiences at Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi, and other parts of India. You can read her poetry in Ratnakosha (Red River, August 2023), and her articles in The Apple Press, a young people’s eco journal which she edits and curates. Her poetry and stories have been published widely in newspapers and magazines. She lives with her family and many other beautiful birds and animals between Delhi, Rohtak and a nest in Manali.