ABSTRACT

This fragment first occurs (with later forged signatures) on the address cover of a letter from Godwin dated 29 April 1817, now in the Carl H. Pforzheimer collection (‘Pf.MS’), and was written out again with brief continuations in Nbk 10 (c. May-September 1819), and in Nbk 17 (c. December 1820-March 1821) from which the concept and phrasing of lines 5–6 were used for Hellas 76–93. Presumably the lines were composed c. May 1817, but the latest version is preferred below as being also the fullest. Forman, who from Pf.MS first printed these lines, entitled them ‘Lines to William Godwin’ because of the letter they were drafted on (Forman 1882 ii 162); Locock was told by W. M. Rossetti that the lines dated from 1819, apparently from their occurrence in 570 Nbk 10, and identified the Eagle as Byron (Locock 1911 ii 496), followed more recently by Charles E. Robinson (Robinson 68, 259–60); Rogers identified the Eagle as Plato, on the strength of S.’s translation ‘Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb’ (1975 ii 304, 381). But as Reiman concluded after discussing the eagle images in S.’s poetry (SC v 205–14) ‘there is no need to suppose that “Mighty Eagle” was addressed to any particular person’. In Hellas 76–93 the Eagle is Freedom, recalling Milton’s vision of a free England in Areopagitica: ‘Methinks I see her as an Eagle [renewing] her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam’; in ‘Ode to Liberty’ 6–11 the Eagle is the Imagination, and this fragment as well as the Ode may have been influenced by Goethe’s lyric ‘Harzreise im Winter’ (1777), a translation of which (possibly by John Gisborne, or even by Shelley) Claire Clairmont wrote into her journal under the headings May-June 1818 (SC v 455–7): ‘Like the vulture on the massy clouds of Morning, resting on his soft pinions & looking down for his prey, hover thou my Song … With the many coloured morning thou sweetly clearest [thy poet’s] bosom-thou raisest him aloft in the drifting tempest [Mit dem beizenden Sturm]. In his song torrents rush from the rocks; & the fearful verge of the snow crowned Summit which superstitious nations encircled with Spectres, to him becomes an altar of the purest devotion (1–5, 71–81). S.’s lines may also have defiant reference to Obadiah 3–4: ‘… thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, who shall bring me down to the ground? Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.’