We are quite ready. Well, ’tis very well.
The poems of this period are extraordinary in their number and quality. Among the longer ones are Julian and Maddalo (1818) and The Masque of Anarchy (1819). The latter, inspired by the news of the massacre of Peterloo, expresses Shelley’s revolutionary political views, and is very severe on Lord Castlereagh. The beginning of the poem is startling enough:
I met Murder on the way,
He had a mask like Castlereagh;
Very smooth he looked, yet grim,
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
In The Witch of Atlas (1820) and Epipsychidion (1821) Shelley rises further and further into the ether of poetical imagination, until he becomes almost impossible of comprehension. Adonais (1821) is a lament for the death of Keats. In plan the poem is crazily constructed, but it glows with some of the most splendid of Shelley’s conceptions:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,