The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem on twelve cantos compiled by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817. The poem was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna ; or, the Golden City Revolution: the Nineteenth Century Vision by Charles and James Ollier in December 1817. Shelley worked around Bisham Woods, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest London, from April to September. The plot centers on two characters named Laon and Cythna who embarked on a revolution against the despotic rulers of the Argolis fictional state, imitating the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the title, this poem does not focus on Islam as a particular religion, although the general subject of religion is discussed, and it refers to the archetypes and orientalist themes. This work is a symbolic parable of liberation and revolutionary idealism after the disappointment of the French Revolution.
Video The Revolt of Islam
​​â € <â €
In the Islamic Revolt, Poetry, in the Twelve Canto (1818), consisting of 4,818 lines, Shelley returned to the social and political theme of Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813). This poem is in the Spenseria stanzas with each stanza containing nine lines in total: eight lines in the iambic pentameter followed by a single Alexandrine line in the iambic hexameter. The rhyme pattern is "ababbcbcc". It was written in the spring and summer of 1817. Originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, the Golden City Revolution: the Nineteenth Century Vision. Publishers, Charles and James Ollier, however, refused to print the work because of the theme of incest and his statements about religion. Only a few copies are published. They demand changes to the text. Shelley makes changes and revisions. The work was reissued in 1818 under the title The Revolt of Islam .
His wife, Mary describes the work as follows:
He chose for his hero a young man who was fed in the dream of freedom, some of his acts contrary to world opinion, but which is moved by virtuous love, and a resolution to confer the political lust and intellectual freedom on fellow creatures. She creates for this young man a woman as she likes to imagine - full of enthusiasm for the same object; and they both, by not giving up and feeling the deepest sense of justice of their purpose, encountered difficulties and death. It's in this poem warning a friend of his youth. The character of the old man who freed Laon from his prison, and tended to be sick, based on Doctor Lind, who, when Shelley was at Eton, often stood up to befriend and support him, and whose name he never mentioned without love and respect.
Shelley himself gave two accounts of the poem. In a letter to William Godwin, December 11, 1817, he wrote:
Poetry is produced by a series of thoughts that fill my mind with unlimited and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the anxiety of my life, and I was involved in this task, deciding to leave some notes about myself. Most of the contents of the volume are written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communication of a dying man. I never thought of it as near-perfect; but when I consider contemporary production of the same pretense, I myself am filled with confidence. I feel that in many ways it is the original image of my own mind. I feel that sentiments are true, not assumptions. And in this case I have long believed that my power consists; sympathy and parts of the imagination associated with sentiment and contemplation. I was formed, if for something that is not the same as the flock of humanity, to understand the difference of feelings that are momentary and distant, whether relative to the external or living beings that surround us, and communicate the concepts resulting from considering either the moral or material universe overall. Of course, I believe these faculties, who may understand all the noble in man, are imperfect in my own mind.
In a letter to the publisher, Shelley wrote on October 13, 1817:
All poems, with the exception of the first canto and part of the last, are mere human stories without the smallest supernatural intervention. Canto first, indeed, in several different poetry sizes, though indispensable for the integrity of the work. I say this because, if everything is written in the first canto way, I can not expect that it will appeal to many people. I have tried in the course of my work to speak with the common basic emotions of the human heart, so that, even though it is a story of violence and revolution, it is relieved by images of friendship, lighter natural love and affection. This scene should have been put in Constantinople and modern Greece, but without much effort on the short description of Mahometan manners. This is, in fact, a story that illustrates a revolution as it should be in a European country, followed up by opinions of what has been called (falsely, as I think) modern philosophy, and competes with the ancient ideas and advantages should be obtained from them for those who support them. It is this kind of Revolution which is the beau idÃÆ'Â © al, as it is, of the French Revolution, but is produced by the influence of individual genius and of general knowledge.
Maps The Revolt of Islam
Preface
In the Preface to the work, Shelley explains his purpose for his composition:
The poem I now present to the world is an endeavor that I hardly dare to wish for success, and where an established fame writer may fail without disgrace. It is an experiment about the temperament of the public mind, such as how much thirst for the moral and political conditions of a happier society survive, among the enlightened and subtle, the tempests that have shaken the times in which we live. I have attempted to attain harmony of the metric language, the subtle combination of delusion, the quick and subtle transition of human passion, all the elements that essentially form Poetry, in the cause of liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the flowering view within the chests of my readers, a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope for something good, in which there is no violence or misrepresentation or prejudice that can actually extinguish in between mankind.
Dedication
Poetry has a dedication "to Mary -------- ------" which consists of a verse by George Chapman:
Plot
In the first canto, the poet goes up the mountain from where he observes an eagle and snake fighting. The Eagle is valid. A woman takes poets and wounded snakes on a boat. The poet is placed temporarily in the eternal rest areas, where good and great human beings are represented as recalculations, before the throne of the Spirit of Goodness, their suffering and their earthly work. Among these are two, a man and a woman from the state of Argolis, who, after saving their country for a short time from the tyrannical home of Othman and attaining this great revolution with the power of persuasive eloquence and sympathy of human love alone, nonviolence, bloodshed, or revenge, seeing the fruits of all their labor being blown up by a foreign invasion, and a tyrant who was pretended but not humiliated was changed in his seat. Finally, in the midst of the darkness of their country's horizon, Laon and Cythna died, fearlessly, heroic martyrdom death, burned alive at stake, gathering consolation, in the final pain of their ending nature, of hope and conviction that faith and their example might generate a successor to their work, and that they did not live or die in vain. In the people of these martyrs, Shelley has struggled to realize his ideas about the power and beauty of human love, and, in their history, he has set a series of drawings, illustrating the efficacy of this affection in overcoming personal evil. and public life.
When the poetry is open, Laon and Cythna live in a reverie of excitement. This calm soon crumbles. Othman's troops, a tyrant, came and took Cythna for harem Othman as food "For the lust of hyena, who, among the graves, Over his hated food, laughs in agony, raves." Laon reacted by killing three attackers. The remaining troops dragged him away to await his sentence in prison. Laon suffers from thirst and hunger, but tries to find Cythna. A white screen was installed in the bay below, and he felt that the ship was destined to carry Cythna from the beach. The thought of this meeting prompted him to approach madness. On the fourth day he went berserk at the top of the pillar, upon arriving there an old man, a hermit, who had heard of the cause of his suffering, his generous nature and his high aspirations. The good old man frees him from his chain and takes it to a small bark underneath, whilst not fully sensitive to what is going on around him. Laon learned later that the old man's eloquence had subjected the guards, who had agreed, at their own risk, to escape. He was taken across the sea to a lonely island, where for seven years he had been nurtured by this elderly benefactor, whose good and compassionate wisdom was enough to win back Laon's mind to self-possession.
After Laon recovered, the old man told him that during his illness years, the cause of freedom gradually increased in the "Golden City", imitating Constantinople, and that he himself would gladly assist the Revolution that has now begun there.. However, the old man thought he was too old and too weak in spirit and language to be an effective leader.
Laon took the old man's enthusiasm and they set off with their bark for a revolutionary city. At their arrival, they find the job seems almost finished. A large number of people, men who are tired of political slavery and women who are tired of domestic violence, gather in fields outside the walls. Laon and his friend walked to the camp and were accepted as friends. The host has acknowledged a leader and spirit chair in the person of a woman, whom they respect on behalf of Laone. Laon and the heroine are attracted to each other by unknown sympathy. Her tone of voice raised all the depths of her soul, but her face was veiled.
Othman's palace was then surrounded by a crowd, and entering it, Laon found tyrants sitting alone in the hall, abandoned by all but one child, whom he had won by praise and caresses.
The king secretly was transferred from his palace without anyone following him except the child. On the refinement of their victory, many joined the high festival, where Laone was a female pastor.
Laon sits nearby on his pyramid, but he is arrested, by a strange impulse, from talking to him, and he resigns to pass the night quietly in the distance from where he sleeps. At recess, Laone was awakened by a cacophony of voices. The crowd, lately so strong and collected, is seen flying in all directions. He learns that the cause of their chaos is the arrival of foreign troops, sent by some of his brothers to the relief of Othman. Laone, and some more heroic spirits, retreated to the side of the hill, where, unarmed and outnumbered, they were massacred by their enemies. They took their place in a lonely retreat.
They stayed for a while at this retreat, communicating their long history of suffering. Cythna, according to her own story, was taken away from Laon at the time when she killed three of the kidnappers who surrounded her, had been taken to the tyrant palace, and had suffered all the humiliation, and almost all injuries, to where her prisoners were exposed. However, his high spirits had offended his oppressor, and he was sent to a Submarine cave, or an underwater cave, near Symplegades, where a strange dungeon borne by waves by a slave, "made fool by poison, A Diver is slender and strong, from the sea of ​​Oman. "
In this dungeon, he is given little food daily by eagles, trained to levitate over the only gap where air has access to captives. She is immersed in a melancholy frenzy and is aroused by the awareness of a strange feeling that teaches her to expect that she will become a mother. That is, she gave birth, and for the moment all the grief in her prison was soothed by the caresses of her children. But the boy disappeared suddenly and the bewildered mother suspected that her existence was just a dream of her madness. Eventually the earthquake changed the position of the cave and Cythna was released by several passing sailors, who took him to the city of Othman. The sailors were persuaded by his sermons during the voyage to take part in the rebellion, which Cythna arrived in time to lead.
It is Laon's custom to ride every night on a Tartar horse to get food for Cythna. By this means their retreat was finally found, Laon was arrested, led before tyrants, and sentenced to be burned alive before his eyes, at the scene of his treachery. The guards, the priests, and the slaves, gathered around Othman's throne. Both Laon and Cythna were burned alive at the stake. "A form of light is sitting by his side, A most beautiful child, In the midst of Laon's emergence, freed alone from the hopes and mortal fears." Finally, Laon and Cythna underwent a remarkable transformation. In the last scene, their spiritual journey about transmogrification is told.
Note
References
- Hutchinson, Thomas (undated). The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Includes Material Not Printed in Poetry Edition and Edited with Textural Notes . E. W. Cole: Commonwealth of Australia; Book Arcade, Melbourne. (NB: Hardcover, clothbound, embossed.) Published before ISBN issuance.
- Haswell, Richard H. (1976). "Shelley's
: The Connexion of Its Part." KJS , 25, pp.Ã, 81-102. - Grimes, Kyle. (1994). "Censorship, Violence, and Political Rhetoric: Islamic Rebellion of the Age." KSJ , 43, pp.Ã, 98-116.
- McLane, Maureen N. Romanticism and Sciences: Poetry, Population, and Species Discourse . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Disconnect, M. Elisabeth. "'Common sympathy': Shelley's 'Islamic Revolt'." Link online: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/15881
- Kline, Allan. "The 'American' Stanzas at Shelley's Revolt of Islam : A Source." Modern Language Note , Vol. 70, No. 2 (February 1955), p. 101-103.
- Martinez, Alicia. "Heroes and Heroes of Shelley's 'The Revolt of Islam'." The Study of Salzburg in English Literature , 1976.
- "Percy Bysshe Shelley --- Islamic Rebellion , published in 1818." The Romantics: Timeline . BBC online.
- Nature, Mahmood Pervez. "Shelley's revolutionary spirit and Islamic rebellion . PRESSTV , May 19, 2009.
- Sperry, Stuart M. "The Sexual Theme of Shelley 'The Revolt of Islam'." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , Vol. 82, No. 1 (January 1983), pp. 32-49.
- Orel, Harold. "Shelley's
: The Last Last Poem from the British Enlightenment?" SVEN , 89, (1972), 1187. - Ruff, James Lynn. "Shelley's Islamic Rebellion ." Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg, 1972, pp.Ã, 17-26.
- Gold, Elise M. "Keats Reading Shelley: A Reference to Islamic Revolt in Lamia." Amer. Notes and Questions , 23.5-6 (1985): 74-77.
- Trayiannoudi, L. "Shelley's
: Orthodoxy of Unusual Symbolism." Kakouriotis, A. (ed.); Parkin-Gounelas, R. (ed.). Working Paper in Linguistics and Literature . Thessaloniki: Aristotle U, 1989. 207-36. - Kitzberger, Ingrid Rosa. "Picture of Transformation and Self Patterns in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Islamic Rebellion ." Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine (ed.); Gortschacher, Wolfgang (ed.); Klein, Holger M. (ed.). Trends in English and American Studies: Literature and Imagination. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1996. 171-87.
- Jeetu, Monika. Contemporary review of The Revolt of Islam . Link University of Pennsylvania.
- Richardson, Donna. "The Dark Idolatry of Self": The Dialectic of Imagination in the Shelley Islamic Rebellion . " Keats-Shelley Journal , Vol.XL, 1991, pp. 73-98.
- Reviews: "Observations on Islamic Rebellion ". Blackwood Magazine , 4 (January 1819), 476-82.
- Womersley, David. "Shelley's Arab Spring." Viewpoint , 32, (May 2011), 46.
External links
- The Audiorecording of The Revolt of Islam is read by Christian Pecaut on the Audio Community.
- An online edition on The Literature Network.
- Womersley, David. "Shelley's Arab Spring." Viewpoint , 32, (May, 2011), 46.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments