University of Oxford 新增了 2 張新相片 — 與 Vinayadhar Raju 和 Linh Cu
Time to celebrate - the Bodleian Libraries have acquired their TWELVE MILLIONTH printed book!
The landmark title is 'Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things', written by ‘a Gentleman of the University of Oxford’ in 1811. This gentleman is better known as Percy Bysshe Shelley, then a student at Oxford University and now recognised as one of the greatest English poets.
This is a unique copy of a pamphlet previously thought lost, and is believed to be the only copy in the world.
EPIPSYCHIDION（エピサイキディオン）という不思議な響きの言葉は、ギリシャ語で「魂の分身」と ... ーマは「EPIPSYCHIDION（魂の分身）」。Epipsychidion 希臘文- a soul within the soul 來自靈魂的這靈魂
Epipsychidionにおける魂の遍歴. A Study in P. B. Shelley's Epipsychidion. 山川 智恵子
The Vision of 'Love's Rare Universe' : A Study of Shelley's Epipsychidion by Verma, KD
After the optimistic height of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley embarks upon a darker quest in Epipsychidion. Ostensibly modeled after Dante's La Vita Nuova, Shelley's poetic quest for the ideal love intentionally fails. Epipsychidion mimics both the epical "quest" of Dante and the presence of the ideal for whom the quest occurs. In particular, Shelley adapts Dante's ideas of the ineffability of language as a finite system by which to communicate transcendent thoughts. The speaker's self-awareness and despair at the failure of his task contrasts with the implicit presence in the poem of a Dantesque ideal love-poetry, echoes of which resonate throughout the poem. The contrast between Dante's success and Shelley's failure result in romantic irony, in which contradictory ideals stand side by side in a poetry whose primary characteristic is ambivalence.
EPIPSYCHIDION.
VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE NOBLE AND UNFORTUNATE LADY, EMILIA V—, NOW IMPRISONED IN THE CONVENT OF —.
L’anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nell’ infinito un
Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.
HER OWN WORDS.Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.
[“Epipsychidion” was composed at Pisa, January, February, 1821, and published without the author’s name, in the following summer, by C. & J. Ollier, London. The poem was included by Mrs. Shelley in the “Poetical Works”, 1839, both editions. Amongst the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian is a first draft of “Epipsychidion”, ‘consisting of three versions, more or less complete, of the “Preface [Advertisement]”, a version in ink and pencil, much cancelled, of the last eighty lines of the poem, and some additional lines which did not appear in print’ (“Examination of the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, by C.D. Locock”. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1903, page 3). This draft, the writing of which is ‘extraordinarily confused and illegible,’ has been carefully deciphered and printed by Mr. Locock in the volume named above. Our text follows that of the editio princeps, 1821.]
BBC Radio 4
I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him…
Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Mask of Anarchy
On this day in 1819, The Peterloo Massacre
Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time.
BBC.IN
University of Oxford 新增了 3 張新相片。
This striking statue in University College commemorates the English poet Shelley, who briefly attended the College in the 19th century before being expelled for writing 'The Necessity of Atheism'.
The sculpture depicts the poet after his drowning in Italy and was commissioned by his daughter-in-Law, Lady Shelley.
→搭火車前往Château de Chillon觀光
Chateau du Chillon, 1874
Lake Geneva as Shelley and Byron Knew It
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Panoramic view of Lake Geneva and the medieval Château de Chillon, which inspired Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon.” More Photos »
By TONY PERROTTET
Published: May 27, 2011
SWITZERLAND is rarely thought of as a wild artistic center. Most of us recall the harsh verdict of Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” who declared that the country’s most creative achievement was the cuckoo clock.
Multimedia
Damon Winter/The New York Times
The Grand Rue in Montreux, lined with hotels, restaurants and shops. More Photos »
A few centuries ago, Europe’s most adventurous bohemians flocked to Lake Geneva on the Swiss-French border to savor its inspiring mountain scenery and liberal political climate. The most notorious group arrived from England in May 1816, led by the 28-year-old celebrity poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Having earned the moniker “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” thanks to his debauched behavior and operatic romances with men and women (including his half-sister, Augusta), he was fleeing England in the wake of a scandalous separation from his wife.
His mode of transport was a replica of Napoleon’s coach, and with him were a bevy of footmen, his personal physician (an emotionally troubled young doctor with a bookish bent named John Polidori), a peacock, a monkey and a dog. He and his entourage were met in Geneva by a fellow group of literary wanderers helmed by the struggling poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, by the age of 23, had gained his own notoriety in England as an advocate of atheism and free love. He was accompanied by his brilliant and beautiful 18-year-old mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (she married Shelley later that year), and her alluring stepsister, Claire Claremont. (Also 18, she had been Byron’s lover back in England, and for a time, Shelley’s; it was Claire who had orchestrated the holiday meeting in Switzerland when she heard that Byron was traveling there).
Byron and Shelley got on famously and soon decided to rent adjacent summer houses in the hamlet of Cologny, about four miles north of Geneva. Byron took a grandiose villa with his doctor and servants, while Shelley, Mary and Claire settled into a more humble house by the lakefront.
The coterie was “the most brilliant and romantic circle of poets, writers and personalities which Switzerland — and Europe — has ever seen,” wrote the historian Elma Dangerfield in “Byron and the Romantics in Switzerland, 1816.” The claim may be a little overblown, but there is no question that it was a dazzling alignment of talent. When the group wasn’t sailing on Lake Geneva or making horseback excursions to medieval castles in the Alps, they were writing. That summer produced Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic “Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus”; an array of revered poems from Byron including “The Prisoner of Chillon”; and a sinister short story called “The Vampyre,” written by John Polidori and inspired by Byron, which would years later influence Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
HOPING to get a sense of how Lake Geneva inspired such creativity, I spent a week last summer tracking down some of the places in which the Romantic poets spent their time — a task that entailed visiting one ravishing lakeside village after another.
Croissant-shaped Lake Geneva is the largest, deepest and bluest of Swiss lakes, and its beauty is only heightened by its surroundings — thriving vineyards, historic architecture and, in the distance, peaks dipped in snow all year round. The winters are mild and the summers hot and dry, earning it the title “Swiss Riviera.” There are even palm trees by the eastern shore, and the water is warm enough to swim from pebble beaches from June to September.
But for me, it was the legacy of Byron and the Shelleys — and the juxtaposition of such larger-than-life characters in such a pristine buttoned-down place that gave Lake Geneva its most powerful allure.
Because Cologny, where Byron and his coterie stayed in 1816, is primarily residential, I took a small apartment in a slate-gray cottage high above the fashionable town of Montreux on the far eastern side. As luck would have it, the Montreux Jazz Festival (which will be held this year from July 1 to 16) was in full swing when I visited, and the waterfront promenade — normally lined with quiet gardens and cafes with majestic views — had been transformed into an open-air mall, with the well-heeled crowds moving between booths selling handicrafts, clothing and edible treats. Jazz and every other musical genre wafted though the warm night air, although finding live events was a challenge, since they are mostly held in pricey indoor venues. Instead, I got an $8 shot-size glass of local wine — carefully measured out at “one deciliter” — found a Brazilian D.J. in a bar overhanging the water and lost myself in the tanned throng.
Climbing the 343 steps back up to my cottage, I reminded myself that, bon vivant though Byron was, he didn’t come to Switzerland for the night life.
The next morning, I headed straight for the water. Lake Geneva, at 45 miles long and nearly 9 miles wide, is so well served by impeccable Swiss railways that one can get from almost any point to another in less than an hour. A network of elegant antique ferries also plies the lake, for more-leisurely excursions. For my voyage, I waited for one of the paddle steamers, which date from the belle époque. Mary Shelley raved in her letters about the near-tropical color of the lake, “blue as the heavens which it reflects,” and used an array of scenes from Lake Geneva in “Frankenstein.”
Today, many of the views of tiny villages and coastal crags are unchanged, although Byron and his friends, who traveled in open sailing boats and along rutted carriage trails, would be astonished at how the once-impoverished Swiss republic has become one of the wealthiest corners of Europe. In my polished ferry was a mint-condition dining room of inlaid walnut paneling and fine linen, so I took lunch in aristocratic style, gazing at the terraced vineyards while sipping Swiss sauvignon blanc.
After a two-hour boat ride and 20-minute hop by train, I arrived in downtown Geneva, now home to United Nations bureaucrats and bankers. Back in 1816, Byron and Shelley had seen no reason to linger here; Byron complained in a letter that he was followed about his hotel garden by “staring boobies” — or, more politely, English tourists. So the two groups relocated to the secluded farming village of Cologny near Geneva — Byron to the spectacular Villa Diodati and the Shelleys to the more modest Maison Chapuis just below.
A short bus ride took me past the Jet d’Eau, Geneva’s trademark fountain, to the manicured main square of Cologny. Today, the village is essentially a Geneva suburb, and one of the most exclusive residential addresses in Europe, divided into the magnificent estates of chief executives, sheiks and assorted celebrities. As I strolled past iron fences and hedges, security guards in glass booths eyed me with frank suspicion. To my relief, I soon spotted No. 9 Chemin de Ruth, where the word “Diodati” was discreetly engraved into an antique stone gatepost.
The salmon pink villa is still in private hands (now divided into luxury apartments), but there are good views of it from the street and the public park next door. Its exterior has changed very little from 19th-century engravings, including the expansive balcony where Byron finished the third canto of his epic poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” although the vineyards that once tumbled down to the water are now flower-filled gardens, and Maison Chapuis is gone.
The gate was open, so I blithely strolled into the estate intending to knock on the door. As I drew near, I could easily imagine the bohemians of 1816 gathering by candlelight in the upstairs dining room to debate and carouse. Byron’s initial resistance to resuming his affair with the dark-eyed Claire did not last long. (“I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” he later wrote, “but a man is a man — & if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours — there is but one way.”) Sexual tensions festered as Dr. Polidori fell in love with Mary, and wild rumors began to spread among English visitors to Geneva. Curiosity seekers passed by in boats to peer at the women’s underwear on the washing lines — evidence, it was believed, that the Villa Diodati was a virtual bordello. Others would stop Byron on his evening rides to accuse him of corrupting the local girls and youth. The whole Swiss setup, one British newspaper reported back in London, was a sordid “league of incest.”
But the summer of 1816 was historic not only in a literary sense. A huge volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 (far more powerful than Krakatoa would be 68 years later) sent a pall of volcanic ash across the Northern Hemisphere, bringing so much cold weather and torrential rain to Europe that 1816 was nicknamed “the Year Without a Summer.” In Switzerland, it was mid-June when the freakishly bad weather began — “an almost perpetual rain,” Mary recalled, with terrific thunderstorms rippling back and forth across the lake. Wine flowed copiously, as did laudanum, a form of liquefied opium. One night, when Byron read aloud a haunting poem, Shelley leapt up and ran shrieking from the room, having hallucinated that Mary had sprouted demonic eyes in place of nipples. It was in this surreal, claustrophobic atmosphere that she experienced the famous nightmare that became the lurid plot of Frankenstein (she later recounted in the preface to the 1831 edition of her book), about a scientist who creates a creature from stolen body parts and infuses it with life. The next night, she told the gloomy fable in the Villa Diodati to a rapt audience.
AS visitors do today, Byron and his cohort loved to explore the lake. When the rain finally eased, Shelley and Byron set sail for a weeklong literary pilgrimage of their own. The first stop was the village of Clarens, where the most beloved novel of their era, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary love story, “Julie, or the New Héloïse” was composed and set. In Lausanne, they paid their respects at the house of Edward Gibbon, where he penned his revered epic history, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” (It was already a ruin, and would be knocked down in 1896 for the Lausanne post office). On their way home, the pair were caught in a storm that broke their rudder and nearly sank their boat — presaging the sailing accident that would end Shelley’s life six years later in Italy, since despite his love of boats, he never learned to swim.
But the highlight of the trip, according to Byron’s letters, remains one of Switzerland’s most thrilling attractions: the Château de Chillon, a medieval fortress whose turrets rise dreamlike from the waters. The castle became notorious in the 16th century as a political prison, and the two poets were deeply moved when a gendarme showed them the dungeon, where an outspoken cleric, François Bonivard, had been chained to a pillar for six years.
For my visit, I strolled the two miles along the lakefront from Montreux (ferries also make the journey). The dungeon is still a major attraction, as is the pillar where Byron’s name is carved. (Although Byron’s friend John Hobhouse, who traveled with Byron later in the summer and revisited the castle in 1828, believed that the inscription was made by a drunken guard to attract sightseers). Stairs lead up through endless chambers, many with traces of the original medieval frescoes, into the highest keep, where every arrow slit offers a stunning lake view.
After their visit, Byron and Shelley stayed at a guesthouse in Ouchy, the port below Lausanne, where Byron stayed up late into the night writing “The Prisoner of Chillon” while Shelley worked on his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Today, Lausanne is the most spectacular and vibrant city on Lake Geneva, whose steep hills, crowned by a Gothic cathedral, can be ascended without strain in high-tech funiculars. The old waterfront inn still exists, although it has been expanded into a glamorous business hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre, with blood red velvet armchairs and contemporary art on every wall.
But perhaps the most evocative relic from 1816 is one that was entirely deserted when I went: the mansion of Madame de Stäel in Coppet, about 40 minutes by train from Lausanne, whose salon was the only one in Switzerland that Byron would deign to attend. The formidable 50-year-old de Stäel was famous in Europe for her bestselling novels, her collection of famous lovers and her outspoken liberal politics (she was exiled from Paris by Napoleon in 1804), and her soirées attracted the greatest minds of Europe. Today, the chateau, a five-minute stroll from the railway station, remains in the family. The 10th-generation owner, Count Othenin d’Haussonville, aged 79, lives in one section, but opens many rooms to the public. These are filled with the original furnishings, including Madame de Stäel’s personal bathtub and pianoforte.
FASCINATED as the Romantics were by the spiritual power of untrammeled nature, not even the self-absorbed Byron could visit Switzerland without experiencing the Alps. At different times over the summer, he and his cohort made grueling excursions by horse and mule, to be totally overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the peaks and waterfalls, the rumbling avalanches and the unearthly glaciers — “like a frozen-hurricane,” Byron wrote admiringly in his journal.
The most ambitious Alpine jaunt was undertaken by Byron and his visiting Cambridge chum Hobhouse, into the breathtaking Bernese Oberland. But while Byron and “Hobby” spent days on horseback, the trip can now be made in a few hours on one of Switzerland’s most stunning train rides, which climbs from Montreux to Interlaken in the German-speaking region. The panoramic carriages offer sweeping views from Montbovon over the whole of Lake Geneva, then delve through tunnels and switchbacks into the heart of the Alps, where the three signature peaks of the Jungfrau, Eiger and Mönch loom like a Lindt chocolate box cover.
Even the tormented Byron seemed to enjoy himself in this celestial mountain scenery. On one occasion, crossing a high pass, he apparently lightened up so much that he “made a snowball and threw it at Hobhouse,” reports Elma Dangerfield. And on finding a lush glade, “I lay down in the sun enjoying myself most entirely,” Byron wrote to his half-sister, “and dared to write down in my pocket-book that I was happy.”
The climax came at the village of Lauterbrunnen, stunningly set in a deep gorge lined with waterfalls, one of which Byron described as “the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind.”
Today, Lauterbrunnen’s dramatic setting is entirely intact, although instead of lodging with a local curate, as Byron and Hobhouse did, I took a room in one of many efficient bed-and-breakfasts on the main street. For the next few days, instead of hitching a mule, I rode cog railways and cable cars high above the clouds to hike along breathtaking ridges, then returned to the village for fortifying cheese fondue dinners. One morning, I got up at dawn to enter a tunnel carved beneath the Staubbach Falls just outside town and gazed out through the torrent at the surrounding mountains while slowly being soaked by glacial spray. Who, I thought, needs laudanum?
In the age before contraception, “free love” worked better for men than for women. The Diodati idyll went awry in August, when Claire revealed that she was pregnant. “Is the brat mine?” Byron wondered gallantly in one letter, before reluctantly concluding that it must be. The Shelleys departed for England on Aug. 29, with Byron promising to support the child. He lingered on at the Villa Diodati until the beginning of October, but finally left Switzerland for Italy, to throw himself deeper into sensual abandon.
In retrospect, the “Frankenstein summer” seems a fantastical interlude of happiness in lives marked by tragedy. In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, at age 29; Dr Polidori had committed suicide the year before, at age 25. Claire’s daughter with Byron died at age 5, and only one of Mary Shelley’s four children with Percy survived. Byron died in Greece in 1824, at the ripe old age of 36.
The last survivor was the audacious Claire Clairmont, who lived to age 80. At the end of her life, she started a bitter memoir denouncing the practice of “free love,” which, she says, turned Byron and Shelley, “the two finest poets of England” into “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.” (The scrawled pages were discovered in 2009 by the biographer Daisy Hay in the New York Public Library, where the extensive Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle contains a marvelous array of manuscripts).
Today, such morbid ruminations are hard to sustain in the brilliant summer light reflecting from Lake Geneva. On my last night in Montreux, I headed down to the jazz festival and drank as many thimblefuls of wine as I could afford. Carpe diem — Byron and the Shelleys surely would have concurred — for how many summers do we have?
Lake Geneva Luxury
GETTING THERE
Trains from Geneva (raileurope.com) run to the lakeside towns of Lausanne, Nyon, Vevey and Montreux, and regular ferries crisscross the entire lake. The Zurich airport is also less than three hours away from any of these towns by train.
LODGING
Thanks to the efficient Swiss transport system, any one of the waterfront towns makes a good base for exploring the lake. There are three pricey “literary” hotels worth a visit even if you can’t stay in them: In Montreux, the Montreux Palace Hotel (41-21-962-1212; fairmont.com/montreux) where Vladimir Nabokov lived for 16 years, offers belle époque luxury, from 419 Swiss francs, about $466 at $1.11 to the franc, for a double. Henry James enjoyed the equally sumptuous Hôtel des Trois Couronnes (41-21-923-3320; hoteltroiscouronnes.ch, from 460 francs) in Vevey, and set part of his novella “Daisy Miller” there. And Byron and Shelley stayed in what is now the Angleterre and Residence in Lausanne (41-21-613-3434; angleterre-residence.ch; from 320 francs). Some small apartments can be found via Internet searches, or a cheaper option is the Hostellerie Bon Rivage in Vevey (41-21-977-0707; bon-rivage.ch; from 200 francs).
DINING
The most distinctive gastronomic experience is a meal on board one of the elegant vintage ferries run by CGN (41-21-601-1666; cgn.ch; daily special dishes from 19 francs). For a vaguely bohemian vibe, Le Bleu Lézard in Lausanne has a cafe-restaurant upstairs and nightclub below (41-21-321-3830; bleu-lezard.ch; salads from 22 francs). A pleasant day trip is to take a ferry to the French side of Lake Geneva to the medieval village of Yvoire, where small restaurants offer lunch menus from 15 euros, about $21 at $1.40 to the euro.
RECOMMENDED READING
Edna O’Brien, “Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life” (Norton, 2009); Daisy Hay, “Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives” (Bloomsbury, 2010); Elma Dangerfield, “Byron and the Romantics in Switzerland 1816” (Ascent, 1978).
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