'To Laughter': Shelley's Sonnet and Solitude

When Shelley left England in May 1816, he wrote to Godwin: 'I leave England—I know not, perhaps forever.' Shelley's relationship with Godwin had been severely damaged by his elopement with Mary and now his father-in-law by turns abused him to Mary and made demands for financial support. By threatening self-exile, it is possible Shelley was attempting to frighten Godwin. Shelley's letters to Thomas Love Peacock, a selection of which were to become part of the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, reveal the poet to be in a more boisterous mood, keen to 'play the tourist' (L, I, 475 [15 May 1816]). 'The journey was in some respects exceedingly delightful', Shelley writes (L, I, 474 [15 May 1816]). Despite maintaining the pose of an exile, Shelley was enjoying a Tour. The summer saw the beginning of his friendship with Byron at Lake Geneva and the composition of Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Both poems, in their negotiations with genre and in the description of their subjects, can be seen as similarly playing two significantly different and seemingly incompatible roles. A less famous composition of this period, Shelley's sonnet 'To Laughter', was only discovered in 1976 as part of the Scrope Davies find. The poem maintains more the pose of the exile than the spirit of the tourist: For the most part, criticism of the poem has concentrated on biographical issues. Neville Rogers writes that the criticism of laughter is an indirect criticism of Scrope Davies, Byron's friend, whose humour Shelley is unlikely to have shared. This reading is supported by a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, in which Shelley reveals his new acquaintance with Byron, whilst at the same time distancing himself from the literary circle which surrounds him: Alternatively, Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett argue that the poem might be a defence of Byron, who was 'the butt of caricature and cartoon, whose broken heart lay bare to Laughter', and Kelvin Everest suggests that the poem is a response to Fanny Godwin's feelings of victimisation (POS, pp. 519-20). Timothy Webb has attempted a reading which departs from the biographical, arguing that 'it is important to respect the integrity of Shelley's poem and to mark its decorous distance from the overtly personal or historical.' As a work of art, the sonnet is part of a larger discussion, both in Shelley's own work and in the tradition in which he is writing. As Stuart Curran notes: 'Shelley is always conscious of the traditions against which his sonnets resonate and masterful in his use of form'. François Jost sees this mastery as manifest in Shelley's versatility, arguing that he never used the same rhyme scheme twice. Likewise, Shelley is diverse in terms of subject matter and tone. His sonnets can express the political anger of 'England in 1819' as well as the intensely personal message of 'To Ianthe', or the philosophical meditativeness of 'Lift not the painted veil'. 'To Laughter' adopts the mode of the public invective, such as he uses to criticise Wordsworth, Napoleon ('Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte'), Ozymandias and the entire English political situation of 1819. For Shelley, the sonnet form is a mode rich in irony and paradox. Published in the Alastor volume (1816), 'To Wordsworth' laments the loss of Wordsworth's early talent for registering loss. It is a degradation which Wordsworth does not feel as keenly as Shelley does: 'One loss is mine / Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore' (5-6; POS p. 455). Shelley overtakes Wordsworth as the poet of loss …