“When the Lamp Is Shattered” is a poem of thirty-two lines expressing the loss of ecstatic poetic creativity in response to the loss of a beloved woman’s affections.
The poem was written at the height of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic powers, in the last year of his short life, after he had anchored his restless exile from England in Pisa, Italy. There, in 1820, he at last found the semblance of contentment with his troubled wife and a group of close friends. Among Shelley’s friends were Edward Williams, a retired lieutenant of a cavalry regiment serving in India, and his charming common-law wife, Jane, with whom Shelley carried on a flirtation and to whom he addressed some of his best lyrics. Whether or not Jane Williams was the inspiration for “When the Lamp Is Shattered” remains a matter for conjecture. It was Jane’s husband who was to drown with Shelley when a violent storm swamped their boat off the Leghorn coast on July 8, 1822.
The poem opens with a catalog of images expressing the shattered poetic creativity of the lovelorn male speaker made desolate by the loss of a beloved woman’s affections. The desolation oppressing his creative imagination is like a broken lamp robbing the mortal poet of his vital genius (“The light in the dust lies dead”), like a dispersal of clouds breaking up a brilliant rainbow, or like a shattered lute unable to produce sounds to revive the memories of past love songs already forgotten by...
(The entire section is 542 words.)