Reflections on "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1)

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale’s complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must on thine,

Oh! beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1817

 

My initial impulse was to dismiss this poem as overwrought and ridiculous.  However, after completing some research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem, I realized there was more to it than I had initially thought.

I discovered that the poem had a history, not merely as a Romantic love poem, but also as song lyrics. Arthur Farwell published a setting of this poem in 1899 (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186954/).  Apparently, there were many versions of this poem set to music: one author remarked: “Mid-Victorian composers tumbled over one another to set Shelley to music…. Choral settings are abundant...” (Evans 594).

Curiously enough, it was once even popular among college students at Yale: “ “The final splendour of Shelley’s serenade is that it easily wedded to music, and serves the purpose of expressing and releasing the passion in a lover’s heart.  So far as I am aware, it is the only poem of Shelley’s that ever became a well-known song.  I recall its popularity in the singing at the fence on the old campus, when boys in their early twenties sang it with an emotion which could hardly have arisen from the beauty of the poetry in which is is couched, and who dis- / covered to their surprise that it was the production one of the greatest lyricists in English or any other language.  The air sung at the fence was written by F.B. Tourtellot….” (Tinker 71,72).

Even today, there are versions of it on YouTube, such as this contemporary one:

Works Cited

Evans, Edwin, ed. Musical News and Herald. London: Publishing Office, 1992.

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. Pp. 70-72 (JSTOR),