In early 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley set off for Italy with their two children, along with Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron's mistress, and Allegra, Byron's daughter. By December, Shelley found himself in dire straits. His first wife Harriet had drowned herself almost exactly two years before. In September, just a few months earlier, Clara—his baby daughter with Mary Shelley—had also died. His health declined, and his financial situation wasn't much better. Back in England, his radical political views had rendered him an outcast. On top of this, Shelley became convinced that he was a failure as a poet.
“Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” explores the turbulent forces at work in Shelley's life. The poem uses a common trope of Romantic poetry in which the natural world reflects the speaker's emotional state. Shelley also draws upon elements of the sublime to emphasize the profound depths of the speaker's sorrow. Written during a time of intense turmoil and in Shelley's personal and social life, the poem testifies to Shelley's ability to express strong emotions and create vivid imagery, no matter what the circumstances may be.
The poem is also a particularly strong example of Shelley's mastery of the Spenserian stanza, a poetic form created by Edmund Spenser, one of the famous English literary figures working in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Spenser devised the form specifically for The Faerie Queen, his unfinished epic that allegorized the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The Spenserian stanza consists of nine lines: the first eight are written in iambic pentameter, and the final line is an alexandrine, or a line of 12 syllables with the strongest stress occurring in the middle. Shelley's use of this form throughout his career demonstrates his technical skills as a poet, as well as his interest in aligning his work with the great English traditions of the past. Specifically, in "Stanzas Written in Dejection," the Spenserian stanza's strong stresses and extra syllables serve to emphasize the poem's visceral, emotive qualities, as each stanza's final lines beat in the speaker's pain.
