Queen Mab
Queen Mab,a visionary and ideological poem by P. B. Shelley , written in England and Wales during his early period of political activism, published privately 1813 , when he was 21.
The poem is in nine cantos, using ‘didactic and descriptive’ blank verse greatly indebted to Milton and to Southey's Thalaba . Despite its lyrical opening, invoking ‘Death and his brother Sleep’ and Mab the Fairy Queen in her time-chariot (Cantos I and II), the poem largely consists of attacks on Monarchy (III), War (IV), Commerce (V), and Religion (VI and VII). In place of these Shelley celebrates a future of Republicanism, Free Love, Atheism, and Vegetarianism. The verse is furious and polemical in style, with occasional passages of grandiloquent beauty, such as Canto VIII, presaging Asia's speeches in Prometheus Unbound . Seventeen remarkable prose Notes are attached as Appendices, many of them substantial...
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