The Concept of Liberty in ‘The Question’ and ‘Lines: the Cold Earth Slept Below’ Anonymous 12th Grade

Key to Shelley’s radical personal philosophy was the belief that art breeds liberty. Art -or, in Shelley’s case, poetry- allows any literate person to escape whatever shackles society may have placed on them to empathise with the different and differing worldviews. Indeed, not just was this a fleeting ideology from youth: Shelley held this view staunchly throughout his life, writing just one year before his death in his magnum opus ‘A Defense of Poetry’ “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Hence, it is through this meta-poetic conceit that I will examine ‘The Question’.

This reading will most effectively examine the paradoxes presented in the poem:for example,the final question “Oh! To whom?” explains the conflicting possibility and impossibility of presenting the “nosegay” he has gathered from thinking in his dreamscape to someone outside of these dreams: although the reader cannot physically enter Shelley's mind to understand this -imagined- bouquet, they can experience the arrangement vicariously through Shelley's poem.

Firstly, the poem opens in the ultimate state of liberty- the unrestricted subconscious thoughts of dreams. Thus, the “dreamed” nature of the “Spring” Shelley describes is reflected...