Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples Essay Questions

How does Shelley strategically use nature to help us understand the speaker's dejection?

Because Shelley devotes the first stanzas to a meticulous description of Naples' coast, we know immediately that setting plays a crucial role in the poem. Shelley uses these descriptions of nature to both mirror and express the speaker’s interior state. First, standing between a mountain range, a vast ocean, and a bustling city, the speaker is dwarfed by the wonders around him. Likewise, the speaker feels small and helpless at the center of his despair. The motion of the waves echoes the turbulent, ceaseless pain of his depression. The image of the speaker’s body lying like a sleepless child on the shore is terribly lonely, corresponding to the speaker’s lack of love, hope, and health. Shelley's analogies and connections between the speaker's emotions and features of the natural world give his intangible feelings a concrete, visual counterpart, allowing readers to grasp the often-inexpressible character of intense pain.

What is the sublime, and what role does it play in the poem?

The sublime is a philosophical and aesthetic concept explored by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry (1757). To experience the sublime is to be faced with something whose grandeur, power, or horror is beyond measure. For the Romantics, the sublime is most associated with features of the natural world and intense emotional states. In "Stanzas in Dejection," examples of the sublime would be the snow-peaked mountains in the distance and the vast, turbulent sea at the speaker's feet. Likewise, his boundless, incalculable pain speaks to the idea. Setting the speaker's expression of dejection in the midst of Naples' magnificent coast, Shelley uses elements of the sublime to affirm and validate the speaker's despair. The magnitude of his suffering is as great as the wonders around him. At the same time, the speaker's emotions are so intense that they threaten to overwhelm him from within, driving him to thoughts of death in stanza four.