An Exhortation
Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?
Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!
Shelley’s “exhortation” to poets is playful but complex. It presents the Romantic ideal of the poet as an anti-materialistic free spirit, a subject discussed recently by contributors to the Poem of the week comments. Is Shelley completely in earnest, though? Is he himself playing the chameleon?
The jaunty tetrameters dance in a trio of nine-lined stanzas, finished each time by a graceful trimeter. Their rhythm suggests some evanescent, semi-visible creature, nodding on a breeze-fluttered branch, perhaps, reflecting an ever-changing sky. Shelley would have known perfectly well that actual chameleons need more than light and air as nourishment. The chameleon he conjures is already a creature of imagination.
How beautifully and deftly the noun “light” in line one shape-changes into an adjective, “the light chameleon”, in line seven. Later, in the last stanza, that light chameleon colours up as “the bright chameleon”. These delicate revisions exploit the ability of language itself to behave like a chameleon.
The poem never directly claims that the poet’s changing colour in pursuit of love and fame is admirable. However, there seems to be something about such mutability that appeals to the speaker’s imagination, even as he advises against it. Doesn’t the poet need versatility, and maybe reversibility, to be a poet at all? Keats certainly thought so.
An Exhortation was first published among the individual lyrics Shelley published with his verse-drama Prometheus Unbound in 1820. The poet-critic John Hollander describes it as “a witty piece, developed from Sidney’s phrase, ‘The Chameleon poet’, in his Apology; but it also has a kind of exhilarated poignancy, typical of Shelley”. Steven E Jones points out its source in the Satiric Fragments drafted in the Huntington Notebook. He considers that Shelley’s mind is chiefly on the “Protean” poet William Wordsworth, whose conduct was widely discussed and criticised in English literary circles at the time. Jones cites Thomas Love Peacock’s ballad Sir Proteus, a poem chiefly targeting Southey, but implicating Wordsworth and others considered to have defected from the Radical cause. This is where the marine imagery of stanza two fits in. Proteus was a sea-god; like the chameleon he was a shape-shifter – changeable, slippery, but also a seer. Shakespeare specifically connects the chameleon with Proteus in Henry IV, part III, when Richard III announces:
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
Villainous duplicity hovers around sea-gods and chameleons, then, but Shelley continues his exhortation in a spirit of empathy. Ahead of his time, as so often, he senses the psychological imperative behind the phenomenon. The desire for love/fame is not itself castigated, and the generalised reference to “poets” suggests that the need may tempt any poet on occasion to revise his shapes and colours. Shelley seems not simply to be satirising the wickedly worldly seeker of fame, but glancing with kindly mockery at his Romantic opposite. The tone contrasts strongly with that of the harsh mock-obituary of the earlier sonnet, To Wordsworth.
In another of those chameleon-like shifts mentioned earlier, “light and air” rather delightfully metamorphose into “beams and wind” in the third stanza. And now the message gets another, more serious reiteration, as beams take us inevitably to the real god of poets – not Proteus, but Apollo. Chameleons can’t be mere earth-dwellers, like lizards, the poet declares, and warns his peers to “refuse the boon” of earthly power. Serve Apollo instead, that “sunnier star” that provides your unreliable inspiration, and your ever-changing colours. I think he might be teasing a little, even here.
