The Masque of Anarchy

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1832

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The 372-line poem contains 91 stanzas, largely quatrains (a stanza of four lines of poetry). The poem’s aabb rhyme scheme repeats throughout the poem, though some stanzas have slant rhymes, which means the words are not exact rhymes.

Most lines have seven syllables, though some have eight, and each pair of syllables is a trochee, or a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. This meter is based on a popular ballad form of Shelley’s day.

The poem’s form is a ballad, which is a poem or song that narrates a story with short stanzas. Often ballads are passed orally as a part of folk culture. As a ballad, the poem also focuses on imagery that is both historically important and tragic. Shelley’s framing of his poem as a ballad also supports how he positions his subject as epic in nature, as if this event was the origin of a new England, like the mythical origins of Rome. Shelley’s characters, while ordinary people, are extraordinary in their actions in the face of an almost superhuman enemy. The ballad form allows Shelley to use this event as a rallying cry for radical reform.

Framing Device

Shelley begins the poem with a framing device, which is a description of a scene that is outside of the main narrative. The poem is seemingly a recollection of a dream the speaker had while living in Italy. This framing allows Shelley to describe his dream for his ideal England, while allowing some distance to protect himself from prosecution for seditious libel. The poem never explicitly returns to this framing device, which often happens at the end of poems and stories. On one hand, this might suggest that the speaker has not woken up and continues to live in this dreamworld. Yet on the other hand, the final stanza could be read as a return to the framing device where the speaker directly addresses his reader. In this stanza, then, the speaker is asking the reader to enact the nonviolent protests and radical reforms he has described in the poem.

Allegory

Shelley’s poem builds a central allegory to share his message. An allegory is the use of extended metaphors and symbolic figures to represent a larger truth about society and humankind. The separate parts of the story, like the objects, people, and actions, are part of a larger metaphor to create a secondary meaning that lies outside the text. Because this message is not explicitly stated, an allegory is less didactic than other types of writing like pamphlets and essays. Often, allegories had political or religious meanings. Other allegories in literature include Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the medieval play Everyman, the medieval French poem The Romance of the Rose, John Bunyan’s Christian novel The Pilgrim’s Progress, George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies.

Shelley’s allegory shares his beliefs about how nonviolent resistance is needed to reform the corruption in the English political system. The Peterloo Massacre comes to represent the beginning of a larger revolution. See the Symbols section for a more in-depth analysis of the different elements of this allegory.

Pathos

Shelley makes extensive use of pathos in his argument for radical reform. Pathos is a rhetorical strategy where the speaker appeals to the audience’s emotions to persuade them to his cause. In Shelley’s case, his speaker presents powerful images of suffering to convince his reader to act.

This strategy is particularly on display when the voice is speaking to the crowd after the English people have been ravaged by the mob following Anarchy. The voice focuses on the violent deaths the community has experienced as “the tyrant’s crew / Ride[s] over your wives and you,” which leaves blood “on the grass like dew” (Stanza 47). The voice uses the images of suffering children who are “weak” and “dying whilst I speak” (Stanza 42). To further anger the audience, the speaker addresses that women and children go hungry while rich men give better food to “the fat dogs that lie / Surfeiting beneath his eye” (Stanza 43). He uses charged language, telling the common English people that each of them is “a slave in soul” (Stanza 46) and their current life “is Slavery” (Stanza 51). When describing the shame of the aggressors in Stanzas 86-88, the voice appeals to a sense of personal and national pride. The voice also appeals to a range of human emotions to provoke the audience into demanding radical reform through nonviolent protesting.