Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem

This section stresses the idea that everything manmade must perish, a theme that would later appear in Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias.” Nature’s cycle of birth, bloom, decay, and death affects all levels of existence, from the individual to the collective and civilizational. No matter how beautiful the person, how skilled the architectural or artistic achievement, how great the intellect, or high mighty the empire, it will eventually crumble into nothingness. Nations wage war to destroy each other, monuments and temples raised to glorify human concerns fall, and important cultural icons like Cicero, Antonius, and Socrates are mortal.

The contrast to this cycle of destruction is eternity—the “unchanging harmony” (Line 2.257) of nature, which exists as a unified set of laws that every life form knows instinctually. Queen Mab’s grandiose hall is the site of this everlasting perspective, but people would find it impossible to really imagine what it looks like. The poem’s speaker tries to instill a sense of this sublime space through description that evokes the extremes of natural beauty—the “wild ocean” and its “burnished waves” (Lines 2.2, 2.5), or clouds that look like “rocks of jet / Crowned with a diamond wreath” (Lines 2.11-12). However, the speaker concedes that even these comparisons fall short of “so wonderful a sight / As Mab's ethereal palace could afford” (Lines 2.28-29).

As Queen Mab surveys history, she gives Ianthe’s spirit a lecture on the failings of human morality and the problems that arise from flawed human thinking. Destroyed by greed and the quest for power, places that were once the height of civilization have now been reduced to “a moral desert” (Line 2.163). Queen Mab points out that the once powerful Persian Empire is now a “sterile spot, / Where now the wandering Arab's tent / Flaps in the desert blast! (Lines 2.134-36), just as the Greek and Roman Empires are now just picturesque ruins standing amidst “mean and miserable huts” (Line 2.164).

What Queen Mab most regrets about the decay she witnesses in the progress of human civilization is the loss of the ideals humans claim to value. In the ruins of Athens, “the ghost of Freedom stalks” (2.169)—a reference to Socrates, whose execution was a punishment for his rebellion against political rule. Since this poem too is a work of rebellion against the established order, Socrates becomes a kindred spirit to the poem’s speaker and a warning about what happens to those who learn what Queen Mab is trying to teach Ianthe.