King George III is referred to by “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying.” The “leech-like” nobility (“princes”) metaphorically suck the blood from the people, who are, in the sonnet, oppressed, hungry, and hopeless, their fields untilled. The poem passionately attacks England’s, as the poet sees it, decadent, oppressive ruling class. The sonnet describes a very forlorn reality. Like all sonnets, “England in 1819” has fourteen lines and is written in iambic pentameter however, its rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, c-c-d-d) differs from that of the traditional English sonnet (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g). Composed in 1819, it was not published until 1839 in the four-volume The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Edward Moxon) edited by Mary Shelley. “England in 1819” is a political sonnet by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and reflects his liberal ideals.
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