Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1813

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Summary

Background

Book Summaries & Analyses

Book I

Book II

Book III

Book IV

Book V

Book VI

Book VII

Book VIII

Book IX

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Spiritual versus the Material

According to Queen Mab, the spiritual and the material are in tension with each other. Queen Mab exists wholly in the spiritual realm, and she shows Ianthe’s spirit what the earth looks like from a spiritual perspective, rather than from an earthly perspective. This large-scale view of all of history shows how damaging the emphasis on the material aspects of life, specifically wealth and power, has been for humanity.

Materialism distorts the human sense of value, causing monarchs to dismiss the suffering, starvation, poverty, and death of their subjects, and leading them to impose a permanent condition of despair and fear on their people. In turn, physical misery prevents people from acknowledging the spiritual aspects of life or recognizing that the most valuable quality in life is virtue. As a result, humans have lacked the proper reverence for nature, which is directly connected to spirituality and virtue, leading to greater and greater catastrophes.

Queen Mab tells Ianthe, whom she has chosen because her soul is still uncorrupted by materialist greed, that since the spirit survives after death and the body is unimportant, people should be more focused on preserving the quality of their souls than on accumulating riches or fulfilling earthly desires.

Ultimately, Queen Mab argues, freedom from all materialism is the chief aim of nature—Shelley’s conceptualization of the force that animates all life. This maximum freedom is attainable only through natural law: recognizing that all living things, including animals, plants, and all human beings, are “equals amidst equals” (Line 8.227).

Utopia

Queen Mab demonstrates that society as it exists is far from ideal. She claims that all of civilization, from ancient Egypt to Shelley’s day, is rife with enslavement of the masses by tyrants and religious leaders. In contrast, the coming future utopia will be defined by equality, Shelley’s ideal state of nature. Relationships between men and women will be based on equality; a lack of absolute power will mean the end of enslavement and needless toil. This equality will extend not only to humans, but to all living things: As people develop a keener spiritual sense and understand nature more fully, they will see that every living thing, from the smallest to the largest animal, is sacred and should not be killed, even for food. This spirit of equality will allow there to be peace and harmony all over the world because conflict results from humans lacking the proper spiritual understanding of their connection to each other and the universe.

Shelley’s utopian vision will also be free from organized religion. Instead, the motivating force there will be Nature, which does not require worship and function to fulfill one purpose: to produce and preserve life. Freedom from religious compulsion will allow humans to stop pursuing power and riches at the expense of their souls, which are not truly motivated by such petty impulses as revenge, greed, or fame. By turning to natural law instead of the dictates of faith, people will focus on higher ideals, such as truth and science; their newfound perfection will also make them immortal in reality, rather than in the vague and partial way described by Christianity’s idea of Heaven and Hell. This peaceful, eternal state should be the aim of humanity, attainable when “virtue fixes universal peace” (Line 8.54).

Historical Progress

Queen Mab describes progress as a difficult and slow process. However, when humans realize that utopia could be achieved by following the natural law, destructive structures such as monarchy, slavery, and religion, will be replaced with more humane societal constructs. From her vantage point in the future, Queen Mab admits that “Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love; / Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene” (Lines 9.38-39), but this gradualist approach allowed people to keep pace. Shelley advocates gradualism as a pragmatic way to allow attitudes toward harmful traditions such as religion, enslavement, materialism, and tyranny to change—he knows that people are attached even to the worst features of existence.

Slow progress towards better living conditions will bring a cessation of cruelty and violence, which enables people to gain insight into the fact that Nature is the origin of all that is good. Eventually, progress will slow to a crawl and then stop altogether: When people achieve moral perfection, they will reach utopia and the end of time itself. History, which in this poem is the horrible story of death, famine, slavery, and conquest, will stop with eternal peace.