The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem in twelve cantos composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817.Sandy, Mark. "The Revolt of Islam". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2004. Accessed 24 October 2010. The poem was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century by Charles and James Ollier in December 1817.The Revolt of Islam. knarf.english.upenn.edu. Retrieved 12 January 2026. Shelley composed the work in the vicinity of Bisham Woods, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, from April to September.
The plot centres on two characters named Laon and Cythna, inhabitants of Argolis under Ottoman rule who initiate a revolution against its despotic ruler. Despite its title, the poem is not focused on Islam as a specific religion, though the general subject of religion is addressed, and the work draws on Orientalist archetypes and themes. The work is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution.Ack, Tess Lee. "Shelley's revolutionary poetry." Red Flag, 21 December 2022. Retrieved 14 January 2025.Saglia, Diego. "Shelley's Revolt in the Mediterranean: Writing Restoration", The Keats-Shelley Review, 16 October 2018, 148-157. Retrieved 14 January 2026.
Laon and Cythna lead a peaceful, nonviolent revolution against the tyrannical Sultan Othman to achieve liberty, equality, and intellectual freedom. A Hermit befriends Laon, mentors him, and frees him from captivity.
The poem was the subject of discussion among Shelley scholars during the Arab Spring that emerged in the early 2010s.Valentini, Maria. "The Revolt of Islam: Texts, Subtexts, Contexts", The Keats-Shelley Review, Volume 32, Issue 2, 16 October, 2018, 96-101. Retrieved 14 January 2026.
Background In The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos (1818), consisting of 4,818 lines, Shelley returned to the social and political themes of Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813). The poem is in Spenserian stanzas with each stanza containing nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single Alexandrine line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme pattern is "ababbcbcc". It was written in the spring and summer of 1817.
His wife, Mary Shelley, described the work as follows:
He chose for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the world, but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on his fellow-creatures. He created for this youth a woman such as he delighted to imagine—full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they both, with will unvanquished and the deepest sense of the justice of their cause, met adversity and death. There exists in this poem a memorial of a friend of his youth. The character of the old man who liberates Laon from his tower prison, and tends on him in sickness, is founded on that of naturalist Doctor James Lind, who, when Shelley was at Eton, had often stood by to befriend and support him, and whose name he never mentioned without love and veneration.
Shelley himself gave two accounts of the poem. In a letter to William Godwin, 11 December 1817, he wrote:
The Poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but when I consider contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind.
In a letter to a publisher, Shelley wrote on 13 October 1817:
The whole poem, with the exception of the first canto and part of the last, is a mere human story without the smallest intermixture of supernatural interference. The first canto is, indeed, in some measure a distinct poem, though very necessary to the wholeness of the work. I say this because, if it were all written in the manner of the first canto, I could not expect that it would be interesting to any great number of people. I have attempted in the progress of my work to speak to the common elementary emotions of the human heart, so that, though it is the story of violence and revolution, it is relieved by milder pictures of friendship and love and natural affections. The scene is supposed to be laid in Constantinople and modern Greece, but without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners. It is, in fact, a tale illustrative of such a revolution as might be supposed to take place in a European nation, acted upon by the opinions of what has been called (erroneously, as I think) the modern philosophy, and contending with ancient notions and the supposed advantage derived from them to those who support them. It is a Revolution of this kind that is the beau idéal, as it were, of the French Revolution, but produced by the influence of individual genius and out of general knowledge.
Censorship
It was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. The publishers, Charles and James Ollier, however, refused to print the work because of its theme of incest and its statements on religion. Only a few copies were issued. They demanded changes to the text.Coleridge, John Taylor. "Shelley's Revolt of Islam". The Quarterly Review, Vol. 21, No. 42 (April 1819), 460-71. Retrieved 12 January 2026. Shelley made 49 changes. The work was republished in 1818 under the title The Revolt of Islam.
The relationship between Laon and Cythna is changed from biological siblings to adopted ones (canto 2, stanza 21 "I had a little sister" becomes "An orphan with my parents lived"). The critique of religion is still present, but couched in vaguer terms:
+ Canto 8, end of stanza 6 and beginning of 7 Laon and Cythna The Revolt of IslamAnd that men say, God has appointed Death On all who scorn his will to wreak immortal wrath. Men say they have seen God, and heard from God, Or known from others who have known such things, And that his will is all our law, a rod To scourge us into slaves—that Priests and Kings,And that men say, that Power has chosen Death On all who scorn it's laws, to wreak immortal wrath. Men say that they themselves have heard and seen, Or known from others who have known such things, A Shade, a Form, which Earth and Heaven between Wields an invisible rod—that Priests and Kings,
Preface
In the Preface to the work, Shelley explained his purpose for its composition:
The Poem which I now present to the world is an attempt from which I scarcely dare to expect success, and in which a writer of established fame might fail without disgrace. It is an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live. I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a Poem, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind.
Dedication The Poem has a dedication to Mary Shelley comprising a verse by George Chapman and an original 14 stanza poem.Hutchinson, Thomas (undated). The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Including Materials Never Before Printed in any Edition of the Poems and Edited with Textural Notes. E. W. Cole: Commonwealth of Australia; Book Arcade, Melbourne. P.38. (NB: Hardcover, clothbound, embossed.) Published prior to issuing of ISBN.
Characters
Laon: The protagonist, a youth who strives to achieve liberty, equality, and intellectual freedom through nonviolence. He convinces the people to overthrow their oppressive rule and achieve justice, equal rights, and individual freedom. Cythna (also known as Kifna or Laone): Laon’s companion who like Laon espouses liberty and equality for women. Together with Laon, she leads a peaceful, nonviolent revolution against the Sultan Othman. Othman: The tyrannical and despotic Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who rules in the Golden City. He represents oppressive power and arbitrary and dictatorial rule. The Hermit: A kind elderly man who befriends Laon and helps him escape. He frees Laon from a high pillar and removes his chains, taking him to an island where he takes care of him and mentors him on nonviolence.
Plot
In the first canto, the poet climbs a mountain from which he observes an eagle and a snake battle. The eagle prevails. A woman takes the poet and the wounded snake in a boat. The poet is placed for a time in the regions of eternal repose, where the good and great of mankind are represented as recounting, before the throne of the Spirit of Good, their earthly sufferings and labours. Among these are two, a man and a woman of the country of Argolis, who, after rescuing their country for a brief time from the tyranny of the house of Othman and accomplishing this great revolution by the force of persuasive eloquence and the sympathies of human love alone, without violence, bloodshed, or revenge, saw the fruit of all their toils blasted by foreign invasion, and the dethroned but not insulted tyrant replaced upon his seat. Finally, amidst all the darkness of their country's horizon, Laon and Cythna died, without fear, the death of heroic martyrdom, burned alive at the stake, gathering consolation, in the last pangs of their expiring nature, from the hope and the confidence that their faith and example might yet raise up successors to their labours, and that they had neither lived nor died in vain. In the persons of these martyrs, Shelley has striven to embody his ideas of the power and beauty of human affections, and, in their history, he has set forth a series of pictures, illustrating the efficacy of these affections in overcoming the evils of private and of public life.