Shelley never gave these pieces a final shape, and the title admits as much. "Fragments Supposed to Be Parts of Otho" is doubtful twice over: they are fragments, and even their belonging to *Otho* is only "supposed." Rows of dots mark the gaps, and the last piece stops mid-sentence on "And the...". Yet what survives is concentrated, three short bursts of thought about hope, the mind, and escape.
The opening eight lines are the most argumentative. They begin with a list of forces that fail to blind a certain kind of person: "power," "lying faith," "toil," and "custom, queen of many slaves." Making custom a queen is a sharp touch. Habit rules by consent, and her subjects never notice they are subjects. The clear-sighted ones "have ever grieved that man should be the spoil / Of his own weakness." "Spoil" makes humanity both the loot and, through its own weakness, the thief. These people nevertheless "fed hopes of its redemption," and the speaker is stirred "to be their minister," a word with a faintly religious ring, as if serving human hope were a kind of priesthood. The hope is not naive. It returns "Chastened by deathful victory" and finds its "Foundations in this foulest age." The rhyme scheme is ababcbcc, close to the eight-line ottava rima stanza but not identical. In the final lines "recur" and "stir" chime, and "minister" closes the stanza on a heavy, dutiful note.
Two unrhymed lines follow: "Dark is the realm of grief: but human things / Those may not know who cannot weep for them." It is almost a proverb, and it makes compassion a form of knowledge. You cannot understand people from outside, only by being able to grieve for them.
The second fragment moves from argument to image. "The shadows of my soul" fall on mankind, and thoughts themselves are "shadows which the flashing mind … Casts on the gloomy world it leaves behind." The idea is paradoxical, because a shadow needs light, and here the light is the mind itself, moving so fast that it is a "flight of fire" trailed by "swift clouds." The thinker is brilliant but hard to follow, and what reaches ordinary hearts is only the dark outline of the thought. The rhymes "mankind," "mind" and "behind," along with "blend" and "descend," make the gap between thinker and audience audible. The alliteration of "flashing," "flight" and "fire" gives the sentence its speed.
Then comes a change of key. "O that a chariot of cloud were mine!" is lyric rather than argument, and the rhythm loosens into a swinging, rolling line: "I would sail on the waves of the billowy wind." The opening line returns as a refrain, so the wish seems to repeat itself, as wishes do. The imagery is gentler too. The moon is an old woman "spreading the locks of her bright gray hair," a oddly tender picture in which "bright" and "gray" sit side by side. The destinations are "the mountain peak and the rocky lake," places far from the "gloomy world" of the earlier fragment.
Read together, the pieces pull against each other. The first commits the speaker to humanity as its "minister." The second admits that the mind leaves the world behind. The third wants a vehicle to leave it altogether. The cloud imagery links them, since the "swift clouds" that follow the mind's fire in one fragment become something to ride in another. We cannot know whether Shelley meant them to speak to each other, but placed side by side they show a mind caught between duty and flight.
That is what makes the fragments worth reading. Shelley, who died in 1822 at only twenty-nine, left behind a body of work in which unfinished pieces like these let us watch his thinking before it is polished. He turns abstractions into pictures: a queen called Custom, thoughts as shadows, a chariot made of weather. The ending on "And the..." fits oddly well, because the wish for a chariot of cloud is never fulfilled and the sentence never reaches its destination.