Shelley builds a case for cruelty, then pulls the floor out from under it. The first ten lines are one long, breathless "if": if gibbets, axes, chains and racks, if the fires of Hell glimpsed "through the caverns of the shadowy grave," are the true secrets of government and "make men wise and just," then "send the priests to every hearth and home." The tone is acid. State violence and religious terror are bundled into a single catalogue until they look absurd as a recipe for virtue. The hunting imagery points the same way. Despair and Hate are "rapid bloodhounds with which Terror / Hunts through the world the homeless steps of Error." Error is a hunted, homeless creature, and the poem's sympathy lies with the quarry rather than the pack.
The target then appears by name. A second "if" asks what would happen if satire's "scourge" could wake "the slumbering hounds / Of Conscience." The hounds have returned, but now they stand for a guilty conscience, and satire is imagined as the whip that rouses them. Anyone who has seen "What Southey is and was," Shelley says, would cry "Lash on!" The phrase "is and was" suggests a man who has changed, though the surviving lines never say how. What follows is a fantasy of punishment, and Shelley writes it with relish: verse "dipped in flame," a "Parthian arrow," a mirror held up in "Truth's sunlike shield," and a final rain of "fiery snow." He lets himself imagine the revenge in full, which makes the refusal that follows hit harder.
That refusal is blunt: "This cannot be, it ought not." The next line, "Suffering makes suffering, ill must follow ill," folds back on itself, repeating its own words as the cycle it describes keeps repeating. The reasoning is psychological. "Rough words beget sad thoughts," and men "take a sullen and a stupid pride / In being all they hate in others' shame." Attack a man and he hardens, and he may even become the thing that was condemned. So the poem's quarrel is less with Southey than with the belief that pain improves people, the same belief behind the gibbets and the sulphurous sermons of the opening.
The form carries the argument. The poem is written in rhyming couplets of ten syllables, a shape with a long association with English satire, and the couplets often land like verdicts: "chains / pains," "air / Despair," "still / ill." One rhyme is especially pointed. "Terror" is paired with "Error," so the persecutor and the persecuted are chained together by sound. The sentences also refuse to end where the lines do. Both "if" clauses spill across many couplets before reaching their conclusions, which gives the opening its mounting, almost hysterical momentum. When the poem reaches its calm, short statements ("This cannot be"), the contrast is audible.
The ending is the cleverest anticlimax. After all that fire, the alternative offered is a friend who takes Southey on "a country walk alone," softens "harsh words with friendship's gentle tone," and tells him what people think of his conduct. The understatement of "'twere not amiss" is deliberate. Private, kind honesty is set against public humiliation, and the plain words win over the blazing ones. The last line, "Far better than to make innocent ink--", breaks off mid-thought. The title announces a fragment, and the dots scattered through the text mark missing words, so the poem reaches us damaged. We can only guess where that final phrase was heading. Judging by the grammar, it sets the quiet conversation above writing that does no good.
The poem matters because it is a satire that doubts satire. It is full of the heat and invention that make attack-poetry thrilling, and it uses them to argue that attack may only multiply bitterness. That makes it unusually honest, since the poet admits the pull of the whip and then explains why he puts it down. Even in pieces, it leaves a question worth asking about angry writing: does it change anyone, or does it just feel good?