A man sits alone at midnight while a storm tears across the mountains, and the surprise is that the storm is not what frightens him. Shelley's "Victoria" starts out as a catalogue of Gothic terrors: a dying lamp, a swelling "dark tide of the tempest," ravens that "bodingly presaged destruction and woe." Then it quietly moves the horror indoors, into the speaker's own head. The real subject is guilt. A murder has clearly happened, though the poem never describes it. We learn only that the ghost of "the murdered Victoria" has come to claim her killer, and the speaker's behaviour tells us he is that killer. Nothing in the text says who Victoria was or what he did, and that silence is part of the effect. We understand the crime only through his dread.
The storm is built up with a good deal of noise. Lightning "danced in the sky," thunder is "rolling," and the wind carries "low, chilling murmurs." The weather works as a mirror of his mind, but the poem then turns on it. Stanza three repeats the word "unheeded" ("unheeded the war / Of the battling clouds," "unheeded the thunder-peal crashed in mine ear"), and the repetition shows the speaker dismissing everything the sky can throw at him. He boasts that his heart is "hard as iron, is stranger to fear." Then comes the stanza's last line: "But conscience in low, noiseless whispering spoke." The phrase "noiseless whispering" is nearly a contradiction, and it is the quietest moment in the poem. It also beats the thunder, because a whisper he cannot shut out frightens him more than a crash he can ignore.
The sound of the verse helps. The lines mostly gallop in a triple rhythm: "'Twas DEAD of the NIGHT, when I SAT in my DWELLing." That bounding movement suits a ballad, and it makes the storm feel like it is rushing forward. The rhymes are bold. The first stanza stacks "dwelling," "swelling" and "yelling" into a clanging run of three, which to a modern ear is theatrical, even a little over the top. The stanzas alternate between five lines and four. The five-line ones follow an ABAAB pattern, and the four-line ones rhyme ABAB. In the third stanza, "war" sits loosely beside "ear" and "fear" by today's pronunciation, but the pattern is still clear. This regularity makes the poem's one break more striking.
That break is the ending. The ghost arrives in a grand, ghastly image: she rides "on the whirlwind," holding a "shadowy shroud" in her right hand, and "strode" toward his "lonesome abode." The storm he ignored has become her vehicle, so it was not just scenery after all. The version we have stops mid-gesture: "I wildly then called on the tempest to bear me—". The speaker who scorned the thunder now begs the tempest to carry him away, and the irony is plain. The pattern of five-line and four-line stanzas would lead a reader to expect more, but the poem simply cuts off on a dash. Whether the break is deliberate or an accident of the text, it leaves him exactly where the poem has put him, panicking and with nowhere to run.
The poem is significant mostly for how neatly it shows a classic Gothic idea: the most frightening haunting is a guilty mind. Many of its ingredients are stock ones, including the midnight setting, the ravens, the shroud and the spectre. But the structure is cleverly handled. The speaker's boast and its collapse sit side by side in a single stanza, and the contrast between loud weather and a silent whisper does the real work. The poem also makes good use of withholding. By never telling us what happened to Victoria, it makes the reader share the speaker's fear of the answer. Anyone interested in how Shelley's name gets attached to such a melodramatic piece will find it a useful example of what happens when a poet works within a popular, conventional mode. It is not subtle, but it knows exactly where its scare lies.