The “old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king” is George III; “mad” refers to his prolonged episodes of severe mental illness.
The text comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Mary Shelley (London: E. Moxon, 1839).
| An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king, | ||
| Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow | ||
| Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring, | ||
| Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, | ||
| 5 | But leech-like to their fainting country cling, | |
| Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, | ||
| A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field, | ||
| An army, which liberticide and prey | ||
| Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield, | ||
| 10 | Golden and sanguine° laws which tempt and slay, | bloody |
| Religion Christless, Godless—a book seal’d, | ||
| A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d, | ||
| Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may | ||
| Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. |