‘A useful godsend are you to me now,’ are the trickster god’s first words to the tortoise in Shelley’s translation,2 and the Homeric shell is clearly a useful godsend for Shelley as well: as Gary Farnell has argued, the pun on ?????/Shelley enables the poet to claim the allegorical account of the origins of lyric poetry ‘as emblem of his own general …