Coleridge and Shelley

COLERIDGE AND SHELLEY

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Coleridge and Shelley Textual Engagement

SALLY WEST University of Chester, UK

© Sally West 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Sally West has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data West, Sally, 1975– Coleridge and Shelley : textual engagement. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834 – Influence 2. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792– 1822 – Political and social views 3. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834 – Criticism, Textual 4. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822 – Criticam, Textual 5. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834 – Philosophy 6. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822 – Philosophy 7. English poetry – 19th century – History and criticism I. Title 821.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data West, Sally, 1975– Coleridge and Shelley : textual engagement / by Sally West. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6012-5 (alk. paper) 1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Influence. 2. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792– 1822—Political and social views. 3. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Criticism, Textual. 5. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Criticism, Textual. 6. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Philosophy. 7. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Philosophy. I. Title. PR4487.I52.W47 2007 821’.7—dc22 2007025766 ISBN: 9780754660125 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vii viii ix

Introduction

1

1

Cultivating the Topos: Early Engagements

17

2

‘Beside thee like thy shadow’: The presence of Coleridge in Shelley’s Alastor Volume

41

3

‘An unremitting interchange’: The Voices of Mont Blanc

73

4

Perpetual Orphic Song: The ‘vitally metaphorical’ in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘To a Sky-Lark’

99

5

‘To him my tale I teach’: The Legacy of Coleridge’s Mariner in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Volume

123

Afterword

175

Bibliography Index

185 195

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The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (as it was then) for a three-year studentship which enabled the completion of the doctoral thesis from which this book developed. I would also like to thank the many staff, past and present, at the University of Liverpool who provided invaluable support during my time as a research student there. Particular thanks are due to my supervisor Kelvin Everest, for his guidance, support and insight into the work of both Shelley and Coleridge; to Bernard Beatty and Nick Davis for encouragement and illuminating discussions; and to Tony Barley, whose inspirational teaching of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ marked the origin of my fascination with Shelley’s poetry. The passage of this work from thesis to book was eased considerably by the support of Ann Donohue at Ashgate, and were it not for the multitude of probing comments and constructive suggestions from my reader there, a number of important points about the ShelleyColeridge literary relationship would have remained underdeveloped. Finally, many thanks are due to my family for all manner of support and encouragement and especially to Tony, for his continual presence throughout, for enduring my frequent mental absences in front of a computer screen, and for cheerfully welcoming Shelley and Coleridge into our home.

Abbreviations Primary texts BSM

The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, general ed. Donald H. Reiman (23 vols, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987–2000): vol. 1, Peter Bell the Third and The Triumph of Life: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 5, folios 50–69, and Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, folios 18–58, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1991); vol. 2, Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 7, ed. Irving Massey (1987); vol. 3, Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4, ed. P.M.S. Dawson (1988); vol. 4, A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley d. 1, ed. E.B. Murray (2 Parts, 1988); vol. 5, The Witch of Atlas Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 6, ed. Carlene A. Adamson (1994); vol. 6, Shelley’s Pisan Winter Notebook (1820–1821): Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 8, ed. Carlene A. Adamson (1992); vol. 7, “Shelley’s Last Notebook”: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 20 together with Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 15 and Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, folios 212–246, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1990); vol. 8, Bodleian MS. Shelley d. 3, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo (1988); vol. 9, The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks: Bodleian MSS. Shelley e. 1, e. 2, and e. 3, ed. Neil Fraistat (1991); vol. 10, Mary Shelley’s Plays and her Translation of the Cenci Story: Bodleian MSS. Shelley d. 2 and adds. e. 13, ed. Charles E. Robinson and Betty T. Bennett (1992); vol. 11, The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 16 and MS. Shelley adds. c.4, folios 63, 65, 71, and 72, ed. Michael Erkelnz (1992); vol. 12, The “Charles the First” Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 17, ed. Nora Crook (1991); vol. 13, Drafts for Laon and Cythna: Bodleian MSS. Shelley adds e. 14 and adds. e. 19, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo (1992);

x

Coleridge and Shelley vol. 14, Shelley’s “Devils” Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, ed. P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb (1993); vol. 15, The Julian and Maddalo Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 11, ed. Steven E. Jones (1990); vol. 16, The Hellas Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 7, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Michael J. Neth (1994); vol. 17, Drafts for Laon and Cythna, Cantos V–XII: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 10, ed. Steven E. Jones (1994); vol. 18, The Homeric Hymns and Prometheus Drafts Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 12, ed. Nancy Moore Goslee (1994); vol. 19, The Faust Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e.18, ed. Nora Crook and Timothy Webb (1996); vol. 20, The Defence of Poetry Fair Copies: Bodleian MSS. Shelley e. 6 and Shelley adds d. 8, ed. Michael O’Neill (1994); vol. 21, Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose, and Translations from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, etc., ed. E.B. Murray (1995); vol. 22, Bodleian MSS. Shelley adds. c. 5 and Shelley adds d. 6, ed. Alan Weinberg (2 Parts, 1997); vol. 23, Catalogue and Index of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and a General Index to the Facsimile Edition of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, Vols I–XXII, Tatsuo Tokoo; with Shelleyan Writing Materials in the Bodleian Library: A Catalogue of Formats, Papers, and Watermarks, B.C. BarkerBenfield (2000)

CCP

Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997)

CCW

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general ed. Kathleen Coburn (16 vols, Routledge and Kegan Paul: Princeton University Press, 1969–2001): vol. 1, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (2 vols, 1971); vol. 2, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (1970); vol. 3, Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman (3 vols, 1978); vol. 4, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (2 vols, 1969); vol. 5, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes (2 vols, 1987);

Abbreviations

xi

vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (1972); vol. 7, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (2 vols, 1983); vol. 8, Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson (2 vols, 2000); vol. 9, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (1993); vol. 10, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (1976); vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson (2 vols, 1995); vol. 12, Marginalia, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley (6 vols, 1980–2001); vol. 13, Logic, ed. J.R. de J. Jackson (1981); vol. 14, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (2 vols, 1990); vol. 15, Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland (2002); vol. 16, Poetical Works, ed. J.C.C. Mays (3 vols, 2001) Forman 1880

The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, ed. Harry Buxton Forman (8 vols, London: Reeves and Turner, 1880)

Letters

The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)

Mary Jnl

The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

MYR

The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley, general ed. Donald H. Reiman (8 vols, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985–1997): vol. 1, The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1985); vol. 2, The Mask of Anarchy, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1985); vol. 3, Hellas, a lyrical drama, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1985); vol. 4, The Mask of Anarchy Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 2177, ed. Mary A. Quinn (1990); vol. 5, The Harvard Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1991); vol. 6, Shelley’s 1819–1821 Huntington Notebook (HM 2176), ed. Mary A. Quinn (1994); vol. 7, Shelley’s 1821–1822 Huntington Notebook (HM 2111), ed. Mary A. Quinn (1996); vol. 8, Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley’s Poems in European and American Libraries, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Michael O’Neill (1997)

Coleridge and Shelley

xii

PS

The Poems of Shelley, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (3 vols, London and New York: Longman, 1969– )

SC

Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (vols 1–4, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961–70), Donald H. Reiman (vols 5–8, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973–86)

SPP

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977)

Journals ELH ELN K–SMB K–SJ K–SR MLR MLQ PMLA PQ RES SEL SiR WC YES

English Literary History English Language Notes Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin Keats–Shelley Journal Keats–Shelley Review Modern Language Review Modern Language Quarterly Papers of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly Review of English Studies Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Studies in Romanticism Wordsworth Circle Yearbook of English Studies

Introduction

Studying a Masterpiece of Nature: Shelley, Coleridge and the Nature of Influence One great poet is a masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. ... A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. ... Poets, ... are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations of their age. Shelley, Preface to ‘Prometheus Unbound’1 Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence2

Poetry does not fall from the air or spring fully formed from the imagination of the poet. It is, as Shelley was aware, crafted from intersecting influences, both internal and external. Poets create their age in that they develop and sustain the literary history of which they are a part; poets are, and always have been, the creators of other poets. This study seeks to articulate the importance of one such ‘masterpiece of nature’ in the creation of another, in an examination of how the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge influenced the poetic development of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is perhaps not coincidental that of the major Romantic poets Shelley and Coleridge appear to have been the most prodigious readers. The range of reference in their prose and poetry, encompassing diverse subject matter, indicates how fully immersed both men were in the literary, philosophical and scientific traditions of their own and previous ages. Shelley’s letters and the detailed reading lists kept in Mary Shelley’s journal show that by the time of his death in 1822, Shelley owned all of Coleridge’s collections of poetry published at that time, his dramas Remorse and Zapolya, and a number of his prose works, including the Lay Sermons and Biographia 3 Literaria. However, as Mary Shelley’s journals show, Shelley’s reading was so extensive generally that evidence that it included the major works of Coleridge does 1 PS, vol. 2, p. 474. 2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (2nd edn, New York and Oxford, 1997), p. 96. 3 See Letters, vol. 1, pp. 345, 351n, 548; Mary Jnl, vol. 1, pp. 153, 184, 186.

2

Coleridge and Shelley

not in itself help to isolate the elder poet as a notable influence on Shelley’s own developing poetic style. Thomas Love Peacock suggests the particular importance of contemporary writers to Shelley in his Memoirs: ‘He devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey; these had great influence on his style, 4 and Coleridge especially on his imagination’. It is the influence of Coleridge on Shelley’s ‘style’ and ‘imagination’ which this book seeks to explore, and which requires a more detailed concept of influence than simply the study of sources. One such concept has, of course, already been formulated by Harold Bloom. Since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, the term ‘influence’ with regard to poetry has become extremely loaded, with Bloom’s work exerting its own aura of authority over subsequent criticism. In Bloom’s account, the aspiring poet’s work is characterized as an elaborate, unavoidable strategy of defence against the hegemony of previous poetic utterance, in which that new poet, or ‘ephebe’, must ‘misread’ the works of his precursors in order to deviate from them in a way which assures his continued survival as a new and authentic voice. The defence mechanisms employed by the ephebe in this battle for poetic survival are described as six ‘revisionary ratios’, six interrelated means of situating himself in relation to major poets of the past, whilst concurrently aspiring to surpass their achievements. The Freudian terminology employed by Bloom implies that the centre of this conflict occurs within the psyche of the ephebe. The precursor poet, rather than, as one might expect, acting in the role of the superego, controlling and repressing the instincts of the aspiring poet, becomes, in the mind of the ephebe, more analogous to the id, a primitive instinct of the unconscious mind which must be suppressed by the ego of the new poet. As this formula demonstrates, new poets react defensively to the appearance of the precursor poet or poets not as aspects of an exterior literary history, but to the manifestations of those poets’ work within themselves. Thus literary history becomes, for Bloom, internalized; a scene of never-ending psychic warfare occurring within the mind of the ephebe. As Bloom states at the outset of his introductory chapter: ‘Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so 5 as to clear imaginative space for themselves’. However, despite his extensive use of Freud in applying the language of psychological defence strategies to poetic production in The Anxiety of Influence, in his later work, Poetry and Repression, Bloom is at pains to distance himself from the particular branch of ‘Resenters’ – Bloom’s collective sobriquet for many recent schools of literary critics – who term their work ‘psychoanalytic’. Bloom writes: The proper use of Freud, for the literary critic, is not so to apply Freud (or even revise Freud) as to arrive at an Oedipal interpretation of poetic history. I find such to be the usual misunderstanding that my own work provokes. In studying poetry we are not studying the mind, nor the Unconscious, even if there is an unconscious. We are studying a kind of

4 Thomas Love Peacock, Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (London, 1909), p. 37. 5 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.

Introduction

3

labor that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and then taught 6 systematically.

The comment is perhaps surprising, given the attention paid in The Anxiety of Influence to poetry as a ‘family romance’, where the ephebe must struggle with and ultimately mortally wound his poetic ‘father’ in order to establish and maintain his own poetic selfhood. The phrase ‘a kind of labor that has its own latent principles’ suggests a change of emphasis in Bloom’s work from the poetic psyche to the process of poetic production; a shift in focus from poet to poem. As his work on influence develops, the potential for the psychological aspects of influence that Bloom uncovers to reveal the practical textual process by which one poet’s works are affected by those of a precursor becomes clearer. It is this aspect of Bloom’s theory, mediated by the work of other critics, which this study wishes to use as a point of departure in an investigation of how, when he appropriates a particular stylistic feature or image from Coleridge, Shelley adapts and recontextualizes that feature, and, crucially, why he does so. However, whilst his later works show Bloom moving away from the concept of the family romance, what remains constant throughout his criticism is the determination to conceive poetic study as an exclusively intrinsic process, removed from all historical, sociological or cultural contexts. As critics such as Graham Allen have argued, Bloom is able to deflect the charge that his criticism is thus reductive by arguing that as critics, we must read poetry as the aspiring poet does, and, as his model of the precursor poet as part of the ephebe’s id demonstrates, all exterior 7 contexts become internalized in the psyche of the new poet. Thus a potential weakness of Bloom’s theory becomes, paradoxically, and perhaps tautologically, its strength; if his criticism is reductive, it is following an identical reductive movement first made by the poet under study. The validity of Bloom’s approach is predicated on our acceptance of his denial of all external contexts. The factors involved in the production of poetry are reduced to this single psychological battle for survival as a poet on the part of the ephebe. Bloom’s ‘literary history’ makes no concessions to history as we would conventionally understand the term, and in this he acknowledges that he works against the grain of the vast majority of contemporary literary critical trends. To accept that history, society and culture in all their continually altering manifestations have some influence on the production of poetry throughout the ages would be to destroy Bloom’s critical bedrock. Graham Allen succinctly encapsulates the problem: If not merely the meaning of literary texts but the very concept of literature is determined by sociohistorical pressures and contexts, then we can neither locate literary meaning inside literary texts or literary tradition nor can we describe our relation to those texts as 8 intrinsic, as an inside relationship. 6 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London, 1976), p. 25. 7 See Graham Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (Hemel Hempstead, 1994), pp. 7, 33. 8 Allen, Harold Bloom, p. 32.

4

Coleridge and Shelley

In referring to the ‘meaning’ of texts, Allen’s comment implicitly raises another difficulty caused by Bloom’s denial of conventional history. Just as it is difficult to accept that poetic production is uninfluenced by the specific historical, social and cultural contexts within which a poet is situated, an echo of this problem occurs again when we consider the moment of reception. Bloom’s model of influence involves two points of reception which it is an aim of his criticism to conflate: the aspiring poet’s reception of his precursors, and our reception of the work of both precursor and ephebe. It is a tenet of Bloom’s ‘Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism’ that we must ‘learn to read a great precursor poet as his greater descendants compelled 9 themselves to read him’. Whilst this is both a sensible and necessary aim in the understanding of the workings of poetic influence with or without a Bloomian slant, it contains an inherent assumption that we, as readers, can not only identify all of any given poet’s precursors, but also that we can reimagine ourselves back to that point in poetic history where the status of those precursors existed as it did in relation to the new poet. If we were able to achieve this at all, it would require an acceptance of some of the historical and contextual detail that Bloom would disregard. For instance, Bloom’s own adherence to the established canon of Romanticism, as demonstrated in his work The Visionary Company, is an adherence to a selection of writers whose renown has been established in the intervening hundred and fifty years of literary criticism. Bloom’s model of poetic influence has a tendency only to treat those whom he nominates as ‘strong’ poets; yet a ‘strong’ poet from our point in literary history may not be the same ‘strong’ poet from the historical point of view of the ephebe under examination. Whilst it is undeniable that two of Shelley’s major precursors are Milton and Wordsworth, Shelley’s poetic relationship with the former will be of a different mode from that with the latter, simply because Milton was already an established part of the canon when Shelley began his poetic career, whilst Wordsworth was a contemporary, still to achieve canonical status. Bloom’s rebuttal of the historical context of the ephebe’s point of reception would deny this difference. In this respect it becomes clear how much contemporary literary criticism is swept aside by Bloom’s denial of all external contexts in the production of poetry. At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, the work of historicist critics such as Jerome McGann attempts to restore to literary criticism the sort of historical specificity which Bloom’s approach would deny. In his essay ‘The Monks and the Giants’, McGann proposes a ‘Schema for Textual Analysis’ designed to form the basis of a historicist programme of literary criticism. McGann asserts that the understanding of literary texts requires ‘an elucidation of the textual history of the work’ and ‘an explication of the reception history’, two operations which are dialectically related and thus 10 inseparable. McGann’s model distinguishes firstly between the ‘originary textual moment’ and ‘secondary moments of textual production’ (with a further distinction between those in the author’s lifetime and those occurring after his death). Each 9 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 93. 10 Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works’ in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method (Oxford, 1985), pp. 69–89, (pp. 82–3).

Introduction

5

of these points of production would consider a range of influencing factors: those surrounding the author (where the number of concepts will increase posthumously); others involved in production (collaborators, commissioners, editors); stages in the productive process and their causes (personal, textual or social); and the materials, means and modes of production (physical, psychological and ideological). Finally, all of this information should be viewed through an awareness of the current critic’s immediate goals and purposes. It is clear from this brief survey of McGann’s schema how far his conception of the interpretation of literary works differs from that of Bloom. The comprehensive, extrinsic nature of McGann’s model, particularly in its provision for the way in which external factors affect poetic production, serves eloquently to highlight the inwardness of Bloom’s conception of both poetry and criticism. For Bloom, even the apparently external factor of prior poets and poems is transformed into an internal influence (and the only influence) on new poetic work. Furthermore, McGann’s model engages with the way in which a text alters over time, both physically and in terms of its meaning. McGann’s approach appears to offer a framework within which to pursue the external as well as internal influences which Shelley, in the Preface to ‘Prometheus Unbound’, insists combine to create both the poet and his work. However, whilst Bloom’s focus can appear exclusive and thereby potentially reductive, it can be argued that a schema such as McGann’s threatens to obscure through its very inclusivity. As a result, the priority accorded to the various pieces of information accumulated must finally be apportioned by the critic; the model’s worth in terms of communicating the concerns and importance of a given literary work seems predicated on the final stage where the critic’s own goals and purposes are articulated. Here Bloom’s mantra that there are no poems in themselves, only interpretations, begins to look as applicable to McGann’s work as to that of Bloom himself. We can also see that regardless of its rigour in attempting to recreate the moments of textual production and reception, McGann’s work faces the same problem as Bloom’s (although Bloom is unconcerned by it), in that whilst it may be relatively straightforward to recreate the conditions of textual production for one poet, it may be all but impossible to do so for another who has slipped into obscurity at any point during the intervening years of literary history. Whilst it is comparatively easy to isolate possible influences on Shelley’s work through a study of his meticulously kept reading lists and letters, the same cannot be said of all poets. How does Bloom overcome the highly possible situation that the real poetic ‘father’ of a poet that we today regard as ‘strong’, may have been a writer who has faded into obscurity for his perceived lack of poetic strength by subsequent generations of readers and critics? This criticism of Bloom’s approach to the study of influence is not resolved, but conclusively brushed aside by one of the most infuriating, yet perhaps also illuminating paragraphs of The Anxiety of Influence: All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology – in which the poem is and means itself – and reduction – in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem – a poem not itself. And not a poem chosen with total arbitrariness, but

6

Coleridge and Shelley any central poem by an indubitable precursor, even if the ephebe never read that poem. Source study is wholly irrelevant here; we are dealing with primal words, but antithetical meanings, and an ephebe’s best misinterpretations may well be of poems he has never read.11

Commenting on this passage, Graham Allen offers an explanation of Bloom’s position by suggesting that misreading is a defence not against specific poems, but against 12 poetic tradition as a whole. If this is the case, as is indicated by Bloom’s comments regarding the irrelevance of the sort of ‘source study’ which I have suggested to be at the very least the basis for an investigation of poetic influence, then we are once again faced with the difficulty that Bloom’s critical model appears to be concerned less with poetry than with poets. A few paragraphs later, Bloom reiterates his assertion that an antithetical criticism does not concern ‘the transmission of ideas and images from earlier to later poets’; this process ‘belong[s] to discursiveness and to history’. Bloom’s concern is instead ‘a poet’s stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being’, and the defensive strategies employed by the poet are attempts to 13 preserve the uniqueness not necessarily of his poetry but of his poetic identity. This extreme refutation of the viability of source study in the consideration of influence leaves Bloom’s own potential ephebes at something of a critical impasse. Whilst an attempt to separate the poet from his poetry, to observe the product in isolation from the producer, may be termed reductive by Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence can fall victim to a charge of reductiveness itself in that, despite Bloom’s comments to the contrary in Poetry and Repression, its attention to the psychology of the poetic mind exists largely at the exclusion of the poetic product. It is notable that a book proclaiming a theory of poetry has remarkably little space for consideration of individual poems; in effect, it is difficult for the reader to understand how to put Bloom’s theory into practice. Peter de Bolla encapsulates the problem in his comments regarding the rather disproportionate ‘intensity of the private vocabulary’ compared to ‘practical readings of poems’ in Bloom’s work. According to de Bolla, Bloom is ‘deeply resistant to appropriation’, and Bloom’s perception of his own work is ‘highly idiosyncratic, ... [it] deliberately sets itself up in such a manner as to be beyond repetition, impossibly unique, so as to be of marginal and questionable 14 use to anyone else working in literary studies’. Practitioners of influence theory in recent years have explicitly or implicitly adjusted Bloom’s model in order to return the focus of their accounts to the poetry, whilst also taking into account poetic personalities. In Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion, Lucy Newlyn modifies Bloom’s theory in considering the effects of reciprocal influence in this unquestionably dialectical poetic relationship. Her most recent work, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism, explores the relationship between readers and writers in an explicit attempt to expand upon Bloom’s work which, Newlyn argues, ‘lays all its emphasis on one side of the polarity, writer11 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 70. 12 Allen, Harold Bloom, p. 19. 13 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 71. 14 Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London and New York, 1988), pp. 63, 73.

Introduction

7 15

reader, and works in a single temporal direction only’. In Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority, G. Kim Blank acknowledges what he considers to be the relevance of Bloom’s psychoanalytic model, yet articulates the necessity of expanding it to include an analysis of how Shelley was influenced by Wordsworth’s figurative language, ‘because this study is not always dealing with personalities, 16 but with poetry too’. In his isolation of Wordsworth as Shelley’s central precursor, Blank follows Bloom’s own work. In Poetry and Repression, Bloom attempts to show that an engagement with Wordsworth underpins the movement of Shelley’s final work ‘The Triumph of Life’. Here Bloom does describe an engagement between specific poems, yet his discussion of the central image of Shelley’s work, the chariot, is predicated on an accumulation of connotations surrounding that image gathered less from Wordsworth than from biblical history. Furthermore, he reduces the content of Shelley’s poem to the same sort of psychic battle with precursors that formed the basis of the theory of The Anxiety of Influence. However, as suggested earlier in this introduction, Bloom’s work following The Anxiety of Influence does begin more explicitly to draw the process of textual production into the model of psychological defence and repression. It is in A Map of Misreading that Bloom first links six rhetorical tropes to each of his revisionary ratios, a schema which he continues to develop in both Poetry and Repression and his essay ‘The Breaking of Form’. Poetry, Bloom asserts in ‘The Breaking of Form’, is evasion of fate, specifically death, and the trope, the particular form of figurative language that the poet chooses to employ, is his means of evading. Thus the particular figurative movements a poem makes are expressions at the level of language of the forms of psychic defence enumerated in The Anxiety of Influence: ‘Like tropes, defences are turning operations, and in language tropes and defences 17 crowd together in the entity rather obscurely called poetic images’. One of Bloom’s major contentions is that a poem exists only in an interpretation, be it that of another poet or of a critic, and the trope is the means by which that interpretation is achieved. ‘Poetic knowledge’, he writes, ‘is necessarily a knowledge by tropes, an experience of emotion as trope, and an expression of knowledge and emotion by a revisionary 18 further troping’. The relation of different modes of figuration to poetic influence has been explored by John Hollander in his study of echo and allusion in poetry. Hollander relates characteristics of the mythical figure of Echo to our use of the word when describing the allusive relations between one poem and another, commenting, ‘It is ... inevitable that the delay between prior voice and responding echo in acoustical actuality should become in naturalized romantic mythology a trope of diachrony,

15 Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford, 2000), p. vii. 16 G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York, 1988), p. 4. 17 Harold Bloom, ‘The Breaking of Form’, in Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller (eds), Deconstruction and Criticism (London and Henley, 1979), pp. 1–37, (pp. 15–16). 18 Bloom, ‘The Breaking of Form’, p. 20.

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Coleridge and Shelley 19

of the distance between prior and successive poems’. Whilst, as Hollander points out, Echo is unable to originate discourse, merely to respond, there is a mythical 20 association between Echo and truth. From here it is a short step to the idea of poetic truth, the notion that in responding to a prior poem, the new poet is alluding and revising in order to approach the definitive articulation of the subject more nearly than his predecessor. This clearly recalls Bloom’s model of the struggle for poetic supremacy through misreading; if we consider what Hollander calls ‘echo in acoustical actuality,’ we can note that characteristics of weak or partial repetition, where only a portion of the originary phrase is heard out of context, can provide a metaphor for a deliberate mishearing (or misreading) on the part of the new poet when we turn to echo as a figurative description of the relations between poems. The echoing poet mishears then appropriates and recontextualizes a word or phrase from an earlier writer. A further characteristic of the mythology of Echo bears a figurative resemblance to Bloom’s model of poetic influence. Hollander’s observation that ‘whereas in nature the anterior source [of the echo] has a stronger presence and 21 authenticity, the figurative echoes of allusion arise from the later, present text’ is also in alignment with Bloom’s assertion that the new poet needs to achieve priority through his use of language, in effect making the precursor text subservient to, and a weak echo of, his own. Hollander’s approach to literary echo differs from Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence in the attention paid to the variety of effects achieved by such allusion and in the greater degree of intentionality accorded to the echoing poet. Indeed, Hollander states that one cannot allude unintentionally; the text alluded to 22 forms ‘part of the portable library shared by the author and his ideal audience’. Hollander’s description of echo suggests, in contrast to Bloom, that literary allusion in poetry is a conscious action on the part of the poet, and that a study of such allusion should yield important insights into the form and content of the new poem, helping, in effect, to describe why the poem is as it is: The reader of texts, in order to overhear echoes, must have some kind of access to an earlier voice, and to its cave of resonant signification, analogous to that of the author of the later text. ... When such access is lost in a community of reading, what may have been an allusion may fade in prominence; and yet a scholarly recovery of the context would restore the allusion, by revealing an intent, as well as by showing means.23

The final clause of Hollander’s comment here highlights once again the primary difficulty in Bloom’s theory of influence. A recovery of the ‘context’ of the genesis of the particular image under discussion will, by revealing ‘intent’ and ‘means’, restore the allusion, and thus potentially enrich our understanding of the new poem. Intent and means are two things which Bloom consciously dismisses as irrelevant in 19 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), p. 21. 20 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 16. 21 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 62. 22 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 64. 23 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 65.

Introduction

9

the study of influence. Whether this represents a flaw in his model, or whether it is merely to ask it for an apparatus it does not profess to provide, is less important than the fact that such a contextless theory, unspecific in its treatment of individual works, is not one which can easily be ‘taught systematically’ or used to reveal new insights into the study of specific poems. Hollander’s study engages with allusion at the level of individual examples of figurative language. In addition to clear, metaphoric echoes of the language of one poem in that of another, Hollander describes a more complex form of allusive figuration, which, in his final chapter entitled ‘Echo Metaleptical’, he terms ‘transumption’. The roots of metalepsis in allusion are clear; metonymy, from which metalepsis derives, involves the substitution of an attribute of a thing for the thing itself. Metalepsis carries the process a stage further by obscuring the nature of the original thing through the choice of particular detail employed as a substitute for it. To apply this language of tropes to allusion between poems, metonymy would describe a partial but clear echo of an image or aspect of a prior poem in a new; metalepsis would enact the same process, but through its choice of new figure would, at the level of words, obscure the original example of literary language to which it alludes. As Hollander describes ‘transumption’, it is a trope which is a ‘figure of linkage between figures, ... there will be one or more unstated middle terms which are leapt 24 over, or alluded to, by the figure’. The metaleptic echo, or trope of transumption, is described by Hollander as diachronic; in his employment of a particular image a poet may consciously accept the accretion of figurative baggage from that image’s use in a previous poem, yet the ‘revisionary power’ of metalepsis, Hollander implies, arises from the echoes of that image’s employment throughout history, from the ‘unstated middle terms’ which are subtly reanimated in the figure’s new context. In relating the work of Hollander to that of Bloom, we can start to see links between the idea of poetic influence and the very mechanics of poetry itself. If we were to ask what distinguishes poetry from other forms of language, one answer would be its consistent employment of figuration, the process of which is trope and the result imagery. In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom writes, ‘Every poetic trope is an exile from literal meaning, but the only homecoming would be the death of figuration and so the death of poetry, or the triumph of literal meaning, whatever that is’. He continues, ‘From Wordsworth, through our contemporaries, the trope defends against literal meaning in the same way that psychic defenses trope against 25 death’. Poetic ‘death’, which we can perhaps elaborate as unoriginality, repetition or derivation, is here equated, at the level of language, with literalism. If poetry is an attempt to articulate ideas or experience in a new way, then the medium used, language, must continually be reinvigorated through repeated efforts of figuration. Furthermore, we can argue that in the reanimation of an image from a previous poem, a poet may consciously call into play the context of that image’s prior life, thus further enriching the scope of the newly emerging poem. Although Bloom’s work subsequent to The Anxiety of Influence appears to extend the theory of psychic defence to encompass more fully the poetic product as 24 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 114. 25 Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975; repr. 1993), pp. 89–90.

10

Coleridge and Shelley

well as its producer, his continued insistence on the central nature of repression to the poetic enterprise still threatens to cloud with negativity Bloom’s whole stance towards poetry. Recently, Christopher Ricks has described the process of allusion in poetry in terms which speak not of repression and defence, but of both benevolence and originality. Rather than avoiding the burden of the past, which for Bloom is the motivating force behind all poetry, a poet should instead acknowledge and exploit it: for to allude to a predecessor is both to acknowledge, in piety, a previous achievement and also is a form of benign appropriation – what was so well said has now become part of my way of saying, and in advancing the claims of a predecessor (and rotating them so that they catch a new light) the poet is advancing his own claims, his own poetry, and even poetry.26

Ricks’s stance, like that of Hollander, is to accept that allusion in poetry is a conscious tactic in which the new poet engages to achieve a specific result. No ‘passive copyist’,27 however, the poet is, through such allusion, able to sustain poetry as a whole both by opening up previous poetic contexts and ‘rotating them’ with his own particular genius ‘so that they catch a new light’. In denying intent, positive or otherwise, on the part of the poet, Bloom also denies the critic the means to pursue the process of allusion and describe the nature of influence. Both the importance of poetic intent and a way forward in this endeavour are suggested by Ricks in the distinction he draws between sources for certain images in poetry and the process of allusion: Although to speak of an allusion is always to predicate a source (and you cannot call into play something of which you have never heard), a source may not be an allusion, for it may not be called into play; it may be scaffolding such as went to the building but does not constitute any part of the building. Readers always have to decide – if they accept that such and such is indeed a source for certain lines – whether it is also more than a source, being part not only of the making of the poem but of its meaning. The question of intention bears upon allusion as it bears upon everything, not only in literature but in every form of communication.28

Bloom himself would deny the viability of the defining terms of Ricks’s argument: intent, allusion and sources are terms which have no place in Bloom’s theory of poetry. As such, as Peter de Bolla has suggested, it is hard to formulate a practical application of Bloom’s theory when examining a specific poem, or to reconcile his dismissal of ‘source study’ and ‘allusion hunting’ with his developing focus on the figuration of language. The development of Bloom’s theory towards a practical use is what concerns de Bolla in the second half of his book Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics. De Bolla’s work here is akin to that of Hollander, and pertinent to the approach which this study will take towards discussing the influence of Coleridge’s work upon that of Shelley.

26 Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford, 2002), p. 33. 27 Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, p. 82. 28 Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, pp. 3–4.

Introduction

11

In his discussion of figuration, de Bolla points out that whilst trope as a system of language substitution remains constant, the effects of this system, the resulting figures, vary over time. Furthermore, he distinguishes between first-order figuration, or figures of words, and second-order figuration, or figures of thought. Figures of words are what we would conventionally understand as metaphor; if we alter the words, we alter the figure. Figures of thought have their basis in metalepsis, and occur in the meaning generated behind the words, having a range beyond the poem itself. If metaphor, or first-order figuration, creates a figure by linking a literal idea to a non-literal idea, metalepsis or second-order figuration, links a figure to another figure, without a necessary return to literal meaning. It is this second type which is particularly prevalent in poetry; as de Bolla writes, ‘poetic language is not generally a swerve away from literal language use, but from an already constituted figurative 29 use’ To demonstrate this, de Bolla recalls Bloom’s commentary in The Breaking of Vessels on the ‘Aeolian trope’ as manifested in Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’. Here, 30 when Coleridge refers to the woods making ‘a solemn music of the wind’, his words refer not to the aeolian harp itself, but to the connotations emanating from it both in his own previous poem and in poetry throughout history. This is, in de Bolla’s language, a second-order figuration, or metalepsis, in that the image in question does 31 not refer back to the literal, but to previous instances of figurative language. De Bolla’s aim is to lay the grounds of a theory which can articulate the shifting nature of figurative language over time: a historical rhetoric. His work is helpful in its articulation and expansion of Bloom’s connection between tropes of figuration and influence. The present study hopes to explore further the nature of poetic influence through specific instances of echoed literary language. The aim is to show that, contra Bloom, ‘the transmission of ideas and images’ is not always ‘just “something 32 that happens”’, and that a sustained attention to this process, particularly to clusters of transmitted images, poetic forms and styles of language, can present not only a clearer picture of how one poet was influenced by another, but also guide us to the central concerns of the newly emerging poem. For if, as Bloom argues, the poetic identity and the poetic product are inseparable, attention to the formation of that product should reveal as least as much about the poetic psyche behind it as an attempt to replicate the process of that psyche through the application of psychoanalytic models of defence. This introduction has already suggested that poetry does not simply come into being fully formed. Neither, crucially, does the poet. Each poet emerges from a particular nexus of social, historical and cultural conditions; it is the contention of this study that one of the most important contexts from which the poet emerges and with which he or she engages, the literary context, is a much more tangible and historically specific one than Bloom would allow. Poetic relationships, whether they are psychological, literary or social, are subject to the same historical shiftings as any other influence brought to bear on a poet. A clearer understanding of

29 30 31 32

De Bolla, Towards Historical Rhetorics, p. 120. ‘France: an Ode’ l. 8 in CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 462–8. See de Bolla, Towards Historical Rhetorics, p. 120–21. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 71.

12

Coleridge and Shelley

this context is crucial to an appreciation of the final poetic product, and, importantly, of the process that brought it into being. The decision to focus upon Coleridge as Shelley’s significant precursor is not to suggest that the attention paid to the relationship between Wordsworth and Shelley by Blank, Bloom and others is in any way misplaced; a comparison of the mode of engagement which Blank detects between Shelley and Wordsworth and that which this study argues exists between Shelley’s work and that of Coleridge demonstrates the surprisingly different ways in which the younger poet reacted to the work of two of his most recent poetic precursors. With some notable exceptions, there has been relatively little critical attention paid to the influence of Coleridge’s work upon that of Shelley.33 In response to the question of why Shelley employs a particular poetic form, image or other stylistic feature, poetry by Coleridge often offers itself as a highly credible source. However, this study does not aim simply to collate a record of Coleridgean echoes in the poetry of Shelley. It attempts to use the Coleridge-Shelley relationship to provide one response to the critical question of how poems come into being. The task is therefore threefold. Firstly, to establish which works of Coleridge were read by Shelley, when, and in what form and circumstances. This area of work will also encompass an examination of evidence of Shelley’s opinions of Coleridge, as man and poet, through attention to the letters and journals of himself and those in his circle. Secondly, we must identify features of Shelley’s poetry, (individual images, forms, or ideas), which echo or allude to corresponding elements in the work of Coleridge. Finally, attention must then be paid to the revision and mutation which that particular feature undergoes in its passage from the elder poet’s work to that of the younger. In Bloomian language this might be to measure the clinamen, or swerve, that Shelley makes from Coleridge, but my concern is not to apply this knowledge as a formula to discover how Shelley misread his precursor, but to examine what Shelley does with the appropriated aspect of Coleridge’s work when he incorporates it into his own. In exploring how Shelley revises features of Coleridge’s work, my focus is on the way in which an examination of how the appropriated feature alters in its passage from Coleridge to Shelley can enrich our understanding of the concerns of Shelley’s finished poem. The function of the mutation and transformation of images within Shelley’s poetry has formed the basis of a number of critical studies. Both Jean Hall in The Transforming Image and Jerrold Hogle in Shelley’s Process attend to the interrelation 33 Michael O’Neill’s excellent recent essay ‘The Gleam of Those Words: Coleridge and Shelley’, K–SR, 19 (2005), 76–96, is a case in point, suggesting that the relationship between Coleridge and Shelley is starting to attract more critical attention. A number of O’Neill’s observations are discussed in more detail in the body of this book. John A. Hodgson has considered the relation between rhetoric and transcendental inquiry in the work of Shelley and Coleridge. Hodgson explores affinities and differences between the two poets’ rhetorics, concluding that both ‘are ultimately metaphorical’, but whilst Coleridge resists deconstruction of his texts, Shelley invites it. Whilst of interest, Hodgson’s work does not explicitly consider the way in which Shelley engages with Coleridge’s work, and as such its focus is not of immediate relevance to the main argument of this study. See John A. Hodgson, Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry – Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology (Lincoln and London, 1989), pp. 115–16.

Introduction

13

between Shelley’s style of figurative transformation and the thematic, social and cultural aspirations of his poetry. Hogle situates his work in relation to that of Bloom in accepting that Shelley’s images often ‘reclaim’ the language of a ‘father-poet’, but extends Bloom’s formulation of poetry as a primarily defensive movement. Shelley cannot simply react against the language of his precursors: He must strive to seize upon some metaphor that appears to underwrite the language of the father and wrench that figure away from its existing context into a radically different one, where it is turned toward other meanings that are not yet fully worked out. ... For Shelley, any figure or construction within an existing piece of writing, ... is in transit from a previous use into the present one and from the present order into a future reinterpretation, sometimes within the same work and even the same line. Poetry would not exist if one entity were not always being seen in terms of another.34

Hogle’s model is attractive in that it retains the Bloomian idea of the intricate relations between literary texts, yet repudiates the potential negativity implied by Bloom’s theory of psychological defence mechanisms. Furthermore, its focus on the transformation of language is akin to the work on figuration and its relation to influence carried out by Hollander and de Bolla. Observing how Shelley ‘wrench[es]’ a figure from Coleridge to apply it, in an altered form to ‘a radically different context’ is one of the aspects of the Shelley-Coleridge literary relationship that this study seeks to explore. Poetry, as these critics demonstrate, is predicated on figuration, on the movement from one incarnation of an image or concept to another. When the study of that figuration is linked to an awareness of how a poem engages with other texts, we should gain insights into the workings of the newly emerging poem, whilst concurrently opening that poem out to a broader literary context. Neither Shelley nor Coleridge underestimated the importance of the continual reanimation of language to the longevity and vitality of poetry. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge laments the present state of language; lacking both precision and originality, language is regarded as a ‘barrel organ’ which anyone may play, or ‘a press room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces’ which can be slotted together 35 at random. In a famous passage from A Defence of Poetry, to which this study will return, Shelley champions the poet’s process, and warns of the consequences should such a process cease to operate: Their [poets’] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.36

Here Shelley articulates a distinction that should be made between Bloom’s rather dismissive conception of ‘source study’ and ‘the transmission of ideas’ and the model 34 Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of his Major Works (Oxford and New York, 1988), pp. 19–20. 35 CCW, vol. 7, I, pp. 38–9. 36 A Defence of Poetry in SPP, p. 482.

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Coleridge and Shelley

of influence which this study seeks to pursue. Simply to appropriate a feature of a previous poet’s work would, in Shelley’s language, be merely to engraft upon the newly emerging poem a ‘sign’ for a portion or class of thought with a specific, closed set of connotations. The poet’s role, as Shelley conceives it, is to ‘create afresh’ that image or stylistic feature by opening it up to new associations by virtue of its altered context and refiguration. As he writes later in the Defence, ‘Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever 37 craves fresh food’. It is important to recognize the significance which Shelley places upon this reanimation of language. Without this ‘vitally metaphorical’ approach, ‘language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse’. This raises a central aspect of the poet’s role according to Shelley, an aspect hinted at by Ricks, Hollander and others, but which Bloom’s theory of interiority ignores: that of communication. Poetry is not a psychological defence mechanism, it is a creative, crafted art, from which process, in the case of the poets under discussion, the finished product is offered to the world. Poems are formed consciously, and the skills required for that formation are, at least initially, learnt from previous poets. Thus when considering Shelley’s early work we should expect to find it markedly more derivative of previous poets than the poetry of his maturity. However, an examination of that early work may in fact prove to be particularly revealing in indicating more clearly Shelley’s indebtedness to his precursors and, gradually, his point of departure from them. As John Hollander comments: What a great writer does with a direct citation of another’s language, is quite different from what a minor one may be doing ... his handling of a commonplace will be radically interpretive of it, while the minor writer’s contribution will be more one of handing on the baton, ... of cultivating the topos rather than replanting or even building there.38

In a study of Shelley’s poetic career one would expect to uncover a movement from derivation and imitation to development and transformation of his poetic models. This process is in some ways representative of the importance of communication to poetic creativity. From a linear movement where forms, figures and ideas pass in a rather unreconstructed manner from Coleridge to Shelley, we should observe the development of a more dialectical poetic relationship between the two writers’ work. Here, Shelley’s transformations of aspects of Coleridge’s poetry imbue his own constructions with associations from their source in Coleridge, whilst also having the potential to comment on that source, and yet by virtue of their imaginative manipulation and fresh context are also capable of communicating something new, ‘replenishing’ the imagination ‘with thoughts of ever new delight’. It is the mechanics of this process, one aspect of the means by which Shelley’s poetry comes into being, that will be the focus of this study. I do not seek to enthrone Coleridge as Shelley’s sole and rightful poetic father, but I do hope to demonstrate 37 SPP, p. 488. 38 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, p. 73.

Introduction

15

that the influence which this particular precursor exerted over Shelley’s poetic development is both more extensive and more profound than has previously been recognized. Tracing the creative process of Shelley’s poetry will also illuminate the development of his poetic style throughout his career and seek to establish interrelations within his diverse body of work. If, as Bloom states, ‘Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem’, then it is the critic’s task to tread those roads between the components of one poet’s body of work, as well as those between the poetry of different personalities. The result should be not only to see Shelley’s individual works in their immediate environment, but to realize how that environment was created by exposing those works to their specific literary context. The structure of this study is broadly chronological, although where appropriate I have attempted to clarify aspects of Shelley’s engagement with Coleridge and the nature of his poetic development by reaching forwards and backwards within his body of work. Chapter 1 considers Shelley’s early engagements with Coleridge’s work, which although more imitative than transformatory, demonstrate Shelley’s growing interest in particular aspects of Coleridge’s poetry which develop creatively in the work of his maturity. Chapter 2 considers Shelley’s alleged poetic portrait of Coleridge in the lyric ‘O! there are spirits of the air’, and explores how attitudes expressed here towards the loss of creative vision inform the narrative of the title poem of Shelley’s 1816 Alastor volume. Chapter 3 explores the direct influence of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ on Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, and suggests ways in which the later poem adjusts the vision of the earlier one. Chapter 4 considers possible resemblances between the respective ideas of Shelley and Coleridge regarding the relationship between language and thought, and seeks to demonstrate how such resemblances may underlie affinities between the two poets’ creative styles. Finally, Chapter 5 explores in detail the legacy left by Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in some of the poetry of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound volume. The first section considers the impact of Coleridge’s revisions to the text of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, particularly the inclusion, in 1817 of the marginal gloss, in order to suggest that Coleridge consciously presents the inadequacy of any one, closed means of interpretation of the poem’s events. The second section explores the influence of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ on Shelley’s critically neglected poem ‘A Vision of the Sea’, and the final section argues that this engagement extends to the title poem of Shelley’s collection. Throughout, the chapter argues that Shelley found in the Mariner’s means of interpreting his experience, and in his subsequent isolation from all communities, a mode of apprehension which he realized must be overcome in order to achieve individual, social and political amelioration. By way of conclusion, I suggest that there is a connection between Shelley’s insistence on the primacy of the protean qualities of metaphor in his poetic programme and the nature of poetic influence itself. Both metaphor and influence imply dialogue and relationship, qualities central to the thematic concerns of the Prometheus Unbound volume. As such, it may not be excessive to argue that the sort of poetic dialogue with Coleridge’s works in which Shelley engages in his own poems is a formal manifestation of the themes of community and regeneration which underpin the action of the Prometheus Unbound volume.

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Chapter 1

Cultivating the Topos: Early Engagements The beginning of Shelley’s sustained interest in the work of both Wordsworth and Coleridge can be dated to the winter of 1811. Following his expulsion from Oxford in March and his marriage to the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook in August, Shelley’s already strained relationship with his father, Sir Timothy, was at crisis-point. When Shelley and Harriet left York for Keswick in early November, it was this state of affairs which initially dictated their destination. Shelley was hoping that the Duke of York, then residing at his castle at Greystoke, near Keswick, would act as an intermediary between himself and his father to enable Shelley to receive some money from his family.1 However, Keswick held other attractions of a more literary nature. Confident, on his arrival, that he would meet all three of the ‘Lake poets’, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, it is perhaps, as Richard Holmes has succinctly noted, ‘one of the greatest strokes of ill-luck’ that the only number of the trio that Shelley was to encounter then, or at any future date, was Robert Southey.2 Throughout his life, Shelley maintained a respect for the poetry of both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although in the case of the former, Shelley’s distrust and increasing disgust towards what he perceived as the future laureate’s cynical recantation of his earlier liberal political opinions was to inspire such poems as the 1816 sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, and the late satire ‘Peter Bell the Third’, it is undeniable that Wordsworth’s earlier poetry, in particular the Lyrical Ballads and the ‘Immortality Ode’, was to influence Shelley’s own poetic development in more positive ways throughout his career. The influence of Coleridge on Shelley’s poetry was no less marked, yet the comments in Shelley’s letters, and the occasional appearances of the figure of the elder poet in the work of the younger are clearly characterized by a greater respect and a greater forbearance of criticism than Shelley accords Wordsworth. Although Shelley and Coleridge never met, Shelley’s later friendships with both Godwin and Byron would have allowed him access to anecdotes about and opinions of Coleridge from those who knew him.3 Whilst we can only speculate as to 1 See Kenneth Neill Cameron, Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London, 1951), pp. 109–10. 2 Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (rev. edn, London, 1995), pp. 93–4. 3 Godwin and Coleridge had been acquaintances since 1800, and whilst not without its arguments, their friendship was strong and mutually influential, including late night inebriated discussions about atheism, which would have appealed to Shelley. (See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1990), pp. 257–9). Coleridge’s relationship with Byron was largely responsible for the former’s decision finally to publish the Christabel volume

18

Coleridge and Shelley

how a meeting with either Wordsworth or Coleridge may have influenced Shelley’s poetry or opinions, the record of his acquaintance with the remaining member of the ‘Lake’ trio, Robert Southey, suggests there is a danger of disappointment inherent in encountering one’s poetic idols in the flesh. More significantly for the purposes of this study, an analysis of the contact between Shelley and Southey in the winter of 1811 provides highly suggestive evidence of the origins of Shelley’s first encounters with a number of works by Coleridge. Furthermore, if we view this evidence in the context of Shelley’s poetic output immediately subsequent to his time in Keswick, we can start to observe the ways in which Coleridge’s work first influenced the 19year-old Shelley. Whilst Richard Holmes’s comment implies that Shelley was unfortunate in drawing merely the short straw of Robert Southey during his residence in Keswick, this may be to look back with the hindsight of our current awareness of the degree of literary reputation accorded to each of the ‘Lake poets’. In fact, Shelley’s letters prior to this period reveal a number of references to Southey, but none at all to Wordsworth or Coleridge. By 1811 Shelley was already a conscientious reader of Southey’s works. His letters of late 1810 show an eager anticipation to receive the recently published The Curse of Kehama, and in June of the following year he arranged for a copy to be sent to his correspondent Elizabeth Hitchener, describing it in an accompanying letter as ‘my most favorite poem’.4 Kenneth Neill Cameron suggests that Southey became a significant figure to Shelley as ‘the first important intellectual he had known’,5 yet Shelley’s letters suggest that furthermore, Southey’s works were, at this time, of greater importance to Shelley than those of the other ‘Lake poets’. Shelley’s letters of the winter of 1811–12, written during his residence at Keswick, provide a picture of the younger poet’s shifting view of the elder as Shelley attempted to reconcile the fallible, human Southey with his exulted conception of the great poet. Renting Chestnut Cottage, just outside Keswick, Shelley’s walks in the Lakes took him past Southey’s house, Greta Hall. Originally rented by Coleridge in 1801, Greta Hall became Southey’s home when an extended family visit to the Coleridges in 1802 evolved into permanent occupancy. Shortly after Southey’s arrival, Coleridge left for Malta, and thereafter his residences at Greta Hall were infrequent, and he was never to return after 1812. At the time of Shelley’s visit to Keswick, Coleridge was attempting to reanimate his career with a series of lectures in London, and had been for some years unofficially separated from his wife, Southey’s sister-in-law, who continued to reside at Greta Hall with the Southeys and the various Southey and Coleridge children. Shelley wrote expectantly to Elizabeth Hitchener on 11 November, ‘Southey lives at Keswick. I have been contemplating the outside of his house’, and then again on 23 November, ‘I have not seen Southey, in 1816, after Byron expressed his extreme admiration for the poem and agreed to help Coleridge’s negotiations with publishers for the forthcoming Biographia Literaria. Byron was also responsible for introducing Christabel to Shelley in 1816. (See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London, 1998), pp. 414–15, 425–6). 4 See Letters, vol. 1, pp. 24, 25, 97, 101. 5 Cameron, Young Shelley, p. 113.

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he is not now at Keswick: believe that on his return I will not be slow to pay homage to a really great man’.6 In these comments we can observe something of the aspiring poet’s admiration for the established one, particularly in Shelley’s rather awed contemplation of Greta Hall, the place of composition of The Curse of Kehama, his ‘most favorite poem’. The tone of these comments is in sharp contrast to that of a letter of 15 December, again to Elizabeth Hitchener: Southey has changed. I shall see him soon, and I shall reproach him of [for] his tergiversation – He to whom Bigotry Tyranny and Law was hateful has become the votary of these Idols, in a form the most disgusting. – The Church of England it’s Hell and all has become the subject of his panygeric. – the war in Spain that prodigal waste of human blood to aggrandise the fame of Statesmen is his delight, the constitution of England with its Wellesley its Paget & its Prince are inflated with the prostituted exertions of his Pen. I feel a sickening distrust when I see all that I had considered good great & imitable fall around me into the gulph of error.7

It is interesting that these comments were made prior to Shelley’s first meeting with Southey. Frederick Jones suggests that Shelley received this information about Southey from William Calvert, a friend of both Southey and Wordsworth, whom Shelley met at the Duke of York’s castle in Greystoke, and who was responsible for introducing the young poet to Southey. It seems likely that Shelley’s specific targets of assault here were the articles which Southey had contributed to the Tory Quarterly Review since 1809.8 Southey certainly wrote for the paper in support of the war, and whilst he was generally in favour of humanitarian social reform, his tendency was to envisage that reform occurring only through existing government frameworks. In addition to this, Southey had been in receipt of a government pension since 1807, a fact that may have contributed to the venom of Shelley’s comment about ‘the prostituted exertions of his Pen’. Shelley was at this time planning a trip to Ireland, where he hoped to disseminate propaganda about social and political reform to the populace, and many of his letters to Elizabeth Hitchener are written in the context of their projected plan to undermine perceived forces of tyranny in the political and social sphere through the establishment of an model community which adhered to ideals of equality and justice. It is unclear whether Shelley knew of the similar project proposed by Southey and Coleridge in the 1790s, that of establishing a ‘pantisocracy’, an ideal community based on the tenets of equal government and shared property; if he did, Southey’s descent from the ‘imitable’ advocate of liberty and justice to the paid producer of government propaganda, would, in Shelley’s eyes, have been swift and shocking. The key word in the letter is, perhaps, ‘imitable’;

6 Letters, vol. 1, pp. 174, 191. 7 Letters, vol. 1, p. 208. 8 Kenneth Curry writes that the Quarterly was established in part ‘to counterbalance the defeatist attitude of the Edinburgh Review towards the Peninsular War and to strengthen the hand of the ministry in its determination to wage war against Napoleon’. See Kenneth Curry, Southey (London and Boston, 1975), p. 47.

Coleridge and Shelley

20

Shelley’s disillusionment is personal as well as sociopolitical as he confronts an intellectual idol now tarnished and in possession of human frailties. Yet there is a competing tone in the letter; Shelley’s confident intention to ‘reproach’ Southey for his change of opinion and the rather self-righteous handwringing in his sentiment that all around him falls ‘into the gulph of error’, suggest that the young poet is prepared to do some proselytizing of his own. Such comments may also be an attempt to dilute his continued reverence for Southey to a correspondent to whom Shelley himself wished to remain in a position of intellectual and moral authority. The substance of Shelley’s conversations with Southey when the two poets finally met later that month is reported to Hitchener in a strangely ambivalent mix of justification and censure: You may conjecture that a man must posess [sic] high and estimable qualities, if with the prejudice of such total difference from my sentiments I can regard him great and worthy – In fact Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality; he looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected, and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind; but he is now an advocate for existing establishments; ... Southey ’tho far from being a man of great reasoning powers is a great man. He has all that characterises the poet – great eloquence tho’ obstinacy in opinion which arguments are the last things that can shake. He is a man of virtue, he never will belie what he thinks.9

It is difficult to unpick from this Shelley’s precise opinion of Southey. There is a sense that, in addressing a correspondent to whom he had consistently advocated an adherence to ‘liberty’, Shelley felt obliged to justify his continued conference with Southey subsequent to finding ‘such total difference’ in their respective sentiments regarding this issue. Thus Shelley augments Southey’s stature by ascribing to him characteristics which must indeed be ‘great and worthy’ to suppress, at least temporarily, Shelley’s ‘sickening distrust’ of the votaries of ‘Bigotry Tyranny and Law’. That this is a suppression rather than an appeasement of Shelley’s disquiet, is revealed in his inability to do more than report Southey’s opinions without comment, and to mention his wish for a future perfected state as evidence that ‘Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality’. When Shelley’s comments on Southey become more personal, the same ambivalence towards the elder poet is still in evidence. It is pertinent to Shelley’s own conception of the role that he should imply that ‘obstinacy of opinion’ is a characteristic of the poet. It is possible that in Southey’s opinions, even – perhaps especially – in those he himself cannot share, Shelley saw a prototype of his own struggle: the necessity of holding fast to one’s beliefs even in the face of argument. In retrospect, Shelley may have seen Southey as the epitome of the man whose early opinions were not held strongly enough. The idealism of youth replaced by the obstinate, blinkered vision of conformity and conservatism would stand as a warning to Shelley of the consequences when pressures of society and convention force expediency. If Shelley had the prescience to see his potential future self in Southey, the process was mirrored in the elder poet. On 4 January 1812, Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor Bedford, ‘Here is a man at Keswick, who acts upon me as my own 9

Letters, vol. 1, pp. 211–12.

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ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley.’ Here Southey includes a potted history of Shelley’s life, including his expulsion from Oxford, marriage to ‘a girl of seventeen’, and his estrangement from his father. In response to Shelley’s difficulties, both poetic and practical, Southey concludes: He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good, with 6000l a year.10

That Southey saw himself as an intellectual ‘physician’ to Shelley, and evidently gave him instructions in his reading, suggests a genuine interest on Southey’s part in the young poet. However, the tone of the letter conveys the rather indulgent attitude of the older, worldly-wise man towards the serious, idealistic youth. Such an attitude may help explain Shelley’s rather ambivalent feelings towards Southey as revealed in his letters. Shelley appears to have been willing to embrace Southey’s offer of guidance, and possessed a high enough regard for the poet and his opinion to send him a copy of his Alastor volume in 1816.11 However, the slightly patronizing tone of the letter to Bedford must also have been evident during the conversations between Southey and Shelley, as the comment regarding the two poets’ respective ages is one that Shelley repeats in letters to two correspondents, suggesting that Southey’s wellmeaning but nonetheless condescending tone rather rankled. The first occasion was in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, where Shelley related a disagreement between the two poets regarding politics and morals: Southey says Expediency ought to [be] made the ground of politics but not of morals. I urged that the most fatal error that ever happened in the world was the separation of political and ethical science, that the former ought to be entirely regulated by the latter, ... Southey did not think the reasoning conclusive – he has a very happy knack when truth goes against him of saying, ‘Ah! when you are as old as I am, you will think with me’ – this talent he employed in the above instance.

10 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey (6 vols, London, 1850), vol. 3, pp. 325–6. 11 Shelley’s tone in his covering letter to Southey is respectful and amicable. He writes: ‘Let it be sufficient that, regarding you with admiration as a poet, and with respect as a man, I send you, as an intimation of those sentiments, my first serious attempt to interest the best feelings of the human heart, believing that you have so much general charity as to forget, like me, how widely in moral and political opinions we disagree, and to attribute that difference to better motives than the multitude are disposed to allege as the cause of dissent from their institutions.’ See Letters, vol. 1, pp. 461–2.

22

Coleridge and Shelley

This tone of condescension on the part of Southey, combined with apparently irreconcilable differences between the two poets’ political opinions, seems to have precipitated in Shelley an irreversible sense of disillusionment in the elder poet. He continues to Hitchener that he no longer thinks as highly of Southey as he once did: I do not mean that he is or can be the great character which once I linked him to. His mind is terribly narrow compared to it – Once he was this character, everything you can conceive of practised virtue. – Now he is corrupted by the world, contaminated by Custom; it rends my heart when I think what he might have been. – Wordsworth and Coleridge I have yet to see.12

Shelley cannot quite hide his sense of personal disappointment in Southey. He seems unwilling to believe what his first sentence implies, that Southey simply does not represent the incarnation of Shelley’s ideals. He swiftly qualifies his statement, ‘Once he was this character’, where the emphasis is pertinent in betraying Shelley’s anxiety to assure himself that many of his own political and poetical principles have not been laid on sand. He places the blame for the contraction of Southey’s mind on ‘the world’ and ‘Custom’, and ends on a note of pity, returning in kind the same sort of condescension that Southey had displayed towards him, but a condescension that is perhaps intended to mask some of his genuine disappointed disillusionment: ‘it rends my heart when I think what he might have been’.13 Shelley seems in this letter ready to look for a new mentor; Southey is swiftly dismissed, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge I have yet to see’. A meeting between Coleridge and Shelley is, as Michael O’Neill has recently expressed, a ‘bewitching scenario’ which, unfortunately, never happened.14 In later life, Coleridge himself expressed regret that he ‘did never meet with Shelley’. Comments made by Coleridge subsequent to Shelley’s death suggest that the respect which the younger poet had for the work of the elder was, to a certain extent, reciprocated. The Table Talk comments arose from Coleridge’s expressed admiration for Shelley’s translation of parts of Goethe’s Faust, and articulate more generally his belief that ‘there are flashes of the true spirit to be met with’ in Shelley’s work. His comments also provide a telling gloss on Coleridge’s own assessment of the likely influence of Southey on the young Shelley: Poor Shelley, it is a pity I often think that I never met with him. I could have done him good. He went to Keswick on purpose to see me and unfortunately fell in with Southey

12 Letters, vol. 1, p. 223. 13 It is interesting that Southey himself later adopted a very similar tone towards Shelley as Shelley here exhibits towards him. Writing to a correspondent in 1838 of the ‘the most frightful tragedy’ of Shelley’s life, Southey comments: ‘I took a great liking to him, believed (most erroneously as it proved) that he would outgrow all his extravagances, that his heart would bring him right, and that the difference between us was that at that time he was just nineteen and I was eight and thirty.’ See New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (2 vols, New York and London, 1965), vol. 2, p. 474. 14 Michael O’Neill, ‘The Gleam of Those Words: Coleridge and Shelley’, K–SR, 19 (2005), 76–96, (p. 76).

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instead. There could have been nothing so unfortunate. Southey had no understanding for a toleration of such principles as Shelley’s. I should have laughed at his Atheism. I could have sympathised with him and shown him that I did so. I could have shown him that I had once been in the same state myself, and I could have guided him through it. I have often bitterly regretted in my heart of hearts that I did never meet with Shelley. 15

Although Coleridge’s comments initially imply that Shelley’s association with Southey could be characterized as that of an impressionable schoolboy who ‘fell in’ with a bad crowd, the overwhelming tone of the remarks is one of empathy. Coleridge regrets the lost opportunity to offer sympathy and guidance, and his words suggest a felt affinity for the young poet in his philosophical endeavours. Although one wonders whether Shelley would have appreciated having his atheism ‘laughed at’, Coleridge paints himself here, in contrast to Southey, as one who could understand and tolerate opinions which diverged from his own. As we shall see in the following chapter, Shelley’s portraits of Coleridge in his later poetry are marked by a similar sense of loss and wasted potential; both poets seem to express intense regret that the other has in some way taken a wrong turn which has prevented the full flowering of his creative abilities. Yet, like Coleridge’s comments in Table Talk, Shelley’s portraits of the elder poet are characterized primarily by respect, sympathy and a desire to understand. However, in 1812 it did not take Shelley long to outgrow the ministrations of his one existing ‘Lake’ mentor. By the time he repeated Southey’s comment about the only difference between them being their respective ages to another addressee in January 1812, he had hardened his heart. Southey is ‘now the servile champion of every abuse and absurdity ... I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr. S’s proselyte’.16 Here the correspondent is significant. Disillusioned by Southey, and finding Wordsworth and Coleridge unforthcoming, Shelley was to address his hopes and present his plans to a new ‘great character’: the philosopher William Godwin. Shelley’s change of allegiance from Southey to Godwin is evident in a letter of 16 January to Elizabeth Hitchener. Godwin has answered Shelley’s letters, ‘and he is now my friend’. Shelley continues, ‘I think he is old, but age with Godwin must be but the perfecting of his abilities, but the fruit of that blossom that unfolded itself so beautifully in adolescence!’, where the emphasis seems to draw an implied comparison with Southey. Godwin has remained loyal to the tenets of his youth in a way that Southey has not. Later in the same letter Shelley quotes from one of Southey’s articles in the Edinburgh Annual Register, disgusted at the ‘abominable flattery and horrible lie’ of Southey’s pro-monarchical, conservative stance. Announcing his decision to go to Ireland, Shelley concludes, ‘Southeys [sic] conversation has lost its charm, except it be the charm of horror, at so hateful a prostitution of talents’. Writing the following month of his departure from Keswick, Shelley is able to assert that ‘I passed Southeys [sic] house without one sting’.17 15 CCW, vol. 14, I, p. 574. 16 Letters, vol. 1, p. 231. 17 Letters, vol. 1, pp. 232–3, 249.

24

Coleridge and Shelley

In fairness to Southey, Shelley admitted that the elder poet had granted him great hospitality and ‘it is to be confessed that to see him in his family, to behold him in his domestic circle he appears in a most amiable light’.18 For Southey’s part, his interest in the young poet appears if slightly indulgent, certainly genuine. Writing to Charles Danvers in 1812 of Shelley’s appearance at Keswick, Southey’s tone consists of a mixture of humour and genuine affection when describing Shelley’s publication of The Necessity of Atheism: ‘For happening to have a great deal of genius, a great deal of enthusiasm, and high notions of sincerity and virtue he thought that having discovered truths of such infinite utility to mankind it was his bounden duty to disseminate them’. Southey’s account of Shelley concludes, ‘To tell you all the odd things about him would fill a larger sheet than I have allowd [sic] myself for this whole letter’.19 Although later relations between the two men were to become highly antagonistic in the light of Southey’s increasing disapproval of Shelley’s lifestyle, particularly subsequent to his separation from Harriet and her eventual suicide, and Shelley’s unshakeable belief that Southey was responsible for some caustic reviews of his own work and that of Leigh Hunt, their association at Keswick seems to have been cordial. However, despite the amiability of Southey’s private character, Shelley was unable to reconcile himself to the elder man’s political views. He and Southey were never to meet again. Aside from altering his opinion about Southey, the time spent in Keswick and his visits to Greta Hall had further significance for Shelley in the development of his poetry. From this period, Shelley began to acquire a sustained interest in the work of both Wordsworth and Coleridge which was to continue throughout his life. Southey’s library at Greta Hall was extensive, and Shelley certainly had some access to its contents, as Southey’s own comment about having put the young poet ‘upon a course of Berkeley’ implies. In his Life of Shelley, Thomas Jefferson Hogg suggests that this access may have been limited. Hogg recalls an anecdote, presumably related by Shelley, that although Southey’s ‘dismal house’ was lined with books, the handling of them was not encouraged: ‘I took out some volume one day, as I was going downstairs with him. Southey looked at me, as if he was displeased, so I put it back again instantly, and I never ventured to take down one of his books another time. I used to glance my eye eagerly over the backs of the books, and read their titles, as I went up or down stairs. I could not help doing so, but I think that he did not quite approve of it.’20

According to Hogg, Southey was happy to let Shelley examine any book he himself had removed from the shelves, but Shelley found these volumes largely uninteresting, and condemned much of Southey’s knowledge as derivative: ‘“he was not so much a man as a living common-place book, a talking album filled with long extracts from long-forgotten authors on unimportant subjects”’, Hogg recalls Shelley

18 Letters, vol. 1, p. 223. 19 Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 2, p. 20–21. 20 Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Edward Dowden (London and New York, 1906), p. 291.

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21

pronouncing. It is hard, however, to be certain of the accuracy of Hogg’s account of Shelley’s access to Southey’s books. Whilst we also have Hogg to thank for the anecdote of Shelley’s liking for Mrs Southey’s teacakes (after overcoming his initial disgust at the indulgence), and the story of Shelley falling asleep during Southey’s recitation of The Curse of Kehama (surely unlikely, given Shelley’s long admiration of the text), we should also bear in mind Hogg’s general unreliability, particularly at this stage in his memoir. Hogg had been deliberately excluded from the Shelleys’ trip to Keswick after Harriet informed her husband of Hogg’s unwanted sexual attentions towards her. Shelley’s letters to Hogg from Keswick are full of recrimination and disappointment in his friend, and precipitate an eventual cessation in communication between the two which was to last for a year. Hogg’s unreliability as a biographer is revealed in his shameless doctoring of these letters when he included them in his Life. In order to expunge any suggestion of wrongdoing on his part, and indeed to conceal any evidence of an estrangement between himself and Shelley, Hogg removed all references to his attempted seduction of Harriet. Furthermore, Hogg concedes that he had no idea of how Shelley and Southey came to meet, and that his knowledge of this period of Shelley’s life is sketchy.22 As regards Shelley’s access to Southey’s books, Southey certainly seems to have been protective about his library; Kenneth Curry writes that he ‘had the true collector’s regard for his books and took care to preserve as closely as possible their pristine, clean condition’.23 If this is the case then it is perhaps a mark of Southey’s interest in and liking for Shelley at this time that prior to their departure for Ireland Harriet Shelley wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener that she was ‘reading a new thing written after the Revolution ... Southey has lent them to us’.24 However, exposure to Southey’s library may help explain a number of references in Shelley’s later letters, and in Mary Shelley’s journal, to works by Coleridge to which it is puzzling to see how he could otherwise have had access. Writing to Byron in September 1816, Shelley exhorts him to ‘be persuaded with Coleridge that “Hope is a most awful duty, the nurse of all other virtues”’. In a letter of October 1819, Shelley repeats the comment, in a modified form, to Maria Gisborne, again attributing it to Coleridge.25 In his notes to the Letters, Jones points out that the phrase ‘How awful a duty does not hope become’ occurs in the Coleridge–Southey collaboration Omniana, but in a passage not included in the 1812 edition of the work or in any published form until Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Literary Remains in 1836.26 If Shelley had seen Omniana in manuscript, under Southey’s instruction whilst at Greta Hall, he may have had the opportunity to study passages which did not appear in the published work. Furthermore, if Southey had informed him that this portion

21 Hogg, Life, p. 292. 22 Hogg, Life, pp. 290–301. 23 Curry, Southey, p. 45. 24 Letters, vol. 1, p. 241. 25 See Letters, vol. 1, p. 504, and vol. 2, p. 125. 26 Letters, vol. 2, p. 125n. In Shelley and His Circle, Donald Reiman supports Jones’s view by confidently attributing Shelley’s remark to a memory of Omniana. See SC, vol. 7, p. 11.

26

Coleridge and Shelley

of the work was Coleridge’s, this may explain why in future Shelley was to attribute the remark to Coleridge alone. The phrase occurs in a section of manuscript entitled ‘Hope in Humanity’, and contains sentiments which would have been likely to attract Shelley, proposing that the happiness of man would be increased if he became ‘suddenly convinced, vitally convinced, of the truth of the blessed system of hope and confidence in reason and humanity!’. Coleridge continues, ‘How awful a duty does not hope become! What a nurse, yea, mother of all other the fairest virtues! We despair of others’ goodness, and thence are ourselves bad.’27 However, another possible source for Shelley’s characterization of hope as a ‘most awful duty’ has been proposed by Charles E. Robinson: Coleridge’s weekly paper The Friend, published between June 1809 and March 1810. Robinson identifies a passage in No. 5 (14 September 1809), where Coleridge writes ‘What an awful Duty, what a Nurse of all other, the fairest Virtues, does not hope become!’. Robinson goes on to cite other instances in the letters of Shelley and his circle which suggest a knowledge of Coleridge’s paper, in particular the long recognized echoes of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, which can be explained when we consider that Coleridge’s poem was printed in No. 11 of The Friend.28 Further evidence that Shelley had certainly read, and in all probability possessed a copy of The Friend, is to be found in Mary Godwin’s journal entry for 6 January 1815: ‘S. reads Ode to France and repeats the poem to tranquility’.29 Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Tranquillity’ had first appeared in the Morning Post of 4 December 1801, but was not incorporated in any edition of his works until Sibylline Leaves of 1817. The poem did, however, appear in the first issue of The Friend of 1 June 1809. Both Southey and William Calvert were subscribers. Shelley was clearly attracted to Coleridge’s characterization of hope as an obligation for humanity, a necessary bedrock for all other virtues. The closing lines of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, composed around the same period that Shelley repeated Coleridge’s words to Maria Gisborne, elaborate upon this notion in Demogorgon’s final exhortation to humanity: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (IV, 570–74)30

Whether it is possible to detect the direct influence of Coleridge here is debatable; what is clearly suggested however is an affinity in thinking between the two writers. The necessity of hope and consequent faith in humanity’s ability to overcome and

27 The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1917), pp. 381–2. 28 See Charles E. Robinson, ‘The Shelley Circle and Coleridge’s The Friend’, ELN, 8 (1971), 269–74; The Friend in CCW, vol. 4, II, p. 70. 29 See Mary Jnl, vol. 1, p. 59. 30 PS, vol. 2, p. 648.

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renew is a founding tenet of ‘Prometheus Unbound’. Even as early as 1812, we can observe Shelley grappling in his poetry with the various manifestations of ‘tyranny’ which he perceives in the world around him, and searching for a means of articulating the method of humanity’s escape from these ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. At this stage in his career, however, it is in the expression of the problem, rather than in the positing of a solution where Shelley is indebted to the poetry of Coleridge. In early 1812 two poems by Coleridge, which it seems likely that Shelley read during his visits to Greta Hall, influenced his immediate poetic output. The first was ‘The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad’, a version of which Shelley included in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of mid-January 1812, and then revised and extended during his time in Ireland. The poem is a clear imitation of the Coleridge–Southey collaboration ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, and narrates a day in the life of Beelzebub as he visits the earth and admires humankind’s apparently unconscious obedience to his creed. The Coleridge–Southey version allows for a great deal of satirical jibing at, amongst others, lawyers, English prisons, the slave trade and Methodists. As Cameron has suggested, Shelley adopts this ‘general plan’ but ‘brings the matter up to date’, targeting for instance the war against France, rather than the slave trade.31 Much of Shelley’s imitation of the earlier version of the poem is simple appropriation; for example, he clearly admired in particular Coleridge’s stanza: He saw a lawyer killing a viper On the dunghill beside his stable; Oh – oh; quoth he, for it put him in mind Of the story of Cain and Abel. ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ (13–16)32

as he incorporated it, with very little alteration, in his own version.33 In this respect, Shelley appears to be attempting deliberately to situate himself within a tradition of radical poetry, reanimating and updating the existing satire. Morton D. Paley has commented that much of what he characterizes as Shelley’s early ‘apocalyptic’ poetry demonstrates a desire ‘to forge links with the radicalism of the previous generation’ and identifies this drive to construct a continuum between past and present as ‘frequently a strong and important motive’ in Shelley’s work.34 Expanding his poem in Ireland, Shelley published ‘The Devil’s Walk’ as a broadsheet, and set about distributing it. Cameron notes the potential irony that ‘Southey may have inadvertently given Shelley his first lesson in expressing a radical creed in an extended literary medium’, and comments on ‘The Devil’s Walk’ that ‘the poem is deliberately written in the loose, over-simplified style of the political ballads of the time, and, although it lacks the cohesive sparkle of the best works of the genre, it is an effective piece of mass political propaganda’.35 Shelley’s Satan is pleased 31 Cameron, Young Shelley, p. 115. 32 All references to ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ are to CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 560–67. 33 See ‘The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad’, ll. 84–7 in PS, vol. 1, pp. 230–37. 34 Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999; repr. 2003), p. 220. 35 Cameron, Young Shelley, pp. 113–16.

28

Coleridge and Shelley

with what he sees on earth, remarking that his ‘Cattle’ will ‘dine on news of human blood,/ They sup on the groans of dying and dead’ (47–8), an image which Shelley proceeds to expand over a number of stanzas. Much of Shelley’s expansion of the poem results from the elaboration of such imagery – as C. Darrel Sheraw remarks, it becomes the ‘controlling metaphor’ of the poem36 – arguably to the point of selfindulgence. For this reason, as Paley comments, the final effect of Shelley’s verse suffers in comparison to its source: What made ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ such a success was its coolness. It scored points by being genuinely funny, … Shelley started out by imitating its method, but when he more than doubled the size of his ‘Ballad’ most of what he introduced was straightforward rhetorical denunciation and invective that weakened the effect of his satire.37

Many of Shelley’s poems of a political nature during this period are characterized by such ‘rhetorical denunciation and invective’. The impulse to curse ‘tyrants’ and ‘tyranny’ is often indulged at the expense of fostering a vision of how such structures could be overturned. However, some poems, of which ‘Falsehood and Vice: A Dialogue’, written during his visit to Dublin in early 1812, is an example, show Shelley still developing the imagery of consumption and excess characteristic of ‘The Devil’s Walk’, but also suggest the direction his political poetry would take in his later work. It is perhaps significant that in ‘Falsehood and Vice’ Shelley is once again engaging directly with a poem by Coleridge which he almost certainly encountered during his visits to Greta Hall. On 8 January 1798 the Morning Post published Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue’. The poem’s location is ‘a desolated Tract in la Vendée’, and its substance is a dialogue between the three allegorical figures of the title. In an incantation reminiscent of the witches’ chants in Macbeth, Fire, Famine and Slaughter relate the various forms of misery which they have inflicted upon humankind under the influence of Prime Minister William Pitt, Coleridge’s very earthly substitution for Shakespeare’s Hecate. ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ was reprinted in the Annual Anthology of 1800, a publication which appeared for two years, devised and edited by Southey, containing short poems contributed by himself and his friends. It seems likely, as Cameron notes, that Shelley encountered the poem in this edition during his time in Keswick.38 It is clear that Shelley had read the poem by the period 1815 to early 1816, as both ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ and Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ were transcribed by Mary Shelley during this period, almost certainly from memory.39 The indebtedness of ‘Falsehood and Vice’ to Coleridge’s ‘War Eclogue’, 36 C. Darrel Sheraw, ‘Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and the Devil’, K–SMB, 23 (1972), 6–9, (pp. 7–8). 37 Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, p. 224. 38 See Shelley, The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (London, 1964), pp. 183–5. 39 See SC, vol. 7, pp. 8–12 for Donald Reiman’s commentary on these transcriptions. Reiman demonstrates that substantial variants between the transcripts and the printed texts of the poems to which the Shelleys would have had access at this time imply the poems were copied out either from memory or as Shelley recited them. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin

Cultivating the Topos

29 40

which was first observed by C.D. Locock in 1911, consists of more than merely similarities in subject matter. In addition to the use of allegorical figures and a dialogue form, Shelley follows Coleridge in adopting the incantatory rhythms of the tetrameter line as he develops the dialogue between his protagonists. Morton Paley has described ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ as an ‘apocalyptic satire’ and ‘one of Coleridge’s most aggressive political fantasies’.41 Part of the power of this satire is achieved by the way that Coleridge compels the potentially abstract personifications of Fire, Famine and Slaughter to carry contemporary relevance through his invocation of Pitt and via the barely concealed allusion to recent historical events and the current political climate. The scene for this dramatic exchange is that of the failed, English-backed attempt by royalist forces to invade la Vendée in 1796, and the initial date of the poem’s publication in the Morning Post of 8 January 1798 indicates a response to the passage of Pitt’s war taxes through Parliament. Coleridge’s poem is a satirical reaction to a specific political situation; as the three protagonists detail their exploits, particular abuses by the Pitt administration in recent political and military history become if not explicit, certainly implied. To an extent, Coleridge’s adherence to the implicit intensifies the bite of his satire; as Paley notes of the similarity between the three sisters’ reluctance to name Pitt, (repeating instead ‘Letters four do form his name’), and ‘those dashes used in the eighteenth century satirical tradition’ in place of the name of the target of the satire, such apparent evasiveness serves ‘not to obscure but to identify’.42 As with the witches of Macbeth, Fire, Famine and Slaughter compare achievements, yet recoil from mentioning the name of ‘Pitt’, the implied instigator of their activities. By the end of the poem however, Famine and Slaughter appear ready to turn on their master, with only Fire asserting ‘I alone am faithful’, until the ironic twist of her final words ‘I/ Cling to him everlastingly’ (80–81).43 ‘Falsehood and Vice’ imitates ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ in establishing a dialogue between personified evils, each of which attempts to outdo the other in terms of the gravity of misfortune which their activity inflicts upon humanity. This dialogue is prefaced by a stanza in a different voice of unknown provenance. The function of these lines is similar to that of a chorus in a drama – to establish the scene and introduce the protagonists – yet the voice does not retain the objectivity of a chorus, quickly becoming associative in imagery and condemnatory in tone:

Everest conjecture a date of February–March 1812 for Shelley’s composition of ‘Falsehood and Vice’, during his visit to Dublin, immediately subsequent to his stay in Keswick. See PS, vol. 1, pp. 211–15. All references to ‘Falsehood and Vice’ are to this edition. 40 See The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. C. D. Locock (2 vols, London, 1911), vol. 2, p. 553. 41 Morton D. Paley, ‘Coleridge and the Apocalyptic Grotesque’ in Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (eds), Coleridge’s Visionary Languages (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 15–25 (p. 16). 42 Paley, ‘Coleridge and the Apocalyptic Grotesque’, p. 17. 43 All references to ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ are to CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 428–44.

30

Coleridge and Shelley Whilst monarchs laughed upon their thrones To hear a famished nation’s groans, And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe That makes its eyes and veins o’erflow, – Those thrones, high built upon the heaps Of bones where frenzied famine sleeps, Where slavery wields her scourge of iron Red with mankind’s unheeded gore, And war’s mad fiends the scene environ, Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar, There Vice and Falsehood took their stand, High raised above the unhappy land.

‘Falsehood and Vice’ (1–12)

Aside from the excessively gothic imagery, the structure of the stanza reveals that the stance of its voice is not an impartial one. The opening ‘Whilst’ should have the effect of subordinating the clauses which follow, creating a rapid movement through them until the main subject is reached. However, the extent of this voice’s involvement in and condemnation of the conditions which permitted the emergence of Falsehood and Vice causes an associative movement from image to image, as if the poem’s voice becomes side-tracked, driven by its ever increasing anger towards the situation it describes. Shelley’s gothic language has the initial effect of expressing outrage at the state of this ‘unhappy land’. The ‘monarchs’ are not merely passive spectators to a country’s ruin, but are actively enjoying the carnage; their laughter is predicated upon the ‘famished nation’s groans’, where the rather unsubtle rhyme with ‘thrones’ explicitly contrasts the opulence of the oppressor with the physical pain of the oppressed. Such juxtaposition guides the structure of the opening stanza, with the effect of establishing a dichotomy between tyranny and oppression, vice and trampled virtue. As Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest point out, one of Shelley’s sources for the image of thrones built from human bones may be Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum, where ‘The Temple of Despotism, ... is built of human skulls and cemented with human blood’;44 the victims of tyranny are eternally silenced and literally incorporated into the power structures which support oppression. Shelley’s elaboration of the image via allusions to ‘frenzied famine’ and ‘war’s mad fiends’ may also suggest that he was recalling lines spoken by Famine herself in Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’: ‘I stood in a swampy field of battle;/ With bones and skulls I made a rattle’ (30–31). If we recall Paley’s comments about Shelley’s tendency towards ‘rhetorical denunciation and invective’ in ‘The Devil’s Walk’, we can observe a similar problem developing in the opening lines of ‘Falsehood and Vice’, where Shelley creates a number of difficulties for himself which conspire to temper the revolutionary bite of the poem. The anger that can be seen in the increasingly gory gothic imagery is directed at tyranny as a whole; the ‘monarchs’ remain unidentified, as does the ‘nation’ which they oppress. Exactly what form of ‘slavery wields her scourge’ is unclear; the term appears to be used in a generic sense to incorporate the full spectrum of physical and 44 See PS, vol. 1, p. 212n; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum (Oxford and New York, 1992), p. 22.

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31

political oppression, and ‘war’s mad fiends’ is both unspecific in its target and rather clichéd in its phrasing. It is clear that ‘mankind’ generally is the victim here, and Shelley uses the rest of the poem to attempt to show how Falsehood and Vice have brought things to this state. Whilst in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ Coleridge is able to overcome the potential difficulties of employing allegorical figures in a political poem by allying his personifications to specific political individuals and events, the targets of Shelley’s poem tend to remain vague, rather hackneyed conceptions of evil, and his excessively gothic descriptions serve to remove the abuses he describes even further from reality. It is from this atmosphere of rather generalized tyranny and oppression that the figures of Falsehood and Vice emerge. Falsehood’s opening lines are marked by images of consumption akin to those of ‘The Devil’s Walk’: Brother! arise from the dainty fare Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow; A finer feast for thy hungry ear Is the news that I bring of human woe.

(13–16)

Shelley effects a deceleration in the pace of the poem by shifting from the hectic rhythms of the iambic tetrameter to alternate nine and ten syllable lines, where the effect of an acceleration followed by a pause in the anapaestic feet allows the reader’s focus to fall upon the stressed monosyllables, ‘toiled’, ‘bled’, ‘feast’ and ‘woe’, thus continuing the dichotomy of the opulence of the tyrants and the pain of the oppressed first established in the opening stanza. It is possible that Shelley here imitates Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ explicitly. The section of Coleridge’s poem which involves Famine making ‘a rattle’ with human bones on the battlefield reads in full: the men have bled, Their wives and their children faint for bread. I stood in a swampy field of battle; With bones and skulls I made a rattle, To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow And the homeless dog – but they would not go. So off I flew: for how could I bear To see them gorge their dainty fare? ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (28–35)

Shelley’s ‘thousands have toiled and bled’ echoes Coleridge’s ‘the men have bled’, and the younger poet appropriates both the language and context of the phrase ‘dainty fare’ to describe how human suffering provides fuel for the oppressors. In the affinity between Shelley’s use of such images of consumption and Coleridge’s conception of Famine’s inability to bear watching the scavengers pick off the remnants of the battlefield, we see Shelley unable to achieve the subtlety of his source. There is a dark humour in Coleridge’s vision of Famine’s phobic aversion to consumption in any form; Shelley incorporates Coleridge’s images only to increase the effect of gothic horror in his poem and to contribute to his creation of a diametric opposition between the oppressors and the oppressed.

32

Coleridge and Shelley

Both ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ and ‘Falsehood and Vice’ depend heavily for their form as well as their content on the Witches’ dialogue in Act 1 scene 3 of Macbeth, where the Weird sisters challenge one other to provide details of their success in wreaking havoc upon the earthly world. The tetrameter line which provides the Witches’ speeches with their incantatory rhythms is a likely source for Coleridge’s use of the metre in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. Whilst Shelley may simply be echoing Coleridge’s metre in ‘Falsehood and Vice’, he certainly knew and enjoyed the Witches’ dialogues. Newman Ivey White cites evidence from a school friend of Shelley’s at Eton who recalls Shelley singing the Witches’ songs, therefore it seems highly likely he recognized and exploited Coleridge’s source.45 The tetrameter line is an effective form for the sort of satire which Coleridge wishes to create in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’; the shorter metrical line concentrates the effect of the prevalent rhyming couplets, creating what Carl Woodring has referred to as a ‘tetrameter jog’, which lends ‘additional dread to the total unholiness’, establishing the verse as ‘a rite for destroying one’s enemy’.46 In appropriating the form of speech of Macbeth’s Witches, both Coleridge and Shelley seem to be attempting to produce a spell-like incantation. In Coleridge’s case, this incantation can, crucially, be used to make something happen; just as the Witches’ brew will produce its desired effects, Coleridge envisages the destruction of Pitt by the very forces of evil which he has so long controlled. In Shelley’s case however, his verse is largely descriptive of the evils already perpetrated by Falsehood and Vice. In his later work, particularly ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Shelley was to reflect again on the nature of the spell or incantation, seeking ways to harness its magic. In 1812 however, if his employment of the tetrameter line has any power to make something happen, it is only to evoke the evil consequences of Falsehood and Vice’s dominion over the earth, not to offer an alternative spell to counteract their power. However, Macbeth may also have influenced ‘Falsehood and Vice’ in a manner that allows Shelley at least to imply the existence of an antidote to the poison administered by his allegorical protagonists. In Falsehood’s response to Vice’s question ‘what hast thou done/ To compare ... with me?’ (18–19), we can see Shelley using Macbeth to imply that the omnipotence of Falsehood and Vice is not unassailable: What have I done! – I have torn the robe From baby truth’s unsheltered form, And round the desolated globe Borne safely the bewildering charm: My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor Have bound the fearless innocent, And streams of fertilizing gore Flow from her bosom’s hideous rent, Which this unfailing dagger gave... I dread that blood! – no more – this day Is ours, though her eternal ray Must shine upon our grave.

(21–32)

45 Newman Ivey White, Shelley (2 vols, New York, 1940), vol. 2, p. 495. 46 Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison, 1961), pp. 130, 133.

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33

Here Shelley introduces an opposing personification in the figure of ‘baby truth’, from whom Falsehood has appropriated the external appearance, or ‘robe’, in order to traverse the ‘desolated globe’ wreaking havoc by propagating lies in the form of truth. Superficially, truth seems to be powerless against Falsehood; depicted as an entity of enormous fragility, she is a ‘baby’, isolated and ‘unsheltered’. However, that she remains a ‘fearless innocent’, even whilst ‘bound’ by ‘tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor’ imbues this apparently powerless personification with an element of strength and durability in the face of tyranny. Shelley may have adapted this technique from Shakespeare, specifically from Macbeth’s speech of Act I scene 7 where he sees, with prescient clarity, what the ramifications of Duncan’s murder will be: his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind.47

Pity, as a ‘naked new-born babe’ is, like Shelley’s ‘baby truth’, accorded innocence, purity and fragility. However, as the image accumulates and develops, Macbeth’s fear of the inherent strength of this human emotion is clear. The active purpose inherent in pity ‘Striding the blast’ provides a visual image of something powerful, resolute and capable of overcoming adversity. Macbeth exhibits a tragic awareness of the potential power of this apparently fragile human emotion; disseminated by ‘the sightless couriers of the air’, pity spreads like fire, to the extent that human tears ‘shall drown the wind’. Here pity is not an isolated abstraction; its diffusion is associated with humanity – the ‘horrid deed’ will be blown in ‘every eye’ – and the extent of its power by the end of this image implies how the cumulative generation of pity amongst humankind results in a power which can ‘drown the wind’. Shelley may be attempting to imitate this concept of spontaneous propagation when ‘baby truth’ is described by Falsehood as releasing ‘streams of fertilizing gore/ ... from her bosom’s hideous rent’. Initially this ‘gore’ may seem allied to the images of consumption earlier in the poem; an emission of misery which feeds Falsehood’s power. Yet Falsehood pauses to ponder upon the image he has created before retreating from it, apparently in fear: ‘I dread that blood!’, where yet another echo of Macbeth, in this case the ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ speech of Act II, scene 1 is in evidence. A wounded truth may produce more truths, which will ‘fertilize’ the consciousness of humanity, fomenting opposition to all that Falsehood embodies.48 47 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, vii, 18–25 in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1988; repr. 1995). 48 This transformation of an image of destruction to one of fertilization and dissemination is clearly observable in Shelley’s later poetry. In ‘Ode to the West Wind’ the ‘leaves dead’ and ‘winged seeds … Each like a corpse within its grave’ form part of the natural cycle of death

34

Coleridge and Shelley

Although Falsehood attempts to compose himself, he is still forced to admit that ‘her [truth’s] eternal ray/ Must shine upon our grave’ in an acknowledgement, similar to that of Macbeth, of the unconquerable nature of a virtuous emotion or concept when distributed amongst humankind. Shelley’s lines present the possibility of human redemption, and identify the source of that redemption as humanity itself. This is a belief which will be developed in Shelley’s later poetry, yet in ‘Falsehood and Vice’ it remains just a distant possibility. In 1812, Shelley seems to be more interested in recounting where humankind has got it wrong, rather than how this state of affairs might be redressed. When Vice asserts that Falsehood would never have had the opportunity to assume the shape of truth and pass unregarded amongst mankind had Vice not already ‘to those hateful sons of heaven/ GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER given’ (39–40), as the capitalisation suggests, Vice’s bequests to humanity are treated as merely abstract concepts, gift-wrapped and complete. Precisely how Vice is involved in the creation of such structures, and how they in turn contribute to the destruction of humanity, is not elaborated upon. Shelley attempts to overcome this difficulty and thus establish connections between the gothic horror of the world of Falsehood and Vice and the actual earthly world in a passage concerning religion which may be specifically indebted to Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. Falsehood boasts: I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth; She smothered Reason’s babes in their birth; But dreaded their mother’s eye severe, – So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear, And loosed her bloodhounds from the den . . . They started from dreams of slaughtered men, And by the light of her poison eye Did her work o’er the wide earth frightfully.

‘Falsehood and Vice’ (49–56)

In his characterization of religion as a crocodile, Shelley appears to be making a number of allusions. Firstly, according to legend, the crocodile weeps whilst devouring its prey, and as such has become a symbol of hypocrisy. It is an image to which Shelley was to return in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ of 1819. This poem describes a procession of allegorical figures who are disguised as members of the government: Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown; His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to millstones as they fell. And the little children, who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them. Clothed with the Bible, as with light, followed by dispersal and regeneration which the poet hopes to apply as a metaphor to the future life of his own words. See SPP, pp. 221–3.

Cultivating the Topos And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by.

35

‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (14–25)49

One of the reasons that ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ is a satire with far more contemporary relevance than ‘Falsehood and Vice’ is due to Shelley’s use here of specific political figures and his alliance of each to a particular form of vice. It is possible to see how images and ideas from the earlier poem are developed more successfully in the later one. Characterizing religion as a crocodile in ‘Falsehood and Vice’ Shelley is able to associate institutionalized religion with hypocrisy, but the connection remains undeveloped; in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ however, Shelley is simultaneously more subtle and more explicit. The vices Shelley details are made human and relevant by appearing in the form of well-known politicians; it is significant that, for instance, Fraud looks like Eldon rather than the other way around. The actions of Fraud and Hypocrisy are joined together in Shelley’s manipulation of the image of the crocodile weeping whilst it eats its prey. Eldon appears to weep rather like the crocodile – there is an ironic edge to Shelley’s ‘for he wept well’ – yet his tears turn to millstones, and the ‘little children’, mistaking the stones for gems, (perhaps a symbolic image of the public’s mistake in accepting false compassion as true), promptly ‘Had their brains knocked out by them’. The following image turns to Hypocrisy, as Sidmouth, who is ‘Clothed with the Bible’ and riding on the crocodile itself. Shelley’s ultimate stance has not changed a great deal from the earlier poem to the later one; both use the symbol of hypocrisy as a crocodile, and both incorporate the idea of that hypocrisy being religious. However, in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ Eldon’s ‘big tears’ which ‘Turned to mill-stones as they fell’ alludes more explicitly to the leviathan of Job 41. 24 in a way which enriches the evocation of Shelley’s allegorical creations: ‘His heart is as firm as stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.’50 However, two pieces of information suggest that Shelley’s extended description of the havoc which Falsehood’s daughter Religion causes on earth may be intended to have specific contemporary relevance. The first is that ‘Falsehood and Vice’ was probably written during Shelley’s visit to Dublin in 1812, where he had limited success as a public speaker, reciting material from his political pamphlet An Address to the Irish People to a meeting of the Catholic Committee;51 the second is the debt Shelley’s poem owes to Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. Shelley’s description of the progression of religion over ‘the wide earth’ is as follows: 49 SPP, pp. 301–310 (p. 302). 50 Morton Paley identifies in this image a more ‘macabre’ biblical echo of Jesus and the little children in Matthew 18. 6, where Jesus proclaims, ‘But whoso offends one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea’. Paley comments that in Shelley’s vision, horrifically, ‘the millstone that was to punish the transgressor against the child is what causes the child’s destruction’. See Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 241–2. Shelley’s allusion may also extend to Hobbes’s appropriation of the image of the leviathan to signify complete sovereign power in his treatise The Leviathan of 1651. 51 See Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, pp. 124–6; Paul O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland (London and Dublin, 2002), pp. 89–109.

36

Coleridge and Shelley The dreadful stench of her torches’ flare, Fed with human fat, polluted the air: The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries Of the many-mingling miseries, As on she trod, ascended high And trumpeted my victory! –

‘Falsehood and Vice’ (57–62)

The lines retain the rather unrestrained sense of gothic horror which Shelley has employed throughout the poem, but gain a certain immediacy due to their appeal to the senses. The only visual detail is that of the torches; more evocative is the smell of ‘human fat’ which feeds those torches and the cacophony of human misery expressed in ‘The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries’. The lines create a sense of disorder in darkness, perhaps appropriate in describing religion’s reign in a land devoid of the light of reason, one that is forced to operate on blind faith and fear. This spread of religion is not unlike Fire’s own description of her passage across Ireland in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’: Sisters! I from Ireland came! Hedge and corn-fields all on flame, I triumphed o’er the setting sun! And all the while the work was done, On as I strode with my huge strides, I flung back my head and I held my sides, It was so rare a piece of fun To see the sweltered cattle run With uncouth gallop through the night, Scared by the red and noisy light! By the light of his own cot Was many a naked Rebel shot.

‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (46–57)

Coleridge’s satirical critique of Pitt’s bloody quelling of rebellious uprisings in Ireland may lie behind Shelley’s attempt to evoke the effects of a similar religious tyranny in the same country over a decade later. Shelley’s impetus to visit Ireland and to write An Address to the Irish People was a sympathy with the cause of Catholic emancipation, and an antipathy towards the English government’s Act of Union. The Address itself, whilst directed at the Irish Catholics, is very clear to point out that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism have ‘always been characterized by the mildness of benevolence which Jesus Christ recommended’.52 It seems possible that Shelley may have had religious divisions in Ireland particularly in mind when he described the ‘crocodile’ religion’s passage across the earth. There are certain verbal parallels between that section of Shelley’s poem and Fire’s account of her activities in Ireland in Coleridge’s work. There is a similar implicit evocation of disordered noise and of darkness alleviated only by flames; the cattle are ‘Scared by the red and noisy light’. The passage of fire in Coleridge’s poem and that of religion in Shelley’s are each referred to as ‘work’, and both protagonists accomplish the task in a dauntless and gleeful manner: Fire ‘strode’ on with ‘huge strides’, whilst 52 See Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, 1954), pp. 39–59, (pp. 56–7).

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Falsehood relates religion’s passage ‘on she trod, ascended high/ And trumpeted my victory!’. In both poems a similar manipulation of metre contributes to the relentless pace of the verse, mirroring formally the inexorable progression of the protagonists. Another echo which suggests Shelley may have paid particular attention to this section of Coleridge’s poem comes immediately after Falsehood’s speech. Asked to respond in kind to his brother’s exploits, Vice opens his following speech with the assertion ‘I have extinguished the noon-day sun’, perhaps a direct echo of Fire’s earlier proclamation, ‘I triumphed o’er the setting sun’. This long final speech by Vice highlights a key difference between the way in which Shelley and Coleridge conceive the actions of their allegorical protagonists. We have seen how in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ Prime Minister Pitt is presented as the instigator of the deeds of the three sisters. As Slaughter explains: He came by stealth, and unlocked my den, And I have drunk the blood since then Of thrice three hundred thousand men.

‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (22–4)

In ‘Falsehood and Vice’, however, Shelley seems unable to decide whether his protagonists are merely opportunists, taking advantage of humanity’s misdirection, or whether they themselves are solely responsible for the atrocities in which they take so much delight. The former explanation is suggested at the start of Vice’s final speech: I have extinguished the noon-day sun In the carnage-smoke of battles won: Famine, murder, hell and power Were glutted in that glorious hour Which searchless fate had stamped for me With the seal of her security . . . For the bloated wretch on yonder throne Commanded the bloody fray to rise.

‘Falsehood and Vice’ (64–71)

Here it seems that Vice has taken advantage of the sins of humanity, specifically those of ‘the bloated wretch on yonder throne’, to exacerbate the horrors of the battlefield. That this is sheer good luck for Vice is suggested by the phrase ‘searchless fate’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘searchless’ as ‘inscrutable, impenetrable, resisting investigation’, citing Shelley’s use of the word in The Revolt of Islam as an example. In this way, Vice seems merely a catalyst to destruction, the instigators of which are a combination of human weakness and fate. Pausing to consider the ‘tyrants’ who play a part in the disastrous proceedings, Vice asserts that although they may ‘Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame’ (82), they are labouring under a delusion if they believe that their own actions would provoke earthly torment without the connivance of Vice, an entity answering to no-one: ‘I – I do all’ (85). In this respect Vice seems granted a greater autonomy than Coleridge’s allegorical figures; working freelance he utilizes human weakness, but is ultimately the sole creator of the catastrophic consequences of that weakness upon earth. This is an idea which Shelley will develop in a more sophisticated form in his construction

38

Coleridge and Shelley

of the Furies of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, who feed on human fears, fomenting disharmony and prejudice. At this stage of his career, however, Shelley’s thinking regarding the causes of vice perpetrated by humanity seems rather more muddled. One of the reasons for this may be that he is still working closely with his two main sources, Macbeth and ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. In the first quotation above, the concept of the ‘seal of security’ of ‘searchless fate’ may be once again indebted to the Witches, who rightly identify that ‘security/ Is mortals’ chiefest enemy’ (III, v, 32–3), and go on to exemplify this understanding by augmenting Macbeth’s feelings of security until he believes himself unassailable. Similarly, Vice’s assertion ‘I – I do all’ is reminiscent of the First Witch’s promise of revenge on the sailor’s wife who refuses to share her chestnuts, ‘I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do’ (I, iii, 9). The conundrum posed by Macbeth as to the relative responsibility of human actions and supernatural intervention in the creation of depravity is similar to that which Shelley proposes in ‘Falsehood and Vice’, although in Shelley’s case it is questionable as to how far he intended this to be the focus of debate. The reference to the culpability of ‘the bloated wretch on yonder throne’ may be Shelley’s means of following Coleridge in appointing an earthly minister for the activities of his abstract evils, yet the allusion is only made in passing, and the poem’s refusal of specificity continues in the rather vague reference to ‘the bloody fray’ which allows Vice a free hand in the creation of death and destruction. The failure of Shelley’s poem either to identify specific targets of attack or to propose a means of redress becomes apparent in a comparison of the conclusion of ‘Falsehood and Vice’ to that of ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. In Shelley’s poem, Vice ends the dialogue by enumerating the human manifestations of the agency of himself and Falsehood: A short-lived hope, unceasing care, Some heartless scraps of godly prayer, A moody curse and a frenzied sleep Ere gapes the grave’s unclosing deep, A tyrant’s dream, a coward’s start, The ice that clings to a priestly heart, A judge’s frown, a courtier’s smile Make the great whole for which we toil.

(95–102)

The regularity of the iambic tetrameter here is particularly striking. From lines 95 to 101 there are only two anapaestic substitutions, in lines 97 and 100, and as these occur at precisely the same point in the line the effect is a consolidation rather than a disruption of the regular rhythm. The result is a replication at a formal level of the rather formulaic descriptions of the effects of Falsehood and Vice upon the earth. The relentless pace of the lines now sounds rather fatigued, as if the ubiquity of vice has begun to tire the poet. The references are unspecific examples of misery; there are no suggestions as to the causes of or possible means of salvation from this weary procession of torment. Conversely, Coleridge’s protagonists retain their specific characteristics until the end of the poem, where a reversal is effected which suggests how these apparently subservient propagators of misery may ultimately turn upon their master. After the

Cultivating the Topos

39

three sisters ask each other how they shall ‘yield him [Pitt] honour due’, Famine and Slaughter respond: Fam: Wisdom comes with lack of food. I’ll gnaw, I’ll gnaw the multitude, Till the cup of rage o’erbrim: They shall seize him and his brood – Slau: They shall tear him limb from limb!

(68–72)

Here Coleridge is able to make the political point that the famine to which Pitt has contributed through his policies may return to haunt him by promoting ‘wisdom’ in the form of rebellion in its victims, a state of affairs in which Slaughter is happy to collude. Fire, after initially reproaching her sisters for their apostasy, ends with the final caveat, ‘I alone am faithful! I/ Cling to him everlastingly’, thus consigning Pitt to hell by means of his own creation. It is this black humour which is partly responsible for the bite of Coleridge’s poem; the verse seeks specific targets, details specific examples of oppression, and seeks to offer a warning to the government through invoking the serious threat of revolution in the apparently whimsical conclusion. In ‘Falsehood and Vice’ we can observe some of the early results of Shelley’s reading in the imitation of Shakespeare and Coleridge, and see him seeking for a form in which to craft both his poetical and political visions. He imitates forms and images from Coleridge and Shakespeare to combine with and enhance his own, but is as yet unable to effect a full transformation in which he can fuse the work of his predecessors with his own in a wholly new poetic creation. If we recall John Hollander’s comments, cited in the introduction, where he makes a distinction between how a ‘great writer’ and a ‘minor one’ may manipulate allusions to the work of another, we could argue that in ‘Falsehood and Vice’, Shelley is ‘cultivating the topos rather than replanting or … rebuilding there’.53 Whilst Shelley’s use of allegorical figures and gothic imagery enables him to evoke the ills of humanity, he is unable to manipulate this appropriated topos either to critique the causes of these ills or to posit a means of overcoming the despotic world order the poem so graphically depicts. Ultimately, ‘Falsehood and Vice’ fails to achieve the specificity of contemporary comment seen in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, and the poem remains a dialogue between the two protagonists alone, rather than between either the poet and his audience or Shelley and his poetic models.

53 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), p. 73.

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Chapter 2

‘Beside thee like thy shadow’: The presence of Coleridge in Shelley’s Alastor Volume In 1815, when Shelley and Mary were reading, reciting and transcribing ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, Shelley had begun work on what was to become his first mature volume of poetry. At the end of August 1815, the Shelleys, Thomas Love Peacock and Charles Clairmont enjoyed a boat trip along the Thames from Windsor to Lechlade via Oxford. After two nights at Lechlade, the party intended to extend their itinerary to navigate their way to the source of the Thames, but were thwarted by high reeds and shallow water, and forced to head homewards. Charles Clairmont wrote of the excursion, ‘We have all felt the good effects of this jaunt; but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he has now the ruddy healthy complexion of the Autumn upon his countenance, & he is twice as fat as he used to be.’1 This view was seconded by Shelley himself in a letter to Hogg of 22 September, where he added that ‘my habitual dejection and irritability have almost deserted me’. Furthermore, the trip had clearly had an equally beneficial effect upon his imaginative faculties, for Shelley informed Hogg ‘I have been engaged lately in the commencement of several literary plans’.2 One of these plans was almost certainly the volume Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude and Other Poems, published in February 1816. It is perhaps unsurprising that a boating expedition which aimed to locate the source of a river should partly inspire the narrative of the title poem, where the poet protagonist seeks in vain along winding rivers for the ideal embodiment of his imagination. Arguing for the thematic coherence of the Alastor volume, Neil Fraistat contends that throughout ‘Shelley probes the limitations of human knowledge, questioning the nature of the world, the mind, and poetry itself’, and that the volume ‘comes to ask a compelling question: given the nature of the world and the mind, can a poet retain his clarity of vision without faltering before what he sees?’3 If, as Fraistat suggests, in the Alastor volume Shelley is concerned with the role of the poet, it is not merely his own poetic activity which is subject to scrutiny. In the sonnet, ‘To

1 The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (2 vols, Baltimore and London, 1995), vol. 1, p. 15. 2 Letters, vol. 1, p. 432. 3 Neil Fraistat, ‘Poetic Quests and Questioning in Shelley’s Alastor Collection’, K–SJ, 33 (1984), 161–81, (pp. 162–3).

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Coleridge and Shelley

Wordsworth’, Shelley clearly expresses both his debt to and divergence from one important poetic model: Poet of nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return: Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is mine Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, – Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve Thus having been, that thou should’st cease to be.4

The opening lines of the sonnet make overt reference to the ‘Immortality Ode’; ‘thou hast wept to know/ That things depart which never may return’ recalls Wordsworth’s sentiments that ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’ and that ‘there hath passed away a glory from the earth’.5 Shelley then employs this sense of loss in an initial moment of identification, ‘These common woes I feel’, followed by a sharp differentiation; one loss, felt by both poets, is ‘deplor[ed]’ by Shelley alone. That loss is Wordsworth himself, the Wordsworth who, as a ‘lone star’, sang ‘Songs consecrate to truth and liberty’. Many commentators have noted that in characterizing the former Wordsworth as a ‘lone star’, Shelley may be consciously alluding to Wordsworth’s depiction of Milton in his sonnet ‘London, 1802’,6 whose ‘soul was like a star and dwelt apart’.7 Wordsworth’s sonnet invokes Milton to return to the ‘fen/ Of stagnant waters’ (2–3) that is England and to ‘give us manners, virtue, freedom, power’ (8), a paean to the socially ameliorative function of poets echoed in Shelley’s characterization of Wordsworth as ‘like to a rock-built refuge stood/ Above the blind and battling multitude’. Commenting on the repeated star image in the two sonnets, G. Kim Blank concludes: ‘Wordsworth is to Shelley as Milton is to Wordsworth’, and suggests that each poet ‘is making an imagistic acknowledgement of indebtedness to his respective forerunner’ by associating the original notion of influence, as arising from the movement of stars and planets, with the concept of influence in poetic tradition.8 4 ‘To Wordsworth’, PS, vol. 1, pp. 454–5. 5 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, ll. 9, 18 in ‘Poems in Two Volumes’ and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, New York, 1992), pp. 271–7. 6 See for example, PS, vol. 1, p. 455n; Fraistat, ‘Poetic Quests and Questioning’, p. 179n; G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York, 1988), pp. 47–8.. 7 ‘London, 1802’, l. 9 in ‘Poems in Two Volumes’, ed. Jared Curtis, p. 165. 8 Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley, pp. 47, 48.

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Both the star and the ‘rock-built refuge’ signify permanence and certainty amid flux and doubt, yet the respective embodiments of such stability on whom the poets call are both irrevocably removed from the ‘stagnant waters’ and ‘winter’s midnight roar’ of contemporary society through death; literal in the case of Milton and metaphoric in that of Wordsworth. Fraistat glosses Shelley’s condemnation of Wordsworth in the final lines of the sonnet thus: ‘For a poet to “be” he must serve the cause of “truth and liberty”. “Deserting these” (line 13), Wordsworth, once “having been”, now quite literally ceases to “be”, according to Shelley.’9 In a way that would support an Oedipal interpretation of poetic influence, Shelley uses his precursor’s language against him, succinctly revealing how far he believes Wordsworth has strayed from his previous poetic self, and ends by symbolically ‘killing’ Wordsworth. Poetic annihilation engendered by deserting the cause of liberty proves far more damning than literal death. In structure as well as content, Shelley’s sonnet implies no hope for Wordsworth. Fraistat notes that the ‘inversion of the customary order of octave and sestet suggests Wordsworth’s inversion of his own early values’.10 Furthermore, whilst Shelley employs a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, the only hint of a couplet occurs not at the end, but in the rhyme of ‘stood’ and ‘multitude’ at lines 9–10, consolidating the sense that Wordsworth has ‘ended’ at the point in his life when he was still a ‘rock-built refuge’ to the multitude, and implying the harmony of these formerly held values. Wordsworth was not the only contemporary poet to suffer Shelley’s criticism in the Alastor volume. In the 1839 edition of Shelley’s poems Mary Shelley described the short lyric, ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ as being: Addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinion as rather an act of will than conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth.11

Whilst some commentators have rejected or dismissed as unimportant Mary’s description of the poem’s genesis, there seems no good reason to take issue with her belief.12 On her return to England after Shelley’s death, Mary met Coleridge and was struck by the similarities to her late husband. In her journal entry for 18 January 1824 she wrote, ‘Seeing Coleridge last night reminded me forcibly of past times – his beautiful descriptions, metaphysical talk & subtle distinctions reminded me of Shelley’s conversations – such was the intercourse I on[c]e dayly [sic] enjoyed’.13 If we accept that the poem is addressed to Coleridge, ‘O! there are spirits’ uncannily dramatizes the negative consequences of the elder poet’s belief as stated 9 Fraistat, ‘Poetic Quests and Questioning’, p. 178. 10 Fraistat, ‘Poetic Quests and Questioning’, p. 172. 11 See PS, vol. 1, p. 448. 12 Earl R. Wasserman comments ‘Mary Shelley’s identification of the addressee as Coleridge seems to be without support, but at any rate contributes nothing to the meaning of the poem’. See Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London, 1971), p. 8n. 13 Mary Jnl, vol. 2, p. 474.

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Coleridge and Shelley

in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ that ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’.14 Shelley traces the change in Coleridge’s relationship with the outside world from one of reciprocity to withdrawal from all ‘outward forms’ and a self-destructive focus upon his own mind. The poem opens with a description epitomizing the poet of nature: O! there are spirits of the air, And genii of the evening breeze, And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair As star-beams among twilight trees: – Such lovely ministers to meet Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet. ‘O! there are spirits’ (1–6)15

One possible source for Shelley’s language in this opening stanza, as Everest and Matthews suggest, is Coleridge’s early lyric ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’, where the poet invokes ‘Spirits of Love’ to ‘heed the spell, and hither wing your way,/ Like far-off music, voyaging the breeze!’ (43–4).16 Coleridge’s poem is an invocation to Fancy, and reveals the poet attempting to recapture a past moment of imaginative inspiration: As erst when from the Muses’ calm abode I came, with learning’s meed not unbestowed; When as she twined a laurel round my brow, And met my kiss, and half-returned my vow. ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ (17–20)

Coleridge’s poem makes a link between the intangible manifestations of the natural world and imaginative inspiration. He recalls a time when he was able to appeal to 14 ‘Dejection: An Ode’, ll. 45–6 in CCW, vol. 16, II, pp. 695–702. ‘Dejection’ was first published in the Morning Post for 4 October 1802, but was not included in any of Coleridge’s collections until 1817. It therefore seems unlikely that Shelley was familiar with the poem prior to writing ‘O! there are spirits’ in 1815. However, conversations with William Godwin, who had been closely acquainted with Coleridge, may have furnished Shelley with details of the elder poet’s life. It seems likely that Godwin was one of those ‘who knew him [Coleridge] well’ to whom Mary refers in her note on the poem. In the late 1790s Godwin had considered writing Coleridge’s biography. See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London, 1989), pp. 225–37. 15 All references to ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ are to PS, vol. 1, pp. 448–50. 16 All references to ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ are to CCP, pp. 46–8. CCW prints the original version of the poem, published under the title ‘Absence’ in the Dorset Weekly Entertainer for 28 October 1793. The revised version, cited here, appeared in Coleridge’s 1803 collection, which Shelley ordered in December 1812. See Letters, vol. 1, p. 345. Further evidence that Shelley knew the poem well, as Keach points out, (CCP, p. 443), lies in the affinity of lines 93–4, ‘No more your skylarks melting from the sight/ Shall thrill the attuned heart-string with delight’ to lines 16–20 of Shelley’s 1820 poem ‘To a Sky-Lark’: ‘The pale purple even/ Melts around thy flight,/.... Thou art unseen, – but yet I hear thy shrill delight’ (SPP, p. 226).

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nature and anticipate a reply, a situation which Shelley dramatizes in ‘O! there are spirits’. However, this envisaged dialectic is fragile; that Coleridge’s muse only ‘halfreturned’ his vow indicates not only the ephemeral nature of the response Coleridge seeks, but furthermore that the burden of sustaining that connection rests firmly with the poet. Coleridge is the instigator of the relationship with his coy muse; implicit in these lines is the sense that were his faith in his ability to receive inspiration from the natural world to be shaken, the bond between the poet and his ‘spirits of the air’ would shatter. Another possible Coleridgean source for the language of the opening stanza of ‘O! there are spirits’ is the image of the eolian harp. The poem that was eventually to bear the same name was first published in Coleridge’s Poems of 1796, as ‘Effusion XXXV. Composed August 20th, 1795, at Clevedon, Somersetshire’, and was to appear, with various revisions, in all subsequent collections. Evidence for Shelley having been acquainted with a collection of Coleridge’s poems generally, and ‘Effusion XXXV’ in particular, prior to his order for the 1803 edition in December 1812, exists in references in his early letters to images which vividly recall the language of ‘Effusion XXXV’. As early as November 1811, whilst discoursing upon the possibility of the transmigration of the soul to Elizabeth Hitchener, Shelley depicts the phenomenal world in terms very similar to those of Coleridge’s poem: I will say then, that all nature is animated, that miscroscopic [sic] vision as it hath discovered to us millions of animated beings, whose pursuits and passions are as eagerly followed as our own, so might it if extended find that Nature itself was but a mass of organized animation; – perhaps the animative intellect of all this is in a constant rotation of change, perhaps a future state is no other than a different mode of terrestrial existence to which we have fitted ourselves in this mode. – … Free-will must give energy to this infinite mass of being, & thereby constitute virtue.17

Shelley was to ponder further on this concept in his conversations with Southey about religion, where he explained his belief that ‘God is another signification for the Universe’. If everything is ‘animation’, Shelley argued, there cannot be a termination, nor, therefore, a first cause.18 Shelley’s choice of diction in his explication of this theory is highly reminiscent of that of Coleridge in ‘Effusion XXXV’: Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain As wild and various as the random gales That swell or flutter on this subject Lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze,

17 Letters, vol. 1, pp. 192–3, (emphases added). 18 Letters, vol. 1, p. 215.

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Coleridge and Shelley At once the Soul of each, and God of all? ‘Effusion XXXV’ (31–40, emphasis added)19

Comparing his passive mind, momentarily roused by various disjointed thoughts and ‘flitting phantasies’, to the way in which the wind harp is similarly manipulated by the intruding stimulus of the ‘random gales’, the poet grapples with the possibility of humanity’s passive pliability to all external forces. Coleridge expands this metaphor in the following lines, creating an image of ‘all of animated nature’ as ‘organic harps’, passive to the caprice of ‘one intellectual breeze’. As Kelvin Everest comments, the mind, as part of ‘animated nature’ is apparently seen ‘as passive in perception and acted upon by a manifestation of God. The Creation is subject to a power that is external to it’.20 The concept that our minds can only be animated to create thoughts by the indifferent movement of something external to us and beyond our control is simultaneously comforting and frightening, through the implication that we therefore bear little responsibility for our thought processes. However, in its passage from microcosm to macrocosm Coleridge’s metaphor shows ambiguities which threaten to break down the equivalencies established between ‘mind’, ‘lute’, and ‘animated nature’ on the one hand, and ‘thought’, ‘random gales’ and ‘one intellectual Breeze’, on the other. Everest goes on to discuss the impossibility of extracting a coherent philosophical theory regarding the relationship between mind, God and nature from Coleridge’s poem by pointing out the ambiguity of the origins of the ‘intellectual Breeze’, and the mingling of internal and external in ‘At once the Soul of each, and God of all’.21 If the ‘intellectual Breeze’ is akin to the ‘many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d’ which are seen to ‘Traverse’ the poet’s brain, then, as the very use of the word ‘thought’ suggests, the ‘Breeze’ is in fact a product of the mind/ harp, instead of (or as well as) that external force which causes the production of thought/ music. The difficulty of the harp metaphor thus arises in identifying the tenor of the metaphoric breeze; whilst implying it is an external force, the structure of Coleridge’s imagery concurrently suggests that it is an internal power and that therefore the source of imaginative thought may actually lie within the mind rather than outside it. The poem’s imagery reveals, perhaps consciously, Coleridge’s uncertainty regarding the origins of the imagination; unable to decide between God, the natural world or an aspect of the mind itself, the wind-harp metaphor starts to break down. This confusion as to the source of inspiration lies at the heart of Shelley’s portrait of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’. It is possible that Shelley is referring to Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ in the image of the ‘genii of the evening breeze’; as Everest and Matthews point out, Shelley had employed the phrase ‘... that strange lyre whose strings/ The genii of the breezes sweep’ in Queen Mab.22 The first stanza of ‘O! there are spirits’ suggests a withdrawal on the part of Coleridge from human

19 ‘Effusion XXXV’, CCP, pp. 85–6. 20 Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Hassocks, 1979), p. 203. 21 Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry, pp. 204–11. 22 See Queen Mab, I, 52–3 and PS, vol. 1, p. 448n.

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contact as he enters the magical yet insubstantial terrain of the ‘spirits’ of nature. The second stanza elaborates on the nature of this reciprocity: With mountain winds, and babbling springs, And moonlight seas, that are the voice Of those inexplicable things Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice When they did answer thee

‘O! there are spirits’ (7–11)

These lines initially imbue the elements of the natural world with a sentient, responsive quality; the ‘winds’, ‘springs’ and ‘seas’ have a voice which can answer the searching desire of the poet for commune with something beyond himself. Yet the nature of this dialectic, as in ‘Effusion XXXV’, remains ‘inexplicable’, and whilst this may be a reason for its power, it implies, like the ‘half-returned’ vow of ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’, the delicate, ephemeral nature of the relationship which Coleridge seeks. We have seen in the text of what was to become ‘The Eolian Harp’ Coleridge’s difficulty in isolating the nature of the relationship between mind and world, particularly in his conception of the role of his own imaginative responses in constituting that relationship. This was to preoccupy Coleridge in his future poetry; in ‘Dejection’ the poet finds his sense of despondency reproduced in his inability to perceive the features of the landscape in anything more than the starkest terms: ‘I see them all so excellently fair,/ I see, not feel how beautiful they are!’ (37–8). Whilst it is tempting, and perhaps legitimate, to connect Coleridge’s lack of vision to his then newly acquired philosophy from Kant, which locates the source of impressions of the natural world in the mind of the perceiver rather than in the thing perceived, as Everest points out in his analysis of ‘The Eolian Harp’, poetry is not philosophy. What is more striking in ‘Dejection’ and foreshadowed in ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ is the sense of imaginative loss experienced by Coleridge when he is no longer able to turn to the natural world for restoration in his dejection, finding instead only a mirror of his own despondency. Shelley was almost certainly unaware of Kant’s work in 1815, and even had he been able to untangle the sources and substance of Coleridge’s philosophical beliefs from the Biographia Literaria, as this was not published until 1817 it seems unlikely that in ‘O! there are spirits’ Shelley was offering a particular critique of any specific philosophy adopted by his precursor. However, further examination of ‘O! there are spirits’ can perhaps establish not necessarily the actual reasons for Coleridge’s loss of commune with nature, be they philosophical or personal, but what Shelley perceived those reasons to be. In the conclusion to the second stanza of the poem, after his depiction of the delicate and restorative relationship which the addressee enjoyed with the natural world, Shelley presents a curiously abrupt end to this reciprocity; the elements of the environment ‘Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away’. If we were to follow the line of reasoning intimated in ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ and ‘Effusion XXXV’ and fully articulated in ‘Dejection’, we would tend to locate the source of Coleridge’s loss of commune with the natural world in his own means of perception, rather than in a sudden spurning of the poet by that world; just as previously he only

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Coleridge and Shelley

perceived that relationship to be reciprocal, he now perceives himself to be rejected. Yet this is not what Shelley says. The third stanza of ‘O! there are spirits’ extends the compass of the addressee’s rejection to include the rest of humanity: And thou hast sought in starry eyes Beams that were never meant for thine, Another’s wealth: – tame sacrifice To a fond faith! still dost thou pine? Still dost thou hope that greeting hands, Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?

‘O! there are spirits’ (13–18)

Whether Shelley knew of Coleridge’s unhappy marriage and his unrequited love for Sara Hutchinson, or whether he was recalling his own estrangement from Harriet Shelley and elopement with Mary Godwin, is unclear. What does become manifest in this and the succeeding stanza is that Shelley depicts the external world as a vacillating and uncertain source of emotional sustenance, and appears to locate Coleridge’s mistake in placing any faith in it at all: Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope On the false earth’s inconstancy? Did thine own mind afford no scope Of love, or moving thoughts to thee? That natural scenes or human smiles Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?

‘O! there are spirits’ (19–24)

These lines seem to confirm, with a bitter edge, Coleridge’s feelings as expressed in ‘Dejection’ that we ‘may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’. Yet if we read the poem as an address to Coleridge in the context of Shelley’s knowledge of him in 1815, the lines appear somewhat paradoxical. It is hard to imagine a more cynical disquisition of the individual’s interaction with the world around; if one does not confine the location of ‘hope’ and ‘moving thoughts’ to one’s own mind, then both the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ worlds act parasitically and deceitfully upon this weakness to entrap and betray. Clearly the thrust of these stanzas is incongruous with the idea that Shelley is rebuking Coleridge for jettisoning ‘the better and holier aspirations of his youth’. Furthermore, as the Shelleys’ letters and reading lists up to 1815 show that they had read the majority of Coleridge’s works in verse and prose available in print, it seems probable that Shelley would have been aware that withdrawal into the ‘scope’ of his own mind was precisely what Coleridge had done. We have seen that Shelley almost certainly had access to a collected edition of Coleridge’s weekly paper The Friend. In the first issue, Coleridge had written: Suffice it for the present to affirm, to declare it at least, as my own creed, that whatever humbles the heart and forces the mind inward, whether it be sickness, or grief, or remorse, or the deep yearnings of love ... in proportion as it acquaints us with “the thing, we are,”

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renders us docile to the concurrent testimony of our fellow-men in all ages and in all nations.23

Here Coleridge advocates the cultivation of sympathy with ‘our fellow-men’ via an increased reflection on the self during states of heightened emotion. The primary movement here is inwards; implicit is the idea that we can only identify with others through our own experience of pain. The corollary of this, however, is that unless we experience an emotion ourselves, we are incapable of truly understanding its manifestation in others. This construction of empathy forms a direct contrast to that formulated by Shelley in A Defence of Poetry of 1821: The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.24

Whilst Coleridge advocates a theory of sympathy which ‘forces the mind inwards’, Shelley cannot conceive of an empathy with humanity which does not involve ‘a going out of our own nature’. Although the Defence post-dates ‘O! there are spirits’ by six years, Shelley’s commitment to the individual’s social responsibility to others was already well developed by the time of his meeting with Southey in 1811, as his letters to Elizabeth Hitchener and his subsequent visit to Ireland demonstrate. In this context, we must reconsider the tone of stanzas four and five of ‘O! there are spirits’, which recommend that Coleridge reflect increasingly upon his own mind and warn him to be wary of believing external phenomena to be adequate sources of emotional support. If we believe Mary Shelley’s description of the poem’s genesis and accept Shelley to be an advocate for the Coleridge who did ‘hold commune’ with the spirits of the natural world, then the comments of stanza four must be taken as heavily ironic. Here we find Shelley speaking through his conception of the new Coleridge, the Coleridge of The Friend who advocates a turning inward of the mind to acquaint us better with ‘the thing we are’. By this logic it is Coleridge who has ‘Cast, like a worthless boon’ the love of the natural world away. The fifth stanza consolidates this idea; the addressee has indeed turned into his own mind, abjuring, without discrimination, the offerings of the external world, and the results have been catastrophic: Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted; The glory of the moon is dead; Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed; Thine own soul still is true to thee, But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

23 CCW, vol. 4, II, p. 7. 24 SPP, pp. 487–8.

‘O! there are spirits’ (25–30)

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Coleridge and Shelley

The opening ‘Yes’ sounds confirmatory, yet the stanza does not confirm the poet’s prior censure of the addressee for foolishly placing his trust in that which is external to him. Rather, the lines imply that turning inwards to his own mind is exactly what the figure has done, thus augmenting the sense that the previous stanza was intended ironically. If we were to accept the sentiments of stanza four at face value, then the fact that ‘all the faithless smiles are fled/ Whose falsehood left thee brokenhearted’ should be a cause for celebration. Yet the idea that even ‘faithless smiles’ have deserted the addressee appears to consolidate further his lonely status, and the continuation of the stanza serves to confirm this. Because he can neither reach out of himself, nor allow external stimuli ingress, the addressee is unable to establish a dialectical relationship with the outside world, and the terms of description are redolent of the flat, two-dimensional tones of ‘Dejection’. In the lines ‘The glory of the moon is dead;/ Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed’, it is possible that Shelley is identifying one of Coleridge’s frequent analogies. In ‘Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon’, a juvenile composition published in the 1803 collection, Coleridge establishes a similitude between the moon, successively illuminated and obscured as it moves amongst the clouds, and hope, ‘Now dimly peering on the wistful sight;/ Now hid behind the dragon-wing’d Despair’.25 The image was to recur in Coleridge’s poetry, and, as we shall see, appears to have been noted by Shelley, who appropriated it in ‘Alastor’. If Shelley is incorporating the image of the moon in ‘O! there are spirits’ because of its particular resonance in Coleridge’s poetry, it is possible that he is also assimilating its metaphoric function. Thus the ‘glory of the moon’ being ‘dead’ implies not only the inability to see beyond the crude outlines of things, but also that the hope of a reversal in this state, the possibility of recapturing that previous way of seeing, is equally extinct. This image of the moon occurs in another of the poems in the Alastor volume, closely succeeded by another example of the wind harp imagery already noted in ‘O! there are spirits’. The opening stanzas of ‘Mutability’ read as follows: We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly! – yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last.

‘Mutability’ (1–8)26

Shelley opens with an apparently straightforward simile which has the effect of exaggerating the transitory nature of human existence by comparing it to the ephemeral wisps of cloud which float around the moon. If the ‘Night’ which ‘closes round’, causing the clouds to disappear, can then be seen as a metaphor for death, we can argue that here the moon represents a stability and permanence lacking 25 ‘Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon’, ll. 10–11 in CCW, vol. 16, I, p. 103. 26 PS, vol. 1, pp. 456–7.

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in human life. Yet the image seems a slightly convoluted one for Shelley to have chosen independently; the remnants of the light of the day, or disappearing shadows in the onset of evening would have served the same metaphorical purpose. Clouds in the night sky remain visible; their disappearance in the context of the night is not as inevitable as the end of one human life in the context of eternity. If we consider the proximity – both in terms of publication and in probable date of composition – of ‘Mutability’ to ‘O! there are spirits’, and the fact that the same image of clouds around the moon appears in Coleridge’s sonnet, the relations between the works start to appear more suggestive. Whilst ‘Mutability’ seems to establish a rather melancholy juxtaposition of natural permanence and human transience, the poem as a whole and the Alastor volume generally caution against any belief in or desire for a world without change.27 It is perhaps not coincidental that in employing the moon as an image of permanence, Shelley audaciously inverts its traditional function as a symbol of inconstancy. In this respect, Shelley seems to imply that to attribute to the natural world notions of certainty and longevity in a way which diminishes, by contrast, the power of our own finite lives, is an evasive and self-defeating exercise. In ‘Mutability’ it is this very human impermanence which Shelley celebrates. The clouds that are like humanity in their ephemerality possess an energy and natural delight, ‘How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver/ Streaking the darkness radiantly!’. Similarly, the potentially negative connotations of ‘forgotten’ and ‘dissonant’28 in the opening description of the lyres, can obscure the huge variety of potential inherent in: Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last.

The repetition in ‘various response to each varying blast’ seems to consolidate the idea that in ‘Mutability’ Shelley depicts characteristically negative aspects of man’s existence – the inevitability of death, his subjection to continuous change – and converts them into virtues. This is not immediately to turn Hell into Heaven, however; still ‘We rest. – A dream has power to poison sleep;/ We rise. – One wandering thought pollutes the day’ (9–10), yet: We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! – For, be it joy or sorrow, 27 William J. McTaggart suggests a connection between the preoccupation with change observable in the Alastor volume and the maturing of Shelley’s conception of the necessity of social change. He points out that the variety of poetic forms and metres evident in the volume expresses, at a formal level, Shelley’s belief in this necessity. See ‘The Design and Unity of Shelley’s Alastor Volume’, K–SMB, 23 (1972), 10–29, (p. 29). 28 Everest and Matthews gloss ‘dissonant’ as ‘variously-sounding’ and cross-reference Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’; PS, vol. 1, p. 457n. As well as the more common definition of ‘inharmonious’, the OED cites ‘dissonant’ as meaning ‘incongruous, discordant, at variance, different’.

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Coleridge and Shelley The path of its departure still is free: Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

‘Mutability’ (11–16)

Whilst moments of ‘joy’ will depart, so will those of ‘sorrow’; rather than seeking for symbols of permanence to act as anchors in our fluctuating lives – such as, for instance, Wordsworth had done in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – Shelley here actively embraces the changing landscape of our mental lives as that which makes us quintessentially human. Applying this context to the figure of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’, we can see that the error that Shelley perceives in his precursor is precisely this failure to embrace alteration. If we recall the opening of stanza four, which I have argued is intended ironically, ‘Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope/ On the false earth’s inconstancy?’, the word ‘inconstancy’, which initially seemed to possess a natural collocation with ‘false’, starts to assume a different tone. It is less as if Shelley is accentuating the ironic tone by derogating the earth, than simply providing an objective description of that earth’s defining characteristic. Coleridge’s mistake, in this sense, was to ask the natural world to supply a permanence and certainty that by definition it could not provide. At the end of the fifth stanza, after cataloguing the loss which Coleridge has experienced, Shelley concludes: ‘Thine own soul still is true to thee,/ But changed to a foul fiend through misery’. If, as I have argued, Shelley has criticized Coleridge for a retreat from the outside world in all its natural and human forms, replacing interaction with a solipsistic self-examination, then it is perfectly logical that Coleridge’s ‘own soul still is true’ to him. Deprived of the messy, vacillating process of constantly viewing itself in relation to external things, Coleridge achieves a consolidation of self. Yet this process of self-examination causes, paradoxically, Coleridge’s soul to become other to him, a ‘foul fiend’ captured in a laboratory jar, no longer recognizable in its stasis as a creative, imaginative human mind. Coleridge has abjured change, which can only happen in relation to external phenomena, perhaps as a consequence of pain (the ‘faithless smiles’), yet the result is a stagnation of and alienation from the self: This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever Beside thee like thy shadow hangs, Dream not to chase; – the mad endeavour Would scourge thee to severer pangs. Be as thou art. Thy settled fate, Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.

‘O! there are spirits’ (31–6)

The search for the perfect recipient of the affections of heart and mind has driven the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’ to the ‘inexplicable’ voices of nature and the ‘starry eyes’ of one destined for another. Encountering nothing but mutability in relationships where he seeks permanence, he retreats to the assumed safety of his own mind. Yet this refuge proves to be a chimera.

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In the fragment ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, assigned by Mary Shelley to 1815, Shelley discourses upon the ‘Difficulty of Analysing the Human Mind’: If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, ... A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears, ... But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards; – like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of the mind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it were possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed – if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience, – if the passage from sensation to reflection – from a state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation, were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.29

Punctuated by the conditional ‘if’, Shelley’s ‘Speculations’ expresses the difficulty of examining the mind with the mind, a situation which he would explore in verse in the opening lines of ‘Mont Blanc’. The paradox that our own mind is in fact closed to us because the instrument with which we would examine it is itself the entity under examination, provokes the labyrinthine imagery of the ‘perpetual stream’ and the pursued figure who ‘speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile’.30 Such a situation seems akin to the ‘mad endeavour’ which Shelley warns Coleridge against pursuing at the conclusion of ‘O! there are spirits’ which will ‘scourge’ the poet ‘to severer pangs’. Yet Shelley is not advocating the cessation of philosophy; earlier in the ‘Speculations’ he asserts that ‘in the great study of ourselves we ought resolutely to compel the mind to a rigid examination of itself’.31 What Shelley appears to criticize Coleridge for is the attempt to analyze the mind in isolation from the external world 29 ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’ in Forman 1880, vol. 6, pp. 283–97 (pp. 291–2). 30 The image of ‘one in dread who ... dares not look behind’ may be an echo of ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Like one, that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn’d round, walks on And turns no more his head: Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. (1798, 451–6) In December 1812 Shelley ordered the two-volume Lyrical Ballads (1800); see Letters, vol. 1, pp. 343–5. There are certain textual differences between 1798 and 1800, including the modernization of the poem’s title from ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, but the lines referred to above are unaltered. As modern texts tend to print 1798, I am using the Cornell edition of Lyrical Ballads, which includes complete annotations showing any alteration between 1798 and 1800. See ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992), pp. 769–91). Shelley was to use a variation of this image in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, II, iv, 129–40; see PS, vol. 2, p. 565. 31 ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, p. 288.

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which gives that mind its existence. In the opening section of the ‘Speculations’, Shelley writes: We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, and in shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetually changing the mode of their existence relatively to us. To express the varieties of these modes, we say, we move, they move; and as this motion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conception of the diversities of its course by – it has been, it is, it shall be. These diversities are events or objects, and are essential, considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of the human mind. For if the inequalities, produced by what has been termed the operations of the external universe, were levelled by the perception of our being, uniting, and filling up their interstices, motion and mensuration, and time, and space; the elements of the human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease. Mind cannot be considered pure. 32

Mind is not ‘pure’; it exists only in relation to the ‘diversities’ which are ‘events or objects’ external to it. Our conception of self is formed through the ‘inequalities’ we perceive between that self and surrounding phenomena. Such inequalities will involve fluctuation and change, not all of which, as ‘Mutability’ admits, will be pleasant. However, it is precisely this fluctuation which creates and gives endless power to the animated, vibrant entity which we call the mind. In ‘O! there are spirits’, it seems credible that Coleridge is being criticized not necessarily for his pursuit of the workings of the mind, but for attempting to do what Shelley believes is impossible, to consider mind as ‘pure’. Coleridge may be one who has, through turning away from the ‘diversities’ of the external world in all their pleasurable and painful forms, attempted to ‘level’ the differentiation between self and world. The consequences of this are stark: ‘the elements of the human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease’. The result of this is the sort of imaginative sterility depicted by Shelley in ‘O! there are spirits’ and expressed by Coleridge in ‘Dejection’. It is perhaps, therefore, not coincidental that many of the terms of description employed by Shelley to attempt to articulate the workings of the human mind reappear five years later in two more portraits of Coleridge. ‘Peter Bell the Third’ is, as G. Kim Blank has shown, more than simply a satire at Wordsworth’s expense; rather, it is an exploration of Shelley’s ambivalent feelings towards what he perceives to be a change in both Wordsworth’s politics and, importantly, his poetics.33 When Shelley censures Wordsworth’s mind for being ‘At once circumference and centre’, where ‘Nothing went ever out, although/ Something did ever enter’, he presents a portrait where all external stimuli are referred to and absorbed within the poet’s mind.34 This is in direct contrast to Shelley’s insistence in the Defence of Poetry of 1821 that ‘Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight’.35 In his earlier portrait of the poet, the 1816 sonnet, ‘To Wordsworth’, Shelley identified a sociopolitical backsliding on the part 32 33 34 35

‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, p. 286. See Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley, pp. 63–73. ‘Peter Bell the Third’, ll. 294, 296–7 in SPP, pp. 323–47, (p. 334). SPP, p. 488.

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of his precursor. In 1819, Shelley turns to the poetical consequences – or possibly the causes – of this apostasy; Wordsworth’s mind appears circumscribed, incapable of achieving the truly reciprocal and thus ‘replenishing’ relationship with the world around. However Wordsworth is not damned entirely; Shelley is willing to admit that this potentially solipsistic self-referentiality is still capable of producing ‘An apprehension clear, intense/ Of his mind’s work’ with the effect of ‘Wakening a sort of thought in sense’ (309–12). Oddly, it is the inability of another character drawn from life in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ to achieve ‘An apprehension clear’ of his own mind which causes that figure to ‘damn[ed] himself to madness’. In ‘Part Fifth’ of the poem Shelley dramatizes Peter/ Wordsworth’s first encounter with Coleridge. Acting as a hired hand of the devil at one of his master’s ‘petit soupers’, Peter encounters ‘A man … fair as a maid’ who entrances him: He was a mighty poet – and A subtle-souled Psychologist; All things he seemed to understand Of old or new – of sea or land– But his own mind – which was a mist. This was a man who might have turned Hell into Heaven – and so in gladness A Heaven unto himself have earned; But he in shadows undiscerned Trusted, – and damned himself to madness. He spoke of poetry, and how “Divine it was – a light – a love– A spirit which like wind doth blow As it listeth, to and fro; A dew rained down from God above “A power which comes and goes like dream, And which none can ever trace– Heaven’s light on Earth – Truth’s brightest beam.” And when he ceased there lay the gleam Of those words upon his face. ‘Peter Bell the Third’ (378–97)

If we recall the ‘obscure and shadowy’ caverns of the mind described by Shelley in ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, it is unsurprising that Coleridge’s mind should remain a ‘mist’, resistant to the penetration of his ‘mighty’ intellect. Michael O’Neill suggests that in using the word ‘mist’ Shelley deliberately alludes to Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’.36 Echoes of the ‘Mariner’ continue in the following lines celebrating poetry, which Coleridge is here made to characterize as a ‘spirit’ 36 Michael O’Neill, ‘The Gleam of Those Words: Coleridge and Shelley’, K–SR, 19 (2005), 76–96, (p. 93).

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Coleridge and Shelley

which ‘listeth, to and fro;/ A dew rained down from God above’, where the ‘short uneasy motion’ (391, 393) of the Mariner’s ship and his final release from drought are recalled. The allusion is telling; Shelley calls to mind the immense power of Coleridge’s poetry by bringing one of the elder poet’s most famous works into play, but simultaneously evokes the isolated figure of the Mariner himself, allying Coleridge to another who ‘damned himself to madness’. In Coleridge, Shelley seems to have identified one who could not accede as readily as Wordsworth to the creed of the mind as ‘At once circumference and centre’. Unlike Peter/ Wordsworth, who never could Fancy another situation From which to dart his contemplation, Than that wherein he stood

(299–302)

Coleridge exhibits a capacious understanding of ‘All things … Of old or new – of sea or land–’, but, like the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’, has placed his trust in ‘Shadows undiscerned’, colluding in his own damnation and madness. Taken together, Shelley’s two portraits of the elder poet suggest he saw one who had prioritized the pursuit of the workings of his own mind to the exclusion of the other half of the equation, the external world, and thus lost the very basis of the reciprocity which had intrigued him in the first place. This loss can perhaps be identified with ‘the holier and better aspirations’ of Coleridge’s youth which Mary Shelley wrote that her husband believed the elder poet would come to regret. The vital nature of this relation between inner and outer is emphasized in Shelley’s sense that Coleridge has lost the opportunity to convert ‘Hell into Heaven’. The sense of precisely how much potential has been squandered here is thrown into sharp relief if we turn to a stanza from earlier in the poem. In ‘Part Third’, Shelley offers a portrait of Hell, ‘a city much like London’ (147), where poverty, corruption and squalor resist the ministrations of … some few, like we know who, Damned – but God alone knows why– To believe their minds are given To make this ugly Hell a Heaven; In which faith they live and die.

(242–6)

Here Shelley makes reference to what he believes to be his own role as reformer, ‘To make this ugly Hell a Heaven’. Shelley was fond of employing Satan’s words from Paradise Lost in this context. In A Defence of Poetry he was to write: All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. “The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But poetry defeats the dark curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. … It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates the universe

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anew after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.37

To ‘make heaven of hell’ is a particular duty of the poet’s imagination in its capacity to ‘create[s] the universe anew’ in a quest for relationship and possibility. That he employs the same phrase in his portrait of Coleridge, with the poignant sense of lost potentiality in ‘might have turned’, shows a development of what Morton Paley describes as Shelley’s desire in his poetry to ‘forge links with the radicalism of the previous generation’.38 Shelley appears to recognize the capacity of Coleridge’s poetry to ‘spread[s] its own figured curtain or withdraw[s] life’s dark veil’. As Michael O’Neill has suggested, it is arguable that A Defence of Poetry ‘launches itself’ from the words which Shelley here accords to Coleridge.39 The tone and content of the speech which he bestows upon the elder poet allows Shelley an impassioned expression of the value of poetry, but one which also emphasizes, once again, the nebulous nature of inspiration. Poetry is both ‘light’ and ‘love’, yet like those things resists categorization, remaining as intangible as a ‘spirit’, a ‘wind’, ‘dew’ and a ‘dream … which none can ever trace’. That Shelley here uses the figure of Coleridge to articulate his own conception of the nature of poetry is indicated by the another echo of the Defence, where the ‘footsteps’ of poetry ‘are like those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only on the wrinkled sand which paves it’.40 Yet from this ephemerality emanates a ‘power’ in the shape of ‘Heaven’s light on Earth – Truth’s brightest beam’. It is the power of Coleridge’s own defence of poetry here which Shelley characterizes as inspiring the slightly hapless Peter/ Wordsworth who ‘began/ In a wild measure songs to make’ (405–6), songs which were to become, in Shelley’s retelling of Wordsworth’s history, the Lyrical Ballads. By 1819, Shelley was more convinced than ever of the connection between the renewing power of poetic vision and the regeneration inherent in social and political reform. To reimage anew through metaphor is to embrace change and possibility; the mind can ‘make a heaven of hell’ if it remains committed to applying its inner vision to the world around. It is this second movement, that between inner and outer, which Shelley’s portraits of Coleridge suggest the younger poet feels has been lost in the elder. Steven E. Jones encapsulates Shelley’s attitude to the ‘lost leader’ Coleridge in these lines: The line between the reformers’ “faith” in perfectibility and Coleridge’s trust in “shadows undiscerned” is a fine one. There is something in Shelley’s temperament that gives him a special affinity with this philosophical elder poet, and the danger of idealism – like the danger of self-sacrificing meliorism – is one to which Shelley is always prey. … In 1819

37 SPP, pp. 505–6. 38 Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999; repr. 2003), p. 220. 39 O’Neill, ‘The Gleam of Those Words’, p. 93. 40 SPP, p. 504. Michael O’Neill also notes this echo, arguing that in the mouth of ‘Coleridge’ the words are ‘close to calculated commonplace, and crying out for the reworking which Shelley gives it in the prose poetry of A Defence’. See O’Neill, ‘The Gleam of Those Words’, p. 93.

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Coleridge and Shelley Shelley knows very well that in a sense his own poetry also encourages a reliance on “shadows undiscerned” – on what is yet “unapprehended” and must therefore be projected or imagined.41

Jones’s analysis of this divided attitude towards the elder poet in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ is acute in its identification of Shelley’s simultaneous impulses to identify with yet differentiate himself from Coleridge and his fate. In some respects, Shelley’s means of situating himself in relation to Coleridge here is susceptible to the Bloomian reading of poetic influence as a ‘family romance’, were it not for Shelley’s disinclination, here and elsewhere, either to obscure the debt to his precursor, or to seek to vanquish that precursor with his own words. Here Shelley feels both the loss of Coleridge and Coleridge’s loss; the loss of the thinker who could have employed his capacious understanding towards furthering the cause of social and political reform, and the loss experienced by the man who ‘damned himself to madness’ through trust in ‘shadows undiscerned’. As Jones suggests, it is Shelley’s own felt affinity with Coleridge which heightens that loss and which lends the portrait of the elder poet in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ an almost elegiac quality within a poem intended primarily to satirize. This apprehension of Coleridge’s predicament and the wasted potential inherent within it is consolidated in another poem of 1819. In ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, Shelley describes the things his friend will see and the people she will meet on her return to London: You will see Coleridge – he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair – A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. 42

The images here of concentrated, powerful light in ‘exceeding lustre’ and ‘pure/ Intense irradiation’ provide not only a sense of Shelley’s belief in the power and potential of Coleridge’s intellect and imagination, but also once again recall his description of the ‘caverns’ of the human mind in ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’ as ‘pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals’. It might, therefore, not be coincidental that in the ‘Letter’ Shelley chooses to rhyme ‘mind’ with ‘blind’. Coleridge’s mind is bright only with ‘its own internal lightning’. Having rejected the difference and mutability of the outside world, his mind has become like a hall of mirrors, each reflecting aspects of the self, but allowing no change or development, only continually dazzling distortion, leading to ‘darkness and despair’. Left to sit ‘obscure’ in a haze of disconnected thoughts, Coleridge is ‘A hooded eagle among blinking owls’. The strange mixture of respect 41 Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, 1994), p. 58. 42 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 202–8 in SPP, pp. 313–21, (p. 318).

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and censure here expresses Shelley’s sense of loss for one whose great imaginative power is stifled by blinkered, or ‘hooded’, vision; ‘internal lightning’ becomes selfdefeating unless it can be channeled away from the confines of the poet’s mind into the surrounding world.43 Shelley’s conception of Coleridge’s claustrophobic retreat into the labyrinthine pathways of his own mind which appears to lie behind the portraits of the elder poet in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ and ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ suggests that he may have paid particular attention to Coleridge’s own description of this process in ‘Dejection’. After lamenting the ‘afflictions’ which decay his ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’ (82, 86), Coleridge articulates his response to this artistic depression: For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man – This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul.

‘Dejection: An Ode’ (87–93)

It seems highly unlikely that Shelley could have known of the original import of these lines in the poem’s previous incarnation as a ‘Letter’ to Sara Hutchinson, taking them rather at face value in their new context as a response to the ‘afflictions’ which cripple Coleridge’s imaginative capacity. The sense of loss expressed in these lines accords with the regret and disappointment which mark Shelley’s later portraits of the poet. Retreat into ‘abstruse research’, which Coleridge nominates as a cure for his depression, is revealed to incur the most incapacitating side effects; ‘to steal/ From my own nature all the natural man’ conveys the sort of radical emotional surgery which the poet feels compelled to undergo. The nature of Coleridge’s self-diagnosis and the heart-rending acceptance of loss in the nature of his chosen cure may lie behind the pity discernable in Shelley’s portraits of the poet who ‘Flags wearily through darkness and despair’, and Mary Shelley’s comment that her husband believed Coleridge’s ‘change of opinion’ to be ‘rather an act of will than conviction’. Oddly, given that it is difficult to see how Shelley could have had access to ‘Dejection’ prior to the publication of Sibylline Leaves in 1817, the manner in which Coleridge articulates the results of this conscious dislocation between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ 43 Shelley’s image of the ‘hooded eagle’ probably owes much to Byron’s allusion to Coleridge in the second stanza of the ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan, published in 1819: And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumbered with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation – I wish he would explain his Explanation.

‘Dedication’ (13–16)

However, Shelley’s decision to place his own ‘hooded eagle’ in the context of mere ‘blinking owls’ arguably accords the elder poet a greater degree of power and respect. See Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (7 vols, Oxford, 1980–93), vol. 5, p. 3.

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is highly reminiscent of Shelley’s conception of the fate of the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’. The younger poet’s description of that figure’s ‘soul’ being ‘changed to a foul fiend through misery’ accords with Coleridge’s own articulation of the results of his intellectual pursuits as a contagion which ‘infects the whole,/ And now is almost grown the habit of my soul’. Whilst ‘habit’ initially connotes ‘occupation’, as the phrase ‘that which suits the part’ in the previous line suggests, the word also implies ‘dress’ or ‘clothing’. Just as the addressee of Shelley’s poem undergoes a process of fiendish doubling, becoming alienated from his own self, in ‘Dejection’ Coleridge’s ‘soul’ has grown other to him, unrecognizable in its newly acquired clothing of ‘abstruse research’. Shelley’s sense of his own divergence from Coleridge concerning the efficacy of such self-examination is in part confirmed by the elder poet himself in the Table Talk comments made about Shelley subsequent to the latter’s death. After expressing admiration for Shelley’s translation of Goethe’s Faust Coleridge continued: Shelley was a man of great power as a poet, and could he only have had some notion of order, could you only have given him some plane whereon to stand, and look down upon his own mind, he would have succeeded. There are flashes of the true spirit to be met with in his works.44

Compliments aside, had Shelley been in a position to hear such comments one wonders as to the character of his response; satisfaction at the accuracy of his own diagnosis of Coleridge’s persistent quest to ‘look down upon his own mind’, or frustration with the elder poet’s inability to perceive the sort of emotional schism which could result from such inwardness. A preoccupation with the nature and consequences of a loss of poetic vision is developed further in the title poem of the Alastor volume. Once again, Shelley locates the origin of that loss in an inability to communicate with the outside world, precipitating an isolation which condemns the protagonist of ‘Alastor’ to poetic failure, and eventually propels him towards death. As Frederick Kirchhoff observes, the poet is unable ‘to transform private vision into public utterance and thus take rank among “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”’.45 Shelley’s portrait of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’ bears many resemblances to the poet of ‘Alastor’, whose mind ‘drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge’, but is ‘insatiate’ and ‘thirsts for an intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself’.46 Both are figures of vibrant imagination who through error or misfortune lose their previous means of interacting with the world around. Subsequent to a vision in which he ‘images to himself the Being whom he loves’, the ‘Alastor’ poet, like the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’, 44 CCW, vol. 14, I, p. 574. 45 Frederick Kirchhoff, ‘Shelley’s Alastor: The Poet Who Refuses to Write Language’, K–SJ, 32 (1983), 108–22, (p. 112). Kirchhoff includes the Narrator of ‘Alastor’ in his comment; whilst the status of the Narrator is not central to the current discussion, it is arguable that the existence of the poem itself accords the Narrator a greater measure of success than the protagonist he describes. 46 Preface to ‘Alastor’, ll. 5–6, 12–13 in PS, vol. 1, pp. 458–89 (p. 462).

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rejects the offerings of the human and natural worlds in a doomed pursuit of ‘the voice of his own soul’. Because of the connections between the poet of ‘Alastor’ and the figure of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’, and the overtly Wordsworthian style of the poem, a long critical tradition has been established which reads the title poem of Shelley’s collection as a continued allegory of what he perceived to be the mistakes of these two important precursors. The influence of Wordsworth’s poetry on ‘Alastor’ has long been recognized and debated. Echoes of The Excursion in particular, discovered by Richard Ackermann writing in the German publication Romanischen und Englischen Philologie in 1899, were comprehensively refuted by L.H. Allen in 1923, who, with the intention of deflecting charges of plagiarism levelled at Shelley, pronounced verbal similarities between ‘Alastor’ and the work of Wordsworth either unconscious or spurious.47 In 1934, Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs revived the argument in their essay ‘Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’. Situating Shelley’s feelings towards Wordsworth with reference to ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘The Celandine’, Mueschke and Griggs list Shelley’s echoes of, amongst others, ‘Tintern Abbey’, The Excursion and the ‘Immortality Ode’ in ‘Alastor’. They conclude that Shelley’s poem is ‘an allegory of the tragedy that befell Wordsworth in middle life’ in which Shelley laments the decline of the ‘Poet of Nature’.48 Recent critics have acknowledged the Wordsworthian echoes in ‘Alastor’, although now tend to agree with Albert S. Gérard that it is stretching the point to regard, as a consequence, Wordsworth as the visionary of the poem.49 This warning is noted by Yvonne M. Carothers in her essay of 1981, ‘Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth’.50 Using Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and an awareness of Shelley’s ‘personal struggle with the first generation of Romantic poets’ and their political apostasy, Carothers persuasively argues that in ‘Alastor’ Shelley corrects the Wordsworth of The Excursion who recommends religious orthodoxy as a means of quelling the sense of loss evoked by the mind’s ‘obstinate questionings’ of its relation to the natural world. Carothers’s essay is supported and complemented by that of William Keach from the same year, where Keach demonstrates convincingly how Shelley uses key cruxes in the ‘Immortality Ode’ to comment not only on the instability of Wordsworth’s faith in nature, but also on how the elder poet’s awareness of that instability is evident in the poetry itself.51 Like Carothers, Keach sees Shelley questioning Wordsworth’s faith in the ‘recompense’ available to the adult who has lost the child’s intuitive relationship with nature, citing in particular Shelley’s use of the direct quotation from the ‘Ode’, ‘too deep for tears’, at the end of ‘Alastor’, where he converts Wordsworth’s image of hope into one of ‘irredeemable loss’. 47 L.H. Allen, ‘Plagiarism, Sources, and Influences in Shelley’s “Alastor”’, MLR, 18 (1923), 133–51. 48 Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs, ‘Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, PMLA, 49 (1934), 229–45, (p. 245). 49 Albert S. Gérard, English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley, 1968), p. 138. 50 Yvonne M. Carothers, ‘Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth’, MLQ, 42 (1981), 21–47. 51 William Keach, ‘Obstinate Questionings: The Immortality Ode and Alastor’, WC, 12 (1981), 36–44.

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The history of criticism which casts Coleridge as the primary influence on ‘Alastor’ is shorter and more antagonistic, centring largely on whether Shelley had access to ‘Kubla Khan’ prior to 1815. In ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, Joseph Raben implicitly assumes that he did, listing many verbal echoes between the two poems, and describing ‘Alastor’ as ‘Shelley’s reduction of “Kubla Khan” to its essence and his recreation of that poem according to his own genius’.52 Coleridge’s imaginative decay thus becomes a lesson to the 23-year-old Shelley of the perils of poetic disillusionment. A year after Raben’s essay appeared, Timothy Webb, in ‘Coleridge and Shelley’s Alastor: A Reply’, takes issue with its central premise, pointing out that as ‘Kubla Khan’ was not published in any form until 1816, there is little likelihood that Shelley was acquainted with it a year earlier. Webb goes on to characterize many of Raben’s verbal parallels between the two poems as ‘natural coincidence’ and disputes the notion that Shelley had any particular affinity for Coleridge in 1815.53 Although Webb does not discuss the possibility that Shelley may have heard ‘Kubla Khan’ from William Godwin or Mary, (who is reported to have heard Coleridge recite ‘The Ancient Mariner’ when she was a child),54 his rebuttal of Raben’s verbal parallels is generally rather more convincing than the parallels themselves. However, a desire to refute Raben occasionally overtakes attention to the poem itself. As well as denying any connection between ‘Alastor’ and ‘O! there are spirits’, Webb asserts that ‘the Alastor-poet lived and died in harmony with the natural forces’, that ‘the furies’ which pursued him were ‘external and irresistible’ and finally, that the poem is concerned, amongst other things, with ‘idealizing a woman of flesh and blood’.55 The following discussion does not seek to reinstate either Wordsworth or Coleridge as the prototype of the ‘Alastor’ poet. What it does seek to emphasize, however, are the links between the title poem of Shelley’s 1816 collection and the accompanying lyric to Coleridge in terms of both subject matter and imagery. Whilst the connections between ‘Alastor’ and Wordsworth’s poetry, as discussed by Carothers, Keach and others are irrefutable, aside from Raben’s questionable use of ‘Kubla Khan’ little sustained attention has yet been paid to images potentially borrowed from Coleridge. If Neil Fraistat’s summation of the thrust of the Alastor volume is in any way correct, then in addressing the question ‘can a poet retain his clarity of vision without faltering before what he sees?’, it would be natural for Shelley to turn to what he perceived to be the achievements and the failings of two of his most recent and influential precursors. Like the figure of ‘O! there are spirits’, the ‘Alastor’ poet experiences a disruption to his previous means of relating to the outside world subsequent to his fleeting union in vision with the dream-maiden. Prior to his vision, Shelley’s poet is able to receive inspiration from all aspects of the world, be they natural or artefacts of the history of mankind: 52 Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES, n.s. 17 (1966), 278–92, (p. 287). 53 Timothy Webb, ‘Coleridge and Shelley’s Alastor: A Reply’, RES, n.s. 18 (1967), 402–11, (p. 403). 54 See Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London, 2000), p. 58. 55 Webb, ‘Coleridge and Shelley’s Alastor: A Reply’, pp. 410–11.

‘Beside thee like thy shadow’ He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world’s youth,... ...ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

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‘Alastor’ (121–2, 125–8)

Like the addressee at the opening of ‘O! there are spirits’, the poet is able to ‘hold commune’ with the incarnations of the exterior world and ‘rejoice/ When they did answer’, yet it is notable that the poet appears passive to the world which he observes. He gazes on the object, receiving multiple sense impressions from it, until he is able to combine these impressions to produce ‘meaning’, which in itself becomes an active force able to reveal to him ‘The thrilling secrets of the birth of time’. Timothy Clark has pointed out the significance of meaning flashing ‘on’ the poet’s mind, rather than ‘in’ it.56 The mind here does not interfere with the autonomy of the object in question; its activity is one of organizing and combining empirical evidence into new thought. As Shelley wrote in the preface to ‘Alastor’, ‘The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted’ (Preface, ll. 6–9). The terms of description in the poem are in one way reminiscent of the language of Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’, where ‘many idle flitting phantasies/ Traverse my indolent and passive brain’, and share some of that poem’s confusion as to the origin of imaginative thought in the tension between apparent passivity and the urgent repetition of ‘ever gazed/ And gazed’, which suggests an active process of thought within the ‘vacant mind’. That ‘Alastor’ may share the preoccupation of ‘The Eolian Harp’ is indicated by the explicit appearance of wind harp imagery at the beginning and end of the poem. Immediately prior to commencing his history of the poet, the narrator of ‘Alastor’ characterizes himself as ‘a long-forgotten lyre’: I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

‘Alastor’ (45–9)

The nature of the narrator’s invocation shares the mixture of passivity and activity of the poet’s gazings. That he awaits the ‘breath’ of nature, a deity, or poetic inspiration, places the narrator in the position of wind harp, pliant to external forces, yet his desire to ‘modulate’ his ‘strain’ with all aspects of the natural and human worlds, implies an accepting reciprocity with his environment where he is neither sole instigator nor passive recipient. The narrator returns to the image of the lyre when describing the death of the poet, whom he characterizes as ‘A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings/ The breath of heaven did wander’ (667–8). Here the wind-harp image offers no sense of the active relationship which the narrator had previously sought for 56 Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford, 1989), p. 131.

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himself; the poet is entirely passive in the face of the capricious movements of his environment. Earl Wasserman comments on the relation between the two uses of the image, arguing that the second ‘reveals that for man to be but a passive lyre totally submissive to the forces of nature is actually to be a corpse, senseless, motionless, soulless, and gradually eroded by nature’s forces’.57 Wasserman asserts that in the context of the second use of the image, the narrator’s first use ‘gains its full ironic horror’, demonstrating that his own position in the world is no more assured or reciprocal than that of the poet. Wasserman seems to underestimate the nature of the narrator’s desire to achieve commune with his world and his awareness, in Coleridge’s language, that we ‘receive but what we give’. That he is at least partially successful in this is indicated by his ability to tell the story of his poet, and to understand that one of the reasons for his death was a sudden cessation of the dialectic which the narrator himself strives so hard to maintain. Subsequent to his dream-vision, the poet can no longer return to his previous means of perceiving. On waking from his slumber his relationship to the outside world has become one of estrangement: The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled The hues of heaven that canopied his bower Of yesternight?

‘Alastor’ (193–8)

The terms of description have been reduced, as if the landscape now has an alien, unfathomable quality to it. The poet can only view the moon, hills and woods in their simplest, starkest terms of colour and outline; the phrase ‘clear and garish’, connotes a sharp rawness in the landscape almost amounting to violence upon the poet’s senses, which are still imbued with the soft blurred outlines, ‘the hues of heaven’, of his vision. The poet can no longer imaginatively connect with his environment; the valley is ‘distinct’, the woods ‘vacant’ – they can be seen, but not apprehended. Michael O’Neill notes how the resonances of the word ‘vacant’ change from its use prior to the vision to its appearance afterwards. When the poet’s mind was still open to the impulses from the natural world the word ‘implies a mind emptied of anxiety, contemplative’, whereas in the context of his new relation to that world after his vision, it merely connotes imaginative death.58 His previous ability to absorb stimuli in order to recreate anew has been lost; now the panorama is merely ‘Spread round him’, different, other, and impenetrable to his gaze. This description of the schism which has opened up between the poet and his environment once again uncannily echoes Coleridge’s lines in ‘Dejection’: All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky,

57 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 38. 58 Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford, 1989), p. 17.

‘Beside thee like thy shadow’ And it’s peculiar tint of yellow-green: And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen; Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are!

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‘Dejection’ (30–38)

Coleridge’s repeated gazing recalls that of the ‘Alastor’ poet prior to his vision. Yet the results of this contemplation are more akin to Shelley’s poet subsequent to his encounter with the dream-maiden. The descriptions of colour and movement are curiously flat and precise, devoid of any imaginative projection on the part of the poet. It is characteristic of the confusion we have observed in ‘The Eolian Harp’ as to the extent of the mind’s responsibility for what it perceives, that it is impossible to judge whether this static description is the cause of Coleridge’s estrangement from the scene or the result. In either case, it is a feature of this detachment that the poet is unable to perceive the landscape as any sort of organic whole which could, through its delicate interactions and alterations, emotionally affect him. Accordingly, the lines are heavily punctuated, as if each feature of the scene is isolated from the others, only to be perceived in terms of itself. Coleridge’s attempts to fuse details into some sort of harmony quickly break down; lines 31–6 develop into a series of couplets, each description segregated from the others by caesura and rhyme. In his dejection, Coleridge can only see in the landscape a mirror of his own internal misery. In ‘Alastor’, Shelley uses the image of reflection in a number of ways to describe the poet’s changing relationship to his world. Shelley describes the poet waking from his vision and observing the starkly delineated landscape: His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.

‘Alastor’ (200–202)

The collision of ‘empty’ to describe the scene and ‘vacantly’ to describe the poet’s means of perception, leads naturally to the image of static reflection of the moon gazing at its reflection in water. As Wasserman notes, the poet now realizes that ‘Passive sensory perception of the finite world is not an act of knowledge, not a union of world and mind, ... but only a mindless mirroring’.59 As reflection is a visual manifestation of echo, subject to the same mutations and distortions, it seems appropriate that Shelley’s image may have its genesis in a recollection of lines from one of his favourite poems, Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, spoken by one of the spirit voices the Mariner hears in his ‘swound’: ‘Still as a Slave before his Lord, The Ocean hath no blast: 59 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 30.

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Coleridge and Shelley His great bright eye most silently Up to the moon is cast – ‘If he may know which way to go, For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him.’ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 1798 (419–26)

It is perhaps significant that Coleridge’s use of the image occurs at a moment of stasis in the poem; the ship is becalmed, the Mariner unconscious. The image of the ‘great bright eye’ of the reflected moon in the ocean gazing up to its prototype in the sky, as if for inspiration, conveys the stillness and vacancy of the scene. If Shelley is appropriating this image to suggest a similar stasis in his poet, its use in ‘Alastor’ has an added complexity. Prior to his vision, the poet was entranced by artefacts of beauty, history and learning; as Shelley writes in the Preface, ‘The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted’ (ll. 6–9). It is this ‘variety’ in the external world which nourishes the poet’s imagination, yet subsequent to his vision, the poet has seen his perfect other, his true reflection, and all else becomes a vacancy. Thus the moon image works in two ways; firstly it connotes stasis, a mirroring which is no more than a bouncing back and forth of the same image, and secondly, and by way of this first effect, it suggests immediately the erroneousness of the poet’s obsession with his prototype. True reflection which removes all differentiation is simply another example of the static vacancy which the poet is now experiencing. The moon’s reflection is a nothingness, an illusion, but in that moment of calm, distinguishing the real image from the reflection is difficult. A reflection may indeed be a chimera, but its elusive nature may also hide boundless possibilities. The tension between these two ideas strikes the poet and he develops it further in relation to recapturing his lost vision: Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, And pendant mountains seen in the calm lake, Lead only to a black and watery depth, While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung, Where every shade which the foul grave exhales Hides its dead eye from the detested day, Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?

‘Alastor’ (211–19)

Here the ‘Alastor’ poet uses the ambiguous nature of reflection to retain the possibility of reunion with his dream vision. He confronts the idea that the beautiful manifestations of the world, seen previously as limitless in their ability to sustain his thirst for knowledge, may be no more than reflections ‘seen in the calm lake’, chimeras like the moon reflected in water. If that appearance, once probed, reveals nothing but ‘a black and watery depth’, perhaps the obverse is true, and it is only beneath the repellent guise of death that the poet can hope to find the true passage back to the vision of his dream.

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Coleridge’s response to his isolation from the surrounding world in ‘Dejection’ is both a diagnosis and a cure, although, as we have seen, its efficacy is left open to debate: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’ (45–6). It is this position of extreme inwardness which Shelley appears to censure in ‘O! there are spirits’. The ‘Alastor’ poet makes a similar error. His focus upon the maiden of his dream is the cause of his disjunction from his environment, and his decision to recover this vision is his response to the isolating effects of that disjunction. Yet whilst the ‘Alastor’ poet believes himself to be pursuing an ‘outward form’, Shelley’s depiction of the genesis of the dreammaiden demonstrates that his quest is as much a turn inwards as that exhibited by the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’. In the Preface Shelley writes of the vision: His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. ... The vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave. Preface (ll. 12–23)

That the poet ‘images to himself’ the vision suggests an active, creative movement of the mind, yet one unaided by external stimuli. That the vision is a creation of his own mind is indicated by the detail that it ‘embodies his own imaginations’. However, the opening description of the vision in the poem implies a slightly different interpretation of the maiden’s genesis: A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought.

‘Alastor’ (149–54)

In the same way that meaning previously formed itself ‘on’ the poet’s mind, the vision of the maiden appears unbidden ‘on his sleep’. Both the desire for and the ephemerality of what he envisions are expressed in ‘a dream of hopes that never yet/ Had flushed his cheek’, where the intangible nature of these ‘hopes’ is further consolidated by the collocation with ‘dream’, with the equivocation of ‘never yet’ succeeding in holding the full possession of this dream just beyond the grasp. The elusive nature of this vision as an objective experience is counterbalanced by its palpable existence within the poet’s mind. When the maiden speaks to him, ‘Her voice was like the voice of his own soul/ Heard in the calm of thought’, which more accurately recalls the words of the Preface, ‘He images to himself the Being whom he loves’, in that the boundaries between external appearance and internal perception, objective and subjective, appear to collapse in the desire to hear ‘the voice of his own soul’ heard in isolation, in its purest form. Yet, as Shelley had

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commented in ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, ‘Mind cannot be considered pure’. Instead of reaching outwards towards an objective other, the poet appears to be turning inwards towards the essence of his own imagination. That the maiden is a projection which the poet ‘images to himself’ is supported by Shelley’s particular use of imagery in his description of how the poet views her; he ‘saw by the warm light of their own life/ Her glowing limbs’ (175–6, emphasis added). This description has the effect of suggesting that the power of the image is multiplied in an imaginative clarification and intensification. This would necessitate a perceiver, an imagination which is projecting itself into its own creation, thus fuelling the clarity of that image, which in turn intensifies the imaginative involvement in a cyclic process of accumulation. William Keach has observed how it is the power of the dreamer’s imagination, projecting forth aspects of itself, which creates and animates the vision.60 Keach describes such a use of language as a ‘reflexive image’, whereby ‘an object or action is compared, implicitly or explicitly, to an aspect of itself, or is said to act upon or under the conditions of an aspect of itself’.61 Keach goes on to note how this process is integral to the poem’s development subsequent to the vision, replicating at the level of imagery the solipsistic reflections of the poet. However, even as it appears to support the view that the vision is generated by the power of the poet’s mind, Shelley’s description also presents the tantalizing possibility that it is indeed an objective perception. Michael O’Neill has suggested that the use of simile in the line ‘Her voice was like the voice of his own soul’ can function as easily to separate the two voices as to unite them. O’Neill goes on to argue against Keach’s interpretation of ‘by the warm light of their own life’, suggesting that rather than implying a mind feeding and augmenting its own creation, the use of ‘their own’ in fact ‘does not so much refer the light back to the mind of the perceiver as insist on the “otherness” of the maiden’s “glowing limbs”’.62 The fact that throughout his depiction of the poet’s vision Shelley remains equivocal as to whether the source of the image is objective or subjective mirrors the poet’s dilemma throughout his ensuing quest. The vision is, in fact, less a transition between ways of seeing, passively imbibing or actively imbuing, than a recognition of the blurred boundaries between the two, and the impossibility of finding any assurance as to whether the substance of what we perceive has its genesis in the objective exterior or the subjective imagination. As O’Neill observes, the vision forces us to ‘entertain two conflicting notions at the same time: that the veiled maid both is and is not a being separate from the poet’.63 It would appear, therefore, that part of the function of what Keach terms the reflexive image is to call attention to this very ambiguity surrounding the nature of perception. It is notable that Shelley’s use of such imagery often echoes that of Coleridge. Prior to introducing the poet figure, the narrator of ‘Alastor’ recounts his own quest to ‘gaze[s] on the depth’ of the ‘deep mysteries’ of nature (22–3):

60 61 62 63

William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York and London, 1984), p. 82. Keach, Shelley’s Style, p. 79. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, pp. 18–19. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, p. 19.

‘Beside thee like thy shadow’ In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, ... Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge.

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‘Alastor’ (29–37)

Here the atmosphere of reflection, the ambience of the ‘charmed night’ and the use of imagery recall lines from Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’: ’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness.

‘Frost at Midnight’ (8–10)

The images from both poets share the concept of silence actually disturbing by its very silentness. In both cases the image insists on the otherness of the experience – ‘of its own stillness’, ‘its strange/ And extreme silentness’ – yet also offers the possibility that it is the perceiver’s intensity of reflection which creates the particular oddness of ambience. The narrator of ‘Alastor’ is attempting to ‘compel[s] the charmed night’ to ‘render up’ its secrets, and in doing so reflects so intensely as to hear a response from the silence. The voice of ‘Frost at Midnight’ admits that the calm ‘vexes meditation’, thus implying a mingling of mind and atmosphere in perception which consolidates the eerie effect of the silence even in the process of noticing it. In both cases, the choice of image is significant; both narrators are describing the moment when something impalpable – silence – becomes palpable. As with the poet’s evocation of the dream-maiden, the consciousness, by imparting something of itself into the atmosphere, actually has the effect of consolidating the stimulus, producing an objective entity which both is and is not of the mind’s creation, which both is, and is something other than, itself.64 Patterns of images of reflection – both in the sense of mirroring and in that of concentrated contemplation – can thus be seen to permeate ‘Alastor’. The same confusion as to whether the suddenly tangible nature of the silence the Narrator describes is generated by the external atmosphere or the internal imagination can be seen in the ambiguity surrounding the dream-maiden’s genesis. It may be in order to amplify this question that so many of Shelley’s images in ‘Alastor’ are what 64 Shelley employs the same image with similar effect in ‘A Summer-Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, composed during the boat trip along the Thames in August 1815 and also published in the Alastor volume: The dead are sleeping in their sepulchures: And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around, And mingling with the still night and mute sky Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. (19–24; PS, vol. 1, pp. 451–3)

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Keach terms ‘reflexive’, in that they serve to exaggerate the autonomy of the object described, the ‘thingyness’ of the thing. As we have seen, what remains unresolved is the question of whether this amplification is caused by the reflecting power of the perceiving mind, or whether it is a ‘pure’ elaboration of the thing itself. As the juxtaposition of the arguments of Keach and O’Neill regarding the dream-maiden’s genesis suggests, Shelley’s maintenance of this ambiguity appears intentional. To continue to grow and develop we must maintain a dialectic with surrounding stimuli in order to modify our ‘conceptions’ with ‘a variety not to be exhausted’ (Preface ll. 8–9). The ‘Alastor’ poet’s error is akin to that of the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits’ in that he abjures mutability and variety in pursuit of a perfection which may be a chimera. He has created in a process of imaginative projection an image which, because of its birth in his own mind, can never achieve autonomy in the exterior world, but which has gained sufficient objectivity to no longer be confined simply within the compass of his own brain. The problem arises because the vision, now seen once, has attained a concrete form which the poet will forever seek to replicate. If we turn back to Shelley’s Preface, we find a description of the poet’s state prior to his vision: ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed’ (Preface ll. 9–11). Subsequent to his vision, the poet’s ‘desires point towards’ a complete, perfect, finite object. Because of his heightened sensibilities, the poet is not satisfied with any finite object in the world, and thus creates his own. As Wasserman writes, ‘when the mind refuses to limit itself to any finite being it has no choice but to envision its own object in a dream, not of actual reality, but of “hopes” – an object that is only potential.’65 Because he has made something intangible, subjective and potential into a finite actual conception, the poet can neither recapture the full limitless glory of that vision, nor turn his attentions to any of the other infinite possibilities of the world which previously sustained him. Thought processes which were previously creative quickly become destructive, with the poet’s mind chasing its own tail: ‘Bearing within his life the brooding care/ That ever fed on its decaying flame’ (246–7). In this image we find a hideous parody of both poet and Narrator’s previous imaginative exchanges with the world around. Desires which once pointed outwards are now directed inwards in a consuming reduction which punningly mirrors the poet’s consumptive physical state. In a similar way, the imagery Shelley uses to describe the external environment takes a form which mirrors the poet’s imaginative and physical deterioration. As he continues his quest, the poet passes a cove: whose yellow flowers For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave Of the boat’s motion marred their pensive task,... ... The Poet longed To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, But on his heart its solitude returned, And he forbore. ‘Alastor’ (406–9, 412–15) 65 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 19.

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Wasserman points out how the flowers and their reflections image the parallel realities with which the poet struggles; the external reality of the flowers and their watery reflection stand as metaphors for the finite versus the infinite, the empirical versus the imaginative, the known life and the unknown death.66 Unfortunately, as we have seen in the poet’s discourse on the reflection between sleep and death, deciding which pole of the reflection is real and which a chimera is impossible. Timothy Clark cites the same image as drawing a parallel between ‘the kind of simple selfhood enjoyed by natural things’ and ‘the unfulfilled nature of the poet’. The flowers complete themselves by ‘drooping’ towards their reflections, but the poet is aware of the difference between the thing and its reflection, the difference between the perceiving self and the self perceived. This leads to the sort of ‘fiendish doubling’ in evidence in ‘O! there are spirits’.67 The flowers provide a perfect metaphor for the poet; they exhibit the same sort of concentration of self that he experienced in his vision, and as such are to him an attractive symbol. By way of the myth of Narcissus, they figure the poet’s error of seeking otherness in a self-projection, and form another example of the sort of ‘mindless mirroring’ exhibited in the reflection of the moon in water. Momentarily, Shelley offers the possibility that the poet will break out of his own solipsistic quest; just as ‘the boat’s motion marred’ the ‘pensive task’ of the flowers’ gazing, the poet’s desire to ‘deck with their bright hues his withered hair’ implies the potential for a restoration of the sort of dialectical involvement with his environment of which he was capable prior to his vision. Unable to achieve this, the narcissi remain a concurrently attractive and repellent symbol to the poet; their ability to complete themselves through the act of reflection reminds him of the schism between his actual physical being and the projected possibilities of self, briefly seen as other, in his vision. Thus when the poet contemplates his own image in a well, ‘His eyes beheld/ Their own wan light through the reflected lines/ Of his thin hair’ (469–71). On one level this is a replication of the moon’s reflection gazing upon the actual moon, but it is complicated by the barrier of the ‘thin hair’; the poet is seeing his reflected eyes with his actual eyes both through the actual strands of his hair and through the reflected strands. Thus a double barrier of the actual and the reflected is placed between the poet and his contemplation of his reflection, confirming again the difference between the thing and its mirror image, the finite and the infinite, the empirical and the imaginative. There is a clear affinity between the error made by the figure of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’ and that of the poet of ‘Alastor’. Whilst one way of reading the ‘Alastor’ poet’s quest is that he is doing exactly what Coleridge warned against in ‘Dejection’, searching outside himself for the innovative ‘passion and the life’ which only exist within, Shelley would have argued that the mistake of both Coleridge and the ‘Alastor’ poet was to view the mind as a separate entity to the extent that it becomes completely isolated from all the ‘outward forms’ which nourish it in the reciprocal relationship which produces creative thought. This relationship, as the poems from the Alastor volume discussed in this chapter demonstrate, includes mutability in both its positive and negative forms. By attaching to one image all 66 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 30–33. 67 Clark, Embodying Revolution, p. 122.

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aspects ‘of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful’, the ‘Alastor’ poet severs himself from all change and growth, and in his pursuit of this ‘finite’ object, he can no longer experience the glory of the infinite. Likewise, the Coleridge of ‘Dejection’ can only see in the landscape a projection of his own emotions. The result is a consolidation of despair, a reduction of the dialectic between outward and inward to a one-way linear path. Each figure looks inward, and finds himself, then looks outward and sees that self reflected. Without reciprocity there is no growth, leaving, in Shelley’s eyes, both poet figures isolated, untouched and untouchable. Further evidence of Coleridge’s self-awareness regarding the results of his conscious retreat into ‘abstruse research’ exists in one of the poet’s letters to William Godwin of March 1801, where he describes himself as so busy ‘chasing down metaphysical Game’ that: I look at the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I behold them, form themselves into Triangles ... The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once clothed & mitred with Flame.68

Just as the ‘Alastor’ poet’s pursuit of the finite leaves him unable to respond to the infinite, Coleridge’s metaphysical exploits ‘chasing down ... Game’ reduce his perception of the world to the language of hard, mathematical fact. The result for both is a loss of poetic power; in the ‘Alastor’ poet this leads to physical as well as imaginative death, yet in the case of Coleridge it is possible that Shelley hoped for a resurrection. If we recall Mary Shelley’s note to ‘O! there are spirits’, Shelley believed that Coleridge ‘would be haunted by ... the better and holier aspirations of his youth’. This belief in a possible salvation for Coleridge the poet is indicated in unfailingly respectful references to him in Shelley’s letters, and a clue that it may not have been unfounded exists in Coleridge’s letter to Godwin in the brilliant and affecting image of the cold, snuffed out candle which leaves behind no trace of its former vibrant light. The poet who wrote ‘Alastor’ would certainly have recognized the horrible irony that even in the process of describing the loss of his imaginative capacity, Coleridge employs language of a creative and evocative intensity which recalls his greatest poetry.

68 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols, Oxford, 1956–71), vol. 2, p. 714.

Chapter 3

‘An unremitting interchange’: The Voices of Mont Blanc If ‘Alastor’ narrates the loss of the essential reciprocity between a poet and his environment, ‘Mont Blanc’ reflects upon the same relationship from a different perspective. Written in the Vale of Chamonix in July 1816, the nature of Shelley’s scene and subject-matter places his poem in a dialogue with Coleridge’s 1802 ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’. Although not published in any of Coleridge’s collections until 1817, the ‘Hymn’ was printed in issue 11 of The Friend (26 October 1809), to which, as we have seen, Shelley almost certainly had access subsequent to his visit to Southey in 1811. Coleridge’s poem is superficially one of awed reverence; observing Mont Blanc, the poet is compelled to offer praise to God for the elements of the natural world, whilst concurrently entreating those same elements to join him in thanking the heavens for their very existence. In Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, the mountain itself becomes a sort of conduit between earth and heaven, a conveyor of mortal praise for the glimpses of the eternal and the divine which the poet intuits from the landscape. Such an overtly Christian panegyric could perhaps be calculated to elicit a dismissive disdain from the atheistic Shelley, yet whilst the dialogue established in ‘Mont Blanc’ with Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’ is certainly revisionary, it is far from scornful. More than one critic has noted the undercurrents of desperation in Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, and has pointed out the thematic as well as temporal connections to the more famous ‘Dejection’ ode.1 It is possible that Shelley too recognized the submerged fear, bordering on panic, in his precursor’s repeated exhortations to the landscape. One important aspect of ‘Mont Blanc’ is its insistence on facing that fear, the fear of nothingness, and finding within it a source of poetic and visionary strength. Before turning to ‘Mont Blanc’ itself, a brief consideration of the outline of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ will help to clarify one particular model of the individual’s apprehension of his environment against which Shelley situates his 1 See Reeve Parker, Coleridge’s Meditative Art (Ithaca and London, 1975), pp. 150–51; Angela Esterhammer, ‘Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise” and the Voice Not Heard’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford, 2001), pp. 224–45; Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, (New Haven, 1959), pp. 11–19. Whilst Parker grounds the concerns of the ‘Hymn’ in the personal and literary problems of the ‘“Dejection” crisis’, Esterhammer, drawing on ‘Chamounix beym Sonnenaufgange’, the poem by Friederike Brun on which Coleridge ‘based’ his ‘Hymn’, argues that the poem raises deep concerns about the status of its own voice. Bloom identifies a ‘quality of desperation’ in the poem, which he relates to that of ‘Dejection’, and which, he argues, ‘suits a hymn before sunrise in a vale of affliction’.

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poem. The opening lines of the ‘Hymn’ are light and conversational in tone, ‘Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-Star/ In his steep Course? So long he seems to pause/ On thy bald aweful top, O sovran BLANC!’ (1–3), their chattering speed effected through the enjambment.2 Yet this light-hearted fluency soon gives way to the slower rhythms of heavily paused lines in the poet’s first intuition of the divine and the beginning of his entranced prayer: O dread and silent Mount! I gaz’d upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my Thought: entranc’d in prayer I worshipped THE INVISIBLE alone. ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ (13–16)

Initially, the object of Coleridge’s contemplation serves as a catalyst for his sensation of ‘THE INVISIBLE’ which lies beyond that object, and after serving this purpose, the mountain ‘Didst vanish from my thought’. However, as if unhappy with this evocation, Coleridge reformulates the description in the following lines in a measured contemplation which implies a temporal distance from the experience: Yet, like some sweet beguiling Melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life’s own secret Joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfus’d, Into the mighty VISION passing, there As in her natural form, swell’d vast to Heaven! ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ (17–23)

This passage will become important when we come to consider Shelley’s parallel moments of intuition in ‘Mont Blanc’. The lines imply a merger of subject and object, of the perceiving poet and the perceived mountain, ‘Thou, ... wast blending with my thought,/ ... with my Life’, which precipitates an expansion of ‘Soul’, and a consequent greater proximity to the divine, as that soul ‘swell’d vast to Heaven!’ Thus enraptured, Coleridge is able to launch his hymn of praise to the god that he intuits from the landscape, and the verse marches forward through a series of descriptions which both evoke and invoke nature to ‘all join my Hymn’. All 2 All references to ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ are to the Friend text (CCW, vol. 4, II, pp. 156–8), the text to which Shelley had access. However, there are a number of alterations to this text between its first printing in 1809 and reprinting in the 1812 collected Friend. Furthermore, 1809 is also subject to a list of corrections published in number 13. If Shelley’s knowledge of The Friend dates from visiting Southey in the winter of 1811, then the text he saw would obviously be 1809. However, Mary’s comment that Shelley recited the ‘Ode to Tranquillity’ in January 1815, (Mary Jnl, vol. 1, p. 59), and the repeated references to Coleridge’s characterization of Hope as ‘a most awful duty’, noted in Chapter 1, suggest that between 1811 and 1815 Shelley acquired a copy of the text, which would imply that 1812 is his reference. Accordingly, the following discussion uses the collected Friend text of 1812. See Charles E. Robinson, ‘The Shelley Circle and Coleridge’s The Friend’, ELN, 8 (1971), 269–74.

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elements of the scene, including the ‘stern Monarch of the Vale’, Mont Blanc itself, are called upon to ‘utter praise’ to God. It is perhaps the degree to which this tenor of prostration before the divine is maintained which has led critics generally to ignore the ‘Hymn’, concurring perhaps with Harold Bloom that it ‘is not one of Coleridge’s finest poems’. Bloom locates its fault in its ‘high-pitched quality’, which produces the effect of ‘a man trying to work himself into a state of continuous rapture’, the result of which ‘works a considerable strain’ upon the reader.3 The following discussion does not seek to reinterpret ‘Mont Blanc’ as solely a response to Coleridge’s own religious apostrophe to the mountain. It seems highly possible, given the repeated references to the Alpine landscape in his letters and in Mary’s journal, that Shelley would have addressed Mont Blanc in verse with or without knowledge of Coleridge’s poem.4 Yet because Shelley’s verse does engage, in some places very specifically, with the language of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, it seems inconceivable, given the two poets’ divergent views on religion, that Shelley’s work should not seek to readjust the Coleridgean theological response to this most imposing of landscapes.5 Just as in the ‘Hymn’ Coleridge uses the natural scenery as a means of interrogating his intuition of the divine, ‘Mont Blanc’ is a meditation less upon the physical prospect confronting the poet, than on the manner in which the individual apprehends that scene. Whilst the mountain is the ostensible object of Shelley’s poem, the tenor of the opening verse paragraph is not the poet’s environment, but the workings of the mind perceiving it: The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom – Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, – with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, 3 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 12. 4 See especially Shelley’s letter to Peacock, starting 22 July 1816 (Letters, vol. 1, pp. 495–502) and Mary Jnl, vol. 1, pp. 110–17. Interestingly, thoughts of Coleridge seem to have preoccupied Shelley at this time. In a letter written to Peacock on 17 July, Shelley asks his friend to ‘Tell me of the political state of England – its literature, of which when I speak Coleridge is in my thoughts’. See Letters, vol. 1, p. 490. 5 A number of critics have noted the relationship between the two poems, usually treating the ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ as a brief prelude to the discussion of ‘Mont Blanc’. See Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto and London, 1987), pp. 67–70; Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, pp. 11–19; Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Secret Strength of Things’, WC, 18 (1987), 99–107, (p. 99); Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 49, 58–60. Their observations will be discussed more fully during the course of this chapter.

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Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

‘Mont Blanc’ (1–11)6

Part of the oddity and difficulty of these lines stems from the problem of distinguishing between the tenor and the vehicle of Shelley’s metaphor. The title of the poem leads us to expect a description of Mont Blanc and its Vale – an expectation which is perpetuated by the imagery of the verse paragraph – yet the actual subject, or tenor of the metaphor, is apparently the perceiving mind. The first four lines describe how ‘The everlasting universe of things/ Flows through the mind’, invoking a construction of perception where our impressions of the scene are produced by the action of the external world on the existing contents of the human mind. This suggests a dialectical process, involving both illumination and concealment, whereby our existing knowledge, thoughts and experiences are modified by this new influx of sensory information. However, critics following Earl Wasserman make a distinction between the ‘mind’ of line 2 and ‘the source of human thought’ of line 5. According to Wasserman, the ‘mind’ through which the ‘universe of things’ flows is the One Mind, as distinct from individual consciousness. Wasserman’s construction of the One Mind derives largely from his employment of Shelley’s prose fragment, ‘On Life’, in particular, the following paragraph: The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.7

Shelley continues, ‘Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it’. Wasserman argues that Shelley’s formulation arises from a desire to overcome the dualisms of mind against world and thought against thing. All human minds, according to Wasserman’s reading, are aspects of the One Mind, and in total the One Mind composes existence.8 Thus when he begins his reading of ‘Mont Blanc’, Wasserman assumes that the ‘mind’ to which Shelley refers in line 2 is this One Mind rather than the individual human consciousness. As such, the opening one and a half lines of ‘Mont Blanc’ evoke a repository of potentiality existing in the universe to which the individual mind may have access and even contribute (lines 5–6), but which remains distinct from individual perception. Commenting on ‘Mont Blanc’, Jonathan Wordsworth points out that ‘On Life’, on which Wasserman’s formulation of the One Mind is based, in all probability postdates ‘Mont Blanc’ by some three years, and as such is a less viable structure by 6 7 8

All references to ‘Mont Blanc’ are to the B text in PS, vol. 1, pp. 542–9. ‘On Life’ in SPP, pp. 474–8, (pp. 477–8). Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 146–9.

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which to interrogate the poem than Wasserman suggests. Wordsworth argues that a reading of the poem which incorporates the concept of the One Mind in addition to an individual mind is largely without basis and unnecessarily complicates the reading of the opening lines: If Shelley had intended us to see the mind in question as the One Mind, wouldn’t he have made it a little more obvious? In effect, Wasserman wishes us to rearrange the line, and read “The universe of things flows through/ The everlasting mind,” but that is not what Shelley wrote. ... It is so much easier to see the mind as human, and regard it as the meeting-place of the external world experienced through the senses, and the thought (in Coleridge’s or Wordsworth’s terms, the imagination) that wells up within the individual to modify his perception.10

As Wordsworth suggests, there is little internal evidence in ‘Mont Blanc’ to justify Wasserman’s distinction between the One Mind and the individual consciousness. Furthermore, ‘On Life’ is generally regarded as a fragment, and in it Shelley himself is less than clear as to the exact nature of the One Mind; the passages cited above are his fullest explication of the concept. In effect, whether one agrees with Wasserman’s reading or not, he tends to present as a clear and coherent philosophy ideas from Shelley’s prose which are considerably more disparate and less fully formulated. This is not, however, to sweep aside Wasserman’s commentary; the substance of his account of ‘Mont Blanc’ remains largely intact whether or not we choose to assent to the concept of the One Mind.11 As Wasserman himself points out in his earlier discussion of what he terms Shelley’s intellectual philosophy, ‘Although Existence is to be described as the One Mind, we exist nevertheless as discrete minds in a spatiotemporal condition which tends to separate into thought and things’. Wasserman opens this chapter, ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, by arguing that Shelley in fact sought a philosophy which was primarily experiential, to account for not ‘the nature of reality in the light of absolute truth, but reality as it is phenomenalistically determined, reality as our minds truly experience it, even though in the aspect of eternity that reality may be only illusory’.12 If, as the following discussion seeks to show, ‘Mont Blanc’ is concerned with experiential rather than absolute truth, then the question of the coherence of Shelley’s developing philosophy of how things actually are in the world, and thus the question of the One Mind, becomes subservient to the more immediate question of how we experience that world, and thus to the workings of the individual consciousness. If we return to the opening lines of ‘Mont Blanc’ in this context, we can discern that the external world, the ‘everlasting universe of things’, which enters the human 9 Donald Reiman dates ‘On Life’ to 1819, as it was composed in the same notebook as the 1819 essay A Philosophical View of Reform, and may well, Reiman argues, have grown ‘directly from an early passage’ of the longer work. See SPP, p. 474n. 10 Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Secret Strength of Things’, p. 102. 11 See Jonathan Wordsworth: ‘Wasserman’s chapter stands as by far the most impressive discussion of Mont Blanc, and his conclusions, though couched in terms of a preoccupation with the Essay on Life are frequently just.’ (‘The Secret Strength of Things’, p. 102). 12 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 149, 133.

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mind, engenders a process whereby aspects of that mind are variously illuminated and concealed, ‘Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom –/ Now lending splendour’, by its passage. That this process is not quite as arbitrary, nor the mind quite as passive as the image of rolling water suggests, is implied by the phrase ‘where from secret springs/ The source of human thought its tribute brings/ Of waters’. The complexity of assigning status to the ‘tribute’ of ‘the source of human thought’ derives partly from the syntactical difficulty in identifying the referent of ‘where’ in line 4, which could be the ‘everlasting universe of things’ in line 1, the ‘mind’ in line 2, or, indeed, the product of the first four lines in their entirety: the action of the ‘universe’ on the ‘mind’. However, the difficulty arises in part from the critical insistence that the ‘mind’ of line 2 is indeed distinct from the ‘human thought’ of line 5. If this is the case, as Wasserman argues, the lines describe the individual mind making its contribution to the One Mind. But nowhere does Shelley himself make this explicit. If we propose, however, that the distinction being made is actually between ‘mind’ and ‘thought’, the former being the cavernous receptacle within which the production of thought occurs, with the latter the ‘tribute’ which results from this shadowy process, then there seems little need to invoke an epistemology involving two concepts of mind. If Shelley is referring exclusively to the individual human mind throughout, then it becomes easier to accept that the ‘source of human thought’ refers to existing individual thought combining with external sense impressions, ‘the everlasting universe of things’, in a dialectical relationship where the internal mind is modified by, and in turn modifies the impressions of, the external world. In support of this reading it is worth noting that the lines are further complicated by Shelley’s use of the word ‘source’ in line 5. ‘The source of human thought’ initially suggests that the implicit subject of the lines is the origin of thought, a concept supported by the image of process arising from the action of external upon internal described in the preceding lines. However, if, as the accumulation of water imagery and the cancelled draft line ‘fountain of the mind’ suggest, ‘source’ is intended simply as a synonym for ‘spring’, the question of the origins of thought, which in part generates Wasserman’s distinction between two types of mind in these lines, becomes a false trail.13 As we shall see, ‘Mont Blanc’ as a whole, perhaps partly in response to the superficial certainties of ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’, exhibits a distinct suspicion towards the easy assignment of origins. It is possible that in recognition of humankind’s inherent desire to uncover the ‘source’ of things, Shelley’s use of the word here is an intended pun.14 The continuation of the first verse paragraph serves to support the idea that this search for origins is in vain. Again, Shelley’s syntax is complicated: 13 See BSM, vol. 11, pp. 6–7. 14 As Ronald Tetreault observes, in this respect ‘Mont Blanc’ approaches the concerns of ‘Alastor’ from a different perspective, consolidating the sense that the mistake of the ‘Alastor’ poet was to pursue origins which cannot be isolated: ‘The question of origins, ... is central to Alastor, but in Mont Blanc Shelley puts the matter of origin under “erasure”, as a concept at once necessary and inexplicable, and then proceeds to explore the consequences of this suspension.’ The Poetry of Life, p. 71.

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from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, – with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone

Whilst it is conceivable that the ‘sound but half its own’ refers back to the flow of ‘rapid waves’ of the ‘universe of things’, the imagistic connection between ‘tribute’ and ‘feeble brook’ would suggest that it is the ‘source of human thought’ which is being described. Shelley’s continued use of water imagery, which melds opposing forces in a way which negates the possibility of assigning certain origins, again suggests a disinclination to provide any concrete, mechanistic description of the process of perception. The second half of the verse paragraph is an aural equivalent of the visual images of the first; just as the interaction between world and mind was first presented as a reflective, fluid process of alternate illumination and obfuscation – ‘rolls its rapid waves,/ Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom – ’ – the same process is now evoked as a symphonic fusion of sound. Thus just as the ‘tribute’ of thought has ‘a sound but half its own’ when exposed to the competing noises of the external ‘universe of things’ which flows through the mind, the individual elements of the landscape cannot be observed as aurally distinct: Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

What Shelley’s imagery evokes is the tenet first articulated in ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’, that ‘Mind cannot be considered pure’.15 The ‘tribute’ of human thought is made to ‘assume’ a character greater than itself through its interaction with the ‘everlasting universe of things’, the external stimuli which flow through the mind. In the same way that it is impossible to isolate the ‘pure’ noise of the ‘feeble brook’ when heard with the accompaniment of waterfalls, the rustle of woods in the wind, and the passage of a ‘vast river’, human thought cannot be considered in abstraction from the multiple sense impressions of the external world. Whether we consider the arena in which this activity occurs as the One Mind, to which our individual minds have access and are able to contribute their own ‘tribute’ of thought, or as simply the individual perceiving mind, the thought processes of which affect and are affected by sensory impressions, Shelley accords less priority to the ‘origins’ of thought than to the vibrant reciprocity between mind and world. Thus in the second verse paragraph of ‘Mont Blanc’, this sense of the combination of various powers of varying strengths to the creation of a whole, in which the individual elements both enhance and are enhanced by each other, is replicated in the poet’s consideration of the landscape itself:

15

Forman 1880, vol. 6, p. 286.

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Coleridge and Shelley Thus thou, Ravine of Arve – dark, deep Ravine – Thou many-coloured, many-voicèd vale, Over whose pines and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest.

‘Mont Blanc’ (12–19)

Whereas in the opening verse paragraph Shelley used the interactions of the natural scene as metaphors to describe the dialectic between world and mind, the cumulative product of that paragraph now functions as a metaphor for the workings of the landscape. Shelley complicates further the relationship between tenor and vehicle; whilst as a point of focus the landscape now takes precedence, its description is initially controlled by the model of the mind established at the poem’s opening. As Judith Chernaik observes, ‘each detail is a full realization of the hypothetical scene sketched earlier’.16 The effect upon the reader is one of a gradually augmented disruption to our understanding of the poem’s intended subject matter. Thus in its very structure and progress, ‘Mont Blanc’ replicates the blurring of origins perceivable in the opening verse paragraph’s description of the production of thought.17 In the opening lines of the second verse paragraph, the language used to describe the ravine recalls the presentation of the mind in the poem’s opening lines. It is both cavernous and ‘dark’, yet, like the mind whose contents were capable of ‘glittering’ and showing ‘splendour’ when exposed to the passage of the ‘universe of things’, the Ravine of Arve becomes ‘many-coloured’ and ‘many-voicèd’ as its structure is acted upon by the ‘Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams’, and its voice modulated by the Arve itself, whose passage it dictates. The scene is one of a vast dialectic, each element acting and acted on by countless others. Notions of origins or hierarchical forces vanish in the face of this never-ending process. The process of metaphoric complication is intensified by the line ‘Power in likeness of the Arve comes down’, which seems to introduce a new figural force into the landscape whose provenance, like so much else in the description, is unknown. The flooding torrent of the Arve seems to parallel the flowing ‘everlasting universe of things’ from the opening lines, whilst being indisputably one manifestation of that universe. Whilst we could initially extrapolate to say that the ‘Power’ is in some way akin to the ‘universe of things’, the construction ‘in likeness of’ holds back such simple identification. Furthermore, it is not the Arve which seems to the poet to be like ‘Power’, but a ‘Power’, apparently palpably present to the poet’s senses, which only resembles the Arve. Shelley appears to be responding not only to the 16 Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London, 1972), p. 41. 17 The employment of a similar formal technique in order to emphasize a thematic point is observable in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, where the leaves which form the subject of the first stanza are introduced metaphorically in the second to describe the progress of the storm; in effect, the tenor of the first stanza becomes the vehicle of the second. The effect is a consolidation of the cyclic nature of the natural processes Shelley describes in the poem. See SPP, pp. 221–3.

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scene itself but to an apprehension of a greater ‘Power’ beyond it. The cumulative effect of the opening 20 lines of ‘Mont Blanc’ is one of continual complication and obfuscation. The actual physical presence of the landscape is enmeshed so thoroughly in language concerning the mind’s process of apprehending that landscape, that the poem becomes self-reflexive; it describes what it is, a poetic attempt to convey not only the scene before the poet, but the actual process of perception of that scene. It describes how, at this particular moment, to this particular perceiver, the scene came into being. In the following lines, Shelley consolidates the sense of unceasing activity without clear origination by considering such activity’s manifestation in the various aspects of the scene before him. He addresses the ravine: thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear – an old and solemn harmony;

‘Mont Blanc’ (19–24)

Shelley’s lines suggest eternal process with neither beginning nor end. The pines combine both youth and maturity; they are ‘Children’, but ‘of an elder time’, where the refusal of specificity regarding origination is again apparent. A similar effect of timelessness is created by the ‘chainless winds’ which ‘still come and ever came’, and a symbiosis which denies all hierarchies and first causes is effected in the description of the action of these winds upon the pines. The winds come to ‘drink’ the ‘odours’ of the pines and to hear ‘their mighty swinging’, but neither the scent of the pines nor their song would be released were it not for the action of the winds themselves. The details of the landscape mirror the construction of the mind in the opening paragraph in their insistence on active dialectical relationships and their refusal to specify origins in the everlasting cycles of restless activity. The scene thus evokes immense power and potentiality: Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image

‘Mont Blanc’ (25–7)

These lines convey a layering effect, the sense of further elements held just beyond the grasp of human perception, but which, in their ‘unsculptured’ forms, can be brought into existence by the imagination. In his description of the ravine, Shelley repeats a number of details from Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sun-rise’. Lines 3–7 of Coleridge’s poem read as follows: O sovran Blanc! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Riseth from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently!

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From these lines, Shelley almost certainly appropriated ‘Rave ceaselessly’ for his description of the ‘feeble brook’, where ‘a vast river/ Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves’, in his metaphoric elaboration of the process of thought in the opening verse paragraph. At the opening of Coleridge’s poem the pines are ‘silent’, a detail to which Shelley will return at the end of ‘Mont Blanc’, yet his depiction of the activity of the trees in lines 19–24 may owe something to a later description in the ‘Hymn’, where Coleridge impels the elements of the scene to sing God’s name: ‘God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!/ Ye pine-groves with your soft and soul-like sounds!’ (‘Hymn’ 60–61). Whereas the song of Coleridge’s pines is rapidly translated by the poet into Christian affirmation, the music of Shelley’s trees is, as we have seen, resolutely other, a product of timeless, sourceless natural interaction, called into being by the passage of the ‘chainless winds’ rather than by any deity of human or divine construction. Similarly, in his description of the rainbows veiling the ravine, Shelley may be working against Coleridge’s rhetorical question to the landscape, ‘Who bade the sun/ Clothe you with rainbows?’ (‘Hymn’ 55–6). Whereas Coleridge’s rainbows are unquestioningly attributed to God, Shelley, perhaps asserting a better knowledge of science, characterizes his as ‘earthly’. Ascribing the splendour of the scene to a Christian deity is, Shelley argues, insufficient. Whilst some features of the natural world are scientifically explicable, others remain sourceless and fathomless, and the postulation of an omnipotence, even if one could assent to its existence, would merely raise more questions than it answered. The activity of the ravine is resolutely dialectical in character; to attribute its processes to a removed, inviolable creating force helps explain neither those processes themselves, nor how and why the human mind perceives them as it does. In this context, Shelley’s characterization of the ravine, ‘Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,/ A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame’ (30–31), seems a pointed contrast to the scene as described by Coleridge, where all voices are forced into subordination to the poet’s cry of ‘God!’. Yet Coleridge’s perception of the landscape is a valid one, although it may not be one with which Shelley can concur. It is significant that contemplation engenders in both poets a trance-like state from which their responses garner greater depth. It is worth returning to Coleridge’s formulation of the experience: Yet, like some sweet beguiling Melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life’s own secret Joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfus’d, Into the mighty VISION passing, there As in her natural form, swell’d vast to Heaven! ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ (17–23)

Coleridge’s experience is one of fusion, a blending together of his consciousness with the surrounding world, which leads to a loss of distinct selfhood as his soul is ‘transfus’d,/ Into the mighty VISION’. Yet paradoxically, the loss of autonomy generates a consolidation of identity; the soul, ‘As in her natural form’, achieves a proximity to the divine, ‘swell’d vast to Heaven!’. It is from this vantage point that Coleridge invokes the landscape to ‘join my Hymn’.

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Coleridge appears to have discovered instant certainties, a confirmation of his belief in a divine omnipotence moving behind all the manifestations of the natural and human worlds. It is the speed with which he is able to quantify and explain his experience that reveals an important contrast with ‘Mont Blanc’. Angela Leighton locates this difference in ‘the ease with which Coleridge personifies the object of his address’. Perceiving all around him as the manifestation of a divine presence, Coleridge is able to gain immediate proximity to the source of the awe which the landscape inspires and thus, in the repeated cries of ‘God!’ which follow, ‘The poem exorbitantly proclaims the resolution of all uncertainty and doubt in this litany of faith’.18 Against this easily won assessment of experience we can juxtapose Shelley’s description of his own ‘trance sublime and strange’: Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around.

‘Mont Blanc’ (34–40)

The interfusion of elements which Shelley observes in the landscape is once again made to stand as a metaphor for the complex processes of the poet’s mind: ‘when I gaze on thee/ I seem ... To muse on my own separate fantasy’. In a way which is congruent with the preceding verse, the language here expresses the difficulty of distinguishing between inner and outer processes. The reciprocity observable in the ravine reminds Shelley of his own thought processes which hold ‘an unremitting interchange/ With the clear universe of things around’. Yet despite his attempts to differentiate this process from its metaphoric incarnation in the ravine through the use of ‘separate’ and the emphatic repetition of ‘My own, my human mind’, the landscape which has prompted these musings is also inextricably involved in their nature. The ‘clear universe of things around’ is both a metaphor for and an essential component of this ‘unremitting interchange’.19 A number of critics have found difficulty in the apparently paradoxical construction ‘passively renders’ in this passage.20 However, within the context of scepticism 18 Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime, p. 59. 19 Earl Wasserman interprets the emphasis in lines 36–7 as evidence of Shelley making a distinction between the individual mind and the One Mind. See Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 226–7. I.J. Kapstein is closer to my interpretation here. Kapstein’s reading is interesting in that it employs, to different effect, the same passage from ‘On Life’ which prompts Wasserman’s distinction between the individual mind and the One Mind: ‘The existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion.’ (‘On Life’, SPP, p. 477). With this passage in mind, Kapstein suggests that Shelley uses the word ‘fantasy’ to express that ‘it is an illusion that his mind is an entity separate and independent of the “universe of things”’. See Kapstein, ‘The Meaning of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”’, PMLA, 62 (1947), 1046–60 (p. 1050). 20 See, for example, Harold Bloom in Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 29; I. J. Kapstein, ‘The Meaning of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”’, pp. 1050–53.

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regarding the isolation of origins which has been established in the poem, it seems possible that Shelley is once again expressing the complex, involuted genesis of his imaginative impressions of the scene. Whilst Shelley does not actively seek to imbue the landscape with something from himself, the dizzying process of apprehension naturally draws associatively upon past experiences and conceptions. It is in this respect that ‘Mont Blanc’ becomes that which it describes. If human apprehension is a dialectical process whereby new sense impressions are elaborated and modified by previous ones, then the guiding principle of our means of relating to the outside world is akin to poetic metaphor; the process of perception forces each element to be seen in terms of something else. The confusion surrounding the subject matter of ‘Mont Blanc’, initiated by the apparent disjunction between title and opening lines, is proving to be precisely the poem’s point. The symbiotic process between inner and outer is too fast and too interwoven for either pole to be examined in isolation, hence the use of external imagery to describe the internal process in the opening verse, and the ensuing application of this construction of apparent interiority to the description of the exterior scene in the second. Through language, Shelley creates not a description of either the mind or the mountain, but a replication of the experience of the one comprehending the other. It is in this context that we should consider Shelley’s following lines: One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by, Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

‘Mont Blanc’ (41–8)

Once again, Shelley’s syntax is complicated, leading critics to propose several alternative referents for ‘that or thou’ of line 43. Following Wasserman, Donald Reiman reads ‘that’ as the ‘clear universe of things’ from the preceding lines, and ‘thou’ as an address to the One Mind. Harold Bloom argues that ‘that’ refers to Shelley’s mind, and ‘thou’ to what that mind confronts in the ravine. Everest and Matthews suggest the ‘legion of wild thoughts’ and the ravine respectively as the most likely referents. Jonathan Wordsworth confirms, through attention to the surrounding context, that the ‘thou’ of this passage is the ravine, and suggests, drawing on Plato’s myth of the cave and the attendant darkness of human perception, that the most logical referent of ‘that’ is in fact the ‘darkness’ of the preceding line.21 Syntactic consistency tends to favour these latter commentators’ reading of the lines as less convoluted than that of Reiman and Wasserman. The isolation of the ravine as the ‘thou’ of the passage has one important potential implication; by describing the ravine and its environs as ‘no unbidden guest’ in Poesy’s cave, Shelley may be 21 See Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 227–8; SPP, p. 90n; Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 29; PS, vol. 1, p. 544n; Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Secret Strength of Things’, pp. 103–4.

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making reference to this landscape as a poetic subject, thus invoking its previous incarnation in verse in the ‘Hymn Before Sun-rise’ of his precursor, Coleridge. The lines which follow focus upon the process of poetic perception, describing the activity of the ‘legion of wild thoughts’ whilst they inhabit Poesy’s cave: Seeking among the shadows that pass by, Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image

‘Seeking among the shadows’ for ‘some shade of thee’ seems a perfect description of poetic metaphor, the attempt to capture a new image or experience by viewing it comparatively against the mind’s catalogue of previous images and experiences, ‘Ghosts of all things that are’. Furthermore, whilst the process applies to poetic creation in particular, it can also be seen more generally to describe all moments of apprehension. The final lines heap further complexity on the passage: ‘till the breast/ From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!’. Jonathan Wordsworth is surely correct to see the ‘breast’ as Shelley’s and ‘they’ as the ‘legion of wild thoughts’. Wordsworth continues: ‘Till he recalls the wild thoughts (by coming out of his reverie), the Ravine that he has throughout been addressing, and the mystery that surround it, are to be found within the Cave of Poesy; that is, they are subject to the imagination – half, perhaps, created by it’.22 This does not, however, explain the final exclamation of ‘thou art there!’, which seems to capture the experience of the ravine, but is uttered, presumably, once Shelley has come out of his reverie. Rather than discovering his experience in a specific ‘shade’ or ‘phantom’, Shelley’s lines seem to point to the poetic ‘Seeking’ as itself constitutive of experience; the essence of the ravine of Arve is not to be located in a specific image or pattern of images, but in the process of comparison. Just as in ‘To a Sky-Lark’ of 1820, Shelley deliberately exposes the limitations of any particular individual simile in capturing the essence of the bird, yet finds poetic strength in the picture gained through movement from one comparison to another, so in ‘Mont Blanc’, the ravine exists both in and in between attempts to isolate it. The convolutions in syntax which blur the boundaries between inner and outer, thought and referent, allow Shelley to dramatize the complexity of the process, presenting not a picture of what the experience is, but a process in which the reader too must engage. As Michael O’Neill writes of this passage: ‘it involves us in the struggle to capture intuitions and thoughts as they come into consciousness; it ends up as being itself an experience rather than a statement about experience’.23 The opening words of Shelley’s third verse paragraph establish a speculative, questioning tone which is maintained throughout this section of the poem: ‘Some say that gleams of a remoter world/ Visit the soul in sleep...’. Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that the tone recalls Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’, ‘And what if all of animated Nature/ Be but organic harps...’. Such a sense of slightly whimsical conjecture is underpinned in ‘Mont Blanc’ by a secure basic scepticism which accepts that all such attempts to interpret the mountain landscape and the sense of power in nature

22 Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Secret Strength of Things’, p. 104. 23 O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, p. 45.

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and humanity which it provokes, be they rational, religious or mythical, provide only part of the story. Gazing at the mountain, Shelley speculates: how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. – Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply – all seems eternal now. ‘Mont Blanc’ (69–75)

As quickly as the speculation is entertained it is dismissed as merely one means by which the interpreting mind attempts to fathom what is before it. Once again the search for origins proves futile; the source of the mountain exists beyond the sort of temporality which humankind can perceive: ‘all seems eternal now’, where ‘seems’ acknowledges the limitations of human perception. It is perhaps significant that Shelley’s questions here are consciously rhetorical, baldly answered by ‘None can reply’. Yet Shelley’s rhetoric is of a different kind to that of Coleridge. Whilst the latter supplies his own response to the questions he asks of the mountain, ‘Mont Blanc’ accepts that there are no definitive answers. Yet Shelley’s questions suggest that he understood Coleridge’s need in the ‘Hymn’ to seek assurance through explanation. Many details from this section of ‘Mont Blanc’ appear to replicate images from the ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’, yet where Coleridge finds certainty, the scene reveals to Shelley only greater doubt. When, in line 53, Shelley states ‘I look on high’, this precipitates a chain of questions concerning the relation between sleep, dreams and waking which culminates in the sceptical conclusion cited above. When Coleridge lifts his head to survey the mountain, it occurs at the very end of the ‘Hymn’, and constitutes a moment of beatific assurance which aims to extinguish doubt and uncertainty: Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou – That, as once more I raise my Head bow’d low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow-travelling with dim eyes suffus’d with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, To rise before me – Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a Cloud of Incense, from the Earth! Thou kingly Spirit thron’d among the Hills, Thou dread Ambassador from Earth to Heaven, Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent Sky, And tell the Stars, and tell yon rising Sun, EARTH with her thousand voices praises GOD!

‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ (74–85)

What underlies and undermines Coleridge’s moment of apotheosis at the end of the ‘Hymn’ is a palpable sense of estrangement from the objects which he has been addressing throughout. When he reveals that his head has been ‘bow’d low/ In adoration’, one gets the uncomfortable sense that he has not been really observing the scene at all. This sensation is doubtless contributed to by a reader’s awareness of two

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factors which have dogged the ‘Hymn’ and tend to dominate critical commentary. Firstly, the issue of potential plagiarism arising from Coleridge’s translation and appropriation of the short ode ‘Chamounix beym Sonnenaufgange’ by Friederike Brun.24 Secondly, our acceptance of the veracity of Coleridge’s experience is threatened by the knowledge that he had never visited the Vale of Chamonix in his life.25 However, there is ample internal evidence in the ‘Hymn’ which augments the questions about the exact nature of Coleridge’s experience which were first prompted by the relentless, proselytizing tone established throughout. Even at the poem’s close, Coleridge’s vision is literally blurred; his eyes are ‘dim’ and ‘suffus’d with tears’, and the mountain only ‘seemest, like a vapoury cloud’ to rise in front of him. If his sight is compromised, we have already seen how his sense of hearing has been undermined through his urgent need to force the mountain to confirm his already established creed. The speed with which Coleridge places ‘God’ in the mouths of the natural elements negates his repeated injunction to the landscape to speak to him; the relentless pace of the verse gives it no room for response. The apparent certainty of the tone of Coleridge’s exclamations has the further effect of obscuring an underlying ambivalence regarding the mountain’s status at the end of the poem. Whilst language such as ‘kingly Spirit thron’d among the Hills’ and ‘Great Hierarch’ suggests an authority located in the mountain itself, or at least in what it represents to the poet, the conclusion of the poem reveals Mont Blanc to be merely an ‘Ambassador from Earth to Heaven’, although admittedly one which inspires ‘dread’. The mountain’s majestic place within the landscape and its ‘skypointing Peaks’ make it the perfect intermediary between earth and heaven; whilst it too is enjoined by Coleridge to thank God, it is distinguished from the other elements of the scene in that it is also able to convey the combined praise of nature to its object in the heavens. Thus the subtext of Coleridge’s poem reveals an uncertainty not dissimilar to that of Shelley, yet it is a subtext which the elder poet cannot explicitly acknowledge. Part of what Coleridge appears to seek for in the landscape is a sense of community; joined together in praise, the poet and his surroundings are literally singing from the same hymn sheet. Community, or lack of it, had already formed one of the central themes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, where the only way in which the protagonist can temporarily relieve his self-destroying isolation is to repeat continuously his tale to anyone who can be compelled to listen. Writing of the ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’, Harold Bloom suggests that ‘The poet knows that Mont Blanc is part of the “inanimate cold 24 See Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London, 1971), pp. 26–30 for a discussion of the plagiarism issue. Angela Esterhammer juxtaposes a reading of Brun’s poem against that of Coleridge, and suggests that Brun’s is one more ‘voice not heard’ in the ‘Hymn’. See ‘Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise”’, pp. 226–33. 25 In a letter of September 1802 to William Sotheby, Coleridge wrote about an experience on Sca’ fell in the Lake District after which, ‘I involuntarily poured forth a Hymn in the manner of the Psalms, tho’ afterwards I thought the Ideas &c disproportionate to our humble mountains – & accidentally lighting on a short Note in some swiss Poems, concerning the Vale of Chamouny, & it’s Mountain, I transferred myself thither, in the Spirit, & adapted my former feelings to these grander external objects.’ See Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols, Oxford, 1956–71), vol. 2, pp. 864–5.

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world” until he himself makes it something that lives in his own life’.26 What Bloom goes on to identify as the ‘quality of desperation’ in Coleridge’s attempt to create community through the assimilation of all voices into one, is prompted by a fear that the only voice the poet will hear in the void is his own.27 One of the consequences of Shelley’s technique of obscuring origins in his dramatization of the dialectic between mind and landscape is the creation of the sort of community which Coleridge desires but cannot quite believe in. This is not to suggest that Shelley evokes the scene as one uninterrupted harmony to which he may have access. Yet the dialectic involved in the natural world finds itself replicated in the interaction between that world and the human mind as soon as the imagination actively engages with what it perceives. We have seen that the process by which this occurs is akin to poetic metaphor. It is through a metaphoric approach to the landscape of the Arve that the poet is able to engage, and thus enter into a relationship with what he sees. Susan J. Wolfson has argued that the ‘Hymn’ is an example of Coleridge’s tendency to interrogate the constructed nature of metaphor and analogy. In her reading, Coleridge’s use of another’s words and his decision to alter the location of the original inspiration mark a deliberate foregoing of ‘the intimate union of mind and object’. In this way he is engaged in a process of ‘exposing the unity vested in the privileged form of the symbol as an illusory or factitious (however intensely desired) effect of poetic form’, and the poem itself becomes representative of ‘the effort of poetic making’. Wolfson’s reading would make Coleridge’s enterprise in the ‘Hymn’ more akin to that of Shelley in ‘Mont Blanc’, with the undercurrent of uncertainty intended to be obvious. Whether the younger poet regarded the disjunction in the poem between the apparently inspired mind and its apparent object of inspiration as deliberate or not, his response in ‘Mont Blanc’ would suggest he recognized the ‘illusory’ and provisional nature of Coleridge’s constructions.28 G. Kim Blank has noted that ‘Contemplation is not always an aim in Shelley’s poetry, especially contemplation in an accepting or passive sense’, and that External objects or presences become only points of references to something notthemselves: they are metaphorical, and as such are guides to (creating) relationships. It is never quite enough for Shelley to say ‘There it is’. He finds he has to question ‘What gives it its “there-ness”?’, and, most important, ‘How is “there-ness” to be poetically expressed?’29

Blank’s comment that Shelley uses objects as ‘guides to (creating) relationships’ is pertinent to what we have observed of the poet’s insistence on blurring the 26 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 18. 27 Angela Esterhammer comments that Coleridge ‘sets out to make sunrise happen through the power of poetic voice’ yet is unable to ‘let Mont Blanc have the last word ... any actual response on the part of nature proceeds to disappear, leaving only the echo of the poet’s commands’. See ‘Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise”’, pp. 235–6. 28 Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997), pp. 64–7, (pp. 67, 66, 67). 29 G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York, 1988), p. 160.

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boundaries between inner and outer in ‘Mont Blanc’. In this way he creates a submerged dialogue based upon an awareness that ‘there-ness’ is essentially the subjective product of this continuous dialectic. Coleridge shares Shelley’s desire to call into being a relationship, but the apostrophizing tendency in the ‘Hymn’, more repetitive and strident than in ‘Mont Blanc’, never entirely succeeds in the attempt to break down the barriers separating subject and object which Shelley perceives as a necessary step to achieving true community. Writing on the apostrophe in poetry, Jonathan Culler observes that the act of calling is more important than the thing being called upon: ‘to apostrophize is to will a state of affairs, to attempt to call it into being by asking inanimate objects to bend themselves to your desire’. The apostrophe is thus ‘a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship which helps to constitute him. ... The object is treated as a subject, ... One who successfully invokes nature is one to whom nature might, in its turn, speak’.30 Such speech is what Shelley detects in the ‘unremitting interchange’ between his own mind and the exterior universe where it becomes impossible to distinguish who is constituting whom. The same desire to hear a voice in nature underpins Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, and the same need for relationship with the outside world leads the poet to find his own words replicated in the voices of the Arve. Yet in the ‘Hymn’, there is a danger that this replication has more in common with the sort of mindless mirroring experienced by the ‘Alastor’ poet after the departure of his vision, and by the poet of ‘Dejection’ who gazes at the features of the landscape with ‘how blank an eye’ and can only ‘see, not feel how beautiful they are’ (30, 38). As Angela Esterhammer has written of the ‘Hymn’, Coleridge ‘cannot conceive the landscape inspiring or responding to the human subject of its own accord, but only as an echo of what the poet’s “busier mind” and “active will” bestows. Yet there is no guarantee that the landscape will return even an echo’.31 Culler links the apostrophizing tendency in poetry to the desire to make something happen; when Coleridge speaks to the landscape, he receives an element of assurance back, but he is unable to will a new state of affairs into being because by assimilating disparate voices into his own, he can only receive confirmation of his own beliefs. What lies behind this may be a fear of the sort of disruption to vision apparent in ‘Dejection’, where the inability to establish a relationship with the outside world leads to a suspension of the poet’s ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’ (86). Shelley, on the other hand, embraces such disruption as a potential source of innovation. Whilst such potentiality leads immediately to poetry, the ‘unremitting interchange’ between self and world may have a greater lesson to teach: The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith with nature reconciled; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

‘Mont Blanc’ (76–83)

30 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (London, 1981; repr. 1992), pp. 139–40. 31 Esterhammer, ‘Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise”’, p. 238.

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That the ‘mysterious tongue’ of nature can produce both ‘awful doubt’ and ‘faith so mild’ is perhaps an indicator of Shelley’s belief in the role of the individual consciousness in constituting the world around. Furthermore, whilst Shelley’s lines can be interpreted as a criticism of Coleridge’s easily won faith in the ‘Hymn’, they may also express a recognition of the ‘awful doubt’ which precipitates such a withdrawal into established orthodoxy.32 Thus far the poem has shown that faith is attendant upon the sort of doubt which can be overcome by continually reconstituting the relationship between mind and world in an active, metaphoric process which poetry is ideally situated to undertake. Thus it is perhaps in this sense that Shelley wishes us to understand ‘reconciled’. The process of perpetually deconstructing the barriers between subject and object forces us to perceive nature not as a hierarchy indicative of a supreme creator, but as a dialectical process from which creation emerges. If, in the momentary removal of the dichotomy between inner and outer, we are able to see ourselves as part of that process, we can also accept that we have the ability to harness some of its power. It is the ability to accept that ‘influencings’ occur in a multi-directional way, rather than as a linear path, which the voice of Mont Blanc may be able to teach. The result would be a true relationship between inner and outer which does not countenance hierarchies on either side. That this has an application beyond simply that of a philosophical model is revealed in Shelley’s assertion that the mountain’s voice has the capability to ‘repeal/ Large codes of fraud and woe’. If the social, political and religious structures underlying our lives were predicated on dialogue rather than edict, then not only do many more voices become heard, but humanity is empowered by the knowledge that its destiny, specifically its ability to ‘repeal/ Large codes of fraud and woe’, lies in its own hands. Commenting on Shelley’s perception of ‘Power’ in ‘Mont Blanc’, Paul Fry argues that this power has nothing to do with ‘mythopoeic structures of temporality’, and suggests that the poem shows that ‘such structures are willed into being by ourselves to withstand the threat of Power’s sheer vacancy’.33 Fry’s comment is pertinent in the context of what we have observed of the distrust exhibited towards the assignation of origins in ‘Mont Blanc’, either philosophically, as in the case of thought, or more literally, as in the creation of the ravine of Arve. Furthermore, such structures can be seen to embrace the ‘codes 32 The difficulty in reading lines 76–9 lies in the phrase ‘But for such faith’, which initially suggests the ‘faith so mild’ is in fact a barrier to achieving reconciliation with nature. Harold Bloom reads the lines thus, and suggests that the faith alluded to is one typified by Wordsworth and Coleridge, a faith which is so serene ‘as to prevent us from being able to reconcile ourselves to the seemingly malevolent aspects of nature’. (Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 32). Whilst Bloom’s reading is congruent with Shelley’s presentation of nature in ‘Mont Blanc’ as a far more amoral force than Coleridge would allow in the ‘Hymn’, Everest and Matthews have convincingly argued, with reference to the Scrope Davies MS and to similar examples elsewhere in Shelley’s poetry, that ‘But’ is used here in the sense of ‘Only’, making Shelley an advocate for the ‘faith so mild’. (PS, vol. 1, p. 546n). In either case, Shelley’s ‘faith’ is differentiated from that of Coleridge by its juxtaposition with ‘awful doubt’, which I have suggested is repressed in the ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’. 33 Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven and London, 1980), p. 198.

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of fraud and woe’ in all their forms, but specifically, with reference to Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, those of religion. Structures of hierarchy and origination underlie Coleridge’s experience in the ‘Hymn’, and, as the poem develops, they are appealed to by the poet with progressively greater force. Should he be unable to coerce the elements of the landscape to comply with him in confirming the presence of the orthodox Christian structures to which he adheres, Coleridge fears that, without the ballast of a shared community of faith, he will be left facing the ‘sheer vacancy’ alone. The way in which ‘Mont Blanc’ prioritizes metaphor as a model of interaction suggests that poets in particular should be amongst those who ‘Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel’ the guidance offered by the mountain’s voice. A model for this is provided by Shelley’s fourth verse paragraph which opens with an evocation of the cyclic movements of ‘the daedal earth’ (86), and concludes ‘All things that move and breathe with toil and sound/ Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell’ (94–5). But rather than finding in this cosmic ephemerality a tale of sound and fury which signifies nothing, Shelley achieves the insight that it is only within this ceaseless movement and change that we can intuit a glimpse of the permanence underlying the world: Power dwells apart in its tranquillity Remote, serene, and inaccessible: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice, Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream. ‘Mont Blanc’ (96–109)

Shelley’s conception of ‘Power’ can be seen to be analogous in effect, if not in character, to Coleridge’s God. Here Shelley rejects the model of the ‘soul’ swelling ‘vast to Heaven’ adopted by his precursor and offers an alternative, and in his view the only means of apprehending such a power in the visible universe. The starkness of the statement that such a power ‘dwells apart in its tranquillity/ Remote, serene, and inaccessible’, perhaps encapsulates the fears which assail Coleridge in the ‘Hymn’, that unless it can be compelled to join him in song, the natural world may reveal itself as a ‘remote’ and ‘inaccessible’ void which ‘dwells apart’ from the poet. Yet Shelley’s lines mark a recognition of Coleridge’s fear and subtly posit a means of overcoming it. Just as Coleridge’s God can only truly be perceived in his effects, so too is the case with Shelley’s Power. Whilst Power cannot be grasped in isolation, interpretive acts using the power of poetic metaphor can intuit its presence by mimicking its action. Rather than confronting a void, Shelley’s lines intimate an eternal process. Thus the representation of the glaciers that ‘creep/ Like snakes that

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watch their prey’ conveys perpetual movement through the fluidity of enjambment and the comparison to the involuted motion of preying reptiles. The description insists on the otherness of the image by according the glaciers a sentience and autonomy, yet in the very imaginative act of simile itself shows how this distance may be bridged. That this bridging is only partial, and must be constantly reconstructed, is indicated by the lines ‘many a precipice,/ Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power/ Have piled’, which, in a continuation of the poem’s refusal to assign origins, places the source of the glaciers firmly beyond human powers of apprehension. However, as the following lines show, the effects of this construction by higher forces can be imaginatively perceived by ‘the adverting mind’: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream.

The transition in metaphor here marks the process of imaginative apprehension which enables the scene to be both a ‘city of death’ and a ‘flood of ruin’, and in doing so marks both the limitations of that apprehension and its strengths. When the glaciers are a ‘city’, the human need for related, associative language is revealed in the accompanying terms ‘tower’ and ‘wall’. Yet this conception derives from the transient human world which, as Shelley has detailed at the beginning of the verse paragraph, is in itself insufficient to describe the phenomenon before the poet. Thus ‘city’ and its associative terms are discarded, and the glaciers become ‘a flood of ruin’. Whilst neither metaphoric incarnation of the glaciers is adequate, the transition from one to the other intimates the movement from solidity to liquidity which Shelley observes in the melting boulders of ice. Furthermore, the passage from metaphor to metaphor evokes the movement of mind which concerns Shelley so deeply in ‘Mont Blanc’. To apprehend a power only observable in its effects requires a movement from one set of descriptive terms to another; process requires process, and we are returned, once again, to the image of the mind, so like the image of the landscape, and that of the landscape which so resembles the mind, which opened the poem. Throughout this section of the poem Shelley seems to be working closely with Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, yet whereas Coleridge’s landscape is both harmonized and humanized by its ultimate referentiality to a higher power, Shelley’s becomes steadily more alien and other as the descriptions accumulate. The ‘flood of ruin’ which descends from the glaciers of Mont Blanc ‘from the boundaries of the sky/ Rolls its perpetual stream’ (108–9). Coleridge had employed the same phrase when addressing the mountain, demanding, ‘Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?’ (38). Coleridge here creates a schema of cause and effect; God created the mountain and, as ‘parent’ suggests, the mountain in turn creates and nurtures the ‘perpetual streams’ which flow from it. Shelley appropriates Coleridge’s phrase, only to divest it of its assumptions of hierarchy. Thus it is the ‘flood of ruin’, brought into being by ‘Frost and Sun in scorn of mortal power’, which creates the ‘perpetual stream’; an endless process devoid of a discernable originating force beyond those of natural

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cycles. Shelley’s adjustments to Coleridge’s poem are subtle. He appropriates details from the ‘Hymn’ not to negate the elder poet’s sense of awe when confronted with the scene, but to extrapolate further from those details in order to consolidate the magnitude of the landscape and thus also the potential fear which it inspires. We have seen how such fear in Coleridge is – partly – subsumed by his continual recourse to a higher, ultimately benevolent deity. Lacking Coleridge’s faith, and perhaps sensing how far that faith is in fact stretched in the ‘Hymn’, part of Shelley’s enterprise in ‘Mont Blanc’ is to examine the consequences of such fear. Coleridge’s submerged fear is apparent in his own description of the passage of the glacial torrents: And you, ye five wild Torrents, fiercely glad! Who call’d you forth from night and utter Death, From dark and icy Caverns call’d you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagged Rocks For ever shatter’d and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable Life, Your Strength, your Speed, your Fury, and your Joy, Unceasing Thunder and eternal Foam! And who commanded (and the silence came) Here let the Billows stiffen, and have Rest!

‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ (39–48)

Here, as earlier in the poem, the autonomy of the elements of the scene is mediated by the overseeing action of a creator who ‘calls forth’ and ‘commands’ these elements in their course. Whilst this sense of divine supervision may be responsible for the ‘fiercely glad’ nature of the poet’s evocation, the alien integrity of the torrents and the rocks lurks beneath the assured surface pomp of the verse. The caverns from which the torrents emerge are ‘dark and icy’ and contain ‘night and utter Death’. The unarticulated question is, if God ‘call’d ... forth’ the torrents, did he also create the unknown and threatening caverns from which they emerge, and if not, who or what did? The passage of the torrents is marked by ‘precipitous, black, jagged Rocks/ For ever shatter’d and the same for ever’, where the sense of otherness first seen in the description of the caverns is accompanied by qualities of timelessness and sourcelessness. Both of these qualities are appropriated and amplified by Shelley, whose glacial flood passes where: vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand

‘Mont Blanc’ (109–11)

Shelley’s pines, like Coleridge’s rocks, exhibit damage, yet endure. As if to affirm the elder poet’s implicit awareness that the scene provokes feelings which cannot always be referred to and reconciled by the belief in a deity, Shelley exaggerates the alien nature of the scene and emphasizes its utter removal from the mutable human world: the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

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Coleridge and Shelley The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, And their place is not known.

‘Mont Blanc’ (111–20)

The rocks, already descending from ‘yon remotest waste’ have furthermore ‘overthrown/ The limits of the dead and living world’, their past, present, and future existence lie beyond the temporal schemes of human comprehension. This sense of timeless history provokes Shelley to make a panoramic movement from the lives of ‘insects, beasts, and birds’ to ‘The race/ Of man’, all of whom lose their dwelling places in a period akin to that of the passage of ‘smoke before the tempest’s stream’ when juxtaposed with the permanence evidenced in the contours of the ravine. From this perspective, man’s ‘place is not known’, and the immensity of this concept proves a source of fear to humanity which ‘flies far in dread’. The starkness of Shelley’s vision is an extrapolation of Coleridge’s own observations in the ravine, where the torrents are characterized as ‘Unceasing’, ‘eternal’, and most of all ‘invulnerable’, where the adjective subtly implies its opposite, and thus the ultimate transience of mankind. Yet Shelley may have recognized more in the lines of the elder poet than Coleridge himself was able to admit. If, as Shelley has implicitly argued throughout the poem, the assignment of origins is arbitrary and futile, producing at best fanciful myths, and at worst, ‘large codes of fraud and woe’, then the only way in which man can hope to find his ‘place’ within a landscape such as that of the Arve is through the creation of imaginative, metaphoric relationships. One way in which this can be made to occur is in precisely the sort of dialogue that ‘Mont Blanc’ establishes with Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’.34 Thus the ‘dark and icy caverns’ of the ‘Hymn’ find their own imaginative extrapolation in ‘Mont Blanc’: Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

‘Mont Blanc’ (120–26)

The interconnectedness of the clauses here, as well as the water imagery, recall the poem’s opening verse paragraph. Coleridge’s ‘dark’ caverns become ‘vast caves’, illuminated by the ‘rushing’ and ‘restless’ passage of the torrents of water. The 34 Stuart Peterfreund has observed that one way in which Shelley attempts to reanimate language by ‘fostering the reign of metaphor’ is ‘by engaging other writers in intertextual “conversation”’. See Shelley Among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language (Baltimore and London, 2002), p. 24.

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inability to describe precisely these ‘caves’, ‘chasms’ and ‘caverns’ is accepted in both poems, yet for Coleridge their obscurity connotes ‘night and utter death’, whilst for Shelley, they are merely ‘secret’, unknowable in themselves, yet brought to life in language through the observation of the effects of their product. Thus in ‘Mont Blanc’ there is an amalgamation of these disparate torrents into ‘one majestic River’, which, after all, reveals itself precisely through its relation to mankind exhibited in the analogy of ‘breath and blood of distant lands’. Whilst Coleridge’s torrents share the sentience of Shelley’s river, exhibiting ‘speed’, ‘fury’, and ‘joy’, all of these attributes are referable to an omnipotent creating force located in a Christian deity. Shelley’s river actively ‘Rolls’ and ‘Breathes’, an autonomy emphasized by the parallel positioning of the stressed verbs at the start of consecutive lines, creating through the rhythm a pulsing effect akin to the flowing of the river itself. Fear occasioned by the temporal dislocation which exposure to the ravine has caused has been replaced by a panoramic vision of infinite potentiality, of ‘distant lands’, ‘ocean waves’ and ‘circling air’. It is at this point observable that Shelley’s engagement with Coleridge has been extended to include another of the elder poet’s works. Whether or not Coleridge recalled, in his characterization of the ‘dark and icy caverns’, the ‘caverns measureless to man’ and ‘caves of ice’ of his as then unpublished ‘Kubla Khan’, Shelley almost certainly invokes the poem in his description of the ravine. Furthermore, in doing so he may be attempting to replace what he felt Coleridge had omitted from his 1802 ‘Hymn’. In the second stanza of ‘Kubla Khan’, Coleridge elaborates upon ‘that deep romantic chasm’: And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid those dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean ‘Kubla Khan’ (17–28)35

The imaginative landscape of ‘Kubla Khan’ bears striking resemblances to Shelley’s depiction of the torrents’ passage through the ravine at the end of his fourth verse paragraph. The line ‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething’, is recalled in ‘from those secret caverns in tumult welling’ (‘Mont Blanc’ 122)36, whilst Coleridge’s ‘sacred river’ is reanimated in Shelley’s ‘one majestic River,/ The 35 ‘Kubla Khan’ in CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 509–14. 36 Everest and Matthews describe this image as ‘An unmistakable echo of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”’. See PS, vol. 1, p. 548n. As discussed in Chapter 2, if Shelley had not already heard ‘Kubla Khan’ from Godwin, Mary or Southey, Byron would almost certainly have introduced him to Coleridge’s ‘Vision in a Dream’, as he did ‘Christabel’, during time spent

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breath and blood of distant lands’ (123–4), which also recalls the ‘earth’ which in ‘Kubla Khan’ is seen to be ‘breathing’ due to the passage of water. It is possible that the descriptive terms of ‘Kubla Khan’ may lie behind other instances of Shelley’s evocation of the ravine. The same lines, in their description of rushing water and ‘dancing rocks’, may also have been recalled during Shelley’s composition of the opening verse paragraph of ‘Mont Blanc’, where a ‘vast river/ ... ceaselessly bursts and raves’ over the ‘rocks’ of the waterfall. Furthermore, Shelley’s evocation of the glacial landscape of ‘dome, pyramid and pinnacle,/ A city of death, distinct with many a tower/ And wall impregnable of beaming ice’ (104–6) may be prompted in part by the ‘dome in air’ and ‘caves of ice’ (‘Kubla Khan’ 46, 47) which Coleridge desires to build could he but ‘revive’ within himself the song of the Abyssinian maid. These potential verbal echoes of ‘Kubla Khan’ in ‘Mont Blanc’ gain more substance when we consider the overall thematic tendencies of both poems. In Shelley’s final verse paragraph the aural cacophony of the ravine gives way to the silence of the mountain itself and the sense of power that Shelley intuits from the landscape. This sudden quiet is precipitated by the removal of the perceiving eye: In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them: – Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! ‘Mont Blanc’ (130–36)

This silence returns us to the opening of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn’, where the poet’s vision of the mountain remains uninvested by the presence of a creating deity: ‘thou, dread aweful Form!/ Risest from forth thy silent Sea of Pines/ How silently!’ (5–7). They also recall Shelley’s prior appropriation of a similar image from Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ in ‘Alastor’, where the impalpable silence becomes tangible by the very strength of its emptiness.37 The point towards which these lines are moving is fully articulated in the final question of Shelley’s poem: And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? ‘Mont Blanc’ (142–4)

The state of ‘Silence and solitude’ is the natural domain of the mountain and its surroundings. What, Shelley asks, would that scene convey to us were we unable, by ‘the human mind’s imaginings’, to create sound from silence and presence from absence? This final question alerts us, as Michael O’Neill has observed, to what is at stake in ‘Mont Blanc’. The final lines are ‘poised between celebration at the Villa Diodati in the early summer of 1816. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (rev. edn., London, 1995), pp. 328–30. 37 Compare ‘Alastor’ 29–37 to ‘Frost at Midnight’ 8–10; see also the discussion of this image in Chapter 2.

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of the poem’s “imaginings” and awareness that if one can imagine in a way that bestows meaning, one can also do so in a way that allows meaning to topple back into the “vacancy” which is its perpetual shadow’.38 Thus the perpetual creation and recreation of metaphoric relationships which has comprised both the subject and substance of ‘Mont Blanc’ is revealed as our only means of maintaining a true dialogue with the world around us. Through that dialogue we are able to situate, and continually resituate our position in relation to that world, via a process of repeated metaphoric substitution where what cannot be grasped in itself can be observed in its likenesses. The creation of something from an apparent nothing is, as Coleridge himself knew, a role which the poet is particularly qualified to undertake, yet as we have seen he suffered from the continual fear that his own poetic voice was not sufficient to the task. Both the preface to and the conclusion of ‘Kubla Khan’ articulate the poet’s fear of his inability to capture the same fleeting visionary apprehension which Shelley perceives in Mont Blanc and its ravine; the conditional terms of the close of ‘Kubla Khan’ speak too of a power glimpsed but not grasped. ‘Could I revive within me’, Coleridge writes, the ‘symphony and song’ of the Abyssinian maid: To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drank the milk of Paradise.

‘Kubla Khan’ (44–54)

What Coleridge is left desiring at the end of ‘Kubla Khan’ is a dialectic between visionary power and poetic voice. That he postponed the publication of the poem for so long, finally presenting it to the world as an unfinished fragment of ‘A Vision in a Dream’, is testimony to Coleridge’s dissatisfaction with the sort of ephemeral access to moments of inspiration which Shelley accepts as inevitable in ‘Mont Blanc’. Part of Shelley’s dialogue with Coleridge in the poem is to demonstrate to the elder poet that the fleeting nature of these glimpses of visionary power, evoked with such intensity in ‘Kubla Khan’, need not be a crippling influence on poetic activity. The landscape of ‘Kubla Khan’ is no less an imaginative creation than that of ‘Mont Blanc’. It exhibits the same alien power and provokes the same awed fear. The elements of the scene, unlike those of the ‘Hymn’, are not reconciled through recourse to a deity. As K.M. Wheeler has observed, there are ‘two contrasting aspects’ to the landscape of ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘The Khan, like the artist, builds out of nature. But the labours of the earth, her flingings of huge fragments into air, and her forcing up of the fountain as the source of the river, are analogies of the unconscious mind creating its nature for 38 Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford, 1997), p. 149.

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itself.’ Both aspects depend upon creative vision, to which ‘Kubla Khan’ allows the poet the access which the ‘Hymn’ would deny in its prostration before an absent deity. The strength of power harnessed by such a creative act is observable in the manic, otherworldly image of the poet, with ‘flashing eyes’ and ‘floating hair’. Power, in all its uncertain and potentially threatening aspects is embraced in ‘Kubla Khan’. It is possible that Shelley recognized the extent to which the same power is repressed in the ‘Hymn’, and in echoing ‘Kubla Khan’ in ‘Mont Blanc’ was reminding Coleridge of the imaginative gains to be made when that power is permitted full play within the individual human consciousness. In embracing the uncertainty which Coleridge would repress in the ‘Hymn’, Shelley shows how true dialogue between inner and outer can be achieved, and moreover, how poetic strength is in fact predicated on the movement between ephemeral ‘likenesses’ which constitute both the mind’s process of apprehension and poetic metaphor. In his discussion of Shelley’s ‘intellectual philosophy’, Earl Wasserman invokes Shelley’s comment in ‘On Life’ that within man ‘there is a spirit ... at enmity with nothingness and dissolution’.40 In the ‘Hymn before Sunrise’ Coleridge demonstrates the strength of that spirit, filling what he fears to be an empty void with the cry of ‘God!’. In ‘Mont Blanc’ Shelley shows that the creation of something imaginatively substantial from an apparent emptiness is the triumph not only of poetry, but of human apprehension.

39 K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London, 1981), p. 33. 40 See SPP, p. 476; Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 133.

Chapter 4

Perpetual Orphic Song: The ‘vitally metaphorical’ in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘To a Sky-Lark’ The engagements evident in ‘Mont Blanc’ with Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sunrise’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ demonstrate Shelley’s awareness of both the negative and positive ramifications of the poetic ability to create something from nothing and to evoke presence from absence through the power of what he terms ‘the human mind’s imaginings’. Both of Coleridge’s poems are concerned with the dialectic between visionary power and poetic voice; whilst the fragmented nature of ‘Kubla Khan’ expresses fear that such a dialectic is at best ephemeral, the ‘Hymn’ subsumes its terror that it may be found absent altogether through the resoundingly certain chorus of ‘God!’, as if volume can compensate for substance. The fear that lurks beneath the surface in the two poems may arise in part from a fundamental uncertainty regarding the relationship of language to thought; ‘Kubla Khan’ appears to falter due to the poet’s fear that he cannot ‘revive within’ language the felt experience of the ‘symphony and song’ of the Abyssinian maid. Part of the way in which Shelley responds to Coleridge in ‘Mont Blanc’ is to define this relationship as a perpetually shifting system of metaphoric substitutions where what cannot be captured in a ‘pure’ form can be glimpsed in its movement between various imaginative likenesses in the mind’s attempt to grasp it. This chapter attempts to build upon the preceding discussion by opening up the mode of Shelley’s textual engagement with Coleridge to consider further both writers’ conception of the poet’s role and the value of poetry itself. Although Shelley was as assiduous a reader of Coleridge’s prose as he was of his poetry, what follows argues less for a direct influence of the elder poet on the younger than it seeks to establish an affinity between the two poets’ thoughts on the subject of language and its employment in the poetic recreation of experience. That both Shelley and Coleridge actively engaged with the positive and negative consequences of the uncertain relationship between language and thought is evident from concerns raised in their prose. As analysis of Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ will suggest, that such ideas find both practical application and creative expression in their poetry may underpin stylistic affinities between the two poets. A letter of 1800 to William Godwin shows Coleridge attempting to answer his own question, ‘Is thinking possible without arbitrary signs?’ by expressing a desire to ‘destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into

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Things & living Things too’. Here Coleridge questions whether, in the dialectic between language and thought, one pole has primacy; do the words available to us circumscribe what the mind is capable of producing? If this is the case, then in order to account for the variety of language, we must reconsider our characterization of words, ‘elevating’ them into ‘living Things’ by according them the power to constitute and augment our idea of the ‘Thing’ in question. The ‘chicken and egg’ question of whether language or thought is the originating factor in the formation of articulated ideas is one which also preoccupied Shelley. The juxtaposition of two passages from ‘Prometheus Unbound’ exemplifies what William Keach has termed Shelley’s ‘deeply divided’ attitude towards language: He gave man speech, and speech created thought Which is the measure of the universe;

(II, iv, 72–3)

Language is a perpetual Orphic song, Which rules with daedal harmony a throng Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were. (IV, 415–17)2

If we accept ‘speech’ as a synonym for ‘language’, Shelley appears to articulate two antithetical positions regarding the relative primacy of words and thought. If ‘speech created thought’, then words are not only direct articulations of our mental processes, but, as Keach has commented, ‘language is entirely a product of mind and is therefore more fully and precisely expressive of thought than any other medium.’ If, however, ‘Language ... rules ... a throng/ Of thoughts and forms’, then it is implied that language is merely an exterior means of organizing and expressing the amorphous products of the mind, and, accordingly, that words are ‘inherently imperfect signs of thoughts’.3 If this latter model is an accurate representation of the relationship between language and thought, then the ramifications are potentially severe. If our means of describing our thoughts and experience is necessarily a step removed from the thought or experience itself, then language becomes a potentially inadequate medium for expressing our mental and emotional activities. Worse still, if, as in Coleridge’s phrase, words are merely ‘arbitrary signs’, then there is no necessary connection between mental processes and the means by which those processes are bodied forth to the world in language. However, Coleridge’s desire to elevate words into ‘living Things’ is suggestive of a characteristic of language which prevents it from becoming merely this fixed system of ‘arbitrary signs’; words have the power to constitute our ideas of things not specifically via what they represent, but via what they connote. One word or phrase can suggest another in a chain reaction which forms a sense of the whole which is both descriptive and formative. In 1826, in a letter to the son of his physician, James Gillman, Coleridge went as far as to state that:

1 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols, Oxford, 1956–71), vol. 1, pp. 625–6. 2 PS, vol. 2, pp. 561, 639–40. 3 William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York and London, 1984), p. 2.

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It is the fundamental mistake of Grammarians and writers on the philosophy of Grammar and Language [to assume] that words and their syntaxis are the immediate representatives of Things, or that they correspond to Things. Words correspond to Thoughts; and the legitimate Order & Connection of words to the Laws of Thinking & to the acts and affections of the Thinker’s mind.4

Whilst it would be difficult to apply Coleridge’s implied corollary between syntax and the process of thought consistently – if only because of the varying syntaxes of different languages – we can see here an attempt to break down the ‘old antithesis of Words & Things’ by arguing that we can observe the connotative, associative process of thinking in the construction and collocation of the resulting language. In this way, language is expressive of both the process of ‘Thinking’ and the ‘affections’ of the thinker. Such a description, we might observe, could stand as a more than adequate definition of poetry. There appears to be a distinction developing here between purely representational language employed to evoke the tangible, and abstract language used to give shape to the impalpable.5 Abstract language relies upon the connotative and the metaphorical. Such a distinction appears, for Shelley, to be akin to that between reason and the imagination. At the opening of A Defence of Poetry he comments that: According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.6

An imaginative language has the power to create new thought by connotation and metaphor. The vitality of language is prioritized because the emphasis has shifted from the signification of fixed images by ‘arbitrary signs’ to the actual process of combination and association which is, as Coleridge argues, representative of thought. It is unsurprising that poetry, perhaps the ultimate incarnation of abstract language, should be the ideal medium for presenting thought. We have seen in ‘Mont Blanc’ how Shelley is able to convey his experience of the mountain through interconnected, connotative language which is alive and individual through its generation from associative thought processes. It is this style which Jean Hall, in The Transforming Image, has termed Shelley’s ‘Poetics of Transformation’. In moments of intuition, poetry can organize the flurries of impressions which compose 4 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6, p. 630. 5 Commenting on the two extracts from ‘Prometheus Unbound’ cited above, Stuart Peterfreund formulates a similar distinction between ‘the formal mode of language’ and the ‘referential’ mode: ‘The formal mode works to conjure up the “seen”; the referential, on the other hand, takes the “seen” as a given, a point of departure, and takes as its task the analysis and classification of it.’ See Peterfreund, ‘The Two Languages and the Ineffable in Shelley’s Major Poetry’ in Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (eds), Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, (New York, 1984), pp. 123–9, (p. 125). 6 SPP, p. 480.

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our experience. Because these impressions are subject to diverse combinations, and may not necessarily combine in the same way they have previously, the evocation of experience is subject to an unending novelty.7 Furthermore, such associative language can aid our comprehension and formation of experience through likeness and comparison. It is perhaps this sort of action to which Shelley refers when in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ he wrote that ‘speech created thought’. The connotative capability of language is propagated by the action of different minds containing different thoughts. Whilst a shared structure of reference is required for communication to occur, the striving, metaphorical shiftings the individual mind makes to comprehend the mental movements of another is integral to a society’s progression, via communication, to community. As Shelley wrote in the Defence, ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own’.8 Thus perhaps, after all, we should not accept ‘speech’ as being synonymous with ‘language’. If speech is a marker of community (and the ‘man’ to whom Prometheus gave speech is certainly a collective signifier of humankind), then it is via such community and communal sharing of thought that new thoughts are created and society accordingly developed. Similarly, if we turn again to the apparently opposing characterization of the role of language in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, it is notable that the phrase ‘perpetual Orphic song’ seems, in its expansive connotations, incongruous with the idea of language as merely a force which ‘rules … a throng/ Of thoughts and forms’. It seems likely that in the construction of this phrase Shelley was directly indebted to Coleridge. In ‘To William Wordsworth’ Coleridge describes the entrancing effect of hearing Wordsworth recite The Prelude, characterizing his friend’s poem as ‘An orphic song indeed,/ A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,/ To their own Music chaunted!’ (45–7).9 Both poets use the phrase to accord language, specifically poetry, a magical, visionary quality. More significantly in the context of the present discussion, we can observe the unity which Coleridge insists upon between Wordsworth’s finished poem and the process of thought which produced it: ‘passionate thoughts/ To their own music chanted!’. Orphic song, Shelley would have learnt from Coleridge, is language expressive of thought. In fact, Shelley could be said to go further than Coleridge here; in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ the Orphic song of language is accorded the ability to nourish and awaken the ‘senseless and shapeless’ forms lying dormant in the consciousness. Here language is less an ordering force than a vital and vitalizing catalyst to expression. This interpretation is consolidated if we consider the connotations of Shelley’s phrase ‘daedal harmony’. The OED defines ‘daedal’ as ‘Displaying artistic cunning and fertility of invention’ and notes the word’s associations with variety. To ‘rule with daedal harmony’ is thus not to order but to create in an Orphic song of perpetual variety. Michael O’Neill observes Shelley’s indebtedness to his precursor here and comments, ‘All “language” in Shelley’s redeemed universe aspires self-consciously to the condition of Coleridgean “orphic 7 8 9

Jean Hall, The Transforming Image, (Chicago and London, 1980), pp. 12–16. SPP, pp. 487–8. CCW, vol. 16, II, pp. 815–19.

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song”, even as it moves selflessly outwards to empower “a throng/ Of thoughts and forms”.’10 O’Neill’s phrase ‘moves selflessly outwards’ returns us again to Shelley’s belief in the intimate relation between imagining ‘intensely’ and social good; to be ‘greatly good’ an individual must imagine themselves in the place of others in a selfless movement towards sympathy and community. The sense of a causative relationship between the progress of a society and the development of its language lies at the root of Coleridge’s principle of desynonymy. In the Biographia Literaria, he describes the process as follows: In all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning, ... The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and (this done) to appropriate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the synonym (should there be one) to the other. But if (as will often be the case in the arts and sciences) no synonym exists, we must either invent or borrow a word.11

Here Coleridge explicitly connects the growth of a society to its progress in desynonymizing language. As knowledge increases so does a requirement for more precise distinction in the use of language to describe this knowledge. Thus in Coleridge’s model, language is made to respond to and retain a proximity to the material, intellectual and experiential development of a society. Paul Hamilton has suggested that for Coleridge, poetry represents the highest point of achievement in the process of desynonymization, by virtue of what Coleridge calls its ‘untranslatableness’.12 In Chapter 22 of the Biographia, Coleridge reiterates the tenet of desynonymy in the comment that true poetry must exhibit ‘a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning’ to the extent that Every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely; its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.13

Coleridge’s attempt to close the gap between thoughts and words leads him to argue for a greater precision of language to the extent that an alternative choice or order of words could not convey the same sense as the original. In its distinct nuances of meaning, language thus becomes both the means of achieving and the marker of a more developed society. As Paul Hamilton remarks, ‘Language encapsulates the crudely abstract views which a creative writer can transcend; and discrimination in the use of language is the model of a progressively more astute apprehension of the world’.14 10 Michael O’Neill, ‘The Gleam of Those Words: Coleridge and Shelley’, K–SR, 19 (2005), p. 94. 11 CCW vol. 7, I, pp. 82–4. 12 Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford, 1983), p. 72. 13 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 142. 14 Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, p. 72.

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The potential difficulty with Coleridge’s model is that whilst arguing for greater precision in language use, and potentially for growth and enrichment in the range of meaning achievable, it simultaneously implies a constriction of language, and potentially of thought, by restricting each signified to its allotted signifier. In a notebook entry of November 1801 Coleridge wonders, ‘Whether or not the too great definiteness of Terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital & idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full-made Images & so prevent originality’.15 Precision in language may risk precisely the sort of deadening which Coleridge had expressed the desire to overcome in his letter to Godwin a year previously when he sought to elevate words to the status of ‘living Things’. Perhaps in recognition of this potential threat to the ‘vital and idea-creating force’ of language posed by desynonymy, Coleridge expands his definition of ‘untranslatableness’: Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it.16

Thus a theory which appeared to risk constraining the expressive potential of language frees it again by decreasing the priority accorded to the object in itself, moving instead towards a more impressionistic apprehension of the phenomenal world. By insisting that the meaning of a word is ‘not only its correspondent object’ but includes ‘the character, mood and intentions’ of the writer, Coleridge is already moving towards the terms of his 1826 assertion that words correspond not to things but to thoughts. This broadening of the definition of ‘meaning’ allows language to be more than simply a representational tool where words are attached only to finite objects, and to become instead an articulation of abstract thought. Thus a closed system of signs is opened up by the implication that words are ultimately expressive of the workings of the mind. The contrast between representational and abstract language, and Coleridge’s assertion that true poetical language should not be susceptible to ‘translation’ into another arrangement of words, are ideas congruent with his theory of copy and imitation. Emerson R. Marks locates the first expression of this distinction in one of Coleridge’s notebook entries of 1804: Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself – & yet knowing that the Thing is not present to us. – Surely, on this universal fact of words & images depends by more or less mediations the imitation instead of copy.17

The Biographia goes further in helping to distinguish these terms. In his long discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry, Coleridge cites one of the factors which should 15 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds Kathleen Coburn (vols 1–3, London, 1957–73), Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen (vol. 4, London, 1990), vol. 1, 1016. 16 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 142. 17 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, 2274; Emerson R. Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse (Princeton, 1981), p. 46.

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provoke pleasure in a reader of the Lyrical Ballads as ‘the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author’s own knowledge and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished from a mere copy’.18 A representation which is simply accurate, in that it mirrors what is found in natural life, is designated by Coleridge as ‘a mere copy’. However, the verse takes on the status of ‘imitation’ when it is ‘raised and qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author’s own knowledge and talent’. Thus something from the author permeates that which he describes, subtly altering and enhancing it, creating the level of association which for Coleridge was an integral part of meaning. Thus the implications of Coleridge’s theory of imitation are congruent with his ideas of desynonymy; the two processes work together to increase the breadth of expression open to a writer by removing language from the realm of ‘arbitrary signs’ and locating its provenance in the operations of the writer’s mind. That this reanimates and invigorates language can be seen from the movement of thought implied in an imitation. A copy simply reproduces the thing itself, it is whole and complete and requires no further thought on the part of the reader. Conversely, an imitation produces the suggestion or impression of a thing; further thought is required to amplify and augment it, and thus it is an image which both points outward in its variety and demands the active participation of the mind of the reader to penetrate it. For example, a description of a landscape in poetry is not merely a representation of an actual landscape, but is coloured by the poet’s experience of observing it. When we read the description we recognize aspects of it which are congruent with our own knowledge of looking at landscapes, but concurrently we are aware of impressions which are foreign to our experience. The result is that we make active mental movements which attempt to coalesce the aspects of sameness with the aspects of difference, and thus recreate the experience of looking at a landscape anew. We refresh not only our own past or imagined experiences, but the experience detailed by the poet as well. In his essay ‘On Poesy or Art’, Coleridge argues that such ‘likeness and unlikeness’ must coexist in ‘a work of genuine imitation’ because then ‘you begin with an acknowledged total difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth’ as the mind strives actively to assimilate aspects of sameness and difference to the ‘reconcilement of both in one’.19 Here Coleridge appears to locate the value of a work of art less in the work itself than in the effect which it produces on the mind; active mental processes are prioritized over passive stasis. Emerson R. Marks observes how Coleridge’s insistence on the coexistence of likeness and unlikeness in art is applicable to the idea of metaphor itself: ‘A metaphor forces into unity disparate material, a process often seen to involve a kind of violence’.20 Susan Wolfson also locates the origin of Coleridge’s ‘comparing power’ in the form of simile which, she argues, through its expression of the mind’s 18 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 43. 19 ‘On Poesy or Art’ in Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (2 vols, London, 1907; repr. 1949), vol. 2, pp. 253–63, (p. 256). 20 Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse, p. 100.

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contrary impulses of seeking likeness and difference, ‘in Coleridge’s hands, gains its figurative capacity to set the power of language to construct, connect, and refer against its potential exposure of absence, supplement, and difference.’21 This yoking together of previously unrelated, potentially antagonistic concepts is precisely how Shelley describes the process of poetic language in the Defence: Their [poets’] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.22

Just as Coleridge’s theory of imitation contains a relational element in its implied movement between author and subject, Shelley argues that metaphor gives language vitality and ‘perpetuates ... apprehension’ through the process of making connections and expressing ‘relations’ between disparate concepts. Furthermore, Shelley’s insistence on a relational and connotative approach to language, in which the movement between words mirrors that between thoughts, bears a proximity to both the theory of imitation and Coleridge’s 1826 comment that it is in the order of words and the interconnectedness of language that we can observe the process of thought. Like Coleridge’s theory of desynonymy, Shelley’s metaphoric approach makes language constitutive of thought rather than being purely representational, permanently creating and adjusting meaning. However, this process can stagnate, causing language to become clichéd and lifeless, when we no longer search for new words or combinations of words to express our experience, nor question the appropriateness of a given word in a given situation. Words then become ‘signs’, or, in Coleridge’s language, ‘copies’, a means of categorizing experience rather than recreating and reanimating it in ‘pictures’ or ‘imitations’. That the result of this is so catastrophic indicates the intimate role which language plays in shaping experience. The role of new poets is to ‘create afresh’ associations, to use language in different combinations to encourage diverse ways of perceiving the world. Should no new poets emerge, language will be ‘dead’, no more than a functional sign system, and cessation in communication, ‘the nobler purposes of human intercourse’, will necessarily follow. Towards the end of the Defence, Shelley claims that in this way poetry ‘purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being’.23 This conception reveals the direct influence of Coleridge, who wrote in the Biographia that Wordsworth’s poetic enterprise proceeded by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which

21 Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997), p. 71. 22 SPP, p. 482. 23 SPP, p. 505.

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in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.24

Both Shelley and Coleridge wish to bridge any perceived gulf between language and thought. Thus language must be accurate, as in Coleridge’s theory of desynonymy, with a correct word for each thought, but must also be active, as in his distinction between imitation and copy, or in Shelley’s description of metaphoric language. The feared distinction between language and thought has instead revealed itself as a continuous dialectical process; words express the relation between thoughts, which relation necessitates new thought for its apprehension, which in turn requires new combinations of words to depict this new turn in the thought. What is paramount in the case of both poets is the process itself. It is the movement of the mind which generates, through fresh combinations of words, new and vital thoughts. To observe Coleridge’s theoretical explorations into the role and nature of language in practice, if we turn to ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, we can detect how he manipulates both the temporal and the spatial in an extreme example of replicating experience through poetry. Because Coleridge is not simply recreating his own experience for his readers but is imaging to himself an experience of which he has not partaken, this poem presents particularly clearly the way in which thoughts articulated in language can be made equivalent to experience. The poem opens in a rather self-pitying mood, lingering upon what Coleridge feels he has forfeited in being denied the pleasure of a walk with his friends: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison! I have lost Beauties and Feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance, even when age Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness!

‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ (1–5)25

The rhythmic balance of the opening line emphasizes the contrast between Coleridge’s sense of his friends’ departure, an experience irrevocably ‘gone’, and his awareness of his present limbo-like state. His friends, and the experience he hoped to share with them, are both confined to the past, whilst he remains trapped in a continuous present, where the imperative ‘must’ implies the envisaged tedium of that present to the poet. The emphatic ‘I have lost’ of line 2 initially consolidates the impression of an experience now firmly removed from him, yet the collision of tenses in lines 3–5 almost unconsciously refutes the completeness of this loss. The ‘Beauties and Feelings’ which Coleridge has been prevented from experiencing take precedence at the start of the line and reveal, by the very fact of their articulation, that the poet has already begun to project himself imaginatively into the sensations experienced by his friends in an attempt to create afresh those sensations for himself. That his mind is already moving from the melancholy juxtaposition of his friends’ absence and his own continued presence is revealed in the shift to an envisaged future, where present 24 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 7. 25 All references to ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ are to CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 349–54.

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experiences ‘would have been/ Most sweet to my remembrance’. The enjambment of these lines mirrors Coleridge’s thought process as he moves from the present to a possible future and then to an imaginative augmentation of that future, ‘even when age/ Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness!’. Coleridge’s mind is slowly extricating itself from its temporal and spatial confinement, even in the process of attempting to articulate it, and is beginning to project itself into an imagined experience, as the movement of the following lines demonstrates: They, meanwhile, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told;

(5–9)

The proliferation of caesurae in these lines testifies to the delicate movements of the imaginative process. The intrusion of ‘meanwhile’ signifies the wrench back to the realities of the present after the poet’s musings upon what stores of sustenance for his old age he has been forced to forego. The interjection ‘whom I never more may meet again’ decelerates the pace of the line and appears rather histrionic, impeding the progress of the verse just as the progress of Coleridge’s visualization of his friends’ walk appears impeded by the self-pity of his isolation. Yet the thought that he may never meet his friends again appears to coalesce with his speculations on the progress of their walk in a way which encourages him to continue in his imaginings. This coalescence is revealed in the double sense of lines 6 and 7. Because the verb ‘Wander’, which controls the clauses of line 7, is postponed until the start of line 8, we cannot avoid making the initial interpretation that Coleridge fears not that he will ‘never more’ meet his friends at all, but only that he may never again meet them on the ‘springy heath’, upon which they now presumably walk. There is still a jerky, cumulative sense to the verse produced by the continued abundance of punctuation, yet now we gain a sense of following Coleridge’s thought processes not in the desultory way of the opening lines, but in a more ordered progress, ‘On springy heath, along the hill-top edge’, in the progress of the walk. Coleridge asserts his power to recreate his friends’ progress imaginatively in the interpolation of ‘perchance’, which signifies a movement away from not only the physical constraints of his current situation, but also from the mental confines of relating an actual physical experience, and looks towards the possibilities inherent in an imaginative involvement which transcends the limitations of both time and space. That events continue without our physical participation, yet can be reanimated in our mental perception, is indicated in the choice of diction in ‘that still roaring dell’. Here the reader is momentarily perturbed by the collision of ‘still’ and ‘roaring’, which appears an oxymoronic juxtaposition of a verb of stasis and calm with one implying movement and noise. Yet Coleridge’s addition, ‘of which I told’, which asserts his continued involvement in the walk he has missed, together with the accompanying punctuation, lead us to pause upon the line, whilst concurrently giving the impression that Coleridge is pausing upon the idea. In the following line

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Coleridge revisits the image, and we begin to understand ‘still’ to mean ‘continuing to’ rather than ‘motionless’. As Kelvin Everest has commented, the presence of these opposing definitions of the word ‘underpin[s] the development in Coleridge’s mood from static, barren introspection, to the dynamic growth in consciousness that is effected in the description of an imagined experience’.26 The concept that the dell is ‘still roaring’ in his absence seems to strike Coleridge, as the pause suggests, and he repeats and augments the image: The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day Sun; Where its slim trunk the Ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a Bridge; – that branchless Ash, Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann’d by the water-fall!

(10–16)

The repetition of the image of the ‘roaring dell’ indicates the way in which Coleridge’s thoughts come to rest upon this image. The careful, rhythmic punctuation implies that the qualifying adjectives ‘o’erwooded, narrow, deep’ are precisely chosen, and each enhances the initial image in a gradual, progressive manner. They indicate the exterior aspect of the dell and describe it in terms of its most basic properties. In this way, the choice of diction demonstrates the progression of Coleridge’s thought processes as he gradually constructs and amplifies the image in his mind. The introduction of ‘speckled’ in the following line indicates an increased imaginative involvement, a recollection of an aspect of the scene viewed at a precise moment in precise conditions. Again the line ending is strongly paused, implying a moment of reflection upon the image as it now stands in the mind. This suggestion is consolidated in the following lines where the components of the scene become more specified. The syntax of line 12 reveals Coleridge’s increasingly sophisticated thought processes as he recollects and allows himself to image anew. It is not the ash in itself which Coleridge first recalls but the peculiar effect of its ‘slim trunk’ which ‘from rock to rock/ Flings arching like a Bridge’. The speed of the lines is achieved via the enjambment and the positioning of ‘Flings’ at the start of the second line, which, by literally flinging the development of the image into the middle of the line, mimics in articulation the instantaneous perception by the eye as in one swift movement it becomes aware of the complete span of the ash across the rocks. The structure of the line and choice of verb perhaps provide a sense of what Coleridge meant when he wrote of the ‘untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning’. The associative process of Coleridge’s imagery is now clear; just as thoughts of the dell generated the recollection of the ash, a further pause in the middle of line 13 marks the poet focusing more closely upon that image. That the ash is ‘Unsunn’d and damp’ recollects the opening image of the ‘o’erwooded’ dell, thus enriching not only specific details, but the impression of the overall scene. Yet just as Coleridge imagines the ‘few poor yellow leaves’ which ‘Ne’er tremble in 26 Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry, (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), p. 250.

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the gale’, the associative process of his thought recollects that they ‘tremble still’, and his imagination rushes forward to rest upon the water-fall which generated the recollected movement in the otherwise undisturbed leaves. It is notable that the diction of ‘tremble still’ initially implies a similar juxtaposition of movement and stasis as noted in the ‘still roaring dell’ earlier in the poem. It is possible that the retention of this alternative, almost antithetical meaning of ‘still’ in the consciousness of the reader signifies the deliberate artistry in apparently associative language. Coleridge is using language to articulate how an experience of apparent stasis, his confinement to the bower, can generate movement via the imaginative leaps made by the mind as it re-envisages past experience to place that past in the context of the present. This impression of making a movement between past and present is also conveyed in line 16 via the note of exclamation denoting sudden delight; this process of reanimating his memories has led him to something momentarily forgotten when he commenced his mental walk and the thrill of discovery is akin to that experienced at the first moment of actual discovery of the waterfall itself. Coleridge has discovered that he can reanimate past experiences in order to follow his friends imaginatively on their walk. More than this, however, he can use what is different about this walk, his friends’ presence and his own absence, to create afresh the experience for himself. That he is not physically present becomes a liberation in the imaginative process. Thus he can visualise the sea, With some fair bark, perhaps, whose Sails light up The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles Of purple shadow!

(23–6)

Thus Coleridge augments the known landscape of his recollections with images of potential difference, ‘some fair bark, perhaps,’ which in turn have an impact upon his image of the landscape as a whole, allowing him to imagine effects of perspective and contrast in light generated by the presence of the fictive ship. The power of creation which Coleridge harnesses accords the scene a unity composed of memory and imagination. As Everest comments, this unity ‘implies something conferred by the poet’.27 To use Coleridge’s own terminology, such conference serves to remove his imaginings from the realm of copy, a simple recollection of his own past experience when viewing the same landscape, to that of imitation, where the introduction of new elements causes the mind to reimage the scene and thus appreciate its qualities in a slightly different context through the mental activity required to accommodate the unknown within the known. We can see in the opening stanzas of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ how Coleridge uses language not only to mirror the thought process but to generate new thought. That the coalescence of known and unknown, empirical and imaginative, provides an illumination of perception which in its turn nourishes the mind is revealed in the poem’s moment of apotheosis:

27 Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry, p. 256.

Perpetual Orphic Song Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my Friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when he makes Spirits perceive his presence.

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(32–43)

Coleridge’s imaginative projection of the setting sun on the landscape is peppered with verbs of light and movement: ‘shine’, ‘burn’, ‘live’, ‘kindle’. The stasis of Coleridge’s exile in the bower has been replaced by a vision of light, movement and colour. His ability to revisit the scene has been occasioned by a fusion of known remembrances and the imaginative perception of its appearance through the eyes of another. His invocation to the landscape is performative in that as he envisages each image it achieves an undeniable reality in his mind, animated by the vibrancy of language. The passage recalls Shelley’s comment that ‘nothing exists but as it is perceived’;28 we have the power to shape our experiences through our means of perceiving them, and this re-envisaging and perceiving afresh can only take place through language. Language is therefore not merely a means of ordering our perceptions, it actively creates them. Each component of the evening landscape of Coleridge’s poem comes into being as he envisions it in words, and those words in their associations of light and colour in turn reanimate the scene, preventing it from becoming a fixed copy by virtue of the active involvement of the perceiver as evidenced in the vital velocity of language. The fact of being physically absent from the walk has allowed Coleridge to be more mentally present by providing him with greater variety of imaginative response and an awareness of something ‘Less gross than bodily’. That this ability to shape experience imaginatively confers a greater benefit than that of mere escapism is revealed by Coleridge’s return to the bower following his imaginative excursion: Nor in this bower, This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that Walnut-tree Was richly ting’d, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient Ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass 28 ‘On Life’ in SPP, pp. 476, 477.

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Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight.

(46–57)

As K.M. Wheeler has commented, there is a ‘mirroring effect’ between the imagery of this stanza and that of those preceding it.29 The delicate chiaroscuro of the ‘Dappling’ sunshine on the leaves of the bower recalls both the ‘roaring dell’ which was ‘only speckled by the mid-day Sun’ and the ‘unsunn’d Ash’ with its ‘few poor yellow leaves’. The ‘branchless Ash’ is again recalled in the presence of the ‘Walnuttree’, yet the sickly appearance of the former has been replaced by the ‘richly ting’d’ countenance of the latter. Subtle tones of light and shade are again evoked in the way in which the ‘blackest mass’ of the ivy makes the ‘dark branches’ of the elms ‘gleam a lighter hue’. This technique of presenting infinitesimal distinctions in tone through comparison is one used by Shelley in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Searching for a way to convey the ineffable quality of intellectual beauty, Shelley introduces the following simile: ‘Thou – that to human thought art nourishment,/ Like darkness to a dying flame!’30 Commenting on these lines, Jean Hall observes, ‘the only way darkness can “nourish” a flame is by suddenly descending around it so that the flame appears to flare into brightness through dramatic contrast with the black background’.31 Similarly, in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, Coleridge discovers that even darkness has the capacity to be illuminating through ‘dramatic contrast’. Such details serve to demonstrate that the co-existence of ‘likeness and unlikeness’ in art can be discovered both in dramatic divergence, as in Shelley’s ‘darkness to a dying flame’, and in minute distinctions, as in the shades of black observed by Coleridge in the foliage of the bower. The rich precision of Coleridge’s imagery demonstrates how far the bower has progressed from ‘prison’ to source of inspiration in the mind of the poet. Coleridge’s imaginative extrapolation of his friends’ walk has effected an alteration in perception, so that the environment once coloured by his melancholy is reimaged anew. Commenting on the tendency in Coleridge’s poetry to transform the domestic, commonplace or limiting, Wheeler writes: The domestic is now a transformed scene, a scene revitalized by imaginative appreciation of the beauties and truths once forgotten because too familiar. In such a way poetic images and metaphors become the vehicles of philosophical statements about art, perception, and thought generally. But because these ‘statements’ are not made discursively, but through illustration, they are often unrecognized, in spite of the fact that they are more powerful vehicles of their truth when they illustrate instead of only discussing.32

That the movement of poetry should provide a more comprehensive illustration of ‘philosophical statements about art, perception, and thought’ would have come as no surprise to Shelley, who commented that such ‘vitally metaphorical’ language was required to create ‘pictures of integral thought’ rather than merely ‘signs for portions 29 30 31 32

K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, (London, 1981), p. 140. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ in PS, vol. 1, pp. 528–31, (ll. 44–5). Jean Hall, The Transforming Image (Chicago and London, 1980), p. 35. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, p. 141.

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or classes of thoughts’, and who passionately believed in the ability of perception to alter experience. In ‘The Nightingale’, Coleridge ridicules the conceit, borrowed from Milton, that the nightingale is a ‘“most melancholy” Bird’, by visualizing the ‘poor Wretch’ who, in his own melancholy, ‘fill’d all things with himself/ And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale/ Of his own sorrow’ (19–21).33 In ‘This LimeTree Bower’, Coleridge dramatizes the movement from just such a position to that recommended as an antidote in ‘The Nightingale’, that of ‘Surrendering his whole spirit’ to ‘the influxes/ Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements’ (29, 27–8), which allows the further progression to an active augmentation of actual experience through the imagination. Just as the poet can partake of his friends’ walk, we as readers can partake of his experience due to Coleridge’s manipulation of the structural features and associative qualities of language to mirror the process of thought. In ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ Coleridge manipulates poetic language firstly to replicate a remembered experience. Through an effort of the imagination he is able to overcome the restrictive nature of his situation and transform the bower from a prison to a source of creative potential. Andrew M. Cooper writes of ‘This LimeTree Bower’ that ‘victory over the contingencies of the poem’s inception is achieved by internalizing and symbolically reprojecting them through imagination’.34 More than this, however, it is the very fact of the ‘contingencies’ of the poem’s opening which allows Coleridge to augment a remembered experience imaginatively through establishing a productive dialectic between sameness and difference. The fact of his confinement to the bower allows an opportunity for free play of the imagination which juxtaposes memory and potential to envisage anew. Coleridge then discovers that such enrichment of perception can be reapplied to his present situation, converting stasis into movement and dearth into plenitude. Coleridge’s transition from the replication of an experience of which he has not partaken to reflection upon his actual experience is not dissimilar to the movement of Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’. Whilst Shelley’s poem initially appears to employ an object, the lark, rather than an experience as its impetus to imaginative thought, as the poem develops it becomes apparent that Shelley’s interest lies less in the skylark itself than in the attempt to articulate the particular effect of its song upon the human auditor. From the outset, Shelley takes pains to establish the intangible nature of not only the skylark itself but of the poet’s shifting apprehension of the bird and its song: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert – That from Heaven or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

‘To a Sky-Lark’ (1–5)35

33 CCW, vol. 16, I, p. 516–20. 34 Andrew M. Cooper, Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry (New Haven and London, 1988), p. 152. 35 All references to ‘To a Sky-Lark’ are to SPP, pp. 226–9. ‘To a Sky-Lark’ has received wide critical attention, although often with limited detail. Accounts which support or inform the following discussion include: James Allsup, The Magic Circle: A Study of Shelley’s

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Hailed as a ‘Spirit’rather than a bird, the skylark is accorded a disembodied immortality. The casual otherworldliness of its origins ‘from Heaven or near it’ seems to confirm Shelley’s discovery in ‘Mont Blanc’ that points of origination are subordinate to the apprehension of continual, universal presence. This apparent dismissal of origins, both in terms of the physical provenance of the bird and more spiritually in terms of the reason for its song, allows the poet to immerse himself more fully in the experience of that song itself, unencumbered by the earthly constraints of fact and reason. However, it is the extent to which language can be employed to describe that experience which proves to be Shelley’s concern throughout the poem, and the difficulty of the enterprise is already clear from the first evocation of the bird’s song as ‘unpremeditated art’, where the almost oxymoronic collocation registers the poet’s acceptance of the gulf between the lark’s condition and his own. As Angela Leighton has observed ‘unpremeditated art’ implies a contrast between the natural ease of the bird’s song and the ‘creative delay occasioned by the human poet’s recourse to skill or imitation’.36 Already accepting the second-hand nature of our invention, Shelley evokes opposing poles of our means of categorizing experience; somewhere between these poles, forever mobile and ungraspable, is the experience of the bird’s song. The lark ‘Singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest’ (10), existing only in the ebbing and flowing of the poet’s language, the rhythms of which can only mimic, with self-conscious artistry, the soaring and descending of the lark and the notes of its song. Shelley’s interrogation of the capacity of language to express experience is at its most overt in the series of similes following stanza seven. Admitting of the lark ‘What thou art we know not’, the poet ponders ‘What is most like thee?’ (31–2), before immediately acknowledging the impossibility of a satisfactory answer to his own question, as ‘From rainbow clouds there flow not/ Drops so bright to see/ As from thy presence showers a rain of melody’ (33–5). The negative construction here seems an open recognition of the inadequacy of the simile. Yet in the synaesthetic movement from the sight of the rain drops to the sound of the lark’s melody the reader is stimulated to make further associations not based solely on the like for like comparison of a simile. The ‘rainbow clouds’ suggest height and colour, and the ‘bright’ ‘Drops’ add movement, clarity and texture to the image, rendering a conception of the lark’s melody which is at once a more confused and more accurate evocation of experience in its simultaneous involvement of the different senses. By forcing his reader to make such movements of apprehension, Shelley draws us closer to the experience of the lark’s song not through individual descriptions and similes, but through the oscillation between related but different images.

Concept of Love (New York and London, 1976), pp. 13–19; Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London, 1972), pp. 125–30; Andrew M. Cooper, Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry, pp. 152–5; Newell F. Ford, ‘Shelley’s “To a Skylark”’, K–SMB, 11 (1960), 6–12; William Keach, Shelley’s Style, pp. 122–5, 159–61; Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (London, 1962), pp. 227–31; Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge, 1984, pp. 116–24); William A. Ulmer, ‘Some Hidden Want: Aspiration in “To a Sky-Lark”’, SiR, 23 (1984), 245–58. 36 Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime, p. 118.

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Shelley continues with five further similes which span a variety of qualities of the natural and human world and open, appropriately, with the poet himself. The lark is Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

(36–40)

Just as the poet’s song becomes a disembodied voice through his works, obscured by the light which is, he hopes, cast by the thought presented in his poetry, the lark too is ‘unbodied joy’, ‘unseen’, but heard in its ‘shrill delight’. The poet, like the lark, is spontaneously prompted to sing, ‘unbidden’, and just as Shelley has been moved to ‘sympathy’ with the bird’s song, the poet hopes similarly to engage the minds of his audience. Critics have juxtaposed this stanza with a passage from A Defence of Poetry37 where Shelley writes, ‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why’.38 In both poem and prose, the singing of the poet or bird (of whichever species) seems unprovoked by external influences, emanating from within as an instinctive desire ‘to cheer its own solitude’. Yet in both cases also, the influence of the music is larger than the scope of its creator, reaching out to ‘move’, ‘soften’, to evoke ‘sympathy’, ‘hope’ and ‘fear’. An audience is envisaged but not demanded; the song of either poet or bird should provoke humankind to listen of its own volition, to re-experience and reinterpret the song, just as Shelley here attempts to re-present the skylark’s music.39 In the felt inadequacy of language to describe the experience of being ‘moved and softened’ without a knowledge of ‘whence or why’, Shelley attempts to find a strength. His use of simile in ‘To a Sky-Lark’ is an exaggerated representation of our means of perception and apprehension, whereby we must attend not only to what language signifies, but to what it connotes, as we attempt to bridge the gap between the thing described and the terms used to describe it. In this Shelley’s method recalls in practice Coleridge’s expanded definition of a word’s meaning to include ‘all the associations which it recalls’ in order to convey ‘the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing’ the given object. Furthermore, as both listening poet and attending reader are implicated in 37 See G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York, 1988), p. 186. 38 SPP, p. 486. 39 Compare Shelley’s comments on audience in the Preface to ‘Prometheus Unbound’. In explaining his ‘abhorrence’ of ‘didactic poetry’, Shelley writes that: ‘My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness’. See PS, vol. 2, p. 475.

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this process, what results is a layered extrapolation of Coleridge’s belief that the co-existence of likeness and unlikeness is imperative to any representation which attains the status of true imitation. In her detailed exploration of Coleridge’s analysis and exploitation of both the limits and potential of simile as a structure, Susan Wolfson writes that for both Coleridge and Wordsworth the evocation of a sublime moment is marked by the effort ‘to shape a simile at the limits of imagination’. This effort ‘produces a language of shifting comparisons – some potent, others potential and flickering, others patently inadequate’.40 Wolfson’s formulation of the comparing process of his precursors seems equally applicable to that of Shelley in ‘To a Sky-Lark’ where ‘patently inadequate’ similes prove crucial in locating both the sublime experience of the bird’s song and, more importantly, the nature of poetic strength. The mechanics of this process are most clearly illustrated in the following succession of similes, all of which share the characteristics of overflowing emotion from a concealed source: Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour, With music sweet as love – which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves – By warm winds deflowered – Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.

(41–55)

The ‘maiden’ is ‘Soothing her love-laden/ Soul’ by playing music which ‘overflows’ the confines of her ‘palace-tower’; the glow-worm is hidden in a ‘dell of dew’ yet still emits an ‘aerial hue’ which reaches the very ‘flowers and grass’ which help to conceal it. In both instances something is given ‘unbidden’ and, like the poet-asnightingale image from the Defence, the music from the maiden and the light from the glow-worm are each produced solely for the benefit of the producer yet reach out to touch the surrounding world. The following simile of the rose repeats the same set of attributes; it is concealed within ‘its own green leaves’, until, divested of these by the action of the ‘warm winds’, it produces scent. This explicit introduction of a catalyst to production which induces the subject of the stanza to give forth its essence causes us to reassess the preceding similes and see that in each case a similar complementary force is implied. The glow-worm would not be seen to glow were it 40 Wolfson, ‘The Formings of Simile: Coleridge’s “Comparing Power”’ in Formal Charges, pp. 64–99, (pp. 88–9).

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not for the onset of night; the maiden would not play music were it not for her ‘loveladen/ Soul’. Like the image of darkness illuminating a ‘dying flame’ in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and the delicate shades of foliage which reveal themselves when viewed against a darker background in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, the subject of each simile struggles into view via a dialectical action of opposing forces. In the Biographia, Coleridge describes thought as just such a combination of active and passive movements. Comparing the action of the mind to the movement of a waterboatman across the surface of a stream, Coleridge describes how: The little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive.41

There is an affinity between Coleridge’s description of ‘the mind’s self-experience’ and Shelley’s evocation of contrary forces throughout the entire structure and enterprise of ‘To a Sky-Lark’. Such forces are evoked both in individual simile, and in the overall thematic tendency of the verse which insists how a passive experience, attendance to the lark’s song, requires a complementary active movement of mind in order for a sense of that experience to become crystallized in language. Coleridge denominates the ‘intermediate faculty’ which he envisages mediating between these two forces as the imagination. It is only through a realized piece of such imagination, a poem, that, as Shelley shows, the mechanics of thought can become visible. In one sense, poetry does indeed allow words to become thoughts when both tools and subject, form and content, become indistinguishable from one another. An important point emerges when we return to the image of the poet in this context. Something does prompt the poet to sing his ‘hymns’, despite the insistence that they are ‘unbidden’. Although Shelley writes that the poet-as-nightingale ‘sings to cheer its own solitude’, some form of inspiration must exist to motivate that song. The poet does not exist in a vacuum, and in this he is both like and unlike the lark he praises. Both sing songs which inspire, but, as the opening description of the lark’s song as ‘unpremeditated art’ subtly reveals, the poet does so with elements of intent and artistry foreign to the lark. The series of vehicles which Shelley has chosen in this succession of similes appear both deliberately like and deliberately unlike their tenor, and the speed with which each gives way to the next, with what Angela Leighton calls a ‘self-denying quality’, reveals Shelley consciously accepting the limits of simile.42 Judith Chernaik notes the similarity of this procedure to that which Shelley employed in ‘Mont Blanc’: ‘The poet is driven to seek for images or analogies because of the difficulty of apprehending reality ... and because of his need to surmount that difficulty. The image-making itself is self-conscious, remains tentative, hypothetical’. Chernaik goes on to point out that this series of images, whilst drawn from the natural world: 41 CCW, vol. 7, I, p. 124. 42 Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime, p. 117.

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Coleridge and Shelley are also preformulated images, poetic fancies drawn from the “still cave of the witch Poesy.” Their primary associations are with the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The frequency with which glowworms, maidens, flowers, rainbows, vernal showers, occur in the earlier poets provides Shelley with a poetic context for his own precise vignettes.43

The slightly staged, purposely inadequate quality of these ‘vignettes’ implies not so much the lark’s unfathomable difference from all other aspects of the natural and human worlds, but how far the real experience of its song is from any poetic attempt to capture it. Thus in stanzas 13 and 14 of his poem, Shelley draws the poet and the lark together again only to emphasize the difference in their songs: Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine; I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine: Chorus Hymeneal Or triumphal chaunt Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

(61–70)

Here the unknowable quality of the bird’s ‘sweet thoughts’ is emphasized; any ‘flood of rapture’ which the poet can produce is an ‘empty vaunt’ in comparison. However, these stanzas guide us to the concern of Shelley’s poem. Whilst the fact that all comparable poetry is presented as lacking, ‘A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want’, we start to realize that were it not for the consciousness of this want, Shelley’s poem, and perhaps poetry generally, would not exist. We have seen Shelley attempt to bridge the gap between the amorphous, mobile essence of the lark’s song and the confines of language in a process which forces our apprehension to be continually moving from one discarded simile to the next in an effort to catch, in the corner of our consciousness, a sense of what the lark and the experience of its song are like. Poetry, Shelley suggests, is a continual effort to penetrate this ‘hidden want’, and its value is located in the fact that any success will only be partial. In the Defence, Shelley likens the ‘footsteps’ of poetry to ‘those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it’.44 The means we have of describing sensation is forever consigned to be clutching at the coat tails of the sensation itself; yet making the attempt, with the knowledge that full articulation cannot be achieved, is precisely what creates alive, mobile and affecting poetry. This process is entirely consistent with the argument of the Defence cited earlier where Shelley champions the ‘vitally metaphorical’ language of poets and warns against the dangers of complete articulation. When we no longer have to work to penetrate the poet’s meaning, when we stop asking why he chooses a particular word in a particular circumstance, the word becomes a ‘sign’ for 43 Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, p. 128. 44 SPP, p. 504.

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a thought; robbed of its associative power, its range of possible meanings is reduced to one accepted definition. Experience, Shelley argues, is not like this, not complete, ordered or easily definable. To describe the mind’s experience of a new sensation, the poet must continually challenge language and be challenged by it; he must mark ‘the before unapprehended relations of things’. Thus a poem which appears to question and desire to explain the peculiar beauty of the skylark’s song finally accepts that part of the wonder of the way in which the song affects the listener is in its irreconcilable difference from our own experience: We look before and after, And pine for what is not – Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught – Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

(86–95)

It is a human characteristic to ‘look before and after/ And pine for what is not’. As Donald Reiman observes, in these lines Shelley echoes Hamlet:45 What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused.

Hamlet (IV, iv, 33–9)46

Man, with his ‘godlike reason’ and his ability to look to the past and the future, can never fully abandon himself to the spontaneous joy felt by the skylark, who seems so gloriously unfettered by temporal constraints. Yet even if ‘we were things born/ Not to shed a tear’, we should still be incapable of approaching and understanding the joy of the bird’s song. Shelley’s point is that without the experience and continual threat of sadness, the concept of joy would be meaningless; the two emotions are poles of opposition which define each other, rather in the manner of Blake’s observation that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’.47 William A. Ulmer has observed Shelley’s concern in ‘To a Sky-Lark’ with the necessary juxtaposition of sadness and joy 45 SPP, p. 228n. Shelley may also have been recalling Wordsworth’s use of the phrase to describe the role of the poet in the 1802 additions to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. See ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, New York, 1992), p. 753. 46 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds T.J.B. Spencer and Anne Barton (London, 1996). 47 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1975).

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in human experience. He comments: ‘Not only do we “pine for what is not,” but inevitably discover pain at the heart of present joys, understanding what is only in terms of “what is not.” With the parallel superlatives of line ninety (sweetest, saddest), furthermore, he [Shelley] even suggests that the intensity of happiness and sorrow is mutually determined’.48 Shelley also refers to mankind’s propensity to ‘look before and after’ in his prose fragment ‘On Life’: Man is a being of high aspirations “looking both before and after,” whose “thoughts that wander through eternity,” disclaim alliance with transience and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution.49

This suggests that Shelley’s reference to man looking ‘before and after’ in ‘To a SkyLark’ is less a criticism of humankind than a recognition that our self-consciousness and temporal awareness produce a breadth of perspective which conclusively separates us from the world of the skylark. Because there exists within us a ‘spirit’ which is ‘at enmity’ with ‘transience and decay ... nothingness and dissolution’, we desire to arrest and save from ‘annihilation’ the ephemeral song of the lark. As Shelley’s poem has been arguing implicitly, man is a comparative being, only capable of seeing in contraries. Thus it is that the movement of ‘To a Sky-Lark’ attempts to assimilate the song of the lark to the perspective of ‘before and after’, even whilst it acknowledges that the process is unending. A complete, finite poetic description would be an anathema to the human means of perception and apprehension; in each unfinished, imperfect comparison the poet can experience anew the difference between his nature and that of the lark, and thus relive the pleasure produced by the co-existence of likeness and unlikeness in his perceptions. Thus it is, paradoxically, the human inability to perceive except in terms of contrasts which underlies the value of the skylark’s song. As G. Kim Blank summarizes: If we were to be unlike that which we are, then the proximity to ‘joy’ (which is the intended experience of the poem) could never be felt. Paradoxically, if we were as skylarks, actually were skylarks, then we could not experience the joy of experiencing the Skylark. Thus Shelley here acknowledges and exalts these limitations of creative and imaginative empathy, yet denies any total transformation as both illogical and poetically self-defeating.50

As we have seen, Shelley emphasizes the power of the poet to mark ‘the before unapprehended relations of things’. Thus he comes to locate the value of the skylark’s song in its difference from usual human experience and the value of his poem in its attempt to coalesce the known and the unknown, the concrete and the ineffable, even as he accepts the success of any such attempt can only be partial; the creativity lies not in the result but in the process of the attempt. 48 Ulmer, ‘Some Hidden Want: Aspiration in “To a Sky-Lark”’, p. 254. 49 SPP, p. 476. 50 Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley, p. 187.

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Analysis of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘To a Sky-Lark’ reveals Coleridge and Shelley to be exploring and experimenting with the capacity of language not merely to express but to embody the most delicate nuances of experience. The two writers’ prose engagements with the subject reveal precisely how much both believed was at stake in the process of poetic creation. As Shelley writes in the Defence: In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good that exists in the relation subsisting first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.51

Here, as in ‘To a Sky-Lark’, Shelley nominates the spaces between ‘existence and perception’ and ‘perception and expression’ as sources of creative potential by virtue of their ability to produce a relational expression of experience. Throughout the Defence and the poems of the Prometheus Unbound volume Shelley’s interest in poetry lies less in its ability to embody discreet states than in its capacity to form connections between states, ideas and individuals. This focus is underpinned by his fundamental belief in language as a force which is not merely descriptive but communicative; its vital capacity to ‘perpetuate … apprehension’ marks it as an agent of social growth and development. Shelley’s definition of poetry encompasses all creative language use; in the ‘infancy’ of the new society envisaged at the end of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ ‘language itself is poetry’, and the model of a future society predicated on creative and relational thinking is born. Like the magus-like poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ the ‘legislator’ poets of this new world possess immense power, yet in Shelley’s democratic model it is a power which we all have the potential to harness. A telling poetic encapsulation of Shelley’s apprehension of the poet’s role comes at the end of ‘The Cloud’, another celebration of transformatory power which appeared in the Prometheus Unbound volume. The cloud’s element is movement and change. Even when ousted temporarily from its home in the skies, its response to its ‘own cenotaph’ of clear air is, characteristically, laughter, secure in the knowledge of its infinite metamorphic power to ‘arise and unbuild it again’. The cloud is both ‘Like a child in the womb, like a ghost from the tomb’, where the joyful collision of conflicting similes crushes conventional ideas of beginnings and endings in an image of continual rebirth.52 In the Prometheus Unbound volume Shelley evokes and explores a number of social, political and ideological ‘cenotaphs’, and once again it is, in part, via a textual engagement with the work of his precursor Coleridge that he is able to evoke the ‘vitally metaphorical’ to interrogate and ‘unbuild’ such structures in a vision of community created by the ‘perpetual Orphic song’ of language.

51 SPP, p. 482. 52 SPP, pp. 223–6, ll. 81–5.

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Chapter 5

‘To him my tale I teach’: The Legacy of Coleridge’s Mariner in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Volume From the Alastor volume onwards, we can observe a developing preoccupation in Shelley’s poetry with exploring the intimate relationship which he discerns between thought and language, or, in the words of the Defence, ‘perception and expression’. As this inquiry develops, Shelley’s insistence on the vital role of poetic metaphor in relating to the world around gains increased emphasis. It is perhaps unsurprising that a poetic process which seeks to find relations between different elements should be carried our, in part, through a textual dialogue with the poet who wrote so eloquently, if sometimes perplexingly, on the nature of language. Many of the poems in the Prometheus Unbound volume offer varied analyses of the capacity of language to contract or expand perspective; a preoccupation which forms both the theme and the guiding structure of the lyrical drama itself. The tendency observable in Shelley’s poetry to dramatize his thematic concerns through dialogues with the work of Coleridge continues in the thematically enigmatic and critically neglected ‘A Vision of the Sea’. Although the Prometheus Unbound volume as a whole is generally recognized to be one of the defining products of Shelley’s annus mirabilis, this poem has attracted strikingly little critical attention, and has failed to find a place in many of the selected works of Shelley currently available. ‘A Vision of the Sea’ is a poem which describes in gruesome and gleeful detail the ravages of tempest and shipwreck, the physical manifestations of death and fear, and refuses to offer even a fully realized resolution, much less a hopeful one. In this respect, the poem seems largely narrative, and appears to lack either purpose or motivation, whilst concurrently falling victim to charges of excess in its apparently emotional use of language. However, under scrutiny, ‘A Vision of the Sea’ may in fact reveal itself to be much more deliberate and premeditated in terms of both structure and language than those critics who have commented on it have allowed. The poem is strictly controlled, both metrically and in the tone of oddly detached fascination which Shelley adopts throughout. His description is vivid and detailed, and owes much to the language of Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’. This at times blatant appropriation of both events and language from Coleridge’s poem may in fact be part of a deliberate conception on Shelley’s part to align ‘A Vision of the Sea’ with the superficial ideology of Coleridge’s ‘Mariner’, as a means of questioning our responses to the natural world, adversity, and ultimately life and death. The critical response to ‘A Vision of the Sea’ is, in many ways, more fragmentary and unresolved than the poem itself. Writing in 1946, Edmund Blunden described the

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poem as a ‘tale from the frontier of madness’, concluding that Shelley’s intent ‘is no more than what his title defines’, in other words, an imaginative exercise.1 In 1974, Kenneth Neill Cameron confessed to finding ‘A Vision of the Sea’ to be ‘something of a puzzle’ and that ‘as it stands, the poem makes little sense’, although conceding that the verse is strong and that ‘Shelley expresses compactly and poignantly his doubts on immortality’.2 In 1962, Desmond King-Hele lost patience with Shelley, diagnosing the poem as ‘ludicrously melodramatic’: If poetry ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’, the Vision of the Sea, where emotion seems to pour white-hot from mind to paper, can scarcely be called a poem. Rather it is a Gothic nightmare-fantasy, a welling up of the unconscious, belonging to a genre which is rare nowadays because modern poets, conditioned by psychoanalysis, are shy of parading their neuroses weakly disguised as ‘dreams’ or ‘visions’.3

King-Hele does not elaborate upon precisely which of Shelley’s ‘neuroses’ are being paraded in the poem. However, the emphasis on the relation of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ to Shelley’s biography has been a prevalent feature of the poem’s critical history. Elsie F. Mayer persuasively argues for dating the poem to the summer of 1819, rather than ‘April 1820’, which is appended to the fair copy in the Harvard Notebook. Although Mayer argues from an examination of the surrounding text in the Huntington notebook, where ‘A Vision of the Sea’ was drafted, her two main reasons for reassigning the date of composition are biographical: Mary Shelley’s note to The Cenci, which describes the Shelleys’ vista at Livorno, where they resided in 1819, in terms reminiscent of the depiction of the storm in ‘A Vision’, and the death of William Shelley in June 1819. ‘The 1819 date’, Mayer argues, ‘establishes the poem as a re-creation of Shelley’s grief over William’s death and the reflection on final causes incited by that loss’.4 More recently, Nora Crook has expanded upon Mayer’s argument that William’s death informs the poem by using the Shelleys’ biography in 1819 to illuminate details of ‘A Vision of the Sea’. Thus the ‘nine weeks’ which the ship in the poem has been becalmed correspond to the period of the Shelleys’ projected residence in Rome. It was the decision to remain there longer which proved fatal to William; Crook argues that the ‘lead-coloured fog’ of the poem is an evocation of ‘the malaria epidemic which was probably the cause of William’s death’.5 The first account to consider ‘A Vision of the Sea’ in any detail is Carl H. Ketchum’s ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’ of 1978. Whereas comments such as those of King1 Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story (London, 1946), p. 227. 2 Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 292–3. 3 Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (London, 1962), pp. 236–7. 4 Elsie F. Mayer, ‘Notes on the Composition of “A Vision of the Sea”’, K–SJ, 28 (1979) 17–20, (p. 17). Mayer’s argument for re-dating the poem may be strengthened by Donald Reiman’s observation that the addition of ‘Pisa – April 1820’ at the bottom of the fair copy is in fact in Mary Shelley’s hand rather than that of her husband. See MYR, vol. 5, p. 167. 5 Nora Crook, ‘The Enigma of “A Vision of the Sea”, or “Who Sees the Waterspouts?”’ in Timothy Clark and Jerrold E. Hogle (eds), Evaluating Shelley (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 152– 63, (p. 157).

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Hele stress the undisciplined emotionalism of the poem, Ketchum argues that ‘A Vision’ is, in fact, ‘neatly arranged’ to investigate the ‘complex problem of man’s potential in relation to the outside world’.6 Ketchum’s argument emphasizes the poem’s depiction of the natural world as morally neutral; it is only mankind who interpret tempest, shipwreck and the fight for survival in the animal world as having a moral meaning. According to Ketchum, Shelley is dramatizing the fact that ‘it is an error to interpret the order of things as essentially or unchangeably evil or hostile’ and that ‘man’s will ... finds scope even in a material universe governed by chance or causality’.7 Thus the boat which enters the scene at the end of the poem signifies ‘human inventiveness’, and the potential for man to control and dominate nature once he has overcome his dread of the impartiality of its action. Neil Fraistat finds no such potential for positive outcome in the poem’s conclusion. In The Poem and the Book, Fraistat explores the interrelations between the poems in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound volume, and notes that whilst in the title poem of the collection, ‘man’s will is eventually triumphant, ... that same will appears shipwrecked in “A Vision of the Sea”’.8 Fraistat is in accord with Ketchum’s reading in stressing the ‘hostile, unhumanized natural world’ of the poem, and the critics concur further in the idea that this perception of the natural world is associated with ‘the mind’s own disintegration’.9 Fraistat suggests: It should also be remembered that the poem is entitled “A Vision of the Sea,” not “The Vision of the Sea”. The ocean, after all, can be perceived quite differently. ... the chaotic ocean of “A Vision of the Sea” might be read as symbolic of humanity’s contracted and chaotic perspective. In the Prometheus Unbound volume, ... perspective is everything.10

Scott McEathron’s 1994 essay ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”: Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’ takes as its point of departure what McEathron sees as the tension between Shelley’s belief on the one hand ‘that death resulted in total physical and psychic “termination”’ and the poet’s ‘abiding faith in the enduring, transforming, and perhaps transcendent power of the human spirit’.11 McEathron notes verbal echoes between Shelley’s poem and Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, and argues that Shelley is demystifying Coleridge’s ‘supernaturally surreal playing field’ and ‘debunking what is at least the internally operative cosmology of “The Ancient Mariner”’.12 Whilst this chapter will take McEathron’s comparisons between ‘A Vision of the Sea’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ as a starting point for a discussion of the relation between the two poems, that discussion will argue that the ‘cosmology’ of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and the nature 6 Carl H. Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, SiR, 17 (1978), 51–9 (p. 53). 7 Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, p. 54. 8 Neil Fraistat, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill and London, 1985), p. 172. 9 Fraistat, The Poem and the Book, p. 173. 10 Fraistat, The Poem and the Book, p. 175. 11 Scott McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”: Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, K–SJ, 43 (1994), 170–92, (pp. 170–71). 12 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, pp. 179, 174–5.

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of Shelley’s ‘borrowings’ from Coleridge’s poem are more complex than McEathron allows. Furthermore, whilst Shelley’s imaginative manipulation of elements from Coleridge’s most famous poem underpins the structure of ‘A Vision of the Sea’, the plight of Coleridge’s protagonist continues to inform the dualistic universe depicted at the opening of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, in which the Mariner’s mistakes provide for Shelley an antithetical model against which he formulates his vision of individual, social and political reform. The cosmologies of ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Interpretation from within and without Shelley’s admiration for Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is well documented. Thomas Medwin recalls that it was one of the poems that Shelley ‘used to thunder out with marvellous energy’,13 and Mary Shelley’s journal attests to repeated recitations spanning the period 1814 to 1821.14 It is perhaps unsurprising that a poem which both is, and is about, the re-telling of a story to a designated auditor should demand recitation. Shelley was not the first of Coleridge’s readers to find himself held, like the wedding guest, by the Mariner’s ‘glittering eye’. Charles Lamb confessed in a letter to Wordsworth of 1801: I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. I dislike all the miraculous part of it; but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Piper’s magic whistle.15

What may be pertinent to Shelley’s reading of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in the period 1819 to 1820 is the way in which the poem had mutated under Coleridge’s continual revisions from its first publication in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads to its final form (final, that is in terms of Shelley’s reading of the poem) in Sibylline Leaves of 1817. Jack Stillinger has identified ‘at least eighteen’ separate versions of the ‘Mariner’, and ‘though a dozen of these contain only minor distinctive differences’, the change in the poem between its first publication and its last is substantive: That first version is a relatively simple story of crime, punishment, and partial redemption; the latest version is an elaborate, multilayered narrative (or set of narratives) saturated with historical, social, moral, and theological significance, involving themes like the unity and sanctity of nature, original sin, social alienation and communion, fatalism, and the creative imagination.16

The greatest revisions to the text occurred in 1817, when Coleridge collected the majority of his poetical works together in Sibylline Leaves. This was the first time 13 Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Lives of the Great Romantics By Their Contemporaries: Volume 1: Shelley, ed. John Mullan (London, 1996), pp. 142–83 (p. 183). 14 Mary Jnl, vol. 1, pp. 25, 31, 353. 15 The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (2 vols, London, 1935), vol. 1, p. 240. 16 Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York and Oxford, 1994), p. 60.

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that ‘The Ancient Mariner’ had been formally attributed to S.T. Coleridge. Perhaps the most significant alteration to the text in 1817 was the addition of the prose gloss, which, as many commentators have pointed out, adds a further layer of interpretation to the narrative.18 It is impossible to guess Shelley’s reactions to the alterations to a text which, if the accounts of his spontaneous recitations have any validity, he admired enough to know by heart. Sibylline Leaves was published in July 1817, in the same week as the Biographia Literaria. On 13 July, Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier with an urgent order for Sibylline Leaves, suggesting a convoluted method of delivery which would enable him to receive the volume within a day: be so obliging as to send me immediately “Sibylline Leaves by S. T. Coleridge”. I should receive it the same night if on the receipt of this you wou{ld} have the goodness to send wherever it is published, & direct the messenger to take it to the Marlow Coach of{fice} before he returns.19

Mary’s journal entry for 8 December makes a reference to the Biographia: ‘Shelley reads & finishes Coleridge’s Liteerary [sic] life’, suggesting that Shelley received the two newly published texts together.20 In the discussion which follows, the assumption is made that, as it was the text with which he was most familiar, Shelley’s allusions to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ refer primarily to his reading of the pre-1817 version. Once again, it is impossible to be certain which edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1798, 1800, 1802 or 1805 Shelley initially owned. In December 1812 he ordered a copy of the text, which would have been the two volume edition first published in 1800.21 As the majority of the significant changes to the Lyrical Ballads text occurred between 1798 and 1800, it seems sensible to take 1800 as Shelley’s first reading text, whilst remaining alert to

17 See Coleridge and Textual Instability, pp. 16–21. Stillinger points out that the 1798 Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously, and that 1800 and the subsequent reprintings ascribed the work to Wordsworth alone. Although Wordsworth’s infamous criticism of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in the Preface does alert the scrupulous reader to a second author, their identity remains concealed. How widespread the knowledge of Coleridge’s authorship was is unclear, as is when Shelley, who knew the poem from an early age, first realized it to be Coleridge’s. It seems sensible to assume that if he did not know before, the visit to Southey in Keswick in 1812 would have enlightened him. 18 For example: Sarah Dyck, ‘Perspective in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, SEL, 13 (1973), 591–604; Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), 609–55, (pp. 613–21); Raimonda Modiano, ‘Words and “Languageless” Meanings: Limits of Expression in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, MLQ, 38 (1977), 40–61; Wendy Wall, ‘Interpreting Poetic Shadows: The Gloss of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, Criticism, 29 (1987), 179–95; K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London, 1981), pp. 51–64. 19 Letters, vol. 1, p. 548. 20 Mary Jnl, vol. 1, p. 186. 21 Letters, vol. 1, pp. 343–5.

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any subsequent alterations. However, as we know that Shelley almost certainly viewed the text complete with its 1817 glossed additions, and as we can speculate that the apparently pious Christian morality of some of those additions would elicit a response from the atheist Shelley, this chapter will also suggest that some of the ways in which Shelley engages with ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in his own poetry can be viewed as dramatizations of his reactions to Coleridge’s additions to his most famous poem. It is also possible that another significant change to the poem in 1817, the addition of a long Latin epigraph, also provided Shelley with a starting point for his conception and depiction of the impartial, amoral and ultimately unfathomable forces of nature in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. A consideration of the prefatory material to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ provides an interesting reflection of the development of the poem as a whole as a result of Coleridge’s successive revisions. The 1798 version of the poem in Lyrical Ballads is prefaced by a prose ‘ARGUMENT’: How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.

Here the argument provides a mere outline of the poem’s narrative, focusing solely on the ship’s itinerary. The only indication of the supernatural content of the poem is heralded by the unspecific ‘and of the strange things that befell’. The minimalist nature of the argument resolutely refuses to provide the reader with an extrinsic framework within which to view the poem and its narrative. In this sense, the argument accords with Coleridge’s retrospective description of his contribution to Lyrical Ballads: My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.23

There seems to be a correlation between the creation of ‘poetic faith’ – the injunction to abandon oneself to the world of the poem without what Keats would have termed ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’24 – and the refusal of the 1798 argument to provide the reader with any preconceptions about the content of the poem which follows.

22 All references to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ prior to 1817 are to William Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems 1800–1807, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, New York, 1992), pp. 769–91. This edition gives the 1798 text with any alterations in the subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads noted. 23 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 6. 24 The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, 1958), vol. 1, p. 193.

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In the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the first and last clauses of the 1798 argument remain intact, but the material in between is radically altered: ‘how the Ancient Mariner cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality killed a Sea-bird and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements.’ Here the focal point of the poem – to recall Wordsworth’s criticism, the one point at which the Mariner can be said to have acted rather than to have been acted on25 – is not only revealed but interpreted in an irrevocably damning manner. The reader of the 1800 text is made aware, prior to reading the poem, of the Mariner’s act, and is encouraged by explicitly condemnatory language – ‘... cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality killed ...’ – to view that act in a certain way. Furthermore, the nightmare events which follow the Mariner throughout his voyage are described as ‘many and strange Judgements’ (my emphasis). Rather than approaching the poem with the open mind of the 1798 reader, the reader of the 1800 text is led to believe from the outset that this is a story of crime and punishment. In the text of the poem published in Sibylline Leaves in 1817, the prose argument disappears altogether, replaced by a long Latin epigraph which was to remain as the poem’s starting point in all subsequent editions. The epigraph is adapted from Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae philosophicae, and can be translated as follows: I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe. But who will explain for us the family of all these beings, and the ranks and relations and distinguishing features and functions of each? What do they do? What places do they inhabit? The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it. Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts. But at the same time we must be watchful for the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night.26

In tracing the alterations in the poem’s prefatory matter, Jack Stillinger describes how in the replacement of the argument by this Latin epigraph, ‘Coleridge insists that the reader – another hitherto hidden entity – enter into the interpretation.’ Stillinger points out that the terms of the epigraph are symbolic and do not describe the process of the poem but force the reader to apply them in an act of interpretation.27 It is arguable that rather than being asked to suspend their disbelief and enter the world of the poem on its own terms, the reader of the 1817 text is encouraged to stand outside the narrative and consider the elements of the story as symbolically indicative of a different way of viewing nature and the world around us. In one way, the Latin epigraph can be viewed as the culmination of an increasingly specified process of interpretation of the text from within the text. This process is exemplified most clearly by the marginal gloss. On a number of occasions, the gloss provides more than simply a descriptive commentary of the text; instead the gloss 25 Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in Lyrical Ballads 1800. Cited in ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems, ed. Butler and Green, p. 791. 26 Translation from Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 70. 27 Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 71.

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writer seeks to explain and offer an interpretation of the events of the poem. For example, when the poem describes how the albatross returns daily to the Mariner’s ship, the gloss discerns a causative relationship between the emergence of the ‘good south wind’ and the appearance of the bird, and states: ‘And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through the fog and floating ice’. Two stanzas later where the poem provides the stark statement ‘With my cross-bow/ I shot the ALBATROSS!’, the gloss elaborates, ‘The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen’.28 In this instance, the gloss appears to work with the text, elaborating and expanding upon the poem; the appellation of ‘pious’ to the albatross, for instance, recalls the line of the previous stanza where the bird ‘perch’d for vespers nine’. In this way the gloss anticipates the way in which the Mariner’s shipmates, in the second part of the poem, first attribute the deteriorating weather to the Mariner’s action, then alter their opinion when conditions improve. It is at this point in the poem, when the mariners adjudge ‘’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,/ That bring the fog and mist’, that the gloss passes judgement; the Mariner’s shipmates ‘make themselves accomplices in the crime’.29 The gloss works by interpreting present sections of the poem in the context of subsequent events, and by extrapolating from the Mariner’s own attempts to rationalize his experience by placing it within a Christian framework. On the surface at least, this introduction of a knowing perspective, which visually intrudes upon the flow of the verse, seems to deny the reader the opportunity for the free play of the imagination within the world of the poem which Coleridge suggests had been his initial intent in writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’. As K.M. Wheeler has written, ‘The preoccupations in the gloss with time sequence, causality, and spatial determinations seem contrary to the imaginative spirit explicitly free of the ordinary laws of time, space, and causality’.30 What is unclear is how far Coleridge himself intended his readers to take the voice of the gloss at face value. If we compare the function of the gloss to that of the other main supplement to the textual apparatus, the Latin epigraph cited above, we can see that these two late additions to the poem appear, in fact, to work at cross purposes. The tone of the epigraph is resolutely questioning; it speculates as to the hierarchy of the forces of nature at work in the universe and concludes, ‘The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it’. The epigraph suggests that we may speculate as to the existence of ‘a greater and better world’, and although it remains silent as to whether we should understand this as physical or spiritual, it is suggested that aspiration in this direction will prevent us from being consumed by ‘the petty things of daily life’ and sinking ‘wholly into trivial thoughts’. However, ‘we must be watchful for the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day 28 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves 1817, in the series Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–1834 (Oxford and New York, 1990), p. 7. All references to the 1817 text of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ are to this facsimile reprint. The original edition omits line numbers, therefore quotations are referenced by page number alone. 29 Sibylline Leaves, p. 9. 30 Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, p. 52.

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from night’. The epigraph as a whole appears to advocate keeping an open mind about the world and its workings; however, this speculation or aspiration must be mediated by a desire to seek the truth, to separate that which we can know from that which we cannot. In this sense the epigraph can be seen as a qualification to, and perhaps even a criticism of, the way in which the gloss functions in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Whilst the gloss interprets unmotivated, supernatural or emotional events in ways which are often both theological and rational, the epigraph, even whilst it exhorts us to be ‘watchful for the truth’, stresses the tenuous nature of our means of interpreting the physical and psychological world. It is possible that in this way the 1817 epigraph provides an extrinsic gloss on the poem and on the process of reading that poem. In addition to implying that we should be wary of the gloss writer’s over-tidy interpretations of the narrative, the tone of the epigraph also calls attention to how far the events of the poem have already been interpreted for us, by the Mariner himself. As Coleridge’s retrospective comments on the aims of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ suggest, the poem is predicated on a suspension of disbelief, although for its protagonist as well as the auditor within the poem, the Wedding Guest, that suspension is compelled rather than given willingly. For the Mariner, each retelling of his story is a search for absolution from a crime and a punishment, the nature of which he is still unable to comprehend. His tale is an attempt to use language to impart a rational order to his experience. However, the repeated recitation attests to the fact that such events defy rationalization, and each telling of the tale serves only to confirm to the Mariner his accursed status. The mainspring of the Mariner’s narrative is the shooting of the albatross. Although the Mariner provides neither a reason for this sudden outburst of cruelty, nor any justification for it, this one motiveless act is made to stand as the cause of all his future penance. It is perhaps this lack of motivation which provoked Wordsworth’s famous criticism of the poem, that the Mariner ‘does not act, but is continually acted upon’; the one point in the poem when the Mariner does act is so insufficiently motivated as to appear a mere accident, a momentary impulsive action which cannot be recalled. It is possible that this latter view of the Mariner’s act was one which Coleridge deliberately wished to cultivate. Replying to criticism from Anna Letitia Barbauld that the poem had ‘no moral’, Coleridge argued that, on the contrary, the poem had too much moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader. It ought to have had no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii’s son.31

These comments suggest that the Mariner’s act should indeed be viewed as chance, bad luck, a moment of madness or simple accident. However, as the poem continues we are prevented from drawing such conclusions because the act has already been interpreted for us, by the Mariner himself, in a specifically moralistic manner. As Raimonda Modiano has pointed out, the poem does not present an objective account of an experience, but one interpretation of that experience, told many years after the 31 CCW, vol. 14, I, pp. 272–3.

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event. Modiano argues that ‘Coleridge intended to explore precisely the discrepancy between actual experience and the recounting of experience by a character with “a most believing mind”’.32 The unwillingness of the poem to explain or detail its one crucial event does indeed testify to the passage of time between the experience and the account of the experience given by the Mariner to the Wedding Guest. If the Mariner did ever ask himself why he shot the bird, or attempt to justify his actions, he gave up doing so a long time before this particular recitation, by this time convinced only that he had done ‘an hellish thing’ for which the natural world would, quite rightly, exact retribution. The Mariner’s moralistic interpretation is evidenced most clearly in the emblematic function of the albatross. Sarah Dyck has noted that each of the first six stanzas of the poem end with a reference to the albatross, or to its killing. She argues that this illustrates ‘the intense personal emotional weight carried by the Mariner and his deep involvement in the experience’.33 What is perhaps even more notable about these references is the symbolic significance accorded to the bird. The image of the albatross is almost always accompanied by a religious image; this is often the cross, be it the Mariner’s ‘cross-bow’ or the substitution of the body of the bird for the cross around his neck. This is rather more than simply the reappearance of a convenient rhyme-word; other references include the spirit voice’s injunction that the Mariner ‘hath penance done,/ And penance more will do’ (413–14) and the hope that the Hermit will ‘shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away/ The Albatross’s blood’ (545–6). The Albatross has assumed the role of religious symbol, a process which begins at the very start of the poem with the bird’s first appearance: ‘As if it had been a Christian Soul,/ We hail’d it in God’s name’ (63–4). It is in this early interpretation of the albatross that we gain a sense of the effects of the retelling of the Mariner’s tale; in order to make sense of an ungraspable experience, and with the benefit of hindsight, he attributes Christian significance to the bird and diabolic significance to his act of murder. The very flexibility of such interpretation is demonstrated by the crew’s reaction to the Mariner’s act. When the ship is initially becalmed ‘all averr’d I had kill’d the Bird/ That made the Breeze to blow’ (91–2), but reactions change on the appearance of the sun: Ne dim ne red, like God’s own head, The glorious sun uprist: Then all averr’d I had kill’d the Bird That brought the fog and mist. ’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay That bring the fog and mist.

(93–8)

The syntactic repetition of lines 91 and 95 stresses the arbitrary nature of perception, the fact that the same act can be interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways. This is further emphasized by the way in which the stanza is expanded to six lines, with the additional lines serving only to reiterate that the new perception is ‘right’. 32 Modiano, ‘Words and “Languageless” Meanings’, p. 41. 33 Dyck, ‘Perspective in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, p. 601.

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This repetition, combined with the internal rhyme of lines 95 and 97, provides what Gayle S. Smith has called ‘a hypnotic, lulling, or incantatory effect’. Smith has noted how the stanzas of the poem containing most emotional tension are the ones lacking in the device of internal rhyme.34 This suggests that Coleridge is employing the device to give a deceptively balanced effect, the regularity of the rhythm providing a formal manifestation of the certainty of the sentiment. Internal rhyme marks the Mariner’s story more in the areas where he is providing interpretation, especially, as Smith has shown, when drawing a moral from his tale, in order to consolidate the perceived truth of his understanding of events. That the device is absent from the more emotionally charged sections of the poem suggests the Mariner’s inability to codify all the events of his tale; some things cannot be reduced to choric homilies. The killing of the albatross generates suspicions as to the cause of the misfortune which follows the ship: And some in dreams assured were Of the Spirit that plagued us so: Nine fathom deep he had follow’d us From the Land of Mist and Snow.

(127–30)

The collocation of the insubstantial ‘dreams’ and definite ‘assured’ indicates the precarious ground upon which the known is predicated in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. The movement from dreams to assurance is also the transition from superstition to belief, from potentially creative interpretation to fixed immovable sign, realized in the living symbol of the Mariner with the dead albatross hanging around his neck in place of the cross. It is significant also that at this stage the Mariner and his crew have lost the power of speech, thus removing an avenue of reinterpretation of events and fixing the characters themselves as living symbols of their nightmare. In the opening sections of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge remains true to his professed aim of ‘the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions’ of ‘every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency’.35 The poem deals in the psychological rather than the supernatural, or, more specifically, the psychology of the supernatural. The Mariner tries to interpret the hopelessly intangible in terms of the tangible; he tries to make aspects of his nightmare world congruent with the structures of the known world. Requiring a reason for what is happening to him, he scrabbles around desperately in search of one. The albatross is not the only candidate; whilst the gloss identifies the two figures on the spectre ship as Death and Life-inDeath, and informs us that Life-in-Death has won the Mariner in the game of dice, such an interpretation is by no means clear in the 1800 edition of the poem. All that is emphasized is the ghostly quality of the ship – how can it move without sails or wind? – and the hideous nature of its crew. Their game of dice remains resolutely uninterpreted:

34 Gayle S. Smith, ‘A Reappraisal of the Moral Stanzas in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, SiR, 3 (1963), 42–52 (p. 44). 35 CCW, vol. 7, II, p. 6.

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Coleridge and Shelley The naked Hull alongside came And the Twain were playing dice; ‘The Game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!’ Quoth she, and whistled thrice.

(191–4)

The only evidence that the spectral ship has any influence on the Mariner’s fate is the temporal proximity of its arrival to the commencement of the deaths of the crew. It is only at this point that the Mariner makes an act of interpretation which establishes a correlation between these events and his continuing penance. As the men die, ‘Each turn’d his face with a ghastly pang/ And curs’d me with his ee’ (206–7). He furthermore associates their deaths with the original crime of killing the albatross by visualizing their departing souls passing him ‘Like the whiz of my Cross-bow’ (215). Formulating cause and effect connections between inexplicable events, the result for the Mariner is to feel himself cursed. The curse in the eye is as much a symbol as the dead albatross; it is unspoken and fixed, by memory and by death. His need to locate the origin of his nightmare experience in something tangible leads the Mariner to reach back time and again to the structures of the world he has left behind in a series of symbolic, often religious interpretations, where right and wrong are conventional, understood absolutes. However, Coleridge’s poem dramatizes the insufficiency of this dualistic interpretation; although he has survived to tell his story, the Mariner has become, in the intervening years, no more than an incarnation of that telling, psychologically incarcerated in his past experience. ‘The terror of tempest’: The Mariner’s vision and ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Coleridge’s Mariner seeks certainty in uncertainty, order in disorder, by moulding his narrative into a conventional moral framework. Yet his continual need to re-tell his story implies that he might just as well try to fit square pegs into round holes. On the surface, Shelley’s ‘A Vision of the Sea’ could scarcely appear any more different in its philosophy. Indeed, Coleridge’s 1817 epigraph to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ concerning the unknown hierarchies of the universe would not be out of place as a preface to Shelley’s poem. The voice of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ revels in descriptions of aspects of the natural world which humankind perceives as terrifying and antagonistic to itself, and exposes the limits of our understanding of the forces which govern that world. The poem is steeped in imagery reminiscent of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in its descriptions of storms and shipwreck, but it is arguable that Shelley is doing something more in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ than simply appropriating the imagery of Coleridge’s most famous poem. Whilst Scott McEathron has suggested that Shelley is offering an alternative to the cosmology of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a brief survey of the implications of Coleridge’s revisions to the poem demonstrates that its cosmology varies considerably depending upon the version in which it is read. The following discussion will suggest that as well as manipulating and transforming the imagery of one of his favourite poems, in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley provides an implicit critique of the stance of the interpretive gloss, in an exploration of natural hierarchies which could be said to dramatize the words of the 1817 epigraph to

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‘The Ancient Mariner’: ‘The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it’. ‘A Vision of the Sea’ opens with a depiction of the natural forces which batter the tempest-tossed ship in language which is both precise in its description and almost gleeful in its tone: ’Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale: From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven, And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from heaven, She sees the black trunks of the water-spouts spin, And bend, as if heaven was ruining in, Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass As if ocean had sank from beneath them: they pass To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound, And the waves and the thunders made silent around Leave the wind to its echo. ‘A Vision of the Sea’ (1–11)36

The first clause, ‘’Tis the terror of tempest’, immediately establishes the tone which the voice of the poem will maintain throughout. This matter-of-factness, enhanced by the short alliterative ‘t’ sounds, announces that what follows will be a detailed yet objective exploration of both ‘terror’ and ‘tempest’; the poem will tell it as it is. Commentators such as King-Hele, who stress the emotionalism of the verse, ignore how the fastidiousness of Shelley’s description of the horrors of the storm and the sustained regularity of the anapaestic tetrameter temper the unashamedly gothic language. The regular rhythms emphasize the way in which the elements of the storm are made to work in a sort of demonic harmony, resulting in a considered, controlled tone which at first seems at odds with the frenzied action described. In the opening lines, for example, the lightning illuminates the ‘water-spouts’, which in turn ‘seem to support’ the very ‘heaven’ which has ‘loosed’ the lightning in a ‘deluge’. As the water-spouts ‘pass/ To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound’, their passing seems to calm the other elements of the storm; the waves and thunders are ‘made silent’, leaving only the echo of the wind. This cacophony of sound and movement has its own natural harmonies, proceeding in an ebb and flow of violence and calm which is replicated in the eventual lull in the storm described later in the poem. This sense of individual elements combining and then breaking apart is enhanced by the movement of Shelley’s verse. After the end-stopped lines 3–5, each of which concentrates on a different component of the storm, lines 6–9 run on as the visual effect of the water-spouts appearing to support the heavens is elaborated in a way which echoes the movement of the eye from the sky to the sea as the water-spouts fleetingly appear to fill all the space between before falling ‘To their graves in the deep’. Shelley’s verse arrests the movement of the waters momentarily, pausing at the point where all the elements of the tempest work in harmony, before splitting apart once again. 36 All references to ‘A Vision of the Sea’, unless otherwise stated, are to Forman 1880, vol. 2, pp. 281–6.

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This method of conveying the rhythms of the storm through the rhythms of verse in an evocation of the scene which is both visual and visceral continues in Shelley’s presentation of the ship itself, which appears to drop from view almost as soon as it appears. The assonance of ‘flickering in ribbons’ emphasizes the natural velocity of the anapaestic feet, conveying the speed of the passage of the eye across the scene. The ship reappears in line 11, only to disappear again almost immediately: The vessel, now tossed Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale, Dim mirrors of ruin hang gleaming about.

(11–17)

Shelley conveys the oscillating movement of the ship via a sort of rhythmic freeze-frame technique. The punctuation of lines 13 and 15 generates moments of suspended animation where the ship momentarily disappears from view, propelled skywards into ‘the skirts of the thunder-cloud’, before reappearing, compelled into a vertiginous descent ‘down the sweep’ of the waves, only to be arrested again in the perceiving eye by the manufactured pause of the incomplete anapaestic foot, ‘It sinks’. This gives the voice of the poem an opportunity to expand his perspective on the scene, turning to ‘the walls of the watery vale’, the bulwarks of this suddenly constructed abyss of water into which the ship plummets. That the ‘depths of dread calm’ of this chasm are ‘unmoved by the gale’ seems to imbue the ocean with a greater, almost sentient power. That this colossal tempest, which tosses the ship like a toy, fails to disrupt the calm of the sea’s depths starkly juxtaposes the power of the natural world with the fragility and impotence of the man-made structure currently lost within it. This effect is consolidated further by the way in which the ‘walls’ of this ‘vale’ function as ‘dim mirrors of ruin’, reflecting in their calm the image of the riven ship back to itself. Just as each element of the storm generates another in the opening lines of the poem, so too do Shelley’s similes arise intrinsically from the scene he depicts, each seeming to engender the next: While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron With splendour and terror the black ship environ, Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire In fountains spout o’er it.

(18–22)

Three separate similes to describe the surf precede the verb which depicts its action, then another follows, as if the voice of the poem becomes carried away in its relish for elaborating upon this imaginative apprehension of destruction. The progression of similes moves towards a fuller enunciation of turbulent movement: ‘chaos’, ‘rout’, ‘whirlpools’ and ‘hurled’. Similarly, in each case this movement is accompanied by an increasingly explicit evocation of light and heat: ‘stars’, ‘death-flames’, ‘fire-

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flowing iron’ and ‘sulphur-flakes ... from a mine of pale fire’. This almost obsessively evoked conception of heat, liquidity and increased velocity gains in violence as the similes proliferate, dramatizing the voice of the poem’s simultaneous apprehension of both the ‘splendour and terror’ of the scene. The imaginative relish with which Shelley imbues his image of the swirling waters is reminiscent of the Mariner’s description of the becalmed ship at night in Part Two of ‘The Ancient Mariner’: About, about, in reel and rout The Death-fires danc’d at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green and blue and white.

‘The Ancient Mariner’ (123–6)

Shelley’s language directly recalls Coleridge’s in the proximity of ‘like a rout/ Of death-flames’ to ‘in reel and rout/ The Death-fires danc’d’, and in the overall association of liquidity and heat in ‘whirlpools of fire-flowing iron’ (‘Vision’), and ‘The water, like a witch’s oils/ Burnt ...’ (‘Mariner’). The drafts of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ are often revealing in showing the development of the images of the finished poem. What was eventually to become lines 18–19 originally read as follows:37 spray And the foam like a chaos of stars, like a rout cauldrons Of death-flames, like rivers of fire flowing iron38

This is substantially the same as the final text, but for the floating word ‘cauldrons’ above ‘rivers’, which would eventually become ‘whirlpools’ in the finished version. The draft suggests that in his construction of similes for the violent movement of the ocean Shelley had Coleridge’s ‘witch’s oils’ very much in mind. However, the development of the draft suggests the inception of an important deviation on Shelley’s part from the imagery of his precursor. The transition from ‘cauldrons’ to ‘whirlpools’ draws attention to a feature of the similes Shelley uses here which the surface exuberance of his language can obscure; from the ‘chaos of stars’, through the ‘fire-flowing iron’ to the ‘sulphur flakes’, each comparison, although volcanic and potentially apocalyptic, is drawn from nature, not from the supernatural. In his most explicit borrowing from Coleridge’s lines, the reference to the ‘death-flames’, Shelley, like Coleridge before him, alludes to the appearance of St Elmo’s fire, a meteorological effect of electricity in the atmosphere, yet one which possesses portentous connotations. The velocity of Shelley’s lines in the movement from one simile to the next prevents such connotations from being drawn into play; as swiftly as it is made, the allusion is forced to cede to the next image, the more earthly ‘whirlpools’ which ousted the supernatural ‘cauldrons’ from the draft. As the poem develops, Shelley’s tactic of calling into play language from ‘The Ancient Mariner’ 37 For drafts of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ see MYR, vol. 4, pp. 2–3, 80–81, 225–35, 238–41, 258–73, 282–93, 360–63, 366–71. 38 MYR, vol. 4, p. 286.

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only to deny its miraculous or uncanny implications starts to attain significance in terms of the overall direction which the work will take. Another feature of the similes Shelley uses to describe the progress of the tempest and the wreck of the ship is that they tend to maintain a very close proximity to the thing described: The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree, While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has past. The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven. ‘A Vision of the Sea’ (26–30)

Here the earthquake, with its ‘blast/ Of the whirlwind’ which would splinter the tree in its path, embodies the exact equivalent on land in terms of action, status and function as the tempest is on the sea. Lines 29–30, which refocus on the ship itself, could equally be elaborating on the simile of earthquake, an effect which is enhanced by the way the shattered mast of the ship corresponds visually to the splintered tree, and the fact that the material of the metaphoric tree is inherent in the construction of the actual ship. Throughout the poem, Shelley seems to compare inexplicable, impressive and terrifying natural phenomena to other similarly inexplicable, impressive and terrifying natural phenomena. The purpose of a simile is both to elaborate on the description of the thing itself, and to provide a frame of reference; to say ‘it’s like that’ is often to provide a context in which we can more fully comprehend the unknown because it is presented to us as possessing shared characteristics with something more familiar. Shelley’s attitude towards simile in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ contrasts to the peculiar way in which Coleridge uses the device in ‘The Ancient Mariner’, as noted by Rosemary Ashton. Citing as an example lines 93–4, where the Mariner describes the sunrise, ‘Ne dim ne red, like God’s own head,/ The glorious Sun uprist’, Ashton comments, ‘In order to tell us what the Mariner’s unfamiliar experience was like, he [Coleridge] resorts time and again to comparisons with something even less familiar’. In this instance, we are far less likely to be capable of imagining what ‘God’s own head’ looks like than to be able to comprehend the idea of sunrise, yet the very form of simile leads us to feel that we have gained a familiarity with the Mariner’s experience because that is the normal function of the device.39 Susan Wolfson has also commented on ‘the strangeness, in substance and in syntax’ of this simile, suggesting that it signals ‘a world supervised erratically by a Godhead alternately dim and red or suddenly glorious’. What Wolfson terms Coleridge’s ‘indeterminate grammar of the simile’40 does indeed leave the reader struggling to decide whether the Sun is being drawn into comparison with ‘God’s own head’ as both share the characteristics of being ‘ne dim ne red’, or whether we should rather be observing a distinction between the sun, which is ‘ne dim ne red’ and God’s head 39 Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (Oxford, UK and Malden, Mass., 1996; repr. 1997), pp. 127–9. 40 Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997), pp. 75–6.

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which is in fact both of these things. The instability of the image, its dependence upon the interpretive powers of the reader or auditor, is entirely congruent with the process and effect of Coleridge’s poem in its entirety; once probed, a stable surface gives way to doubt as the known structures of the world which the Mariner believed himself to inhabit fall away under pressure of the incomprehensible. Simile proves for Coleridge an ideal site in which to illustrate this process of alienation. Much like the relationship between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, the connection between tenor and vehicle reveals itself as a forced expediency; rather than forging relationships between disparate elements, simile becomes instead a tool to confirm isolation and uncertainty. As if aware of the illusory status of the Mariner’s simile-making process, in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley seems to be at pains to avoid referring the events he describes to the authority of any context which is external to the workings of that scene itself. In other words, the storm he describes is like itself, not like anything else that we can conceive of. The reader is propelled into this particular scene without the comfort of a larger or more familiar framework within which to absorb the events; to recall Anna Barbauld’s criticism of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the poem appears to have no moral. This may be why ‘A Vision of the Sea’ has attracted the criticism of being emotional and confused; the movement of the tempest and the movement of the verse are strangely congruent, resulting in a peculiar concentration of effect, bewildering and shocking in its unapologetic portrayal of unmotivated, meaningless destruction. Shelley’s response to the human instinct to perceive the ravages of tempest as deliberately antagonistic to ourselves is to accord it no place in his depiction of the storm. His language seems to take delight in shocking the delicate sensibility that would call for some emotional response to the human cost of the tempest, or some moral to be drawn from the events described. Shelley prepares for the introduction of the dead crew of the ship by using the decaying corpse as a simile to describe the ‘heavy dead hulk’ of the ravaged ship which: On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk, Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold Its corruption around it.

(32–4)

The ‘dead’ bulk of the ship is juxtaposed with the ‘living’ sea which, like the metaphoric ‘clay’ of the earth in the following line, seems accorded a sentience, almost a malevolence, through ‘hungering to fold’, which in its relish appears a rather gothic parody of the sort of emotional, terrified response that such a scene of death and destruction should conventionally evoke. When the poem turns its attention to literal rather than metaphoric corpses, the tone of fascination continues. The first introduction of the crew of the ship contains an apparent simile: Who sit on the other? Is that all the crew that lie burying each other, Like the dead in a breach, round the foremast?

(37–9)

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Here Shelley’s technique of retaining a close proximity between tenor and vehicle in his metaphoric language is taken to extremes; the crew are not only like ‘the dead’, they are ‘the dead’. Whilst Shelley imbues his scene with images of the slaughter of battle by invoking the militaristic connotations of ‘breach’, it is notable that the voice of the poem is unable to effect a description of this mound of corpses except through recourse to the image of another mound of corpses. The description is expanded in degree, rather than in kind, in a consolidation of the idea that Shelley is deliberately demythologizing death and destruction in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. Death here contains no moral, merely a macabre fascination. It cannot be compared to anything else in description, it merely is. Shelley’s means of introducing the dead crew of the ship, as well as the vessel’s other passengers – two tigers and a mother and child – recalls the reaction of Coleridge’s Mariner as he watches the spectre ship and her ghastly inhabitants draw near. The disbelieving tone of Shelley’s ‘Who sit on the other?’ is emphasized further at line 45, ‘Are those all?’, and recalls the incredulous questioning of the Mariner as the spectre ship draws closer: Are those her Sails which glance in the Sun Like restless gossameres? Are those her Ribs, thro’ which the Sun Did peer as through a grate? And are those two all, all her crew, That Woman and her Mate?

(175–80)

The possibility that Shelley deliberately frames his rhetorical questions to echo the syntax of Coleridge’s poem is further enhanced by the changes made in the drafts of ‘A Vision of the Sea’. The draft of lines 37–8 runs as follows: but where are the crew who sits on the other? Can th Is that all the crew who lie heaped on another41

The draft shows the false starts made by Shelley when constructing the syntax of the lines, until the final form was reached which echoes most closely the shocked sense of disbelief of Coleridge’s Mariner.42 Shelley’s engagement with the Mariner’s encounter with the spectre ship continues as he develops his description of his own ravaged vessel and dead crew. First Shelley describes the becalming of the ship:

41 MYR, vol. 4, p. 282. 42 Later in ‘A Vision of the Sea’, after describing the dead crew, Shelley opens line 66 with ‘No more?’ before going on to describe the woman at the helm. In the manuscript, the equivalent clause reads ‘Were these all?’, suggesting that the form of rhetorical questioning which finds its source in Coleridge remained in Shelley’s mind as he wrote, with the line altered at a later date, perhaps for metrical reasons. See MYR vol. 4, p. 268.

‘To him my tale I teach’ Nine weeks the tall vessel had lain On the windless expanse of the watery plain, Where the death-darting sun cast no shadow at noon, And there seemed to be fire in the beams of the moon, Till a lead-coloured fog gathered up from the deep Whose breath was quick pestilence; then, the cold sleep Crept, like blight through the ears of a thick field of corn, O’er the populous vessel.

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(45–52)

Shelley’s ship shares its becalmed status with that of the Mariner in Part Two of Coleridge’s poem; Shelley’s ‘death-darting sun’ which ‘cast no shadow at noon’ recalls the Mariner’s description of his own ‘windless expanse’, even to the extent of employing the same rhyme words: All in a hot and copper sky The bloody sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the moon.

(107–10)

Later, in Part Five of the poem, the Mariner’s ship is again becalmed, and again ‘The sun right up above the mast/ Had fix’d her to the ocean’ (1798, 388–9; 1800, 376– 7). Furthermore, Shelley’s ship has been caught in ‘a lead-coloured fog ... Whose breath was quick pestilence’. It is, of course, the advent of ‘the fog and mist’ and the dispute about whether the albatross was a harbinger of such adverse weather conditions or a means of escaping from them, which are presented as the catalyst of all the subsequent tribulations faced by the Mariner and his crew. Whilst ‘A Vision of the Sea’ shares Coleridge’s evocation of becalmed stasis, in his introduction of the pestilent ‘fog’ which claims the lives of the crew Shelley shows no interest in ascribing possible mystical or moral dimensions to the passage of this ‘blight’ through the ship. The fog comes ‘up from the deep’ as simply another aspect of this ship’s doomed voyage. By appropriating events from Coleridge’s poem and stripping them of the moral baggage with which the Mariner loads them, in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley steadfastly refrains from converting misfortune into a morality play. In Shelley’s portrayal of the dead crew the prosaic and the gruesome sit side by side. Once again, Shelley appears to draw the two poles of simile close together as he describes the remaining sailors disposing of the corpses of the dead: And even and morn, With their hammocks for coffins the seamen aghast Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast Down the deep

(52–5)

The lack of punctuation in the final version of the poem leads to confusion as to whether it is the living crew who are ‘Like dead men’ in the performance of this horrific task, or whether this is another example of Shelley exposing the inadequacy of simile to enhance this vision of death, in that the dead men are compared to themselves. The fair copy in the Harvard notebook has a comma after ‘Like dead

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men’, which suggests that Shelley’s intention was to express how the living sailors were like the dead, perhaps in preparation for the revelation that ‘One after one/ The mariners died’. However, the ambiguity of the syntax may be deliberate, and is analogous in construction, if not in effect, to that which we observed in Coleridge’s poem in the description of the rising sun. This description of the death of the crew seems almost unnaturally prosaic. The emotionalism of the lines is heightened only when Shelley describes the physical details inherent upon death and decay: the creatures of the sea were ‘glutted like Jews’ by this unexpected feast. In this graphic presentation of death, we can see one of the ways in which Shelley’s poem may be engaging with Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’. Six of the remaining sailors in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ have been ‘smitten’ by the lightning and ‘lie black as mummies on which Time has written/ His scorn of the embalmer’ (62–3). This evocation of charred bodies recalls the Mariner’s description of the figure on the spectre ship eventually identified as Death, ‘His bones were black with many a crack,/ All black and bare, I ween’ (1798, 181–2; 1800, 183–4), as well as the ‘black lips baked’ of the Mariner and his shipmates after the drought of their becalming. It is perhaps significant that the crew of the Mariner’s ship do not rot in death, and that Death himself seems cryogenically preserved. Coleridge’s poem tends to avoid detailing the realities of death. The Mariner describes his dead crew as ‘The many men so beautiful,/ And they all dead did lie!’ (1798, 228–9; 1800, 230–31), whereas Shelley focuses upon the physical horror of death; ‘Time’ acts on the dead men with all its attendant decay and ‘scorn[s]’ the notion of preserving the physical body once life has departed.43 Scott McEathron observes how Shelley’s depiction of death sets itself in opposition to the sanitized vision of the Mariner, noting, ‘Shelley identifies the aversion of the “common observer” to death’s physical details as the first step in the pernicious mystification and mythologizing of death’.44 By applying the terms of description used to depict the symbolic figure of Death in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ to human figures in his poem, and by denying the Mariner’s idealized vision of his shipmates returning ‘like a troop of spirits bless’d’ to guide the ship homewards, Shelley may be attempting to strip away mystery and religion in his insistence on death as complete physical termination, and a vividly horrific termination too. Prior to describing the macabre status of the ship’s crew, Shelley introduces two of the remaining living occupants: Are those Twin tigers, who burst, when the waters arose, In the agony of terror, their chains in the hold; (What now makes them tame, is what then made them bold;) Who crouch, side by side, and have driven, like a crank, The deep grip of their claws through the vibrating plank.

(39–44)

43 It is notable that the drafts for the poem show that Shelley originally conceived these lines as including references to ‘sea worms’, ‘limpets’ and ‘worms’ which ‘revelled’, as if determined to bring the physical corruption of the body in death forcibly into the mind of the reader. See MYR, vol. 4, p. 268. 44 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 177.

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At this stage in the poem, rather than involving human powers of apprehension, Shelley chooses instead to express the fear attendant upon shipwreck through the status of the tigers, evoking an instinctive rather than an analytic reaction to the sequence of events described. The terror which initially ‘made them bold’, causing them to ‘burst ... their chains’ in a primary fight or flight instinct now paralyses them, provoking an involuntary impulse to cling to life and the sinking ship. The power of this instinct is conveyed through the contrast between the tigers’ stubborn adherence to their position on the ship, inherent in the purpose of ‘driven, like a crank,/ The deep grip of their claws’, and the clear fragility of the ‘vibrating plank’ of that vessel itself. Shelley’s presentation of these predatory animals cowed by the tempest heightens the powerful, alien nature of the storm. As McEathron notes, ‘By displacing the tigers from their traditional role as predators and casting them instead as potential prey in an alien environment, Shelley in effect defamiliarizes the natural order, refining our sense of its naked ruthlessness’.45 The reason for the tigers’ presence on board this particularly doomed ship remains as unexplained as the other elements of the poem’s action.46 In his refusal to provide reasons for the suffering he depicts, Shelley may be alluding to similarly unexplained, unmotivated elements of Coleridge’s poem. The tigers chained in the hold may be a means of demonstrating that whilst man can dominate some elements of the natural world, others, in the shape of the tempest, remain beyond his control. It is true that the tigers seem doubly victimized, at the mercy of both the tempest and humanity, yet the extent of this latter, additional source of terror is one that Shelley leaves largely implicit in the poem; this is not a morality tale of kindness to animals. McEathron goes on to suggest that the tigers may be a ‘gloss’ on Coleridge’s albatross in ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Unlike the “pious bird of good omen” who intuitively seeks the communion of the mariners, the tigers are literally forced into their relationship with humanity: “chain[ed] in the hold” (line 41). The innate fellowship that joins all living things in Coleridge’s poem is pronounced in its absence from the opening passages of Shelley’s seascape.47 45 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 177. 46 It is possible that Shelley’s choice of species to populate his blighted vessel may again owe something to the Witches of Macbeth, whose verse, as we have seen, clearly influenced the early poem ‘Falsehood and Vice’ via Coleridge’s own use of it in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. In Act I, scene 3 of Macbeth the First Witch relates her projected revenge upon the sailor’s wife who would not share her chestnuts. The woman’s husband is ‘master o’the Tiger’, on its way to Aleppo, a voyage which, the Witch promises, will not remain calm: ‘Weary sev’n-nights nine times nine/ Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine./ Though his bark cannot be lost,/ Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.’ (I, iii, 22–5). The fate of this ship mirrors that of ‘A Vision of the Sea’, and it is possible that the ‘nine weeks’ which Shelley’s vessel remains becalmed may be a contraction of the ‘sev’n-nights nine times nine’ during which the Tiger suffers the Witch’s storm. It seems in keeping with the imaginative excesses of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ for Shelley to have transformed the name of a vessel into the literal occupants of his ship. Jonathan Bate has shown how Macbeth generally and the Witches’ passages in particular influenced Coleridge’s poetry, including ‘The Ancient Mariner’. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1989), pp. 58–62. 47 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 177n.

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If we were to apply to Shelley’s poem the sort of moralistic framework that the Mariner adopts to order his experience, we could argue that the tempest that arises in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ is the natural world’s means of vengeance upon a humanity which has enslaved and dominated these members of its natural hierarchies; the storm takes revenge for the capture of the tigers. However, the fact that the tigers are clearly as much at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the tempest as the ship’s human occupants reveals the fallacy of this means of interpretation. By offering a potential counterpart to the albatross in the Mariner’s tale, only to strip it of all the moral connotations with which Coleridge’s protagonist would imbue it, Shelley presents his view of the ludicrous nature of trying to attribute moral sense to the components of the natural world. If one of the elements which Shelley is exploring in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ is the variety of reactions exhibited towards the action of natural phenomena, and if the poem includes an analysis of reactions to fear and the prospect of death, then the tigers provide evidence of one instinctive, visceral response, that of the brute will to survive. This response is further explored in the later stages of the poem when Shelley details one of the tigers ‘mingled in ghastly affray/ With a sea-snake’: The foam and the smoke of the battle Stain the clear air with sunbows; the jar and the rattle Of solid bones crushed by the infinite stress Of the snake’s adamantine voluminousness. And the hum of the hot blood that spouts and rains Where the gripe of the tiger has wounded the veins, Swollen with rage, strength and effort; the whirl and the splash As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash The thin winds and soft waves into thunder.

(137–46)

Shelley’s sea snake perhaps recalls the sea snakes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, yet whereas the snakes in Coleridge’s poem are imbued with symbolic significance when they appear to become the catalyst for the Mariner’s redemption, the snakes of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ are far more predatory animals. Characteristically, the voice of the poem takes delight in relating the visual and aural effects of this titanic struggle for survival. The language has a synaesthetic quality, seeming to appeal to more senses than those explicitly detailed of sight and sound, with the ‘adamantine voluminousness’ of the snake’s coiling body imparting a sensual quality to the verse. The line recalls the moment in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ when Coleridge’s protagonist discovers a sudden beauty in the ‘slimy things with legs’: Within the shadow of the ship I watch’d their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (1798, 269–73; 1800, 271–5)

This association, coupled with the polysyllabic richness of ‘adamantine voluminousness’, and perhaps also the reference to ‘sunbows’ in the preceding line, has the effect of imbuing Shelley’s description with connotations of rich colour.

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The OED cites this instance alone under the definition of ‘voluminousness’ as ‘the quality of forming many coils or folds’. It seems likely that Shelley had in mind Milton’s description of Sin in Paradise Lost where, before a gate formed partly from ‘adamantine rock’, there sat ‘a formidable shape’, part woman, part ‘in many a scaly fold/ Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed/ With mortal sting’.48 However, as with his allusions to the ‘Mariner’, Shelley is able to evoke Milton’s language without acceding to any moral connotations of sin; this desperate fight for survival in the natural world has little to do with ethics. His language, like that of the description of the dead crew, stares the horror of this battle straight in the face, replicating its terrible energy in the words of movement and sound. The simile of ‘some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash’ reveals the brute, unstoppable power of this collision of elemental energies, but also implies that this contention possesses as much moral and malice as the action of machinery. The snake and tiger will battle to the death, then the ‘blue shark’, loitering in the background of this tempestuous affray, will assume its role in the food chain by polishing off whoever is left, becoming the ‘finwinged tomb of the victor’. It is possible that in the conception of the simile ‘some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash/ The thin winds and soft waves into thunder’, Shelley may have been recalling the steam ship designed by Henry Reveley, the son of his friends the Gisbornes, which he was helping to finance. In a letter to Reveley of 28 October 1819, Shelley describes their projected invention as ‘our “Monstruo di fuego e acqua”’.49 In a letter to the Gisbornes of 13 November 1819, Shelley sends his regards to Henry, hopes he is not in want of money for his project, then, with a reference to the essay ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, on which he was working, he comments: I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics; not, you may imagine, without the hope of finding some enchanted paradise. In all probability, I shall be overwhelmed by one of the tempestuous columns which are forever traversing with the speed of a storm & the confusion of a chaos that pathless wilderness. ... We have had lightning & rain here in plenty. I like Cascini very much where I often walk alone watching the leaves & the rising and falling of the Arno. I am full of all kinds of literary plans.50

There are marked affinities between the language Shelley uses here to describe the political ‘desert’ and that of ‘A Vision of the Sea’. The ‘tempestuous columns’ recall the clouds which ‘Like columns and walls did surround and sustain/ The dome of the tempest’ (109–10). The phrase ‘traversing with the speed of a storm & the confusion of a chaos that pathless wilderness’ echoes the language used in the poem throughout, and is specifically reminiscent of the ‘hurricane’ which ‘came from the west … Transversely dividing the stream of the storm’ (99–101). Some months later, on 26 May 1820, in another letter to the Gisbornes Shelley writes, ‘Will Henry write me an adamantine letter, flowing not like the words of Sophocles with honey, but molten brass & iron, & bristling with wheels & teeth? I saw his steamboat asleep 48 Paradise Lost, II, 645–53, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, 1968; repr. 1971). 49 Letters, vol. 2, p. 132. 50 Letters, vol. 2, p. 150.

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under the walls’. In the use of the word ‘adamantine’ and the reference to ‘molten brass ... with wheels & teeth’, the language of the battle between tiger and sea snake in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ recurs. If, as the language of the letters of late 1819 suggests, Shelley had already written, or was in the process of writing ‘A Vision of the Sea’ (perhaps one of his ‘literary plans’?), this suggests that the date Mary Shelley attributed to the fair copy in the Harvard notebook of ‘April 1820’ may very well apply only to that fair copy, rather than to the original composition date of the poem. The evidence of the letters at least suggests that Elsie Mayer may be correct to assign a composition date of late 1819 to ‘A Vision of the Sea’. The recurrence of the language of the poem in a letter six months later may have been prompted by the production of the fair copy, and perhaps implies how closely Shelley associated the language of battle in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ with the imagined movement of his projected steam boat. If we can see how Shelley successfully appropriates this image of mechanistic brute force to imbue his tempestuous battle with power but not with morals, there are a number of instances in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ where his metaphoric language seems to defy elucidation. As well as containing literal tigers, snakes and sharks, the poem evokes a number of animals in the form of simile to describe the process of the storm: The hurricane came from the west, and past on By the path of the gate of the eastern sun, Transversely dividing the stream of the storm; As an arrowy serpent, pursuing the form Of an elephant, bursts through the brakes of the waste. Black as a cormorant the screaming blast, Between ocean and heaven, like an ocean, past.

(100–106)

As a means of suggesting the way in which the dark, amorphous storm clouds are broken by the trail of the hurricane, the serpent and elephant images are not, perhaps, as incongruous as they first appear. However, it is tempting to think that just as ‘the tigers are literally forced into their relationship with humanity’, Shelley mirrors this enforced correspondence in his choice of image; these metaphorical animals are forced into a literary relationship with the process of the storm in an attempt by humanity to comprehend these elemental forces in language. Oddly, Shelley seems to draw attention to the potential excessiveness of these images when the passage of the ‘screaming blast’ is described as moving ‘Between ocean and heaven, like an ocean’, which, in the context of the preceding images, seems bathetic to say the least. The punctuation surrounding the phrase seems to suggest how the voice of the poem pauses momentarily in search of a suitable comparison for the passage of a hurricane which is both like a serpent chasing an elephant, screaming, and as black as a cormorant, then is forced to admit defeat and settle for a repetition of ‘ocean’, before rushing onwards to continue detailing the storm. Whilst we cannot exclude the possibility of this simply being a bad line, not only is the draft exactly the same as the final copy, but in a manuscript generally lacking in punctuation, the commas which 51 Letters, vol. 2, p. 203.

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help achieve this effect of conscious inadequacy of image are clearly present. As was his technique in ‘To a Sky-Lark’, Shelley appears deliberately to allow his use of simile to break down and expose itself simply as simile, and therefore only one possible way of viewing the thing itself. If we recall again the effect of the image of the rising sun as ‘Ne dim ne red, like God’s own head’ from ‘The Ancient Mariner’, it is possible to argue that Shelley’s process here is not dissimilar to that of Coleridge. Both poets draw attention to the way in which simile is necessarily an interpreting device. Coleridge uses simile to draw attention to the undercurrents of instability in the Mariner’s confidence in his own powers of interpretation; if we consider the overall relation between ‘A Vision of the Sea’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ it seems possible that Shelley may, in turn, be drawing attention to Coleridge’s artistry, and thus the Mariner’s error. Much of Shelley’s use of simile in the poem oscillates, as in the above example, between the fantastic and the prosaic; interpretation of the threatening and terrifying is, Shelley seems to argue, a precarious business. What strengthens the sense that Shelley attempts to construct an overt textual dialogue between his poem and that of his precursor is that each of the metaphorical animals in the passage cited above has a possible source in Coleridge. In one of the alterations to the 1817 ‘Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge added two stanzas to Part One of the poem, the first of which reads: And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along.

Sibylline Leaves (p. 5)

The idea of pursuit, and the use of the imagery of birds and flight to describe the passage of the storm are recalled in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. Shelley appears to have had some difficulty with this description; the draft for the lines concerning the cormorant reads as follows: The hurricane came fr from the west, & fled past on To the portal portal By the path of the port gate of the Eastern sun screaming [?tracking] Like a cormorant, [?hasting] with feet & wings the screaming with wings screaming blast w Black as a cormorant with 53

The draft both confirms the idea of the cormorant as essential to Shelley’s conception of the image, and reveals in the repetition of the cancelled ‘wings’, perhaps a clearer debt to the ‘o’ertaking wings’ of Coleridge’s revised description of his own ‘STORM-BLAST’ in the 1817 version of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Furthermore, 52 See MYR, vol. 4, p. 260. 53 MYR, vol. 4, p. 260.

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this passage from ‘A Vision of the Sea’ also recalls lines from Coleridge’s ‘The Destiny of Nations’. Described by Richard Holmes as one of Coleridge’s ‘huge, rag-bag anthologies of his reading, speculations, and enthusiasms’,54 ‘The Destiny of Nations’ largely pre-dates the composition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, but Coleridge’s dissatisfaction with the fragmentary piece saw its publication delayed until Sibylline Leaves. What is of particular interest about the poem, as Holmes points out, is the way in which many of the motifs and images which Coleridge would develop in the ‘Mariner’ find first expression here in a catalogue of superstitions and myths which is both visionary and apocalyptic. Shelley’s depiction of the hurricane in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ as ‘an arrowy serpent’ and his association between the appearance of ‘the screaming blast’ and the cormorant bear an affinity to Coleridge’s description in ‘The Destiny of Nations’ of Solfar-Kapper, a place of religious worship for the Laplanders, where ‘the snowy blast/ Drifts arrowy by’ (72–3), and his allusion to ‘that Giant Bird/ VUOKHO, of whose rushing wings the noise/ Is Tempest’ (93–5).55 It seems likely that this tempest-bringing bird from ancient myth was reanimated by Coleridge in the symbolic form of the albatross in ‘The Ancient Mariner’; as we have seen, the albatross itself becomes an image of superstition with unstable meaning to the mariners aboard ship. It is possible that Shelley had in mind an image from another of Coleridge’s poems in his conception of the ‘arrowy serpent, pursuing the form/ Of an elephant’. In a passage of ‘Religious Musings’, concerned with how ‘far removed from all that glads the sense [are] ... The wretched Many!’, Coleridge suggests that society as we now know it is ‘Fitliest depictured’ as follows: where, by night, Fast by each precious fountain on green herbs The lion couches; or hyaena dips Deep in the lucid stream his bloody jaws; Or serpent plants his vast moon-glittering bulk, Caught in whose monstrous twine Behemoth yells, His bones loud-crashing!

‘Religious Musings’ (270–76)56

The serpent preying upon the Behemoth recalls Shelley’s ‘arrowy serpent’ chasing the elephant as an image to describe the process of the storm. The connection between the Behemoth and an elephant is one emphasized by Coleridge himself in a note to the line which appeared with the poem in all editions: ‘Behemoth in Hebrew signifies wild beasts in general. Some believe it is the Elephant, some the Hippopotamus; some affirm it is the Wild-Bull. Poetically, it designates any large Quadruped’. This slightly vague definition of the Behemoth as ‘any large Quadruped’ is akin to the rather whimsical effect of Shelley’s metaphorical elephant. It is as if, in his desire to rush forward in his evocation of the hurricane’s passage, the voice of the poem plucks ‘elephant’ from the air rather arbitrarily, as a suitable expression of something large, dark and threatening. These lines from ‘Religious Musings’ are 54 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1990), pp. 91, 139–41. 55 CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 279–99. 56 CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 171–91.

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echoed again more clearly later in Shelley’s poem. The image of the serpent crushing the Behemoth in his ‘monstrous twine ... His bones loud-crashing!’ reappears in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ in the battle between the tiger and the sea snake discussed above: ‘the jar and the rattle/ Of solid bones crushed by the infinite stress/ Of the snake’s adamantine voluminousness.’ Once again, Shelley’s drafts of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ allow us trace the mutation of this image in a way which may support the suggestion that it was generated from Coleridge. The lines which are equivalent to 102–4, the serpent pursuing the elephant-like form, in the final version appear to have been a late after-thought, as they do not appear with the body of the text in its sequence at that point (the first section of the notebook used for the poem, *49r–*57r), but appear written on the front paste-down, amongst a variety of doodles: Transversely dividing the s[tream] of the storm pursuing Like an arrowy serpent [leaving] the [?pursuing] the form Of a swift Tyger Of an [ele]phant

burst bursts

the [brakes] of the waste – thr[u]57

Shelley’s original conception seems to have been of a tiger rather than an elephant, an idea that perhaps remained in his mind in the construction of the battle between tiger and sea snake later in the poem. It is possible that the tiger in this context was suggested by the ‘lion’ which ‘couches’ in the lines from ‘Religious Musings’ quoted above. Whilst the congruities between those lines and Shelley’s are by no means clear, if we take the two instances from ‘A Vision of the Sea’ cited together, there does appear to be a marked affinity in imagery with the lines from ‘Religious Musings’, and an association between Shelley’s elephant and Coleridge’s Behemoth could certainly help to account for the presence of this otherwise rather curious image. Coleridge may also be responsible for one other strange animal metaphor in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. When narrating the battle between the tiger and sea snake described above, Shelley evokes the echoing sounds of this desperate fight for survival as follows: ‘the screams/ And hissings crawl fast o’er the smooth ocean streams,/ Each sound like a centipede’. Whilst the crawling movement of a centipede may convey an idea of the passage of echoes across the ocean, the image remains a strange one. However, once again, Coleridge’s water snakes may provide a context for the simile. In the drought and despair of his ship’s initial becalming, the Mariner laments: The very deeps did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy Sea.

57 MYR, vol. 4, p. 3.

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Shelley’s image may derive from Coleridge’s in its evocation of something ‘crawling’ across the ocean. Furthermore, the ‘slimy things ... with legs’ may be Shelley’s source for the otherwise incongruous simile of sound crawling ‘like a centipede’. Whether these ‘slimy things’ are in fact the sea snakes which the Mariner later finds so beautiful is unclear, but the transformation in the Mariner’s assessment of the animals as first ugly then beautiful would accord with the way in which events elsewhere in the poem are conditioned by perception. That Shelley may have had the Mariner’s first impression of the snakes in mind during the composition of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ is perhaps supported by the position of the drafts for lines 147–8 (‘The hissings ... a centipede’) in the notebook. Mary Quinn has conjectured that ‘A Vision of the Sea’ was one of the final entries made in the draft notebook, due to the way in which the pages of the draft are spread throughout the book, as if Shelley was using up the available space wherever he could find it.58 Lines 120–28, immediately prior to the section currently under consideration, are dispersed on the blank pages between *61v and *62r. At this point, Shelley appears to have exhausted all the free space in this section of the notebook, and flipped backwards to a free page at *28r, for the lines which become 136–44. Shelley’s intention appears to have been to keep working backwards through the notebook, but the next page, *27v, was already partly occupied, and Shelley was only able to fit in what become in the final version, 145–7. The next consecutive page in this manner is *27r, which again, appears to have been already occupied, so instead Shelley flicked forward three pages to *25r, then started to work, this time forwards, using up these three pages to complete the poem.59 The point of interest in the drafts in terms of the discussion of the centipede image from line 148 occurs in the movement from *27v to *25r, over which the image is developed. *27v contains the drafts for ‘As of some hideous engine ... And hissings crawl fast o’er the smooth ocean-streams’. The existing material on this page of the notebook which forced Shelley to search elsewhere for space is a fragment beginning ‘Proteus Wordsworth who shall bind thee’, and continues: Coleridge Pro[th]eous Southey who shall find thee, Proteus Coleridge who can who can know thee Southey Proteus Hyperprotean Proteus, Southey shall shall Who can catch thee, who can know thee60

The presence of this text causes Shelley to run out of space and continue instead from *25v, which includes the draft ‘Crawl oer the watery wilderness/ Each sound like

58 See Mary Quinn’s Introduction to MYR, vol. 4, pp. xxx, xxxiv. 59 See MYR, vol. 4, pp. 240, 238, 360, 362, 370, 368, 366. 60 MYR, vol. 4, p. 362.

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61

a centipede’. It seems just possible that the presence of the ‘Proteus Wordsworth’ fragment in this position in the notebook may have further reminded Shelley of his engagement with and reservations about Coleridge, and perhaps influenced his choice of simile in the description of the echoing screams of the battle on the next page of the draft. One further possible antecedent for the plethora of literal and metaphorical animals which populate Shelley’s seascape lies once again in ‘The Destiny of Nations’. In a further example of the ‘legends terrible’ of the Arctic, Coleridge alludes to the good and evil spirits of the ocean, clarifying their antithetical relation in a note: They call the Good Spirit, Torngarsuck. The other great but malignant spirit is a nameless Female; she dwells under the sea in a great house, where she can detain in captivity all the animals of the ocean by her magic power. When a dearth befalls the Greenlanders, an Angekok or magician must undertake a journey hither: he passes through the kingdom of souls, over an horrible abyss into the Palace of this phantom, and by his enchantments causes the captive creatures to ascend directly to the surface of the ocean.62

The concept of spiritual guardians of the ocean is clearly one which Coleridge was to exploit in the intangible and mysterious agency of the Polar Spirit in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. As regards his explanatory note to ‘The Destiny of Nations’, it is tempting to think that Shelley may have had in mind this myth of captive creatures ascending from the depth of the ocean by spiritual wizardry in the construction of his own watery menagerie. As we shall see when we turn to consider ‘Prometheus Unbound’, this particular passage from Coleridge’s poem may well have aided Shelley’s conception of the nature and action of the Furies. If in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley was recalling some of the myths evoked by Coleridge in ‘The Destiny of Nations’, to do so would, paradoxically, be quite congruent with the nature of the poem’s engagement with aspects of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ which we have previously observed. We could, for instance, read the newly released tigers as an example of ‘the captive creatures’ which ‘ascend directly to the surface of the ocean’ under the spiritual power of Torngarsuck. That such a release causes more problems than it solves – both for the tigers themselves and for the ship’s remaining human occupants – could be read as Shelley once again complicating the sort of dualistic interpretation of the workings of the universe based on superstition which is favoured by the Mariner and his crew. Abstract concepts of good and evil do not, Shelley argues, either explain or ameliorate the suffering we observe in the world around us. In the midst of this doomed Noah’s Ark, Shelley introduces the ship’s other remaining passengers, the ‘woman more fair’ and her ‘bright child’. Here he is able to offer, in contrast to the basic survival instinct exhibited by the tigers, a more analytic meditation on life, death and the fear of separation, reducible to the question of lines 82–3: ‘Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,/ That when the ship sinks we no longer may be?’. Scott McEathron takes these lines as the central point of the poem for his discussion of Shelley’s ‘own sense of human spiritual isolation and of death’s significance’ and the difficulties which the poet encounters in his attempt 61 MYR, vol. 4, p. 370. 62 CCW, vol. 16, I, p. 286.

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‘to offer a cogent account of death and its implications for human spirituality’.63 McEathron interprets the woman’s presence as an embodiment of the isolation faced by Coleridge’s Mariner, and locates this isolation in the impending separation from her child in death, ‘the pang that awaits us... So dreadful since thou must divide it with me!’ (78–9). McEathron argues that Shelley places the emphasis on the finality of death in his earlier descriptions of the corpses of the crew in order to assert, in the woman’s speech, ‘that death’s final importance lies in its dissolution of human communities’. The ultimate result of this revelation should be that humankind will focus upon the generation of community and relationship in this world, rather than waiting for it in the next.64 Whilst the accompanying poems in the Prometheus Unbound volume certainly stress Shelley’s belief in human community as a necessary prelude to social amelioration, a problem with McEathron’s location of the poem’s thematic heart in the speech of the woman at the helm lies in the difficulty of attributing to her words any firm theory as regards death and any possible afterlife.65 She fears death, and her instinct is to protect her child, yet, as McEathron notes, her real pain seems located in the loss of physical contact with the child after death, ‘What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more? ... Not to look on those eyes/ Those lips, and that hair, ...’ (84–7). This does suggest a fear of isolation, but if, as Shelley has apparently argued earlier in the poem, death is unquestionably the end, and both the woman and her child are to die, then we must ask in what way are they separated? Who or what is left to lament the loss of physical contact between mother and child? This raises the question of whether the woman’s fear of separation does in fact imply a half-belief in some form of afterlife, although presumably not a heavenly sort. It is possible that the woman’s speech functions as an indication of the ultimately unknowable nature of death, and in doing so represents a greater reservation of judgement than the narrator of the poem has hitherto provided.66 Perhaps in attempts to find some more spiritual centre at the heart of this by turns pragmatic and gleeful depiction of the horrors of storm and death, those critics who have commentated on ‘A Vision of the Sea’ have focused upon this ‘woman more fair’. Carl Ketchum describes her as ‘one of his [Shelley’s] many women 63 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 174. 64 McEathron, ‘Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 182. 65 Another potential difficulty in treating the woman’s speech as the centrally important argument of the poem is that the two lines which McEathron identifies as its ‘heart’, ‘Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,/ That when the ship sinks we no longer may be?’ are almost certainly a late addition to the poem, as they are the only lines which have no equivalent in the draft notebook. It is arguable that Shelley, when writing the fair copy, added the lines as a clearer encapsulation of one of his poem’s themes, but it is equally possible that the absence of the lines from Shelley’s original conception threatens the idea that their content represents the heart of the poem’s concerns. 66 It seems certain, as Nora Crook has argued, that the death of William Shelley on 7 June 1819 and Mary Shelley’s subsequent depression, inform the presentation of the mother and child and the questions regarding the nature of death in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. However, the circumstances of the poem differ in that the fictional mother expects to share the fate of her child. See ‘The Enigma of “A Vision of the Sea”’, pp. 154–9.

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who radiate the light of Intellectual Beauty’ and argues that the woman’s physical attractiveness ‘is a sign of, or part of, a state of moral truth’.67 McEathron attributes to her ‘innocence, beauty, purity of spirit, love of life’, arguing that she is ‘allegoricized as the embodiment of the Shelleyan ideals, which we must infer from the few details of her character that we are given’.68 Both critics seem to infer rather a lot about her role; ‘moral truth’ seems to accord her speech with rather more theoretical cohesion than it actually contains. Ketchum himself comments that ‘she questions the nature of death and finds no response’.69 On one level she displays an instinctual response not dissimilar to that of the tigers in her desire to protect her child from the horrors of their situation: ‘“Smile not, my child,/ “But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled/ “Of the pang that awaits us’ (76–8). Yet in ‘Smile not’ and ‘be beguiled’ she shows an inability to comprehend the child’s own instinctive reaction to the tempest and the tigers: It laughs at the lightning, it mocks the mixed thunder Of the air and the sea, with desire and with wonder It is beckoning the tigers to rise and come near, It would play with those eyes where the radiance of fear Is outshining the meteors; its bosom beats high, The heart-fire of pleasure has kindled its eye; Whilst its mother’s is lustreless.

(70–76)

Whilst the ‘eyes’ of the tigers betray a ‘radiance of fear’, and the eye of its mother is ‘lustreless’, the child’s eye is ‘kindled’ by the ‘heart-fire of pleasure’. The child exhibits a different sort of instinctual response to the tempest; not yet able to analyse a situation as its mother does, or to understand danger and react instinctively as the tigers do, the child accepts the tempest, shipwreck and tigers alike unquestioningly. In this he is perhaps the figure in the poem closest to the poet himself; unmoved by fear he is able to mine the experience creatively, to enjoy the novelty of the visual and aural effects of the storm and the presence of the tigers. The child’s response is, like the voice of the poem, largely sensual; he does not make any act of interpretation of the scene, be it instinctive or analytic. Whilst the woman’s speech may well be an articulation of humankind’s philosophical doubts regarding the nature of death, it is arguable that in this way her fear and desperate struggle for survival, make her more akin to the other protagonists in Shelley’s dramatization of the survival of the fittest, the tigers and sea snake. Rather than being a conundrum which Shelley tries to solve, the woman’s uncertainty regarding death is what makes her archetypally human, one of the human minds in Coleridge’s 1817 epigraph to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘which has always sought the knowledge of these things but never attained it’. The final simile she uses to describe the predicted passing from life of herself and her child is reminiscent of what we have observed of Shelley’s use of simile thus far in the poem; the ‘sweet spirit’ of her child ‘now fades away/ “Like a rainbow, and I the fallen shower”’ (89–90). 67 Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, pp. 57–8. 68 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 180. 69 Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, p. 58.

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The image of the rainbow expresses the transitory, ephemeral beauty of the child’s life, whilst the depiction of herself as the ‘fallen shower’ conveys the relationship between mother and child; it is, after all, the combination of sunshine and rain which produces the rainbow. Yet the inclusion of this meteorological simile to describe these lives imbues existence itself with the same sort of uncertainty of origination that we have seen Shelley apply to the storm. Just as we can attribute no reason to the existence of tempest beyond that offered by meteorology, there is no reason to human existence other than a biological one. Once we begin to strip away the mystery respecting the causes of both life and death, we can start to accept and value life on its own terms, seeking to enhance its joys and relationships and to ameliorate its attendant privations. For Shelley to depict the forces of the natural world as existing in unrelenting opposition to humanity would be to risk acceding to precisely the sort of understanding that would read a moral into every action of the external world. As if to call attention to the dangers of such fixed interpretation, the hurricane, apparently a source of destruction, reveals itself to be the catalyst to the disintegration of the storm when it rends the clouds, allowing the rising sun to enter the scene: where The wind has burst out through the chasm, from the air Of clear morning the beams of the sunrise flow in, Unimpeded, keen, golden, and crystalline, Banded armies of light and air; at one gate They encounter, but interpenetrate.

(115–20)

It is at this point that the two critics who have considered ‘A Vision of the Sea’ in detail become polarized in their interpretations. For Scott McEathron, the ‘light, air, and sea described here bear no resemblance whatsoever to the brute material forces of earlier in the poem’, and this lull in the storm represents a turning point, where ‘the elements ... contain an inexactly defined but nonetheless real power of regeneration that is accessible to humanity’.70 Conversely, Carl Ketchum argues that throughout, the interaction of the elements randomly generates tempest or calm, stressing that the poem presents nature as essentially amoral.71 Ketchum’s reading appears more attentive to the sort of symbiosis we have observed in the workings of the storm in the opening lines of the poem, and yet the language of the verse at this point does attempt to create a different sort of harmony to that of the tempest. The lines ‘Banded armies of light and air; at one gate/ They encounter, but interpenetrate’ create a reversal of expectation in the context of the earlier descriptions of the elements. The word ‘armies’, and the way in which the line runs on to ‘They encounter’ recalls the speed of movement as the earlier components of the storm reacted together destructively, suggesting what follows will be a continuation of the previous confrontation. Yet here Shelley effects a pause in the verse through a subtle alteration of the metre. Midway through the line ‘They encounter, but interpenetrate’, the poem’s sustained anapaestic tetrameter gives way to two iambic feet. Where the 70 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, pp. 184–5. 71 Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, p. 54.

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thundering anapaests had served to propel the verse forward through the way in which the poem’s voice is continually rushing forward to meet the next stressed syllable, the iambic substitutions here cause the caesura in the middle of the line to receive further emphasis and decelerate the succeeding verse, focusing the reader’s attention upon the verb ‘interpenetrate’. On the evidence of both his poetry and prose subsequent to 1818, ‘interpenetrate’ is a word for which Shelley appears to have developed a particular liking. As well as its appearance in Act IV of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, where the Earth describes how love ‘interpenetrates my granite mass’ (370), the word also appears in ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’ of 1818, governing the action of an entire stanza as the poet, adrift in ‘the deep wide sea of agony’, experiences a moment of epiphany, where all ‘of living things each one;/ And my spirit …/ Interpenetrated lie’. Here all the components of the natural world and the essence of the poet himself appear, momentarily, to permeate each other.72 The OED cites both this instance and that of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ as among the earliest usages of the word, although it draws a subtle distinction in meaning between the two. The ‘Euganean Hills’ reference appears under the definition ‘To penetrate between the parts or particles of (anything); ... to pass through and through, permeate, pervade’. The lines from ‘A Vision of the Sea’ are cited under ‘To penetrate each other, to unite or mingle’. The only other author to receive more citations in the OED than Shelley under ‘interpenetrate’ is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That Coleridge was indeed the originator of the word, and that Shelley’s usage of it was self-consciously indebted to the elder poet, is suggested by a comment from Thomas Medwin. Accusing Shelley of creating too many new words in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Medwin recalls adding ‘“and you have fabricated some which I should scarcely hold to be legitimate; for instance, interpenetrate”’. Apparently, Shelley’s rejoinder to this was ‘“I did not make it, ... It is used by Coleridge – quite authority enough”’.73 Coleridge’s use of the word appears to be confined to his prose. In addition to several appearances in the revised Friend of 1818, the word appears perhaps most significantly in terms of Shelley’s likely knowledge of it, in the Biographia Literaria, which Shelley acquired at the same time as Sibylline Leaves. The word occurs during a discussion of poetic metre, where Coleridge takes issue with Wordsworth’s comment in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that, save for metre, there is no essential difference between poetry and prose. On the origin of metre Coleridge comments, ‘This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion’. From this Coleridge deduces ‘two conditions which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work’, firstly that ‘the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement’ and secondly that as metre is formed by a voluntary act, ‘for the purpose of blending delight with emotion’, with the traces of that volition discernible in the metrical language. In conclusion, Coleridge emphasizes the necessary co-existence of these 72 ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’, PS, vol. 2, pp. 427–43, ll. 310–13. 73 Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1913), p. 349. Medwin’s anecdote is cited by Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES, n.s 17 (1966), 278–92, (p. 286).

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two conditions in poetic metre: ‘There must not be only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose’.74 Whilst it is impossible to assess how far this particular instance of the use of ‘interpenetrate’ in Coleridge was in Shelley’s thoughts during the composition of the lines of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ which relate the calming of the tempest, it is at least notable that in using a word which, if Medwin is to be believed, he self-consciously appropriated from Coleridge, Shelley recalls in the very act of that usage the context in which the word had previously been employed by Coleridge. It is at this moment of increased ‘excitement’ in the poem that Shelley employs a word which not only connotes an alteration in the action of the warring elements, but, in a perfect instance of what the elder poet had called ‘an interpenetration of passion and of will’, effects an alteration in the metre to reflect that change in tone. It may be significant that the calming of the tempest arises from the action of one of its destructive elements, the hurricane. The introduction of calm from chaos may be another embodiment of the harmonies of the natural world, invoked to reveal the fallacy of regarding these elements as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending upon the way in which they impinge upon our lives. A few lines later, Shelley writes: The wrecks of the tempest, like vapours of gold, Are consuming in sunrise. The heaped waves behold The deep calm of blue Heaven dilating above, And, like passions made still by the presence of Love, Beneath the clear surface reflecting it slide Tremulous with soft influence. (127–32)

The draft for the start of line 128 originally read ‘Are consumed in the sunlight’, which Shelley then cancelled, replacing it with the line as it exists now. The draft line implies that priority of action is accorded to the sunlight, whereas the final version insists upon a more mutual relationship, as if the vapours are consuming themselves, emphasizing the new concord of the scene.75 The image of reflection which follows seems to transform the images of reflection as stasis which pervade ‘The Ancient Mariner’. On his becalmed ship, surrounded by his dead shipmates, a spirit voice heard by the Mariner in his swoon describes: ‘Still as a slave before his Lord, The Ocean hath no blast: His great bright eye most silently Up to the moon is cast’

‘The Ancient Mariner’ (419–22)

Whereas for the Mariner, reflection connotes stasis, an entrapment indicative of his position throughout the poem, Shelley’s use of the image of reflection between heaven and ocean is an active, dialectical one. There is implicit movement in his scene; the ‘heaped waves’ reflect in their motion the dilation of the heavens above, yet appear stimulated by it, ‘Tremulous with soft influence’. Yet the simile used to

74 CCW, vol. 7, II, pp. 64–5. 75 See MYR, vol. 4, p. 240.

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describe this process, ‘like passions made still by the presence of Love’ is unusual in a poem whose similes have tended to avoid invoking human emotion in their descriptions. We feel as if the poem ought to end here, but more horrors are to come in the formidable encounter between the tiger and sea snake. In the context of his argument that Shelley’s ‘A Vision of the Sea’ ends by attempting to affirm the regenerative effects of mutual love, McEathron quotes from Shelley’s essay ‘On Love’, where Shelley argues that human sympathy exists even in isolation: ‘in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky’.76 McEathron finds Shelley’s insistence on love as allredeeming problematic because its status as a subjective psychological entity makes all external reality uncertain. It is possible that, rather than being problematic to the progress of the poem, this subjectivity surrounding our perceptions of the outside world is precisely the area which Shelley wishes to explore in ‘A Vision of the Sea’. To return once again to Coleridge’s 1817 epigraph to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘The human mind has always sought the knowledge’ of the mysterious hierarchies of the universe, ‘but never attained it’. An exploration of the subjective way in which we tend to project our emotions onto the insentient elements is perhaps at the heart of much of Shelley’s apparently excessive imagery in the poem. Therefore, just as the Mariner attempted to organize his nightmare universe by imbuing it with Christian symbolism of good and evil, in the inclusion of a simile of human emotion in his description of the calming of the tempest, Shelley reveals humankind’s desire to find itself reflected in the natural world. That such a correlation is at best tenuous is revealed in the continuation of the natural warfare in Shelley’s poem, warfare provoked by no more than a brute desire to survive. Whilst we can love the flowers and grass and waters and sky, we cannot be sure that they, in turn, love us. It is possible that Shelley’s decision to continue depicting the brute forces of nature in their bloody battle for survival after the apparently symbolic calming of the storm may be akin to Coleridge’s continued depiction of the Mariner’s penance after the apparently symbolic blessing of the water snakes. This may be a subtle readjustment of what Scott McEathron calls ‘what is at least the internally operative cosmology of “The Ancient Mariner”’.77 This cosmology reveals how the human mind, through its need to understand the workings of its environment, and so find for itself a place within that environment, assigns a symbolic status and human emotion to elements of nature. This process starts with the Mariner and his shipmates, who greet the albatross ‘As if it had been a Christian soul’, then, following the Mariner’s ‘crime’, debate as to whether the bird ‘made the breeze to blow’ or ‘brought the fog and mist’. This process of the assignation of human concepts of good and evil to natural phenomena, a process which we have seen Shelley refuse to contemplate in ‘A Vision of the Sea’, is completed by the 1817 gloss which condemns the Mariner who ‘inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen’, and interprets the subsequent

76 See McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 186 and ‘On Love’ in SPP, pp. 473–4, (p. 474). 77 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 177n.

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becalming of the ship as the commencement of the natural world’s vengeance for the death of the Albatross.78 McEathron has further suggested that the water snakes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ provide Shelley’s ‘organizing image’ for the battle between tiger and sea snake, and that the latter poem provides ‘a radically demystified revision’ of the earlier one. However, despite his implicit awareness that the Mariner’s attribution of the concepts of good and evil to the creatures of the sea is self-consciously presented as flawed by Coleridge (‘what is at least the internally operative cosmology of “The Ancient Mariner”’, my emphasis), McEathron describes the Mariner’s blessing of the snakes thus: Within the design of “The Ancient Mariner,” the water-snakes provide the occasion for the Mariner’s unconscious blessing and thus demarcate the turning point in his spiritual odyssey: the blessing signals his inherent capacity to appreciate the goodness of God’s creation, and once it is uttered, the albatross is released, the shooting forgiven, and harmony reinstated.79

Subsequent to the blessing of the water snakes, the Mariner must still endure the nightmarish voyage back to his ‘own country’, with the ship piloted by the animated corpses of his crew. He must hear, in a swoon, spirit voices judge that he ‘“hath penance done,/ And penance more will do”’. He must escape from his sinking ship to be rescued by the pilot, his boy, (who views the Mariner as a ‘devil’, and promptly loses his sanity), and the hermit, who shows no clear inclination to ‘shrieve’ the Mariner’s soul. The final proof of the Mariner’s continued penance is his compulsive need to retell his experience to anyone who can be compelled to listen, and his continued isolation from all human communities. Harmony is not reinstated; this is how the Mariner, and later the gloss, choose to interpret the blessing of the snakes. McEathron’s argument that in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley may be correcting the view of the world founded on superstition and fear of divine judgement to which the Mariner adheres is convincing. However, McEathron fails to allow for the possibility that both Shelley and Coleridge were aware of the limitations of that view. In addressing the question of why Coleridge chose to add the marginal gloss to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, K.M. Wheeler has shown, through attention to Coleridge’s prose comments concerning the role of poetry in stimulating the imagination, just how antithetical the effect of the gloss is to this enterprise. Wheeler argues that in choosing to engraft upon his poem a consciously reductive view of its content: Coleridge has ‘feigned’ an attitude that seems to provide an occasion for the sketching out of an inadequate response, in order to awaken the reader to the typical ways of misreading and misperceiving. A glimpse of one’s own incomplete reading of the poem by means of the gloss, along with an alternative model of reading, builds up an ironic or self-conscious context around an aesthetic experience and renders it more completely accessible.80

78 See Sibylline Leaves, pp. 6–10. 79 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 178. 80 Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, p. 64.

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Thus the juxtaposition of clear rational judgement with the open-ended, inexplicable content of the Mariner’s tale paradoxically allows the gloss to become a means by which the reader can appreciate the imaginative integrity of the poem. The introduction of a different perspective, the viewpoint of which the reader often instinctively reacts against, provides a context within which that reader must strive for their own interpretation by mediating between the different perspectives offered by the poem and its apparatus. That this is the intended experience is suggested by the disinclination of the poem’s content to reduce itself to any one perspective offered by the text, including that offered by the Mariner himself. Thus the Mariner’s continued penance following the blessing of the water snakes is testament to the failure of his superstitious and religious means of interpretation either to account for or to alleviate his suffering. In fact, the obverse is true; it is the Mariner’s continued consciousness of his ‘crime’ and the desire to atone for it that promulgates his lifelong captivity in the real Life-in-Death, the continued retelling and attempt to reinterpret an experience which defies that interpretation. Throughout ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley appears to be stressing the limits of our knowledge of the natural world. As soon as we start to interpret nature in terms of our own psychology, we are doomed to error. The figure in the poem who has the most intuitive relationship with the elements, precisely because it is incapable of interpreting their actions, is the ‘bright child’, who would play with the tigers and smile at the ocean. Yet Shelley does not possess a romanticized view of this commune with nature; the child is no less vulnerable than its mother or the tigers. In the creation of the ship piloted by ‘twelve rowers with the impulse of thought’ (153) which enters the scene at the end of the poem, Shelley is perhaps re-enacting the Mariner’s rescue. Yet as we recall, this rescue does not mark the end of the Mariner’s penance. Ketchum has provocatively argued that the boat represents ‘Promethean man’ who ‘continues to unveil Earth’s secrets, to dominate her physically as Love has enabled him to dominate her philosophically’.81 In their annihilation of one of the tigers, the rowers certainly show mankind’s propensity to ‘dominate’ nature ‘physically’. However, as McEathron notes, the mother seems to distrust the rowers, certainly showing no relief at their arrival.82 As such, Shelley appears to deny the possibility of attaining the knowledge Ketchum sees as the poem’s aim, revealing instead the flaws inherent in our means of interpreting the world around us. As Coleridge demonstrated in the Mariner’s compulsive retelling of his story, Shelley reveals in ‘A Vision of the Sea’ the impossibility of assigning causation based on human concepts of good and evil to much of our most vivid experience. We are finally prevented from drawing any moral from ‘A Vision of the Sea’ by Shelley’s decision to conclude the poem in a deliberately fragmentary manner. Although there is no counterpart for the final ‘Whilst –’ in the drafts, the notebook suggests that Shelley intended to elaborate upon the idea of the mixture of contradictory emotions that the events of the poem inspire. Whilst the woman continues to grasp the wreck of the vessel ‘impetuously’, and the child still smiles and plays, ‘Death, Fear,/ Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere’ (161–2). The line break here 81 Ketchum, ‘Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea”’, p. 55. 82 McEathron, ‘Death as “Refuge and Ruin”’, p. 188.

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is perhaps significant in consolidating the juxtaposition of the opposing poles of emotional experience in the scene. The penultimate line of the draft reads ‘Like a grave where sweet lilies & violets grow’,83 which expresses a similar juxtaposition of beauty and death. If, as has been suggested, in the latter stages of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ Shelley evokes through his choice of imagery the human desire to attribute emotion and order to the natural world, then the final lines of the poem may signal a reminder of how misplaced this meteorological anthropomorphism can be: her child Is yet smiling and playing, and murmuring; so smiled The false deep ere the storm. Like a sister and brother The child and the ocean still smile on each other, Whilst –

(165–9)

Just as the child sees its face mirrored in the calmed waters, so too do we see human emotion replicated in nature. In this respect, the ocean will be ‘false’ to us; we feel a kinship in its calm and a betrayal in its tempest. The implication of the lines recalls Shelley’s poetry of 1816; the ironic rebuke to the figure of Coleridge in ‘O! there are spirits’ who placed his trust in ‘the false earth’s inconstancy’, and the celebration of that very inconstancy in ‘Mutability’. Shelley’s decision to leave the poem unfinished and the fate of its remaining protagonists insecure may function as a reminder of the tenet of Coleridge’s 1817 epigraph to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, that ‘there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe’. What Shelley learnt from the Mariner’s tale, and which Coleridge’s protagonist himself could never understand, is how our perception of our environment conditions our relationship to it. Religion and superstition trap the Mariner in a dualistic conflict of good versus evil from which he cannot escape. A change in perception, as many of the poems in the Prometheus Unbound volume show, allows a new relationship with the world around. As such, ‘A Vision of the Sea’, which stresses both the amorality and the beautiful harmony of apparently terrifying natural forces, can be said to herald the advent of Shelley’s mature social and political vision. ‘Thy name I will not speak’: The currency of curses in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ Shelley’s engagement in the Prometheus Unbound volume with Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’ extends to the title poem of the collection. As with ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the action of Shelley’s lyrical drama also turns upon a curse. Prior to the blessing of the snakes, the Mariner feels himself to be accursed; whether that curse originates in the Polar Spirit who is avenging the murder of the albatross, or in ‘the curse in a dead man’s eye’ that he feels fall upon him as his shipmates perish, is as unclear to the Mariner as it is to the reader. The power of the curse lies less in its point of origin than in the Mariner’s belief in it. In the opening Act of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Shelley explores the nature of the curse and tests its currency. The protagonist of Shelley’s drama is curser rather than cursed, but in a 83 MYR, vol. 4, p. 366.

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prolonged examination of the self-reflexive nature of the curse, Shelley reveals that the isolation from community which the curse would engender is as applicable to its originator as to its intended target. Steven Jones has traced the development of satire from the curse and describes the motivation of the curser/ satirist thus: In literary terms, cursing satire is – or would be – performative, a social transaction of verbal violence. In practice, however, the curser who would wield that power usually confirms his own status as a social pariah, becomes an outsider railing against his enemies, as the performative transaction serves mainly to highlight the distance between him and his target, the lack of a shared context within which his words could possess real power. In other words, the cursing satirist is frequently himself satirized, revealed as accursed, which is to say, isolated from the community.84

Jones’s description highlights two important features of the curse; firstly that a context of language must exist between curser and cursed in order for the ‘verbal violence’ to function, and secondly the curse’s propensity to bounce back from its intended target to its originator. This self-reflexive property betrays the potential inefficacy of the curse; without a shared belief in the power of language to create what it signifies, the curser’s words are empty and reveal no more than his enraged impotence, confirming his status as the ‘outsider railing against his enemies’. A recognition of the self-reflexive nature of the curse is dramatized in the first act of ‘Prometheus Unbound’. Chained in ‘a ravine of icy rocks’, Prometheus expresses his desire to hear once again the curse with which he denounced Jupiter: ‘The Curse/ Once breathed on thee I would recall’ (I, 58–9).85 Prometheus’s use of the word ‘recall’ contains an essential ambiguity; the context supports both the definition of ‘remember’ and of ‘revoke’, creating confusion as to Prometheus’s motive in wishing to hear his curse repeated. Kelvin Everest notes that Shelley’s usual use of the word was as ‘remember’, and that ‘Prometheus could presumably revoke the curse unaided if he could remember it’.86 This sense is supported by Prometheus’s words to the Earth on the repetition of the curse, ‘Were those my words, O Parent?’ (I, 302). However, the word also carries the further meaning of ‘bring back to life’,87 which is precisely what Prometheus proceeds to do in choosing to hear the curse reanimated by the Phantasm of Jupiter. By the end of the act Prometheus has remembered, brought back to life and revoked his curse. It is possible that in this density of meaning, where each opposed definition of a word is animated by the action of the drama, Shelley offers in microcosm what Prometheus has to learn about the status of curse language. Part of the nature of the incantatory curse is that it must reject ambiguity and constrain language to mean one thing only in order to achieve the desired effect upon its target. What Shelley shows in activating a variety of the definitions of ‘recall’ in his drama is that for progress to occur, for the oppressed to

84 Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire (DeKalb, 1994), p. 16. 85 All references to ‘Prometheus Unbound’ are to PS, vol. 2, pp. 456–649. 86 See note to I, 59 in PS, vol. 2, p. 481. 87 The two examples given from Shelley’s works under ‘recall’ in the OED are both in this context.

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overcome the oppressor, language must be opened up and all its potential meanings allowed free play. That Prometheus’s curse has become a fixed language with magical properties is confirmed by the Earth, for whom the curse has assumed the status of a talisman, the last refuge of protection against Jupiter’s tyranny: Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, Yet my innumerable seas and streams, Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, And the inarticulate people of the dead, Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate In secret joy and hope those dreadful words, But dare not speak them.

(I, 180–86)

The magical properties of the curse are revealed in the Earth’s definition of it as ‘a treasured spell’, a mysterious formation of words which hold an autonomous power, divorced from their originator. This power is preserved through mystery and fear; the Earth and her spirits ‘meditate/ In secret joy and hope those dreadful words’ and ‘dare not speak them’ (my emphasis). This language of magical awe surrounding Prometheus’s curse obscures the oddity of the Earth’s words. If, as she appears to believe, the curse holds the power to defeat Jupiter, one might expect the ‘Mountains, and caves, and winds’ to be chanting the words in a frenzied chorus. It is possible that in his evocation of the curse’s currency, Shelley alludes to the obfuscatory powers of language. While the curse remains an unspoken ‘treasured spell’ the power of its language exists only as potential. For Prometheus, as for the Earth, the existence of the curse has become a means by which a confrontation with the nature of Jupiter’s power may be postponed. Fear of such a confrontation may be at the root of the Earth’s disinclination to allow Prometheus to hear his words spoken again. To repeat the curse, to analyze the power of its language, may be only to realize its inefficacy, to reveal Prometheus as no more than ‘an outsider railing against his enemies’. The means by which the powerful potential of unarticulated language is integral to superstition had already been touched upon by Coleridge in ‘The Destiny of Nations’. The antagonist to the power of the ‘Good Spirit’ Torngarsuk is described as follows: the Fury Form, whose unheard name With eager eye, pale cheek, suspended breath, And lips half-opening with the dread of sound, Unsleeping SILENCE guards, worn out with fear Lest haply escaping on some treacherous blast The fateful word let slip the Elements And frenzy Nature. ‘The Destiny of Nations’ (106–12)

There is an affinity here between the ‘dread of sound’ experienced by the sentinel ‘SILENCE’ and the disinclination of the Earth in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ to relinquish guardianship of the ‘treasured spell’ which maintains the dualistic status quo between Jupiter and Prometheus. In both cases the fear derives from the transformation of

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potential into actuality. Shelley may perhaps also have recalled this passage from ‘The Destiny of Nations’ in his conception of the Furies of his lyrical drama. As we shall see, the Furies retain most potency when the fear they inspire remains amorphous and potential. Superstitious fear, Shelley argues, is based on obfuscation; fear of what a course of action might engender is, through its very potential, more incapacitating than dealing with what is. As ‘a treasured spell’, Prometheus’s words have become public property. This transformation of personal anger into an objective entity is necessary for the curse to carry weight and to sidestep the potential for the words to rebound upon the speaker. Writing on ‘To the Lord Chancellor’, a poem in which Shelley imprecates ‘a father’s curse’ on the man responsible for depriving him of the custody of the children of his first marriage, Steven Jones argues that the curser ‘would articulate the curse while washing his hands of it, would claim that it grows reflexively out of the target’s own hellish status as a demon, independent of the speaker’s obvious personal animosity’.88 To give the curse autonomy from the curser is to provide it with power because it starts to assume the status of a spoken truth. Because of this, the speaker can more easily dissociate himself from the consequences of his words, claiming them to be if not fact then at least the opinion of a society as a whole. In Prometheus’s wish to hear his curse spoken again, we sense more than a little the desire to dissociate: let not aught Of that which may be evil, pass again My lips, or those of aught resembling me.

(I, 218–20)

On the one hand, these words acknowledge both an awareness that the curse ‘may be evil’ and that he has been responsible for uttering it: ‘pass again/ My lips’. However, the positioning of ‘My’ at the start of a line, and the additional phrase ‘or those of aught resembling me’ emphasizes a wish to distance himself from his own words. Susan Hawk Brisman argues that in choosing to hear the curse spoken by its intended target Prometheus is attempting to divorce the words themselves from the evil intent which first prompted their articulation. She points out that Prometheus asks the Phantasm to repeat the curse ‘Although no thought inform thy empty voice’ (I, 249) in an attempt ‘to deny the ghost familiarity with the thought contained in the curse and to guard against any importation of new meaning’, with the result that his words become ‘sounds signifying nothing’.89 Brisman notes that in the world of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ the original curse is propagated in the actions of the Earth, Spirits, Mercury and the Furies. Prometheus is starting to learn that to separate angry words from angry intent is to begin to unbuild the dualistic universe created not by Jupiter himself, but by that universe’s belief in a Jupiter. A curse is only as strong as the emotion which precipitated it; Prometheus’s curse fixed himself and Jupiter in a battle of contraries: good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. To remove one half of that dualism is to disrupt the balance and reveal the other half as meaningless. Prometheus begins to become conscious that 88 Jones, Shelley’s Satire, p. 28. 89 Susan Hawk Brisman, ‘“Unsaying his High Language”: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound’, SiR, 16 (1977), 51–86 (p. 61).

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his curse has merely cast his relations with Jupiter in stone; the opening line of the curse is significant: ‘Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind’ (I, 262, my emphasis). Backed into a corner, Prometheus felt that he could do no more than ‘rail against his enemy’. The verse structure of Prometheus’s curse allows Shelley to express how the Titan collaborates in the creation of this dualistic relationship through the way it emphasizes how righteous anger is distilled into concentrated venom directed straight at his enemy. The four pentameter lines which open each stanza give way to the shorter, pounding, incantatory rhythms of four tetrameters, before the pentameter returns in the penultimate line to lengthen to an alexandrine at each stanza’s conclusion. It is the tetrameter section of each stanza of the curse which reveals a particularly condensed violence of language; in consolidating the spell-like quality of the curse through its metre, Shelley may have had in mind, as he did when composing the early ‘Falsehood and Vice’, the tetrameter line of the Witches’ speeches in Macbeth. The violence of these lines initially focuses on Prometheus himself; they imply an almost masochistic revelling in Jupiter’s tyranny: Rain then thy plagues upon me here, Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear; And let alternate frost and fire Eat into me.

(I, 266–9)

The trochaic substitution which consolidates the imperative force of ‘Rain then’, the excessively gothic quality of ‘Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear’, and the willingness to embrace all extremes of physical torment in ‘alternate frost and fire’, emphasize that Prometheus is countering anger with anger. The movement away from the pentameter of the stanza’s opening lines to the more concentrated tetrameter accelerates the velocity of the curse, consolidating the effect of an incantation, a spell repeated to procure a particular effect. This increased potency of language reveals that Prometheus is becoming carried away by his angry rhetoric: Let thy malignant spirit move Its darkness over those I love: On me and mine I imprecate The utmost torture of thy hate.

(I, 276–9)

Again, the lines open with an imperative, almost goading challenge to Jupiter, yet if the centre of the first stanza of the curse focused upon a self-martyring acceptance of all the ills that Jupiter could throw at him, in these lines Shelley makes us aware of the Titan’s potential perversion of his commitment to humanity by making Prometheus draw others into that undertaking. After commanding Jupiter to do his worst to ‘those I love’, the verse allows a pause for reflection on the sentiment, which is then reiterated in ‘On me and mine I imprecate/ The utmost torture of thy hate’ (my emphasis). Furthermore, whereas the uneasy rhyme of ‘move’ and love’ consolidates the problematic nature of the sentiment, this is followed by the harsh couplet of ‘imprecate’ and ‘hate’ which causes the lines and their sentiment to snap shut, leaving no room for consideration or mediation. In a process similar to that

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which Jones noted in ‘To the Lord Chancellor’, Prometheus places his curse on a public footing and implicates the whole of humanity in his fixed defiance. There is a sense that thus far all Prometheus has done is collaborate in his own accursed state. In the third stanza of the curse, he turns his attentions to Jupiter. The opening lines are a consolidation of the contents of the first two stanzas: But thou who art the God and Lord – O thou Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow In fear and worship – all-prevailing foe! I curse thee!

(I, 282–6)

Via a series of images which deliberately inflate Jupiter’s omnipotence by focusing on the magnitude of the tyrannous potential of his power, Prometheus attempts to establish a momentum in which his own words will carry an equal weight. This seems to be a doubling of the self-reflexive nature of the curse; in effect, Prometheus feels himself cursed by Jupiter, and mobilizes all the power of that felt curse in order to reflect it back at his foe. This accumulation of absorbed power erupts in the following lines: I curse thee! let a sufferer’s curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony, And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.

(I, 286–91)

Prometheus attempts to appropriate the words which signify Jupiter’s position, ‘Infinity’, ‘Omnipotence’, and retain their power when he transforms them into images of the tyrant’s projected suffering. But what Prometheus wishes to reflect back towards Jupiter suffers a further reverberation; these lines tell us more about Prometheus’s hatred than they do about Jupiter’s tyranny. The trisyllabic ‘envenomed’ suggests a pleasure taken in its pronunciation, a process which is exacerbated in the protraction of the final line into an alexandrine, echoing formally the prolongation of the agony envisaged for Jupiter. Because Prometheus depends for his words’ power on the very might of Jupiter’s tyranny, to counter its signifiers of ‘Infinity’ and ‘Omnipotence’ with such ‘high language’ is only to consolidate their tyrannous strength. In using the power of Jupiter’s ‘curse’ to fuel his own opposing scourge, Prometheus succeeds only in enthroning and concentrating the very power he would repel. However, in choosing to hear his curse repeated by its object, Prometheus is already moving towards a recognition of his own role in securing the antagonistic nature of the relationship between himself and Jupiter. To counter the oppressor, Prometheus has done no more than appropriate the language of that oppressor – a fact which is revealed to him in the symbolic patterning of hearing his own words from the mouth of Jove. It is at this moment that Prometheus activates the third possible meaning of the word ‘recall’; he wishes to revoke his curse:

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Coleridge and Shelley It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

(I, 303–5)

Prometheus shatters the currency of the curse; what the Earth had characterized as ‘a treasured spell’ is in fact no more than unmediated anger, words which are ‘quick and vain’. Accordingly, the Earth immediately interprets this revocation as capitulation, ‘Misery, O misery to me/ That Jove at length should vanquish thee’ (I, 306–7). Prometheus, however, has experienced the spontaneous recognition that in cursing Jupiter, he has done no more than descend to the level of the oppressor. His expression of remorse is perhaps directed towards Jupiter, but perhaps also towards ‘mankind’, whom his curse challenged Jupiter to ‘blast’ from his ‘etherial tower’ (I, 275); it is all-encompassing: ‘I wish no living thing to suffer pain’. It is here that parallels emerge between Prometheus and Coleridge’s Mariner. Both have suffered, and will continue to suffer, physical and mental torments, and both feel themselves victimized. The Mariner is trapped in a static, repetitive universe as a result, he believes, of a curse which consigns him to everlasting repentance. Prometheus, in hearing his curse repeated by Jupiter’s phantasm, begins to realize how the self-reflexive quality of his own words of anger have caused the nature of his relationship with Jupiter to be set in stone. In cursing Jupiter, Prometheus cursed himself. This chapter has suggested that the Mariner attributes Christian significance to the albatross and diabolic significance to his act of murder as a means of comprehending the supernatural events that follow him from ‘the Land of Mist and Snow’. In this context, the only way in which the Mariner can hope to counter his curse is by invoking its opposite, the blessing. The blessing of the water snakes becomes an epiphanic experience, a moment of unlooked for and unmotivated joy to counter that other moment of unlooked for and unmotivated cruelty which opened his narrative: Within the shadow of the ship I watch’d their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black They coil’d and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless’d them unaware! Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless’d them unaware.

(1798, 269–79; 1800, 271–81)

The vividness of the snakes’ colour blends with their lithe movement in ‘a flash of golden fire’, in a visual representation of the Mariner’s sudden experience of beauty. Yet this spontaneity of perception is undermined by the stanza which follows where the Mariner once again attempts to tailor his emotional response to the symbolic pattern of the narrative which he has already established. The need to understand,

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and to be understood, prompts the Mariner to refer personal experience to the exterior agency of ‘my kind saint’. Accordingly, ‘The self-same moment I could pray’ (1798, 280; 1800, 282), and the interpretation of the event is duly sealed by further symbolic patterning: the albatross falls from his neck. To impose order on his experience and render it comprehensible, the Mariner imbues accidental, unmotivated events with reason in an appeal to moral absolutes from a world which he has long left behind; in the course of Coleridge’s narrative, a theoretical apprehension of the nature of the world is found wanting in the face of experience. In an appendix to his discussion of politics in ‘The Ancient Mariner’, Patrick J. Keane has drawn a parallel between the moment the Mariner blesses the water snakes and Prometheus’s decision to renounce his curse on Jupiter, citing the verbal affinity between the Mariner’s appreciation of the snakes as ‘happy living things’ and Prometheus’s wish that ‘no living thing’ should ‘suffer pain’.90 Keane suggests, via a discussion of Coleridge’s political attitudes during the composition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, that the blessing of the snakes is a moment of political capitulation on the part of the poet, akin to the kind of withdrawals and retreats observable in ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘Fears in Solitude’.91 Keane writes that in appealing to the agency of ‘my kind saint’ at the moment of the blessing: Coleridge, in short, struggles, religiously and perhaps reductively, to explicate the twilight workings of the unknowable consciousness, to “canonize” his Mariner’s intuitive act by transforming an aesthetic response (“no tongue/ Their beauty might declare”) into an ethical event in a spiritually coherent universe.92

Keane’s argument gains force when we consider the political thrust of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ whilst also observing its debt to ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Keane likens the supernatural tyranny under which the Mariner labours to the political tyranny in England in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Thus ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is, in part, concerned with Coleridge’s dilemma about how far it is possible to withdraw from the political world, a struggle which we see articulated more clearly in the contemporaneous ‘France: An Ode’, or, as it was significantly first titled, ‘The Recantation: An Ode’. Keane sees the water snakes as representative of the Pitt ministry, and draws a parallel between the Mariner’s sudden blessing of that which he once found loathsome (‘slimy things with legs’), and Coleridge’s gradual 90 Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Columbia and London, 1994), pp. 371–6. 91 Keane’s argument focuses upon three specific images in ‘The Ancient Mariner’: the rotting deeps of the becalmed sea, and the attendant imagery of earthquake at the close of the poem; the ‘dungeon grate’ image used to describe the sun on the first appearance of the spectre-ship; and, finally, the Mariner’s blessing of the snakes. Via an extensive investigation of Coleridge’s political sympathies and ambivalences in the years immediately prior to and during the composition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, Keane constructs a convincing argument for latent political significance in these images. He argues that, in part, such images reveal Coleridge’s ambivalent response to revolution, both actual and potential, the poet’s very real fear of imprisonment for treason, and ultimately the tension between Coleridge’s desire for political engagement and his fear of the consequences of that engagement. 92 Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics, p. 202.

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move towards support for the political establishment, suggesting that the blessing ‘may be less a moment of internalized redemption than of individual and collective capitulation’.93 Whether, as Patrick Keane suggests, Shelley interpreted the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes as indicative of Coleridge’s political ‘capitulation’ is unclear. However, that Shelley constructed his lyrical drama to avoid the kind of uneasy reconciliation for which the Mariner settles is suggested by his comments in the Preface to ‘Prometheus Unbound’, where Shelley justifies the alterations he makes to Aeschylus’s projected resolution of conflict between Jupiter and Prometheus: In truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. (Preface ll. 19–24)

Capitulation to Jupiter, in the way that the Mariner can be said to capitulate to his spiritual and psychological torturers, is precisely what Shelley wished to avoid in the execution of his drama. To effect a solution which securely banished Jupiter without recourse to that tyrant’s own underhand tactics requires an appraisal of the human mind’s own responsibility for that tyranny and an investment of faith in its ability to overcome it. It is in this context that we can consider the Furies of ‘Prometheus Unbound’. Whereas the Mariner consistently attributes the occasion of his suffering to external forces, Shelley’s drama makes clear the human mind’s own collaboration in the causes of its oppression. Described by Susan Hawk Brisman as ‘signifieds in search of signifiers’,94 the Furies are projections of mental states, psychological parasites searching for a host. Like the incarnations of curses, they have power only when believed in.95 Whilst the Furies are manifestations of the state of mind brought into being by the enthroning of Jupiter, they are not simply allied to the God, and by working freelance retain a certain detached cynicism; as the First Fury says, ‘Who can please long/ The Omnipotent?’ (I, 343–4). The amorphous nature of the Furies is part of their power; as the embodiment of fear they are most effective when least fully formed. As an articulated fear is often less terrifying than one which is only dimly perceived, it is natural that the Furies should fear speech. As one warns the others on their first appearance: Speak not – whisper not: I know all that ye would tell, But to speak might break the spell.

(I, 533–5)

93 Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics, p. 190. 94 Brisman, ‘Unsaying his High Language’, p. 66. 95 Both Kelvin Everest and P.M.S. Dawson note that Shelley’s Furies probably derive from the Erinyes of Greek myth, avenging spirits which functioned by disturbing the mind. See PS, vol. 2, p. 496n, and Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford, 1980), p. 116.

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The Furies do not wish to elaborate upon their achievements. They work through a perversion of the creative power that Prometheus would recapture, signifying a chorus of confused emotions all the more terrifying for their unspoken status. Persecution functions through fear; pinned down and forced to mean something specific, much of the Furies’ power evaporates. One of Shelley’s sources for the language and character of the Furies may well be Coleridge’s explicitly political poem, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. Just as the Furies fear speech, (‘Speak not – whisper not’), Coleridge’s allegorical figures recoil from articulating the name of Pitt: Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due.

‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (25–7)96

The similarities between Coleridge’s figures and Shelley’s Furies extend to the employment of the tetrameter line in their respective speeches. The re-emergence of this metre acts as a sort of rhythmic identifier, allying the words of the Furies to the type of curse language which Prometheus has already employed against Jupiter. The Furies aid Prometheus’s apprehension of why such language fails to break the deadlock between oppressor and oppressed. Not all of our worst fears remain unspoken; one of the lessons the Furies teach Prometheus is how humanity, in an attempt to organize fear and thus control it, has been guilty of reducing the language of emotion to a language of signs. A symbol of evil can be more easily confronted than the myriad of messy emotions which constitute it. Furthermore, it becomes other, divorced from the human context which created and perpetuated its existence in the first place. Such symbols encourage the dualistic view of the universe where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are cast in perpetual opposition; this is the world created by the defiant battle of wills between Prometheus and Jupiter at the start of Shelley’s drama. The Furies show how our conception of what is ‘good’ can condemn us to oppression as easily as our ideas of evil. Thus the human figure of Christ the man on the cross becomes fixed as an emblem: ‘His words outlived him, like swift poison/ Withering up truth, peace, and pity’ (I, 548–9). An emblem is another way of masking our fears; the Furies show how the inflexible language of religion has done no more than perpetuate an everlasting dualism without resolution. To counter this, Prometheus must look past the sign to Christ the suffering man; as the Titan realizes, ‘Thy name I will not speak,/ It hath become a curse’ (I, 603–4). Words, detached from their original context, can then be reappropriated and used to justify inhumanity and bloodshed. The Furies go on to relate the perversion of the aims of liberty and freedom in the French Revolution. In describing a ‘disenchanted Nation’ (567), Shelley may well be recalling Coleridge’s use of the same phrase to describe France at the outset of revolution in ‘France: An Ode’. There seems here to be an implicit link between the perversion of Christ’s words and the undermining of the libertarian principles of the Revolution. This may be Shelley’s understanding of the substance of ‘France: An Ode’, where Coleridge relates his pursuit of Liberty

96 CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 428–44.

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‘with profitless endeavour’, concluding that ‘thou nor swell’st the victor’s strain, nor ever/ Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human Pow’r’ (89–92).97 Words have the propensity to become emblems when divorced from their original contexts and either emptied of their meaning or re-filled with the desired signification of those using language for their own ends. The kind of symbolic language that Prometheus must break through if he is to free mankind is precisely the sort of linguistic currency that Coleridge’s Mariner employs to codify his experience. Thus in appealing to the agency of ‘my kind saint’ when he blesses the snakes, the Mariner can be said to collaborate in the sort of dualistic moral universe that in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ Shelley realized must be circumvented. When he composed the Furies’ depiction of Christ the emblem, Shelley would also have been aware that the superstitious potential of conventional religion had been castigated by the young Coleridge himself. In ‘Religious Musings’, Coleridge condemns the way in which institutional religion has been employed to condone the slave trade: I will raise up a mourning, O ye Fiends! And curse your spells, that film the eye of Faith Hiding the present God; whose presence lost, The moral world’s cohesion, we become An Anarchy of Spirits!

‘Religious Musings’ (142–6)

Here we can see a clear affinity between Shelley’s emblematic Christ whose name has become a curse, and Coleridge’s condemnation of ‘spells, that film the eye of Faith’. Both poets are aware that to divorce faith from a human context is to reduce it to the sort of obfuscatory sign system which provides succour for a multitude of tyrannies. That Shelley may have recalled Coleridge’s early poems in his depiction of the workings of the Furies is further supported by another passage from ‘Religious Musings’. Describing the tyrannies of Frederick of Prussia, Coleridge suggests: Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, Bidding her serpent hair in mazy surge Lick his young face, and at his mouth inbreathe Horrible sympathy!

‘Religious Musings’ (175–8)

Coleridge was to return to the insidiously infectious nature of evil in ‘The Dungeon’, where the incarcerated prisoner lies: Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity!98

This suggestion of the contagious nature of the psychological states embodied by the Furies may have struck Shelley. In his encounter with the Furies, Prometheus fears: 97 CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 462–8. 98 CCW, vol. I, pp. 222–4, ll. 17–19

‘To him my tale I teach’ Whilst I behold such execrable shapes Methinks I grow like what I contemplate, And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.

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(I, 449–51)

The reflective nature of the Furies’ means of operating, in which they cause the beholder to ‘grow like what I contemplate’, also provides the key to overcoming their power. The Furies’ nature confirms Prometheus’s growing suspicion that simply to place the blame for tyranny on the shoulders of the appointed tyrant is, somehow, to miss the point. The Furies function within the human psyche, and whatever is taking place in the exterior world, only the individual can control his thoughts and perceptions. However, Prometheus’s education is gradual; his first assessment that the Furies issue from ‘the all-miscreative brain of Jove’ (I, 448) is only partly correct. The Second Fury elaborates: The beauty of delight makes lovers glad, Gazing on one another: so are we. As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels To gather for her festal crown of flowers The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek, So from our victim’s destined agony The shade which is our form invests us round, Else are we shapeless as our mother Night.

(I, 465–72)

Just as Prometheus’s curse does no more than reflect Jupiter’s perceived power, the Furies can do no more than magnify existing insecurities. The Fury is explicit; it is only their ‘victim’s destined agony’, where ‘destined’ signifies the victim’s perception of and belief in the inevitability of agony, which provides the Furies with any substance at all, ‘the shade which is our form’. In fact, the Fury’s words obligingly point Prometheus towards the only means of combating such an insidious method of hunting. The simile of the cumulative quality of love when bounced back and forth between lovers, and that of the colour of the rose producing an apparent flush in the cheek of the priestess, with the potential reciprocity of the colour of her cheek affecting the appearance of the rose, are significant in the context of what we have observed of reflecting curses. As Shelley wrote in ‘On Life’, ‘nothing exists but as it is perceived’.99 To perceive something with belief is to make it actual; just as the perception of love in another’s eye causes a proportionate response in the beholder, the perception of ‘disappointment, and mistrust, and hate’ (I, 453), is to call those emotions into being in the guise of the Furies. Like any mythical, supernatural creation, ‘Jove’s tempest-walking hounds’ depend for their existence upon belief, or, at least, the willing suspension of disbelief; like the vampire, they must be invited over the threshold before they can attack. If this is the case, then the solution is simple, and subliminally present in the similes used by the Fury: replace negative perception with positive perception; if evil can be willed into existence, so too can good.

99 SPP, p. 476.

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The previous chapter considered Shelley’s attitudes towards language by juxtaposing two passages from ‘Prometheus Unbound’: He gave man speech, and speech created thought Which is the measure of the universe.

(II, iv, 72–3)

Language is a perpetual Orphic song, Which rules with daedal harmony a throng Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

(IV, 415–17)

What Prometheus begins to learn in the first act of the drama is that speech does not merely give a concrete form to thought, in the words of Mercury, ‘Clothe it in words’ (I, 375), but is actively involved in that thought’s creation. According to Susan Hawk Brisman, ‘speech creates, that is, gives sense and vitality to thought, and does not merely reproduce discrete impressions.’ Brisman distinguishes between the ‘Hermetic’ language used by the Earth, Mercury, the Furies and Prometheus himself at the start of Act I, which isolates the word from the object to which it would refer in thought, and ‘Promethean’ language, which seeks to unify the word and its speaker.100 It is this latter mode of language on which the contention that ‘speech created thought’ rests. What Prometheus learns from hearing his curse repeated, and from the Furies’ emblematic representation of Christ, is that a closed language based on one inflexible mode of perception is responsible for the perpetuation of tyrannies through its refusal to embrace alternative viewpoints. A recognition of the intimate relationship between language and perception engenders the realization that to overcome the pernicious ethos of societies such as that presented at the opening of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, language must be opened up to include other meanings and perspectives. As Shelley discovered in ‘To a Sky-Lark’, to do this language must remain ‘vitally metaphorical’, unendingly connotative and associative. One means by which this may be perpetuated is via articulated speech. Just as metaphor implies a relationship between words and images, speech implies relationship between minds, reanimating and opening up language and therefore perception. The enrichment of perception via speech implies community. It is community which Coleridge’s Mariner craves, but is unable to achieve. However much he desires to reach out to others with his ‘rime’, his story remains a monologue, constrained, in his own mind, to mean only one thing by his dualistic means of interpreting its content. In Romantic Weather, Arden Reed points out that ‘rime’ means both ‘rhyme’ and ‘hoarfrost’. The significance of this pun is that the Mariner is metaphorically ‘rimed’, trapped in his experience and in the continued repetition of his ‘rhyme’: Were the sun ever to melt the rime, in fact, the poem would cease to exist, because the narrator – who is preserved in hoarfrost – would die, and simultaneously the linguistic hoarfrost would evaporate. Thus the poem and the protagonist’s salvation neatly exclude one another.101

100 Brisman, ‘Unsaying His High Language’, pp. 57–8. 101 Arden Reed, Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover and London, 1983), p. 163.

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The Mariner’s rigid adherence to a single means of interpreting his experience as a duel between the godly and the diabolic means that he has become a frozen symbol of his similarly frozen story. It is perhaps not insignificant that just as the Mariner’s nightmare originates in the ‘Land of Mist and Snow’, the Prometheus who opens Shelley’s drama is chained ‘in a ravine of icy rocks’. Both characters are literally and psychologically frozen. However, whereas the recreative power of metaphoric and spoken language allows Prometheus to liberate himself from his status as an ‘emblem’, Coleridge’s Mariner remains like a written text, cryogenically preserved in his story and perpetuating his own curse.

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Afterword

The Dialogue of Influence: Coleridge, Shelley and the Reanimation of Language By the time he published the Prometheus Unbound volume in 1820, Shelley had found a way to coalesce his desire for political and social reform with his poetic enterprise. His intertextual engagement with Coleridge had progressed from imitation to criticism to a true dialogue where the concerns of the elder poet’s works are explored and elaborated upon as part of Shelley’s own developing vision. The relationship between language and perception, explored in ‘Mont Blanc’ and more fully dramatized in the Prometheus Unbound volume, is the means by which Shelley can argue in A Defence of Poetry, that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’.1 The ‘vitally metaphorical’ nature of poetic language expands and replenishes perception, allowing, in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, the spontaneous regeneration of a society which has rediscovered its capacity to conceive the future anew. Yet from his early poetic experimentation in ‘Falsehood and Vice’, to the dualistic universe presented at the opening of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Shelley reveals his awareness of the abuse to which the protean qualities of language have been subjected. We have seen that in this Shelley was also tutored by Coleridge. From the pernicious mystification of government dramatized in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ to the frozen story of the Mariner, Shelley found within Coleridge’s works ample evidence of the consequences when metaphor is misused and language appropriated as a tool of the powerful. In 1816 Shelley read Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual,2 where, with reference to the reading of the bible, Coleridge makes a distinction between symbol and allegory which has particular application to the relation between language and perception: A hunger-bitten and idea-less philosophy naturally produces a starveling and comfortless religion. It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognises no medium between Literal and Metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honours usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES. Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; … On the other hand a Symbol ... is characterised by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the 1 2

SPP, p. 508. See Mary Jnl, vol. 1, p. 98.

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Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative.3

Throughout The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge advocates the need for religion to be understood rather than simply accepted as dogma. Here he laments the propensity of received religion to create either a spiritual wasteland by adhering to the literal, or a pernicious mystery by relying solely on the metaphorical. To accept religious tenets as literal givens implies assent without understanding and adherence without feeling, and generates blind faith, ‘to be buried in the dead letter’. On the other hand, Coleridge argues, to propagate a faith based purely on the metaphorical is to imply that the words of the bible cannot be rendered intelligible in themselves, and that one must be in possession of a secret code to unlock their meaning. Such a state is clearly open to abuse by the powerful in that the exact nature of the laws of religion, the tenets by which human beings should live their lives, can be manipulated by those who claim to be in possession of the necessary key to unlock the meaning of the bible. Furthermore, such instability of meaning can prove as reductive as a simply literal comprehension, turning religion into one fixed allegory; the ‘name and hours’ of faith are thus ‘usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding’. The negative consequences for language in this passage may have been another influence on Shelley’s comments in the Defence of Poetry concerning how without the animating creativity of a vibrant, changing language, words can become ‘signs for portions or classes of thoughts’ and thus ‘dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse’.4 Perhaps surprisingly, considering their evidently different attitudes towards religion, Coleridge and Shelley share an understanding of how the distorted power of words has allowed abuses to be perpetrated in the name of God and Jesus Christ. Just as in the first act of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ Shelley narrated via the Furies how Christ, in transition from human figure to sacred emblem, had been forced to stand as a perverted justification for religious tyranny, the dangers of the allegorical imperative towards religion are clearly evident in Coleridge’s poetry. In ‘Fears in Solitude’ he describes a connection between the literalization of faith and its conversion into mystery so that ‘the very name of God/ Sounds like a juggler’s charm’: The sweet words Of Christian promise, words that even yet Might stem destruction, were they wisely preach’d, Are mutter’d o’er by men, whose tones proclaim How flat and wearisome they feel their trade: Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth. Oh! blasphemous! the book of life is made A superstitious instrument, on which We gabble o’er the oaths we mean to break.

3 4 5

CCW, vol. 6, p. 30. SPP, p. 482. CCW, vol. 16, I, pp. 468–77.

‘Fears in Solitude’ (63–72)5

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Words accepted without understanding become empty vessels which can be filled with mysterious powers. The bible becomes a ‘superstitious instrument’ to repel evil, even though those who ‘gabble o’er’ its words have no understanding of why this should be; the commandments they blindly repeat are broken daily, not through malice but because their purport and truth is pronounced but not felt. In this way the protean qualities of language have become abused. Words are empty and we can fill them with as much or as little meaning as we choose, making language at once either wholly literal or wholly allegorical, because the words we speak have no natural connection to the emotions and concepts to which they were originally attached. In a passage from ‘Fears in Solitude’ concerning how humanity has become inured to the horrors of war, Coleridge assigns the cause to our inability to comprehend the real meaning and connotations of language; it is too easy to become ‘a fluent phraseman’ in ‘all our dainty terms for fratricide’: Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form! As if the soldier died without a wound; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gor’d without a pang; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Pass’d off to Heaven, translated and not kill’d; – As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen! And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony Of our fierce doings? ‘Fears in Solitude’ (114–29)

This is perhaps what lies at the root of Coleridge’s desire for words to be treated as ‘Things, & living Things too’, and is also at the heart of his appeals for a greater precision of language, whilst retaining its diversity, in his theory of desynonymization. In these passages from ‘Fears in Solitude’ the abuse of language is directly related to the abuse of humanity. Words have been granted a false power of signification; an unquestioning approach to this signification allows them to obscure what Coleridge believes to be the truths of the bible and the human cost of war. This one potentially disastrous aspect of the protean nature of language derives directly from the unthinking use of words. In ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’ Shelley states the problem in terms not dissimilar to Coleridge’s comments on ‘a hungerbitten and idea-less philosophy’ in The Statesman’s Manual: We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves. We combine words combined a thousand times before. In our minds we assume entire opinions; and in the expression of those opinions, entire phrases when we would philosophise. Our whole

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system of expression and sentiment is infected with the tritest plagiarisms. Our words are dead, our thoughts cold and borrowed.6

In The Statesman’s Manual Coleridge laments that ‘among the miseries of the present age’ we are apparently unable to distinguish a middle ground between unthinking literalism – as in the case of the churchgoer who will blithely ‘gabble o’er’ the words of the bible – and dangerously loose metaphorical language – as in the perversion of the term ‘liberty’ in the bloody repercussions of the French Revolution. We have seen in the Defence of Poetry how Shelley warns against the creation of a dead, fixed sign system of language through lack of thought, and it is for similar reasons that Coleridge, in both of his Lay Sermons, advocates an adherence to the biblical word through active understanding rather than blind acceptance. In ‘Prometheus Unbound’ Shelley shows that he understands as well as Coleridge that a reappropriation of words under false pretences can also tend towards fixing their meanings in stone. We have seen how Coleridge’s pleas for a greater precision, but also a greater variety of language through desynonymization, and Shelley’s advocation of the ‘vitally metaphorical’ and the ‘going out of our own nature’ can be viewed as means of combating the desiccation and contraction of language. It is possible that another means of reclaiming the protean faculties of language as a positive creative force is to be found in the passage from The Statesman’s Manual first considered above. The lack of a medium term between the literal and the metaphoric precipitates humankind’s inability to distinguish between allegory and symbol. The former ‘is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language’, whereas the latter ... is characterised by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative.

The symbol, in Coleridge’s definition, is a means of viewing the specific instance and the overall picture at the same time. This formulation is compiled with the bible in mind: ‘The Bible alone contains a science of Realities: and therefore each of its Elements is at the same time a living GERM, in which the Present involves the Future, and in the Finite the Infinite exists potentially.’7 Language use in its most perfect form, in Coleridge’s view, biblical language, must reach out from within itself to provide a view of the whole whilst also articulating one part of that whole. The present will contain both the future and the past, the temporal will show glimpses of the eternal. Language, and our experience of it must be constantly pointing outwards in an organic whole of reciprocal relationships. Expanding his characterization of the symbol in Chapter Nine of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes: ‘An IDEA, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction.’8 The symbol, 6 7 8

Forman 1880, vol. 6, pp. 283–97, (p. 287). CCW, vol. 6, p. 49. CCW, vol. 7, I, p. 156.

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as Coleridge’s extended definition in The Statesman’s Manual suggests, involves ‘an apparent contradiction’ because it forces us to entertain multiple, competing, perspectives: the ‘General in the Especial’, the ‘Universal in the General’, or the ‘Eternal through and in the Temporal’. In his poetic practice, Shelley appears to adhere to Coleridge’s characterization of the symbol. In the Prometheus Unbound volume as a whole, as Neil Fraistat has observed, ‘perspective is everything’.9 In ‘Ode to Heaven’ in particular, Shelley uses the interplay of competing voices from different perspectives, working in contradiction to one another, in order to evoke a sense of our conception of heaven. As Judith Chernaik suggests, ‘Ode to Heaven’ illustrates the ability of poetry to be ‘at home in a paradox’.10 The first ‘CHORUS OF SPIRITS’ depict heaven as infinite and encompassing: Palace-roof of cloudless nights, Paradise of golden lights, Deep, Immeasurable, Vast, Which art now, and which wert then; Of the present and the past, Of the eternal Where and When, Presence chamber, Temple, Home, Ever-canopying Dome Of acts and ages yet to come!

‘Ode to Heaven’ (1–9)11

The first voice of the poem seems to convey a more instinctual response to its depiction of heaven than the two voices which succeed it. The descriptions have instant, intense connotations of clarity, light and depth. Heaven is presented as an eternal presence which defeats temporal constraints. However, this instinctual depiction of the eternity of heaven is reminiscent in its abstractions of Coleridge’s definition of allegory in The Statesman’s Manual as ‘a translation of abstract notions into a picture language’. Furthermore, despite the evocation of eternal presence, there is also a sense of limitation to this description; despite the feeling of protection imparted by ‘Palace-roof’ and ‘Ever-canopying Dome’, the vision is also suggestive of circumscription and the finite. In the second stanza the first voice, moves, as Chernaik points out, ‘from the container to the thing contained’ in an evocation of ‘Earth and all Earth’s company’ as ‘Living globes which ever throng/ Thy deep chasms and wildernesses’ (11–13). Chernaik notes the echo of ‘Kubla Khan’ in line 13, and suggests that the landscape of Coleridge’s poem is ‘superimposed on the heavenly regions’.12 But the allusion may have a more potent application to Shelley’s poem. In his description of the ‘swift stars with flashing tresses’ (15), we recall the final images of ‘Kubla Khan’, the figure of the poet who ‘would build that dome in air’: 9 Neil Fraistat, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill and London, 1985), p. 175. 10 Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London, 1972), p. 122. 11 All references to ‘Ode to Heaven’ are to SPP, pp. 219–20. 12 Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, p. 122.

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‘Kubla Khan’ (48–50)

These allusions subtly infuse not only the frenzied power of poetic creation but also its inherent instability into ‘Ode to Heaven’. ‘Kubla Khan’ is, after all, ‘A Vision in a Dream’, and the final images of poetic ecstasy are framed in the conditional: ‘Could I revive within me ... I would build...’ (42–6, emphases added). As Fraistat writes, in ‘Ode to Heaven’, each of the perspectives is ‘as real as its speaker believes it to be’, but Shelley is careful to provide a corollary to this; his use of allusion reminds the reader that this imaginative evocation may only be illusion once we remove the animating belief in its viability. This sort of deconstruction is achieved by the competing voices of the poem. As Chernaik observes, the second voice reinterprets images from the first chorus of spirits in a movement from intensity to uncertainty.13 The potential limitations of the language, ‘Palace-roof’ and ‘Dome’, are exploited by the second ‘REMOTER’ voice. Heaven is ‘but the Mind’s first chamber’ enclosing the ‘young fancies’ of the imagination, in which, in an image of ephemerality, these thoughts ‘clamber/ Like weak insects in a cave’. As Donald Reiman comments, the second voice articulates the view that ‘the present world is an imperfect and darkened delusion compared to the spiritual reality’.14 In contrast to the sense of clarity and light in the opening stanzas, the language here is infused with images of darkness and obscurity. The only light in this cave is provided by ‘stalactites’, which can only produce any sort of light through varying the texture of the darkness. The indistinctness of this only source of ‘light’ enhances the voice’s view that the best ‘glories’ of heaven are ‘But a dim and noonday gleam/ From the shadow of a dream’. Whilst the final voice of the poem is ‘STILL REMOTER’, it is also ‘LOUDER’. It possesses at once a greater surety and a greater ambiguity than the previous voices. It does not deal in descriptions, but hammers out its own vision of heaven through question, answer and extended metaphor: Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, Atom-born! What is Heaven? and what are ye Who its brief expanse inherit? What are suns and spheres which flee With the instinct of that spirit Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature’s mighty heart Drives through thinnest veins. Depart!

(37–45)

The first stanza from this third voice is an angry recapitulation and denunciation of the characterizations of heaven which have gone before. It locates the problem of definition further back than the previous voices have allowed: ‘What is Heaven? and

13 Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, pp. 122–3. 14 SPP, p. 219n.

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what are ye/... What are suns and spheres’. If we recall Coleridge’s criticisms of the two prevalent means of interpreting the bible, either with an unthinking literalism or an obfuscating mystery, it seems that Shelley’s final voice makes a similar criticism of the attitudes of the first two speakers of the poem. The first chorus of spirits encountered no difficulty in simply evoking heaven as a huge eternal enclosure within which all elements of life, be they ‘Atom-born’ or ‘suns and spheres’, exist. The second voice repudiated this view, pointing to the unknown glories for which heaven is merely a transient ‘shadow’. The former voice was serene in its clarity of understanding, the latter equally so in the acceptance of its incomprehension. The final voice questions the very premises on which the first two voices based their views. The first voice’s definition of heaven as something which encloses ‘suns and spheres’ starts to break down when we ask what these entities are. We are not, the third voice seems to imply, asking the right questions; we must define our definitions. In its own depiction of what heaven is, in place of static definition the third voice provides instead an active metaphor which rather than offering answers, suggests how we should approach the magnitude of the question: What is Heaven? a globe of dew Filling in the morning new Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world. Constellated suns unshaken, Orbits measureless are furled In that frail and fading sphere With ten million gathered there To tremble, gleam, and disappear! –

(46–54)

The opening depiction of heaven concentrated on how the finite elements of life were contained within one great infinite whole. The final word of the poem reverses this idea. It is in the archetypally finite drop of dew that we can catch a glimpse of the infinite. Once again, the language of the preceding speakers is appropriated and transformed. The ‘immeasurable’ quality of the ‘Palace-roof’ of heaven has been transferred to the dew drop, which contains involuted ‘Orbits measureless’, and it is this which contains ‘constellated suns’ (recalling the ‘mighty suns’ of the second stanza). In ‘Orbits measureless’ the echoes of ‘Kubla Khan’ return. Whereas earlier this allusion appeared to qualify the imaginative perspective of the first voice, by suggesting the ephemerality of its vision, here the echo seems confirmatory, because its context of the dew drop is something which is unarguably transitory. The final voice of ‘Ode to Heaven’ places a higher value on the ephemeral and the finite, because it is through the very transitoriness of the dream, the vision, or the drop of dew that we see the eternal. Shelley’s dew drop appears to provide an active example of the Coleridgean symbol which, we recall, is characterized by ‘the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’ and ‘while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative’. In the same passage of The

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Statesman’s Manual in which Coleridge wrote that ‘in the Finite the Infinite exists potentially’, he continues: Are we struck with admiration at beholding the Cope of Heaven imaged in a Dew-drop? The least of the animalcula to which that drop would be an Ocean contains in itself an infinite problem of which God Omnipresent is the only solution.15

Coleridge’s image, like Shelley’s, expresses the awe of seeing the infinite, heaven, reflected in the finite, the dew drop. Coleridge emphasizes this vision of the infinite seen in the finite through reference to perspective. To the microscopic ‘animalcula’, the dew drop is ‘an Ocean’; from this perspective the dew drop is infinite. We are thus required to readjust our understanding of the direction in which Shelley’s movement in perspective takes in ‘Ode to Heaven’. An apparent shift from the unimaginably vast to the unimaginably minute is capable of being seen to occur in reverse when our perspective is forced to include that of the ‘animalcula’ of the dew drop. It is the relationship between the minute and the vast, the part and the whole which is at stake; this relationship is seen, finally, to have a greater fluidity than the first two voices of ‘Ode to Heaven’ would allow. The whole does not contain the parts, it is the parts which constitute the whole. Hugh Roberts suggests that Coleridge’s dew drop is able to reflect heaven ‘because the Absolute can only be “enunciated” in the post-lapsarian world by fragments. This allows us to read each fragment, symbolically, as a gauge of future absolution’.16 Roberts goes on to argue that in ‘Ode to Heaven’ Shelley is qualifying Coleridge’s image by insisting upon the potential for this ‘unimagined world’ to ‘tremble, gleam, and disappear’ without warning. Roberts suggests a potentially political point being made by Shelley in his adjustment of Coleridge’s image; just as the part reflects the whole, the citizen reflects the state, but just as the dew drop will fall, ‘Any political system, in time, will lose the legitimating support of the individuals who compose it. When they no longer see themselves as integrated, organic parts of its wider whole, it too will “tremble, gleam, and disappear!”’17 Roberts’s reading is certainly congruent with the context of the Prometheus Unbound volume. In the lyrical drama itself it is the decision by humankind, individually and collectively, to desert the reign of Jupiter which allows a new world to spontaneously spring into being. The dew drop does not, however, disappear entirely. Like the cloud, the ephemeral and protean qualities of which are also celebrated in the Prometheus Unbound volume, the dew drop will return via evaporation to the atmosphere; it too changes but does not die. What does die is the moment of vision it grants, the moment in which we can see ‘the Eternal through and in the Temporal’. Roberts notes the return to echoes of ‘Kubla Khan’ at the end of ‘Ode to Heaven’, and suggests that this shows Shelley presenting Coleridge’s own awareness of how ‘Nature ... escapes from our reflecting minds’ in the echo of ‘caverns measureless to man’. However, the allusion perhaps also returns us to the figure of the poet at the end of Coleridge’s unfinished 15 CCW, vol. 6, p. 50. 16 Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1997), p. 103. 17 Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History, p. 115.

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fragment. If we recall again the conditional language in which the final image of poetic creation is framed, and Coleridge’s own assertion in the preface to the poem that on awaking from his dream he seemed to possess ‘a distinct recollection of the whole’, yet was denied the opportunity to complete his transcription of the vision, we can perhaps see Shelley making a point that poetic vision, indeed, any sort of vision, is ultimately ephemeral. Yet just as the dew drop will return as a product of natural cycles, and just as the eternal can be seen through the temporal and the infinite through the finite, our moments of vision can be reanimated via the protean creativity of language. In the appropriation of the dew drop image from Coleridge, Shelley demonstrates one way in which this reanimation can occur. When in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ Shelley wrote that ‘speech created thought/ Which is the measure of the universe’ he appeared to make a direct correlation between communication and community. The metaphorical powers of language can be revived when words are permitted a greater connotative potential within a dialogue. Just as metaphor is predicated upon relationship between terms, the perpetuation of that ‘vitally metaphorical’ language depends upon relationship between minds. The creative dialogue between the works, and words, of poets is one example of such a relationship, and thus of the reanimation of language. Whilst, as John Hollander has observed, echo can distort language, that distortion can also provide revitalization and, in Shelley’s words, the perpetuation of apprehension, opening up language, and thus perception, to all of the creative potential of ‘the human mind’s imaginings’.

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Index

Allen, Graham 3–4 Allen, L.H. 61 Ashton, Rosemary 138 Bate, Jonathan 143n Blake, William 119 Blank, G. Kim 7, 12, 42, 54, 88–9, 120 Bloom, Harold 58, 73n, 75, 84, 87–8, 90n and poetic influence 2–14 Blunden, Edmund 123–4 Brisman, Susan Hawk 163, 168, 172 Brun, Friederike 73n, 87 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 17, 25, 59n Cameron, Kenneth Neill 18, 27, 28, 124 Carothers, Yvonne M. 61 Chernaik, Judith 80, 117–18, 179, 180 Clairmont, Charles 41 Clark, Timothy 63, 71 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor comments on Shelley in Table Talk 22–3, 60 and the imagination 117 and language 99–107 desynonymy 103, 105, 106, 107, 177, 178 imitation and copy 104–5, 106, 110, 115–16 symbol and allegory 175–6, 178–9, 181 poetry and drama ‘Dejection: An Ode’ 44, 47, 48, 50, 54, 59–60, 64–5, 67, 71–2, 73, 89 ‘The Destiny of Nations’ 148, 151, 162–3 ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ 27–8 ‘The Dungeon’ 170 ‘The Eolian Harp’ (‘Effusion XXXV’) 45, 47, 63, 65, 85 ‘Fears in Solitude’ 167, 176–7 ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue’ 28–39, 41, 143n, 169, 175

‘France: An Ode’ 11, 28, 41, 167, 169–70 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 69, 96 ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ 15, 26, 73–5, 81–3, 85, 86–98, 99 ‘Kubla Khan’ 62, 95–8, 99, 121, 179–80, 181, 182–3 ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ 44–5, 47 ‘The Nightingale’ 113 ‘Ode to Tranquillity’ 26 ‘Religious Musings’ 148–9, 170 Remorse 1 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 15, 53n, 55–6, 65–6, 87–8, 123, 125–35, 137–45, 147–53, 156–60, 166–8, 172–3, 175 alterations to 126–31, 133–4 gloss 127, 129–30 prefatory material 128–31 Shelley’s admiration for 126–8 simile in 138–9, 147 Sibylline Leaves (1817) 26, 59, 126–7, 129, 147, 148 ‘Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon’ 50 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ 99, 107–13, 117, 121 ‘To William Wordsworth’ 102 Zapolya 1 prose Biographia Literaria 1, 13, 47, 103, 104–5, 106, 117, 127, 155–6, 178–9 The Friend 26, 48–9, 73, 74n, 155 Letters 72, 87n, 99, 100–101 Notebooks 104 Omniana 25–6 ‘On Poesy or Art’ 105 The Statesman’s Manual 175–9, 181–2 and religion 176–9 Shelley’s portraits of in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ 58–9

196

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in ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ 43–61 in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ 55–9 Cooper, Andrew M. 113 Crook, Nora 124, 152n Culler, Jonathan 89

Medwin, Thomas 126, 155–6 Milton, John 4, 42, 113 Paradise Lost 56, 145 Modiano, Raimonda 131–2 Mueschke, Paul 61 Newlyn, Lucy 6–7

Dawson, P.M.S. 168n De Bolla, Peter 6, 10–11, 13 Dyck, Sarah 132 Esterhammer, Angela 73n, 87n, 88n, 89 Everest, Kelvin 46, 47, 84, 90n, 109, 110, 161, 168n Fraistat, Neil 41, 43, 62, 125, 179, 180 Fry, Paul H. 90 Gérard, Albert S. 61 Godwin, William 17, 23, 44n, 62, 72 Griggs, Earl L. 61 Hall, Jean 12, 101–2, 112 Hamilton, Paul 103 Hodgson, John A. 12n Hogg, Thomas Jefferson 24–5, 41 Hogle, Jerrold E. 12–13 Hollander, John 7–9, 10, 13, 14, 183 Holmes, Richard 17–18, 148 Hunt, Leigh 24 Jones, Frederick L. 25 Jones, Steven E. 57–8, 161, 163, 165 Kapstein, I.J. 83n Keach, William 61, 68, 70, 100 Keane, Patrick J. 167–8 Keats, John 128 Ketchum, Carl H. 124–5, 152–3, 154, 159 King-Hele, Desmond 124, 125, 135 Kirchhoff, Frederick 60 Lamb, Charles 126 Leighton, Angela 83, 114, 117 Locock, C.D. 29 McEathron, Scott 125–6, 134, 142, 143–4, 151–2, 153, 154, 157–8, 159 McGann, Jerome J. 4–5 Marks, Emerson R. 104, 105 Mayer, Elsie F. 124, 146

O’Neill, Michael 12n, 55, 57, 64, 68, 70, 85, 96–7, 102–3 Paley, Morton D. 27, 28, 29, 35n, 57 Peacock, Thomas Love 2, 41, 75n Peterfreund, Stuart 94n, 101n Pitt, William 28, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 167, 169 Quinn, Mary 150 Raben, Joseph 62 Reed, Arden 172 Reiman, Donald H. 84, 119, 124n, 180 Ricks, Christopher 10, 14 Roberts, Hugh 182 Robinson, Charles E. 26 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 119 Macbeth 28, 29, 31–34, 38, 39, 143n, 164 Shelley, Harriet (née Westbrook) 17, 24, 25, 48 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (née Godwin) 48, 62, 146 Journals 1, 25, 26, 75, 126, 127 on Coleridge 41, 43, 56, 59, 72 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and language 13–14, 100, 101–3, 106–7, 114–21, 172–3, 175–83 metaphor 84–5, 88, 90, 91–2, 94, 97 simile, use of 114–19, 136–9, 147, 153–4, 156–7, 171 and the perceiving mind 53–4, 58, 63–71, 75–98 poetry and drama Alastor (1816 volume) 15, 21, 41, 51, 123 ‘Alastor’ 50, 60–72, 73, 78n, 89, 96 The Cenci 124 ‘The Cloud’ 121 ‘The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad’ 27–8, 30, 31

Index ‘Falsehood and Vice: A Dialogue’ 28–39, 143n, 164, 175 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ 112, 117 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ 58–9 ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’ 155 ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ 34–5 ‘Mont Blanc’ 15, 26, 53, 73, 74, 75–98, 99, 114, 117, 175 ‘Mutability’ 50–52, 54, 160 ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ 15, 43–61, 67, 70, 71, 160 ‘Ode to Heaven’ 179–83 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ 33n, 80n ‘Peter Bell the Third’ 17, 54–8 Prometheus Unbound (1820 volume) 15, 121, 123, 125, 152, 175, 179, 182 ‘Prometheus Unbound’ 26, 32, 38, 100, 102–3, 121, 151, 155, 160–73, 175, 176, 178, 182, 183 Preface 1, 5, 115n, 168 ‘Proteus Wordsworth’ (fragment) 150–51 Queen Mab 46 The Revolt of Islam 37 ‘To a Sky-Lark’ 44n, 85, 99, 113–21, 147, 172 ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’ 69n ‘The Triumph of Life’ 7 ‘A Vision of the Sea’ 15, 123–6, 134–60 ‘To Wordsworth’ 17, 41, 54–5, 61 prose An Address to the Irish People 35, 36 A Defence of Poetry 13–14, 49, 54, 56–7, 101–2, 106, 112–13, 115, 118–19, 121, 123, 175, 176, 178

197

Letters 1, 18–23, 25, 41, 45, 75n, 127, 145–6 The Necessity of Atheism 24 ‘On Life’ 76, 98, 111, 120, 171 ‘On Love’ 157 ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’ 53–4, 58, 68, 79, 177–8 and relation of poetic vision to social and political reform 57, 90, 102, 103, 121, 160, 168–73, 175 and religion 34–7, 45, 75, 82, 91–4, 98, 169–70 Southey, relationship with 17–25 Wordsworth, reading of and feelings towards 17, 54–5; see also ‘Peter Bell the Third’; ‘To Wordsworth’ Sheraw, C. Darrel 28 Smith, Gayle S. 133 Southey, Robert 2, 17–25, 28, 45, 49, 73, 74n, 127n The Curse of Kehama 18, 25 ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ 27 Stillinger, Jack 126, 127n, 129 Tetreault, Ronald 78n Ulmer, William A. 119–20 Wasserman, Earl R. 64, 65, 70, 71, 76, 83n, 84, 98 Webb, Timothy 62 Wheeler, K.M. 97–8, 112, 130, 158 Wolfson, Susan J. 88, 106, 116, 138 Wordsworth, Jonathan 76, 84, 85 Wordsworth, William 2, 4, 7, 12, 17, 41–3, 54–7, 116, 118, 126 The Excursion 61 ‘Immortality Ode’ 17, 42, 61 Lyrical Ballads 17, 53n, 57, 105, 126, 127–8, 155 The Prelude 102 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 52, 61