Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language

O

Shelley among Others

This page intentionally left blank

O

Shelley among Others The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language

Stuart Peterfreund The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore and London

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Northeastern University. © 2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2

4 6

8 9

7 5

3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peterfreund, Stuart. Shelley among others : the play of the intertext and the idea of language / Stuart Peterfreund. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-6751-7 (acid-free paper) 1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Knowledge—Language and languages. 3. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Political and social views. 4. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Knowledge—Literature. 5. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Contemporaries. 6. Intertextuality. I. Title. PR5438 P47 2002 821'.7—dc21 2001000244 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

O

To Sarah Ruth Peterfreund

This page intentionally left blank

O Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Literary History, Cultural Politics, and “The Nature Itself of Language” 1 1: Figures That Look Before and After

25

2: Nothing Beside Remains 49 3: “Mont Blanc,” the Recuperation of Voice, the Way of “Power,” and the Fate of Love 100 4: Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century 135 5: The Poet Situated—between the Failed Past and a Hopeful Future 168 6: A Perpetual Orphic Song; or, The Name of the Father? 218 7: Moving toward the Shade of Shelley Notes

319

Bibliography 381 Index 395

267

This page intentionally left blank

O

Preface and Acknowledgments

My attempt in writing this book has been to produce a comprehensive study of Shelley’s poetry, including most of the major poems and many of the socalled minor poems as well. It is a study that discusses and, by so doing, integrates the intertextual and linguistic conceptions and practices that Shelley himself deployed in seeking and claiming for himself a place in the Western literary tradition. My conception of the integration process that brings together those intertextual and linguistic conceptions and practices has been informed significantly by the work of a number of philosophers and theorists of language. Both Shelley’s idea of language and his sense of intertextuality have interesting affinities with contemporary thought and theory. As my title suggests in part, I believe that an understanding of Shelley’s intertextual conversation with those he identifies as his important conversation partners and formative figures in the Western literary tradition, especially as that tradition provides him with the materials to fashion both his own literary moment and the voice of that moment, is central to forming an understanding of Shelley’s poetry. That this conversation has been remarked and discussed in some detail over time is evident from even a casual perusal of the other poets and writers cited by both Shelley himself and his commentators in the notes to the Reiman and Powers edition of his poetry and prose. Shelley’s idea of language has been the object of increased attention during the last thirty-five years, especially in books such as Earl J. Schulze’s Shelley’s Theory of Poetry: A Reappraisal (1966); John Wright’s Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor (1970); William Keach’s Shelley’s Style (1984); and Jerrold E. Hogle’s Shelley’s Process (1988). I join in the conversation in Shelley among Others, grateful for the contributions of these scholars among others, but also mindful that, at least since the time of Hogle’s book, the discussion of Shelley’s idea of lan-

O ix

guage has attained a level of theorization in need of both acknowledgment and comment. Recently, the discussion of Shelley’s idea of language has expanded to consider the usefulness of theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan in clarifying it. To enter a debate of the moment (and of moment): I question the rejection of the importance of Kristeva’s comments and her notions advanced in Shelley’s Goddess (1992) by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, who in her turn follows Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Butler notes in her discussion of Kristeva that she fails to take account of paternal law as a form of agency that can generate desire as well as prohibiting it. Kristeva is not above tweaking Lacan and Lacanians more generally: metaphor, according to Kristeva, “makes the transference relation dynamic, involves to the utmost interpretive intervention of the analyst, and calls attention to counter-transference as identification.... Without these conditions doesn’t analysis run the risk of becoming set within a tyranny of idealization, precisely? Of the phallus or of the Superego? A word to wise Lacanians should be enough!” However, she builds solidly if critically on the precedents of Lacan and Freud before him: “Amatory identification, Einfühlung (the assimilation of other people’s feelings), appears to be madness when seen in the light of Freud’s caustic lucidity: the ferment of collective hysteria in which crowds abdicate their own judgment, a hypnosis that causes us to lose perception of reality since we hand it over to the Ego Ideal” (“Freud and Love” [1986]). Kristeva’s disagreements with Lacan and Freud have a good deal more to do with the protocols and practice(s) of psychoanalysis than with the theories of language underwriting them. More recently still, Chris Foss (1998) has rightly begun to argue for the instrumentality of ideas like Kristeva’s, not only for a feminist and “empowering re-visioning of Lacanian theory,” but also for a reading of Shelley: book IV of Prometheus Unbound (1819) is his text in point. Here again, however, the approach is to choose Kristeva over Lacan rather than considering the uses of each. In his commentary on Lacan’s The Language of the Self (1968), Wilden notes Lacan’s problematization of the subject’s position. “Who is speaking and to whom?’ is one of Lacan’s central questions,” as Wilden observes, “and if one compares it with the analysis of the ‘who’ of Dasein in Sein und Zeit (1927), it is perhaps not surprising to discover Heidegger’s concern for the status of the ‘I’ in the discourse—as well as negative echoes of the textbook Freud.” Heidegger’s position is extremely close to

x

O

Preface and Acknowledgments

that of Lacan, as Wilden notes in his discussion of “Lacan’s critique of the philosophical cogito in the late fifties.” In Lacan’s own words, “It is not a question of knowing whether I am speaking about myself in conformity with what I am, but rather that of knowing whether, when I speak of it, I am the same as that of which I speak.”

O The writing of Shelley among Others has occupied a good deal of my energies and interest over the past two decades. Originally conceived as a seminar paper for the 1979 NEH Summer Seminar, “Linguistics and Literary Study,” under the direction of Professor Charles Scott of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the study was materially helped in its transformation to a book-length project by Joseph Anthony Wittreich of CUNY and the CUNYGraduate Center, who read it sympathetically and appreciatively during the course of his 1983 NEH Summer Seminar, “The Renaissance and the Romantics,” held at the Huntington Library. The project’s lack of a unifying argumentative core was remedied in discussions with G. Kim Blank about a proposed chapter that I subsequently theorized and wrote, and which appeared in his edited collection, The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views (1991). The substance of that chapter informs the discussion of The Cenci in chapter 6. The project has been aided all along by my ongoing conversations with my colleagues and with graduate students such as Chris Foss, as well as by sabbaticals at Northeastern University, particularly the second of these, in 1993–94, when I did most of the work on the final version of the manuscript. To this general note of gratitude I should add a more specific one of thanks to Provost David Hall and Dean James Stellar for providing subvention monies to help underwrite the production of this volume. My understanding of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva has benefited enormously from my conversations with Martha Bragin, who took time from her own scholarly endeavors and a demanding schedule of teaching, consulting, and international relief work to correct my misunderstandings and lead me to some of the connections important to my understanding of the mind-language dynamic. Above all, the birth of my daughter, Sarah Ruth Peterfreund, in 1988 reinvigorated me and confirmed the rightness of creating works, human no

Preface and Acknowledgments

O

xi

less than textual, that might live. To her I dedicate this book, hoping that it serves not only as an exposition of Shelley’s belief in the informing power of what, in Prometheus Unbound, Demogorgon calls “eternal Love” (Poetry, II.iv.120), but also as a token of the powerful love that I feel for her. That love is a powerful motivation and is, accordingly, responsible for any success that this study may attain. Although I shall write other books as my career progresses, I shall most likely never again attempt anything as unified and comprehensive as this study aims to be. Any mistakes or defects in the present study are of course entirely my own.

xii

O

Preface and Acknowledgments

O

Abbreviations

BPW

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Rev. ed. Ed. David V. Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982. ByPW Byron: Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page, corr. John Jump. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970. CPW The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912. DNB Dictionary of National Biography KPW The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978. Letters The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. MPP John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. OED Oxford English Dictionary Poetry Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Prose Shelley’s Prose; or The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Corr. ed. Ed. David Lee Clark, pref. Harold Bloom. London: Fourth Estate, 1988. SPW The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G. M. Matthews. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970. WPW The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Ed. A. J. George, rev. Paul D. Sheats. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

O xiii

This page intentionally left blank

O

Shelley among Others

This page intentionally left blank

O

Introduction Literary History, Cultural Politics, and “The Nature Itself of Language”

Shelley’s poetry and critical prose exhibit a concern with how language generally, and poetic language in particular, affects the artistic, intellectual, and social construction and authorization of lived experience. Shelley’s idea of language, his sense of its play, may be situated in relation to two discourses that historically intersect the discourse of literature: the discourse of rhetoric, as that discourse underwrites and informs Western intellectual history from the time of Plato onward, and what Hans Aarsleff denominates the “New Philology,” which “has its historical origin in the seventeenth century, both in the study of the early vernacular and in the philosophical exploration of the nature and function of language and words.”1 To situate Shelley in this manner is not to claim that other modes of “philosophical exploration” (e.g., skeptical approaches to the problem of knowledge) and other explorers (e.g., David Hume and William Drummond) played a secondary or insignificant role in shaping Shelley’s view of the interrelationship of language, knowledge, and social institutions. Philosophers such as Hume and Drummond were indispensable to Shelley’s articulation of the relationship between human language, ontology, and epistemology, on the one hand, and between human language and the concept of Power,2 on the other. But as these formulations suggest, virtually all of Shelley’s “philosophical explorations” are explorations of the problem of the relationship between language and some other entity.

OO

Introduction 1

1

Shelley’s Idea of Language and Its Antecedents In the chapters to follow, I elaborate more fully what I understand Shelley’s idea of language and its play to be, and how I understand this idea to inform the formal and thematic elements, as well as the social focus, of his poetry in general and of several of his major poems in particular. Here, however, I wish to focus on the historical context of that idea, which is nowhere more thoroughly and pointedly discussed than in several pertinent passages of A Defence of Poetry. There, Shelley proposes poetry as originary language with unmediated, if partial, access to those truths immanent in prelinguistic origins, up to and including truths touching on the workings of providence itself. For Shelley, poetry is a species of linguistic master text that constructs the world artistically, intellectually, and socially. In specifying poetry’s mode of being—its construction of the life-world by means of the originary trope of metaphor — Shelley also specifies those factors which contribute to the abuse or decline of poetry and the emergence from poetic origins of other discourses that seek to supplant it. In too many instances for the resemblances to be coincidental, the claims that Shelley makes for poetry and his characterization of its mode of being are anticipated by the discourse of rhetoric and the “New Philology.” To say as much is not to propose that Shelley’s thoughts concerning language are derivative but instead to contextualize Shelley’s thought on the subject of language, in general, and on the subject of poetry, in particular. Perhaps the single most salient aspect of Shelley’s striking originality is his attempt to use the medium of poetry itself to foster recognition of what he takes to be its true nature, and then to use this collective recognition of poetry’s true nature as the basis for mounting a critique of the social and intellectual practices of his time. Concerning the characterization of poetry as originary language, Shelley observes, “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 which exists in the relation, substituting, first, between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry” (Poetry, 482).3 Although the despairing Shelleyan

2

O

Shelly among Others

narrator of The Triumph of Life (1822) would subsequently confess distress over the struggle by means of which “power and will/In opposition rule our mortal day” and the irreconcilability of “Good and the means of good” (ll. 228–31), 4 thus implying that language is unable to foster such an apprehension, Shelley here expresses confidence in the originary language of poetry as the means “to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation” of beauty and truth. The mode of poetic apprehension, notwithstanding Shelley’s reference to “substituting,” is essentially transferential,5 placing the mind in a reciprocal relationship with human lived experience or human expression. One may substitute the transferential and unitive dyad of “perception and expression” for the similar dyad of “existence and perception,” but one cannot substitute another term for one of those terms already in a given dyad, nor can one change the order of a given dyad. Existence has no connection with expression except for an analogical connection through the operation of perception as the middle term: existence is to perception as perception is to expression. Existence always precedes perception; perception always precedes expression. Shelley argues in A Defence, with a little help from Milton, for the absolute centrality of the site and organ of perception—the mind—as the term common to both dyads. 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 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 before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. (Poetry, 505) Despite differing as to whether poetry as originary language speaks well or ill of such language, and whether poetic language is fully adequate to the task of apprehending “the true and the beautiful,” eighteenth-century commentators, several of whom Shelley read, concur in the characterization of the language of poetry as originary, as well as in the proposition that transferential

Introduction

O

3

apprehension is the sine qua non of poetic language. William Warburton, whose Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (2d ed., 1738–41) Shelley read,6 argues that poetry arises first out of necessity, owing to the paucity of the resources at the disposal of originary language. LANGUAGE, as appears both from the Records of Antiquity, and the Nature of the Thing, was at first extremely rude, narrow, and equivocal; so that Men would be perpetually at a loss, on any new Conception, or uncommon Adventure, to explain themselves intelligibly to one another: This would naturally set them upon supplying the Deficiencies of Speech by apt and significant Signs. Accordingly, in the first Ages of the World, mutual converse was upheld by a mixed Discourse of Words and ACTIONS; the Use and Custom, as in most other Circumstances of Life improving what arose out of Necessity, into Ornament.7 Giambattista Vico, whose New Science (3d ed., 1744) Shelley probably did not read, nevertheless shows some interesting affinities with Warburton’s Divine Legation. Vico, whose analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of poetic recursions (ricorsi) that operate as a function of necessity has striking affinities with Shelley’s later analysis, argues that, while necessity dictated that poetry precede prose as originary language, this circumstance marks the universality and richness of poetry, not its contingency or inadequacy. Vico concludes “that, by a necessity of human nature, poetic style arose before prose style; just as, by the same necessity, the fables, or imaginative universals, arose before the rational or philosophic universals, which were formed through the medium of prose speech. For after the poets had formed poetic speech by associating particular ideas . . . the peoples went on to form prose speech by contracting into a single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated.” 8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whose thoughts on language Shelley was familiar,9 valorizes poetry as a musical originary language well suited to express both reactions to internal passions and external objects of the senses, and, perhaps more importantly, to express, in the linked acts of existence giving rise to perception and perception giving rise to utterance, the relationships that obtain between the internal and the external. Such relationships, articulate although prelogical, are not a whit less persuasive for being so. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages (ca. 1755), Rousseau takes the position, as the subtitle to the third chapter states, “That the First language Must

4

O

Shelly among Others

Have Had to Be Figurative.” “As man’s first motives for speaking were of the passions,” he argues, “his first expressions were tropes. Figurative language was the first to be born. Proper meaning was discovered last. . . . At first only poetry was spoken; there was no hint of reasoning until much later.”10 Johann Gottfried Herder, who may well have influenced Wordsworth’s comments on how “The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote” in a “language [that] was daring, and figurative,” is of like mind.11 In his Essay on the Origin of Language (1769), Herder characterizes poetic originary language as relational in much the same way that Rousseau characterizes it—as the absolutely indispensable middle term between existence and expression—and observes that “What was said by so many of the Ancients, what in modern times has so often been repeated without understanding, derives from this its living reality: ‘That poetry is older than prose!’ For what was this first language of ours other than a collection of the elements of poetry? Imitation it was of sounding, acting, stirring nature! Taken from the interjections of all beings and animated by the interjections of human emotion!”12 To what sorts of truths, immanent in prelinguistic origins, does the originary language of poetry attain access, and how is such poetic language reflective of or informed by the attainment of such access? In Shelley’s case, “poetry in a more restricted sense expresses the arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained in the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation” (Poetry, 483). In this rich description of how poetry constructs the individual’s artistic, intellectual, and social milieu, Shelley suggests that poetry “in a more restricted sense expresses” no less than the articulations of providence itself. Such articulations take the form of “the arrangements of language, and especially metrical language”—what Shelley elsewhere in A Defence refers to as “a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound” (Poetry, 484). It is this recurrence, at once informed and formally understandable, yet ineffable and irreducible, that testifies to the existence and power of “that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained in the invisible nature of man.”

Introduction

O

5

This “faculty” bears a rather close resemblance to Demogorgon, “a mighty Darkness/Filling the seat of power” (Poetry, II.iv.2–4) as Asia describes him in Prometheus Unbound (1819). And Asia’s attempt to embellish her initial description of Demogorgon only serves to reinforce both his reality and his invisibility. Ungazed upon and shapeless—neither limb Nor form—nor outline; yet we feel it is A living Spirit. (Poetry, II.iv.5–7) Demogorgon manifests the sort of power commensurate with an “imperial faculty” such as providence. Like Demogorgon, with which it is synonymous and connate, “the deep truth” of providence “is imageless,” just as its providential power as “Eternal Love” is supreme and unquestionable, and therefore not subject to the worldly vicissitudes of “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change” (II.iv.116–20). But to say that “the deep truth is imageless” is not to declare such truth completely beyond the ken of human apprehension; rather, it is to say that “the deep truth” is subject only to the originary language of poetry, the rhythms and harmony of which capture the rhythms and harmony immanent in that “truth.” In so doing, poetry either presents the “figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil before the scene of things” (Poetry, 505)—or it both “presents” and “withdraws” (absents), as the exchange between Demogorgon and Asia would tend to suggest. As Earth sings in the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, 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) Warburton observes an important distinction between two kinds of prophetic discourse, a distinction that bears importantly on originary poetry’s object. The practice of “supplying the Deficiencies of Speech by apt and significant Signs,” which “arose out of Necessity,” may have become, in many instances, gratuitous and ornamental—as, for example, when “the Prophets instructed the People in the Will of God, and conversed with them in Signs.” Such a circumstance should not, however, cause one to lose sight of what kind of truth, immanent in prelinguistic origins, the language of poetry can apprehend. “But,” Warburton continues, “where God teaches the Prophet,

6

O

Shelly among Others

and, in compliance to the Custom of that Time, condescends to the same Mode of Instruction, then the significative Action is generally changed into a Vision, either natural or extraordinary.” The language of prophecy exhibits those characteristics of rhythm and harmony that, for Shelley, suggest that the resultant poetry has taken as its proper object “the deep truth” and is both worthy and reflective of that object. Warburton observes that “amongst the Eastern People,” including the Hebrews, the language of prophecy arose as the lingua franca, “a Mode of Conversation which so well exercised their Vivacity, by Motion; and so much gratified it, by a perpetual Representation of Material images: Of these we have innumerable instances in Holy Scripture.” In the final analysis, then, there is little to choose between speaking in signs and speaking in visions, whether natural or extraordinary, as Warburton himself suggests in his examples of natural and extraordinary visions. Visions of the former sort include the one in which “the Prophet Jeremiah is bid regard . . . the Baskets of good and bad Figs [Jer. 24]”; those of the latter sort, the one in which “the Prophet Ezekiel [regards] the Resurrection of the dry Bones [Ezek. 37:2].”13 An atheist, Shelley understands the name God, as used by Warburton, to be the name that Asia mistakenly uses in Prometheus Unbound to refer to that entity which Demogorgon calls “the deep truth” (Poetry, II.iv.112–16), and which Shelley in “Mont Blanc” (1816) calls “Power” (l. 96). But whether one chooses to “name” this originary “deep truth” God, providence, power, or something else, Warburton’s account strongly suggests that when the prophet enters into a transferential relationship with this entity, the prophet’s language becomes the expression of “that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained in the invisible nature of man.”14 For Vico, the originary language of poetry similarly grants access to God’s truth providentially revealed, if not completely understood. In distinguishing among divine reason, reason of state, and natural reason, Vico notes that The first is . . . understood only by God; men know of it only what has been revealed to them. To the Hebrews first and then to the Christians, this has been by internal speech to their minds as the proper expression of a God all mind; but [also] by external speech through the prophets and through Jesus Christ to the Apostles, by whom it was declared to the Church. To the gentiles it has been through the auspices, the oracles, and other corporeal signs regarded as divine messages because they were sup-

Introduction

O

7

posed to come from the gods, whom the gentiles believed to be corporeal. So that in God who is all reason, reason and authority are the same thing; whence in good theology divine authority holds the same place as reason. Here providence is to be admired because, in the earliest times when the men of the gentile world did not understand reason . . . it permitted them to fall into the error of following in place of reason the authority of the auspices, and to govern themselves by what they believed to be the divine counsels thereby communicated.15 Error or otherwise: Vico notes that providence informs the originary language of poetry and directs humanity’s attention to those manifestations of higher truth immanent in the prophetic utterance that is the result. Providence makes itself known in originary poetry through its rhythms, which educate the emotions and thus give rise to social and civic order. Providence, through the work of civil institutions . . . makes itself palpable for us in these three feelings: the first, the marvel, the second, the veneration, hitherto felt by all the learned for the matchless wisdom of the ancients, and the third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek and attain it. These are in fact three lights of divine providence that aroused in them the aforesaid three beautiful and just sentiments; but these sentiments were later perverted by the conceit of scholars and by the conceit of nations—conceits we have sought throughout this work to discredit. The uncorrupted feelings are all that the learned should admire, venerate, and desire to unite themselves to the infinite wisdom of God.16 Rousseau, if not an atheist like Shelley, was certainly unorthodox.17 On the one hand, he speaks derisively of “Father Lamy,” who “thinks that if God had not taught men to speak, they would never have learned by themselves.” But on the other hand, in discussing the origins of the southern (i.e., Mediterranean and Near Eastern) languages, Rousseau says, without apparent irony, “Adam spoke, Noah spoke; but it is known that Adam was taught by God himself.” It seems that for Rousseau the workings out of providence as a function of human history are associated with this first language. At the end of a discussion of the distinctive characteristics of the first language, Rousseau says of its figurality, sonority, and music, “If you understand these ideas in all their ramifications, you will find that Plato’s Cratylus is not as ridiculous as

8

O

Shelly among Others

it appears to be.” Rousseau identifies the core of Socrates’ argument: that the givers of language, in naming the object of language, are also the givers of law. The onomathetes, owing to a pun operative in the Platonic original, are also the nomothetes. Earlier, Rousseau suggestively observes that “The Jewish prophets and the Greek lawgivers, by frequently presenting sensate objects to the people, spoke to them more effectively through these objects than they would have by means of lengthy discourse.”18 Although he takes issue with “Süssmilch’s manner of arguing” that language and reason arise out of “divine instruction,” Herder makes it clear enough that originary language is informed by and owes both its articulative potential and its articulated structure to what he terms “the Omniscient.” Herder defines “reason,” a “more freely working positive power of his [i.e., humanity’s] soul” than mere instinct, as “not a separate and singly acting power but an orientation of all powers and as such a thing peculiar to his species,” that “man must have . . . in the first state in which he is a man.” This is the multipotent faculty “that manifests itself with such effectiveness that the Omniscient who created this soul saw in its first state the full web of life’s actions, as for instance the geometrician finds from one element in the progression, when the class is given, its full constitution.” Herderian reason manifests itself through a process of reflection and acknowledgment. Thus Herder’s rebuttal of Süssmilch takes the line that the divinely instilled ability to sense the presence and apply the principle of contrastive articulation and the contrastive potential itself, not some divine donation of language or instruction in language, is what testifies to the providential operation of “the Omniscient in human affairs.” “To be able to acquire the first syllable of divine instruction, he [i.e., man] had to be—as Süssmilch himself admits—a human being, that is, be able to think clearly, and when he conceived the first clear thought, language was already present in his soul, being there through his own resources and not invented through divine instruction.”19 That Shelley regards poetry as a species of linguistic master text that constructs the world artistically, intellectually, and socially should be clear from looking at the following definition in A Defence: “But Poets, or those who imagine this indestructible order [of the universe], are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain

Introduction

O

9

propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which are called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true” (Poetry, 482). The constructive efficacy of poetry duly noted, his definition would appear to hedge Shelley’s previous comment that “to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful” (482). Unqualified apprehension gives way to “a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true” and “partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which are called religion.” The hedging turns on the subtle but important distinction between being a poet “in the infancy of society” (482) and being a poet who is one of “the founders of civil society.” Civil is the operative term of differentiation here: Shelley picks up on the distinction, clearly evident in the thought of Vico and Rousseau, between the primitive society of the nuclear family or otherwise organically cohesive social grouping (“infancy of society”), and the instituted society of the polis, civitas, or city-state, which is subject to the inaugural violence of the written word that accompanies the division of property and the erection of walls and gates.20 “Civil society” arises connate with a self-articulated need to found and to justify itself upon myths of cosmogonical and civil origins—what Shelley here calls “original religions.” Under the terms of this imperative, the foundational awareness that existence has no connection with expression except for an analogical connection through the operation of perception as the middle term—that existence is to perception, as perception is to expression—is compromised by reason of civic expediency and gives way to a situation in which the middle term becomes a threshold or boundary condition. “Janus,” who has “a double face of false and true,” is, after all, the god of thresholds. In specifying poetry’s mode of being—its construction of the life-world by means of the originary trope of metaphor—Shelley also specifies those factors which contribute to the abuse and/or decline of poetry and accounts for the emergence from poetic origins of other discourses that seek to supplant poetry in its access to such truths and function as a master text. When an “original religion[s]” that is “allegorical, or susceptible of allegory,” is actually allegorized for the purpose of establishing or sustaining the claims for legitimacy advanced by “civil society,” falsehood crosses over the threshold and eradicates truth. This is the set of circumstances Shelley has in mind

10

O

Shelly among Others

when he comments, in A Treatise on Morals on “the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose” (Prose, 188). Under such circumstances, the effect of “expression” is both falsified by being made to bear the allegory’s ulterior significance and reduced from the status of metaphor to the status of metonymy by being made the “cause” that produces the “effect” of ulterior meaning. Shelley is well aware of how and why this falsification comes to pass. In On Life, he discusses what he views as organized religion’s failed attempt to explain the cause of life by the anthropocentric projection of human mental agency as the model for divine causation. Yet, that the basis for all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alledges [sic], mind is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties . . . cannot create, it can only perceive. It is said also to be the Cause? But cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to each other. . . . It is infinitely improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind. It is said that mind produces motion and it might as well have been said that motion produces mind. (Poetry, 478)21 As a result of this triumph of metonymy over metaphor, the analogy that holds that existence is to perception as perception is to expression appears to collapse and become a metonymic chain of cause and effect. Expression, which, when socially appropriated and reified, appears to cause the effect of allegorization, is reduced by the terms of that allegorization. Perception, which causes expression, is correspondingly reduced to the terms of that expression. And existence, which causes perception, is reduced to the terms of perception. This set of circumstances produces political and religious tyranny. In On Life, Shelley discusses the movement from the transferential state characterized by metaphor to the substitutive state characterized by metonymy as a process at once naturally conditioned and culturally instituted. Echoing Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Shelley notes how individuals move from a state of “reverie” in which they “feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being,” to a state in which “this power [of apprehension] commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Their

Introduction

O

11

feelings and their reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts of a series of what are commonly called impressions, planted by reiteration” (WPW, ll. 72–77).22 Although this process “commonly” occurs, it need not do so inevitably. However, Shelley argues that if the movement from “reverie” to “mechanical and habitual” agency does not occur naturally, it will be instituted by those in whom it has occurred, with the result that “reverie” is interdicted for all. “Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained. —Such contemplations as these materialism and the philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid; they are consistent only with the intellectual system” (Poetry, 476, 477). Despite this somber analysis of how poetry can, in time, become a basis for a repressive regime, Shelley retains a belief that if the operation of poetry as a linguistic master text were properly understood, the situation might be otherwise. He does not see the artistic, intellectual, and social construction of the world by poetry—up to and including founding of “civil society” and the establishment of “original religions”—as a historical singularity consigned to an unrecoverable past. Like Herder, but unlike Warburton, Vico, and Rousseau, Shelley believes that the historical present can recapitulate the historical past.23 And unlike all four of his predecessors, Shelley believes that the historical present harbors the potential to recapitulate any historical past, up to and including the historical past of a “golden age,” such as that of Athens, witness the argument of Hellas. Shelley’s beliefs, which prompted him to respond to Peacock’s arguments in “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820) that the efficacy of poetry as linguistic master text diminishes with the passage of time, provide the occasion for that response in A Defence every bit as much as they provide the occasion for Hellas. In the former, his arguments about poets and poetry as agents and means of artistic, social, and intellectual construction are all couched in the present tense, suggesting that “civil society” may be refounded and “original religions” may be reestablished over time. This is a point made manifest in his historical analysis of the fate of poetry from the time when “the antient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolution” to the time of Milton (Poetry, 495–98). For Rousseau, poetry’s constructive efficacy as linguistic master text is, in the present of the eighteenth century, no longer operative, although one can catch glimpses of that efficacy in the distant and unrecoverable past. Rous-

12

O

Shelly among Others

seau further complicates the situation of poetry relative to prose, as Warburton and Vico do, by adding to the historical gradient a cultural one. In the present, as Rousseau notes, eloquence is obsolete in the face of the constructed and reified political and religious power relations that obtain. “One needs neither art nor metaphor to say such is my pleasure. What sort of public discourses remain then? Sermons. And why should those who preach them be concerned to persuade the people, since it is not they who dispose of benefices. . . . Societies have assumed their final form: no longer is anything changed except by arms and cash. And since there is nothing to say to people besides give money, it is said with placards on street corners or by soldiers in their homes.” In Rousseau’s view, the public discourse instituted by the poetic master text is both alienated and alienating. The priest who preaches to his congregation is alienated from it in favor of those “who dispose of his benefices.” This public discourse also uses “placards on street corners or soldiers in . . . homes” to alienate, by means of military force, the capital produced by labor from labor. Thus there is in Rousseau’s analysis an implied analogy between the alienation of speech and the alienation of capital by those who institute and control public discourse. As he understands the situation, it could not be otherwise historically, although it could be otherwise culturally, and although it formerly had been so historically. Rousseau puts the historical issue clearly enough in the following hypothesis: “If a man were able to harangue the people of Paris in the Place Vendôme in French, if he shouted at the top of his voice, people would hear him shouting, but they would not be able to distinguish a word. Herodotus would recite his history in Greek to audiences in the open air, and everyone would restrain himself from applauding.” Rousseau allows that “There are some languages favorable to liberty. They are the sonorous, prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a great distance.” But these are not the alienating languages of rational self-interest spoken by the citizens of the Europe with which Rousseau is familiar. “French, English, German: each is a language private to a group of men who help each other, or who become angry.” According to Rousseau, the languages of other places and other times induce the phenomena of coaudition and unity, which produce an effect opposite to that of alienation. But Rousseau insists that the languages that produce these effects must exist either in the historical past—and in the past of classical antiquity, above all—or in its diurnal equivalent, the East.

Introduction

O

13

“Sonorous, prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a great distance” are the tongues of the untotalizable past and the unconquerable present. While English, French, and German are “language[s] private to a group of men who help each other, or who become angry,” it is neither Attic Greek nor silence, as Rousseau acknowledges, that wields the power. “The ministers of the gods proclaiming sacred mysteries, sages giving laws to their people, swaying the multitude, have to speak Arabic or Persian. Our tongues are better suited to writing than speaking, and there is more pleasure in reading us than in listening to us. Oriental tongues, on the other hand, lose their life and warmth when they are written.”24 Herder parts ways with Warburton, Vico, and Rousseau regarding poetry’s constructive efficacy—or at least its potential constructive efficacy—as linguistic master text. By means of the sense of hearing, which serves Herder much as it serves Shelley as a middle term of sorts,25 one acquires a system of language that provides for the possibility that constructive efficacy may operate in the present. Unity and coherence! Proportion and order! A whole! A system! A creature of reflection and language, of the power to reflect and to create language! If anyone, after all these observations, were still ready to deny man’s being destined to be a creature of language, he first would have to turn from being an observer of nature into being its destroyer! Would have to break into dissonance all the harmonies shown; lay waste the whole splendid structure of human forces, corrupt his sensuousness and sense instead of nature’s masterpiece a creature full of wants and lacunae, full of weaknesses and convulsions!26 For Herder, language “arose out of necessity and in accordance with the plan and the might of the creature described.” Herder proceeds to make his case by surveying the “older and more original languages”— chiefly “Oriental” languages—that serve to construct, up to a certain point, those who speak them through the education of the speakers’ senses and emotions. This education occurs because in the languages in question, according to the first two of Herder’s five “canons” on the subject, the “analogy of the senses is [more] noticeable in their roots,” and because “the older and more original languages are, the more the feelings intertwine in the roots of the words!” For Herder, the inseparability of words and emotions (“feelings”) is of particular importance. As he exclaims, “How everything had to turn into feeling and sound

14

O

Shelly among Others

before it could turn into expression! Hence those powerful bold metaphors in the roots of words!” 27 These metaphors are characteristic of originary languages such as “The so-called language of God, Hebrew, [which] is totally imbued with such boldnesses,” as well as “all unpolished languages.” One also finds traces of “the metaphor of the beginning [which] was the urge to speak” in ancient languages such as Greek and modern languages such as English and German—in fact, Herder excepts only French, because the “entire language is prose of sound reason and has, by origin, almost no poetic word, almost none that would be peculiar to the poet.” But despite the fact that English or German, no less than Greek or the Oriental languages, may have “such boldnesses in its roots . . . the less is it permissible to jump at every original boldness as though each one of all those mutually intertwined concepts were always consciously present in every later application.” 28 Originary metaphor cannot continue to construct the individual and her or his culture as it once did because originary languages undergo a transformation from the metaphoric to the metonymic as these languages begin to serve as a cause for certain linguistic effects. The effects in question include the movement from the paratactic to the hypotactic, the desynonymizing of the word hoard, the movement from a sense-based to an abstract language, and the development of a grammar. The third, fourth, and fifth of Herder’s “canons” speak to this process of transformation. The third states, “The more original a language and the more frequently such feelings appear intertwined in it, the less it is possible for them to be subordinated to one another with precision and logic. Language is rich in synonyms.” In other words, synonymy in diction, arising from the inability to discern genus-and-differentia, causeand-effect, or part-and-whole relationships, lends itself to hypotactic syntax similarly unable to order ideas on any basis other than that of equivalency. “The more unfamiliar man was with nature . . . the more numerous the angles under which in his inexperience he looked at it . . . the more synonyms had to arise.” 29 The fourth “canon” states that linguistic abstractions develop over time from emotion- or sense-linked originals in originary languages. To the extent that those originary metaphors which Herder denominates “boldnesses” are the terms that give rise to “opportunities and arousals of the senses, so no language has an abstract term to which it was not led through

Introduction

O

15

tone and feeling. And the more original a language is, the fewer its abstractions and the more numerous its feelings.”30 Here, Herder is apparently laying out a relationship between emotion- or sense-linked originals and abstractions similar to Shelley’s relationship between metaphor, which “marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension,” and metonymy, which creates “signs for portions or classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts” (Poetry, 482).31 Herder’s fifth “canon” states, “Since every grammer is only a philosophy of language and a method for its use, it follows that, the more primordial a language is, the less grammar must there be in it, and the oldest language is no more than the aforementioned dictionary of nature.” 32 Leaving aside the echo of Adam naming the animals (Gen. 2:18) that is imported into the discourse by the concept of a “dictionary of nature,” Herder is suggesting that originary language in its first utterance, although it does not, strictly speaking, provide the rules and refinements of grammar, nevertheless provides a basis on which grammatical refinements and the rules describing these may proceed. For example, “Declensions and conjugations are merely shortcuts and identifications of the uses of nouns and verbs according to number, tense, mode, and person. Therefore, the less refined a language is, the less regular in these determinations, reflecting at every turn the course of human reason. In fine, without the art of usage, it is a simple dictionary.”33 Herder anticipates Shelley very closely, both in the general principle that is enunciated and the applications that follow from it. As Shelley states in A Defence, “Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the marks of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry.” From the “chaos of a cyclic poem” comes fluidity in such matters as those of declension and conjugation. “A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons and the distinction of place are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry” (Poetry, 482, 483). Reading Shelley from an exclusively postmodern perspective, one could take Shelley’s comments in A Defence and elsewhere as a syncretically inscribed, somewhat fetishized, perhaps confused intertextual manifesto. But to do so would be to foreclose on the option of reading backward, and thus

16

O

Shelly among Others

to lose sight of a tradition that associates the play of poetic language, as manifested by “the arrangements of language, and especially metrical language” (Poetry, 484), with the workings of the world, up to and including the workings of providence itself.

Shelley’s Idea of Language and Its Historical Moment But a caveat is in order: Shelley’s idea of language, although it emerges out of a specifiable tradition and has strong affinities with the ideas of his eighteenth-century predecessors, is not reducible to the terms of that tradition or those predecessors. For example, providence, if it operates at all in the historical present for Warburton, Vico, Rousseau, and Herder, does so mediated both by language and historical circumstance. 34 Providence, when it operates in the historical present for Shelley, is mediated solely by language and harbors the potential, in the context of that present, “to create afresh the associations,” by which Shelley intends “the before unapprehended relations of things . . . which have been thus disorganized . . .” (Poetry, 482). The result, as Shelley views it, is total renovation in the literal sense of making that present time new again,35 whether the present be the golden age of Athens; the age of Dante; the age of Milton; the eighteenth century of Warburton, Vico, Rousseau, and Herder; or Shelley’s own time. He does not displace the operation of providence to the biblical past, or to the past of Vico’s “greater gentes,” or to a Rousseauvian or Herderian state of nature. In Hellas, which ranges freely from the historical present of the War of Greek Independence back to the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), with stopping points at numerous revolutions and wars of liberation in between, the prophetic Ahasuerus lectures the despotic Mahmud on the vanity of aspiring to lasting temporal power. When the Mahmud does not get his point, Ahasuerus glosses it thusly: Mistake me not! All is contained in each. Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup Is that which has been, or will be, to that Which is—the absent to the present. Thought Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

Introduction

O

17

They are, what that which they regard, appears, The stuff whence mutability can weave All that which it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms, Empires and superstitions—what has thought To do with time or place or circumstance? Would’st thou behold the future?—ask and have! Knock and it shall be opened—look and lo! The coming age is shadowed on the past As on a glass. (ll. 792–806)36 In part to validate this speech, Shelley presents the memorable final chorus, which announces, “The world’s great age begins anew,/ The golden years return” (ll. 1060–61). Shelley’s own note in part comments on poetry’s near apocalyptic and renovative potential to obliterate temporal distinction. The chorus is supposed to “remind the reader of Isaiah and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil that we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps approaching state of society in which the ‘lion shall lie down with the lamb’” (438n.). 37 Shelley’s conception of how one’s idea of language can have social consequences is no doubt informed by the political cataclysms of the age in which he lived and wrote. He was born sixteen years after the outbreak of the American Revolution, twelve years after the Gordon Riots, nine years after the Peace of Paris, three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, twelve years before Napoleon was crowned emperor, twenty years before the passage of the Framework Bill, twenty-three years before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, and forty years before the passage of the first Reform Bill. The French Revolution in particular marked a watershed occasion for debating the social consequences of a given idea of language. As Olivia Smith has demonstrated, the exchange between Edmund Burke, writing in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and Thomas Paine, replying to Burke in The Rights of Man (1791–92), threw into bold relief a problem that had been building for some time, and was to continue to be a problem throughout Shelley’s lifetime. On the one hand, Burke’s Reflections was the text that radical supporters of the French Revolution loved to hate—in Smith’s words, “for bringing greater definitiveness to political ideas. John Thelwall (principal orator of the London Corresponding Society) claimed that he did not

18

O

Shelly among Others

consciously hold a political position until he read Reflections. Only then did he realize that he had previously believed in . . . ‘the glorious and happy constitution’ and that he believed in it no longer.”38 On the other hand, however, Burke’s text posed a problem for those who, like Thelwall, wished to answer this “most raving and fantastical, sublime, and scurrilous, paltry and magnificent, and in every way the most astonishing book ever sent into the world.”39 As Thelwall’s adjectives suggest, the impact of Burke’s text derives as much from its high style as from its conservative politics, both of which are identifiable with the ruling classes.40 Enter Paine, who “understood that the problem presented by the Reflections lay equally in Burke’s style and his definition of the audience. Thus, Paine had not only to write a political vernacular prose, as he had already done, but to write in a manner that would refute the political implications of the literary skills represented by Edmund Burke.”41 Thus the issue, long in developing, was joined. Smith notes that “a hegemony of language . . . had been forming since at least 1750.” Aided by early texts such as James Harris’s Hermes (1751), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and Bishop Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), which “contributed to the hegemonic assessment of language by characterizing the literati as a class and formulating a language that was appropriate for it,” the perpetrators of this hegemony justified it in the belief that “To speak the vulgar language demonstrated that one belonged to the vulgar class; that is, that one was morally and intellectually unfit to participate in the culture. Only the refined language was capable of expressing intellectual ideas and worthy sentiments, while the vulgar language was limited to the expressions of the sensations and the passions.” Such “ideas about language justified class division and even contributed to its formation by accentuating differences in language practice”; accordingly, when, “between 1790 and 1819, the hegemony of language was severely challenged,” those who had created this hegemony “were sensitive to any movement that threatened to disturb class boundaries,” and they reacted accordingly. 42 Lest it seem that the debate about language and class was merely the anticipation of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), it should be noted that an implied analogy of function underwrites the debate: those who, by right of birth and training, know how to put words in their proper places also have the responsibility—again, by right of birth and training—to put the speakers (or

Introduction

O

19

writers) of those words in their proper places. As Smith notes, “Petitions to Parliament favouring extended or universal male suffrage provoked responses which relied on assumptions about language. Between 1793 and 1818 (and later as well), Parliament dismissively refused to admit petitions because of the language in which they were written.”43 As a member of the upper classes active in the cause of linguistic, social, and political reform, Shelley did not enter the debate over language, class, and politics without a modicum of unresolved internal conflict, which caused him to assume apparently self-contradictory stances. 44 For example, Lowth’s grammar, its title derived from the title of Lily’s Latin grammar, operates on Lowth’s assumption that “the only means available to learn correct English were to be knowledgeable in the classical languages, to frequent polite society, and to read ‘ancient authors’ extensively”45 Shelley, writing to William Godwin on 29 July 1812, freely owns that, “Of the Latin language, as a grammar, I think highly. It is a key to the European languages and we can hardly be said to know our own without first coming to a complete knowledge of it.” But Shelley goes on to state that the question of whether one is thoroughly grounded in Latin is an affair of minor importance, inasmuch as the science of things is superior to the science of words.—Nor can I help considering the vindicators of ancient learning . . . as the vindicators of a literary despotism, as the tracers of a circle which is intended to shut out from real knowledge, to which this fictitious knowledge is attached, all who do not breathe the air of prejudice, & who will not support the established systems of politics, Religion & morals. . . . Did Greek & Roman literature refine the soul of [Samuel] Johnson, does it extend the thousand narrow bigots educated in the very bosom of classicality[?]. (Letters, 1:318) Shelley elsewhere clarifies that he intends “the science of things” to signify social and economic reform. In An Address to the Irish People (1812), printed and distributed in the February and March preceding the July letter to Godwin, Shelley sets forth a vision of “a happy state of society,” in which “men of every way of thinking [are] living together like brothers.” In such a society, “The descendant of the greatest prince would be entitled to no more respect than the son of a peasant. There would be no pomp and no parade; but that which the rich now keep to themselves would then be distributed among the people. None would be in magnificence, but the superfluities then taken

20

O

Shelly among Others

from the rich would be sufficient when spread abroad to make every one comfortable” (Prose, 51–52).46 The first step toward such social and economic reform, as Shelley observes in his “Postscript,” would be to give the people a workable and demystified language in which to state their needs. Of An Address, Shelley says, “I . . . have taken pains that the remarks which it contains should be intelligible to uneducated minds. . . . It has been the policy of the thoughtless and wicked of the higher ranks . . . to conceal from the poor the truths which I have endeavoured to teach them. In doing so I have but translated my thoughts into another language; and, as language is only useful as it communicates ideas, I shall think my style do far good as it is successful as a means to bring about the end which I desire on any occasion to accomplish” (Prose, 59).47 Shelley’s hope that he has successfully “translated [his] thoughts into another language” for others in a historical situation different from, albeit related to, his own rests on the assumption that it is somehow possible for the socially and historically situated user of language to transcend the material conditions of her or his existence—in Bakhtinian terms, that it is possible to be simultaneously isoglossic and heteroglossic. The assumption is problematic at best, erroneous at worst.48 Moreover, Shelley’s vision of “men of every way of thinking living together like brothers” bespeaks a project founded on the assumption that a visionary monologism, whether figured forth as poetry or as the discourse of social reform, holds the key to a beneficent “common language” and common culture.49 Other instances of Shelley’s assuming apparently self-contradictory stances in the debate over language, class, and politics include his opinion of the relative merits of the conservative language theory propounded by James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, versus the merits of the radical language theory propounded by John Horne Tooke, and his shifting opinion of William Cobbett. In the former instance, Shelley ordered both Monboddo’s On the Origin and Progress of Language (1774–92) and Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (1798) in the letter of 24 December 1812 to Clio Rickman (Letters, 1:344– 45). Although he never commented explicitly on Monboddo, Shelley seconded ideas found in Origin and Progress, such as those having to do with language’s musical origins and the way that it organizes thought.50 When Shelley did comment explicitly on Tooke—for example, in A Treatise on Morals—it was to correct him. Concerning Tooke’s attack on Monboddo and his supporters, in which Tooke argues that “if they give up their doctrine of lan-

Introduction

O

21

guage, they will not be able to make even a battle for their Metaphysics; the very term Metaphysic being nonsense, and all the systems of it, and controversies concerning it, that are or have been in the world, being founded on the grossest ignorance of words, and of the nature of speech,”51 Shelley claims that “the discoveries of Horne Tooke in philology do not, as he asserted, throw light on metaphysics: they only render the instruments requisite to its perception more exact and accurate. Aristotle and his followers, Locke and most of the modern philosophers gave logic the name of metaphysics” (Prose, 185). Shelley would have sympathized with Tooke’s motivation to discredit metaphysics as an ideological formation mobilized “to uphold the distinction between vulgar and refined English, [to] challenge[s] the ambiguity and status of complex terms, and [to] counter[s] theories of language that withdrew attention from temporal and human concerns,” but he would not have assented to Tooke’s “fundamental premise . . . that the parts of speech represent neither types of things nor acts of the mind.”52 Part of the problem with Tooke’s position is that it assumes that the mind does not act. “The business of the mind,” Tooke holds, “extends no further than to receive Impressions, that is, to have Sensations or Feelings. What are called its operations are merely the operations of Language.”53 For Shelley, however, the mind acts as a mimetic agent. It “imitate[s],” as Shelley argues in A Defence, “natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order.”54 Language for Shelley is far more than a record of the operations of the passive mind. Language is, rather, a record and the authorized expression of the active mind characteristic of “Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order.” Such individuals “are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion” (Poetry, 481–82). In the latter instance, Shelley confides, in letter of 29 July 1812 to Godwin cited earlier, “I have as great a contempt for Cobbet [sic] as you can have, but it is because he is a dastard & a time server; he has no humanity, no refinement but were he a classical scholar would he have more?” (Letters, 1:318). Subsequently, Shelley softens his stance. In the letter of 23–24 January 1819 to

22

O

Shelly among Others

Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley declares Cobbett “a fine humnopoios [hymn writer]—does his influence increase or diminish. What a pity that so powerful a genius should be combined with the most odious moral qualities.” Shelley’s last and most positive epistolary reference to Cobbett comes in another letter to Peacock—this last of 20–21 June 1819. In it, Shelley allows, “Cobbett still more & more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic” (Letters, 1:318; 2:75, 99). In this instance, the selfcontradiction is more apparent than real, especially in light of the fact that between 1812 and 1819, Cobbett had altered his own program, undergoing a political conversion of sorts that was marked by the publication of the “Address to Journeymen and Labourers” of 2 November 1816, in which, for the first time, according to Smith, he took the position of “directly addressing, encouraging the articulacy, and defending the political interests of the nonpropertied.”55 His apparently self-contradictory stances in the debate over language, class, and politics duly noted, Shelley agreed early and fundamentally with the proposition that the proliferation of grammars and dictionaries from 1750 onward “contributed to the hegemonic assessment of language by characterizing the literati as a class and formulating a language that was appropriate for it” (SPW, 843).56 Proof of this assertion may be found in the first poem in Shelley’s very early Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810). In this poem, Shelley assumes the persona of “A Person [who] complained that whenever he began to write, he never could arrange his ideas in grammatical order. Which occasion suggested the idea of the following lines.”57 Shelley uses this persona to heap satiric derision on the compiler and grammarian John Entick and the grammarian Lindley Murray.58 Although the artistry of “Mont Blanc” and Shelley’s other major poems lay some time in the future, the linguistic agenda underwriting those poems was already surprisingly well articulated in Victor and Cazire. From his juvenilia on, Shelley saw that the way in which a given language works in a given era, whether it is employed by the party of desiring social imagination or whether it is employed by the party of repressive social control, is central to the construction and articulation of the lived experience of those who speak, write, and read that language in that time. Moreover, Shelley saw and was able to illustrate how the very workings of language itself in historical time first heterologically construct human language and the life-world and then, through acts of social appropriation and reification, constrict what

Introduction

O

23

it constructs to a monological standard. It is the drama of moving beyond historical contingency if not beyond temporality outright, the drama of fostering the reign of metaphor and forestalling the reign of metonymy, of fostering heteroglossia and forestalling the advent of a common language, that is the basis for the both the artistic and the social engagement of Shelley’s poetry. One of the salient characteristics of that engagement is Shelley’s predilection for engaging other writers in intertextual “conversation”—his contemporary Byron, of course, but contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, as well. Nor is this intertextual “conversation” restricted to a circle of contemporaries. Shelley also engages others such as Plato, Vergil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Moreover, the mode of engagement with Byron in a poem such as Julian and Maddalo (1819) points the way to other sites of dialectical play, not only the poem discussed here, but many of the later texts, including the dramas and Rosalind and Helen (1818), which function as alternative doublings of the intertextual engagement seen elsewhere.

24

O

Shelly among Others

O

Chapter 1 Figures That Look Before and After

Tropes Named and Unnamed In A Defence, Shelley explores the vital role that language plays in generating the dichotomy between the two cardinal principles of the intellect’s operation—to poiein and to logizein—which he goes on to redescribe as a dichotomy between “synthesis” and “analysis,” “imagination” and “reason,” “similitude” and “difference,” “agent” and “instrument,” “spirit” and “body,” and “substance” and “shadow” (Poetry, 480).1 More particularly, Shelley speaks of what happens to poetic language in an age when no new poetry worthy of the name reemphasizes the primacy of the imaginative over the rational and, in so doing, renovates by example all the poetry that has gone before. The lack of such new poetry leads, according to John W. Wright, to “a basic forgetfulness (1) of the synthetic character of the apprehended relations of things from which they [i.e., claims to knowledge] arise, and (2) of the metaphoric character of the languages in which they find continuing expression.”2 Shelley specifies two sorts of language: the living language of poets (and poetry), and the dead and anatomized language of prose and logic. If no new poets arise to underscore “the synthetic character of the apprehended relations of things” and “the metaphoric character of the languages in which” claims to knowledge “find continuing expression,” language of the latter sort will inevitably marginalize language of the former sort. Before one can understand the process, however, it is important to clarify the tropaic identity and character of both sorts of language, as well as to specify the process of their engagement. Shelley himself is clear about the character of the language of poetry, but he is less forthcoming about the other sort of language.

O

Figures That Look Before 25 and After

O

25

The language of poets, Shelley says, “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 and classes of thought 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” (Poetry, 482).3 Here, Shelley “names” the language of poetry as “vitally metaphorical”; suggests that, as that vitality wanes, the words representing “the before unapprehended relations of things” become unnamed “signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts”; and specifies an unnamed process of linguistic renovation whereby “new poets . . . arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized.” The unnamed figure and unnamed process are, respectively, metonymy and intertextuality. Intertextuality, as Kristeva observes, augments Freud’s “two fundamental ‘processes’ in the work of the unconscious: displacement and condensation. Kruszewski and Jakobson introduced them, in a different way, during the early stages of structural linguistics, through the concepts of metonymy and metaphor, which have since been interpreted in light of psychoanalysis.” Kristeva, who is ultimately not satisfied with intertextuality, “since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources,’” opts to replace it with “the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality.”4 Although Kristeva has her reasons for the replacement, within the domain of literary studies itself intertextuality still captures adequately the sense of the literary operation intended by Kristeva (and by Shelley before her): “the passage from one sign system to another,” and “an altering of the thetic position—the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one.” Shelley’s intertextual practice—holding conversations with other poets through the medium of his own poetry—flows directly from the precept that “new poets . . . arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized.” He undertakes to mark—and, if possible, to subvert—the process of “the enunciation of a denotation, a truth, and finally an ideology” that is the way of unrenovated poetic language. Subversion is possible, as Kristeva notes, because “mimesis and poetic language do more than engage in an intra-

26

O

Shelley among Others

ideological debate; they question the very principle of the ideological because they unfold the unicity of the thetic . . . and prevent its theologization.”5 The process occurs within a finite system, and, as such, it is constrained by its internal economy. Though Kristeva has occasion to speak of “The semiotic’s breach of the symbolic,” she concedes that the process is constrained by the limits of the symbolic itself. Accordingly, “the irruption of the semiotic within the symbolic is only relative. Though permeable, the thetic continues to ensure the position of the subject put in process/on trial.” This trial results from the tension between the symbolic and the semiotic.6 As for metonymy, Shelley specifies the language of poetry by “naming” it as “vitally metaphorical”—that is, emanating organically, as it were, out of metaphor. But he refrains from naming its antithesis. Wright, attempting to name names, assumes that the antithesis is “dead metaphor.”7 But Wright ignores Shelley’s own description of the tropaic logic on which this antithesis operates. To take but one of Wright’s examples: “metal fatigue” is indeed a dead metaphor—and a latent anthropomorphism as well—likening the loss of a metal object’s structural elasticity and integrity to human fatigue. But it is not a “sign[s] for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts”; or if it is one of these “signs,” it is so only by the operation of a poetic logic that Wright ignores. The poetic logic in question is the very subject of Vico’s New Science.8 Discussing a class of now dead metaphors very much of a kind with Wright’s anthropomorphic “metal fatigue”—for example, “the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening”—Vico comments that such metaphors arise out of circumstances in which the speaker “does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.”9 Shelley would not judge this process so harshly as Vico: witness his description of love. Playing on the Greek root of metaphor (metapherein ‘to transfer’),10 Shelley equates love with the process of metaphoric transference. 11 To return to Vico’s analysis: the metaphoric transference of which he speaks sets in motion a tropaic dialectic. “Giv[ing] names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas” is the source of other sorts of figures, especially metonymy. “Metonymy of agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were commoner than names for acts. Metonymy of subject for form and accident was due to inability to abstract forms and

Figures That Look Before and After

O

27

qualities from subjects. Certainly metonymy of cause for effect produced in each case a little fable, in which the cause was imagined as a woman clothed with her effects: ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, Pale Death.”12 Vico’s account could do with some unpacking. The authors of these “little fable[s], in which the cause was imagined as a woman clothed with her effects,” are “the first poets”—men. As Vico observes, “this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them.” 13 Least of all do such men understand that there is nothing beneath the imaginative fabric of what “was imagined as a woman clothed with her effects.”14 Why do “the first poets” fail to understand the true nature of their situation? It is their lot to repress desire. As Elizabeth Grosz notes, “In opposition to demand (and in accordance with need), desire is beyond conscious articulation, for it is barred or repressed from articulation. It is structured like a language, but is never spoken as such by the subject. Its production through repression is one of the constitutive marks of the unconscious, upon which it bestows its signifying effects.”15 Two effects of metonymy as Vico describes it are worthy of additional comment. The metonyms of “agent for act,” “subject for form and accident,” and “cause for effect” are also anthropomorphic projections— personifications that tend to reify those acts as their agents, those forms and accidents as their subjects, and those effects as their causes. Repeated often enough, the “little fable[s]” in question take on the status of originary mythology, and reification tends toward deification. Vico’s analysis, in fact, proceeds on just this understanding of the operation of metonymy, his axiom being “that man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe.”16 Shelley is fully aware of both the process and outcome of metonymic thinking: witness Cythna’s analysis of “Power” in The Revolt of Islam (1818). The mariners who rescue her from a craggy promontory in the middle of the ocean learn precisely the lesson that Vico teaches: “metonymy of cause for effect,” with its resultant “little fable,” is the means by which, under the aegis of repression prompting unconscious desire and conscious demand, “man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe.” In Cythna’s terms, which bear an uncanny resemblance to Coleridge’s terms in his subsequent evocation of the Brocken-Spectre in Constancy to an Ideal Object (1825), our ignorance leads us to anthropomorphize an unknowable first cause, of which humanity is an effect, and then to reify that anthropomorphism as the proper object of worship.

28

O

Shelley among Others

What is that Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world’s vast mirror shown. (SPW, ll. 3244–48)17 It is worth recalling, as Timothy Clark has done, that Shelley deems The Revolt of Islam “an experiment on the temper of the public mind” (SPW, 32), and that Shelley’s “notion that individual minds are only portions of ‘one mind’ . . . cannot, in sum, be divorced from Shelley’s politics.”18 What the “moon-struck Sophist” of Cythna’s account does is to reduce “Power,” the causal agent or pristine manifestation of that “one mind” to the terms of the individual mind—his own—thus giving rise to what Shelley terms “The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being” (SPW, 37). This turn of events Cythna, and Shelley along with her, seeks to redress in a poem intended to narrate “a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind” (SPW, 32). The phrase “signs for portions and classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts” figures the operation of the trope of metonymy in terms reminiscent of the foregoing discussion of reductive tendencies, although the description does not “name” the trope as such. The absence of the name metonymy may be an oversight, albeit an unlikely one, given Shelley’s familiarity with classical rhetoric.19 Another way to understand this pointedly curious omission is as an object lesson in the operation of metonymy as a self-consuming trope both figuring and repressing desire.20 It is an object lesson transposed only slightly in Roman Jakobson’s challenge to linguistic and literary studies of forty years ago, a challenge to move beyond studying “the metaphoric style of romantic poetry” and begin to study “the metonymic texture of realistic prose.”21 In making this challenge, Jakobson does not even begin to engage metonymy’s power to fabricate an ideology of the real,22 although he does hint at the presence of the repressed or implied metanarrative— that “realistic prose”—by means of which such fabrication occurs in the very act of denying the desire that gives rise to it. Shelley suggests that metonymy operates by self-concealment if not repression outright in his comments on what he views as a surplus of “moral,

Figures That Look Before and After

O

29

political and historical wisdom. . . . The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. . . . We want the creative faculty to imagine what we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest” (Poetry, 502). “Signs for portions and classes of thoughts” are the reified detritus of “integral thoughts,” responsible both for concealing the poetry that underwrites the “wisdom” in question and for lending themselves to “calculating processes.” Absent those with “the creative faculty to imagine what we know,” those with “the generous impulse to act that which we imagine”—unless “new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have thus been disorganized,” in other words—”language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.”23 Although it receives its fullest exposition in A Defence, Shelley’s idea of language existed long before 1821. For example, in the letter of 2 January 1812 to Elizabeth Hitchener, Shelley consoles her regarding the supposed defects of her writing style: “but words are only signs of ideas, and their arrangement only valuable as it is adapted adequately to express them. Your eloquence comes from the soul, it has the impassionateness of nature” (Letters, 1:215). 24

The Dyadic Dynamic of Language Metaphor and metonymy are inextricably linked in the dyadic dynamic of language. Metaphor is forward-looking, whereas metonymy is backwardlooking. Metaphor is the figure of love expressed; metonymy, the figure of desire repressed. Metaphor projects while metonymy reifies.25 Metaphor, motivated by the quest to apprehend truth and beauty, “outlines the crystallization of fantasy and rules the poeticalness of the discourse of love,” according to Kristeva; metonymy, motivated by the will to power, “controls the phantasmic narrative” in the service of a self-interested but repressed falsification of worldly order.26 Shelley himself hints at this dyadic dynamic repeatedly with the trope of looking forward and backward. Prometheus Unbound depicts its protagonist’s struggle to be true to his name and not to give in to the Epimethean impulse to analysis, establishment of cause-and-effect, assignment of blame, and self-vindication. In Prometheus Unbound,

30

O

Shelley among Others

the Spirit of the Hour describes an envisioned future likeness of his chariot as pulled by “The likeness of those winged steeds” that pull the actual chariot, “Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake” (III.iv.120–21). The amphisbaena of legend is a snake with heads at either end, a feature that allows it to move in either direction indifferently. Wherever it goes, whether under its own power or pulled by the Spirit’s chariot horses, it looks, by definition, both forward and backward at once.27 In “To a Sky-Lark,” the speaker contrasts the human condition to that of the bird, a natural, self-renewing poet, by stating that “We look before and after,/And pine for what is not” (Poetry, ll. 86–87). The gesture, deeply latent in the Prometheus myth,28 which deploys the forward-looking Prometheus against his backward-looking double and opposite, Epimetheus, gives way to the emblem of Janus, the two-(or four-) faced Roman god of gates and doorways. Speaking of the interplay of the metaphoric and metonymic impulses in the poetic imagination and expression of “indestructible order,” Shelley observes that “all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true” (482). In The Triumph of Life, it is Janus Quadrifons rather than Janus Bifrons that we see assume control of the horses that pull Life’s chariot, but it is definitely “A Janus-visaged Shadow [that] did assume/The guidance of that wonder-winged team” (ll. 94–95). There is virtually no way around the double bind of the metonymic impulse. 29 It is a natural consequence of the poetic impulse itself, just as “signs for portions or classes of thoughts” are a natural consequence of the prior creation of “pictures of integral thoughts.” 30 As Judith Chernaik describes it, that impulse, when unmediated and free of “bondage, enforced by circumstance and self-willed,” has a powerful humanizing effect. It “invests nature with a human impulse and form, creates of the natural world a human world, free from human limitation.” 31 But personification and reification may readily follow from such an act. In Shelley’s terms, “Every epoch under names more or less specious has deified its peculiar errors” (486–87). The problem is not so much with the deification as with the hegemony that follows it if there is not sufficient fresh metaphor to point up the provisional, contingent, and derivative status of the metonyms responsible for deification. If such a hegemony, speaking in the name and on the presumed authority of God, nature, truth, or the like interferes with the production of poetry—and such a hegemony might well do so, given the fact that all subsequent poetry points up the figurality of what has gone before—then there is no justification for the

Figures That Look Before and After

O

31

imaginative play that “invests nature with human form” and more generally speaks the world into coherence. To use Shelley’s cases in point: Dante and Milton “were both deeply penetrated with the antient religion of the civilized world” (499)—Christianity. And yet the poetry of The Divine Comedy (ca. 1310) and Paradise Lost (1667; 1671) is strong enough to overcome their respective deifications of error and transcend the respective historical situations in which both poems were composed, provided that readers of subsequent ages are imbued with “the poetical principle” (496) and recognize the operation of the like in these two epics. As Shelley observes in the Essay on Christianity, “Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the horrible legacy of accumulated vengeances . . . have not failed to attribute to the universal cause a character analogous to their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious being . . . resembles more or less its original in proportion to the perfectness of the mind on which it is impressed” (Prose, 206). “Perfectness of . . . mind,” as Shelley understands the concept, means on the one hand the active presence of “the poetical principle” that allows one to receive a perception or impression of God, create an account of that being, and assert the probability of its existence. But, on the other hand, such “perfectness” means the presence of a sufficiency of skeptical self-awareness to distinguish between such an impression and the conclusion that God exists as a material or spiritual object in external space, to distinguish between one’s account of God and God as a thing-in-itself, and to distinguish between the probability of God’s existence and the truth of that existence, 32 not to mention the promulgation of versions of “God’s truth” based on the presumed truth of that existence. In an age when “the poetical principle” is weak or is lacking, when the dogmatic account of reality overcomes the skeptical account of reality, the deification of error becomes the hegemony of error.33 Taking the fate of “The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ” during the Dark Ages as his case in point, Shelley argues, “It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despo-

32

O

Shelley among Others

tism and superstition. . . . Lust, fear, avarice, cruelty and fraud, characterised a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or institution” (Poetry, 495–96). Is Shelley’s case against established Christian orthodoxy a wishful history fabricated by a naive atheist, 34 or is it something more? The history of the Nicene, then the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (A.D. 325– 81), would seem to support Shelley’s position concerning the effect of “despotism and superstition” acting in the name of orthodoxy on “the poetical principle” seeking expression as heterodoxy. The heterodoxy in this instance is Gnosticism. Discussing the first tenet of the creed (“I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”), Elaine Pagels notes that this tenet served “to exclude the followers of the heretic Marcion (ca. 140) from orthodox churches” because of its insistence that the creator-God of Genesis and the loving, forgiving God of the New Testament are one and the same. Moreover, by foregrounding the attribute of fatherhood, this tenet provided prima facie justification for a patriarchal hierarchy of church discipline and authority—again, to the end of excluding heterodox alternatives such as those of Marcion and his followers. “Marcion had, in fact, scandalized his orthodox contemporaries by appointing women on an equal basis with men as priests and bishops.”35 Pagels demonstrates how the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed at once extinguishes heterodox, heteroglossic dissent and establishes the patriarchal orthodoxy of established church governance and interpretive authority. But the argument for patriarchal orthodoxy is just that—an argument, an attempt to marginalize what Pagels calls “the divine Mother.”36 The God of the Gnostic gospels declares itself, in the Trimorphic Protennoia, “androgynous [I am both Mother and] Father since [I copulate] with myself [and with those who love] me, [and] it is through me alone that all [stands firm]” (XIII, 1: 45, 2– 6).37 The source of the material “all” but not identical to it, such a God exists not as being but rather as becoming. One of the consequences of such an existence is that the God in question may be reified but not totalized. In Allogenes the situation is explained thusly: “Now he [i.e., God] is reified insofar as he exists in that he either exists and becomes, or acts and knows, although he lives without Mind or Life or Existence or NonExistence, incomprehensibly. And he is reified among his attributes. . . . He is indeed better than the Totalities in his privation and unknowability, that is, the non-being Existence, since he is endowed with silence or

Figures That Look Before and After

O

33

stillness lest he be diminished by those who are not diminished” (XI, 3: 61, 24–62).38 According to the relational logic of metaphor,39 the God of the Gnostic gospels is both father and mother, the principle underlying the rest of the material “all,” without being totalized by the “all” or reduced to its terms. But when metaphor gives way to metonymy, mobilized in the cause of so-called orthodoxy, the relational logic of metaphor gives way to the part-for-whole substitutive logic of metonymy,40 with the result that God does appear to be reduced to and totalized as the patriarchal, artisanal creator of the material world, and with the corollary result that the full range of women’s roles in the material world is marginalized and subordinated to men’s roles.41

Life under and beyond “Natural Law” The Mask of Anarchy (1819; 1832), certainly “the longest and most complex of the exoteric [political] poems,” if not necessarily also “the most ambivalent,”42 contains Shelley’s most succinct characterization of what it is like to live in a world “naturalized” by means of a metonymically driven catechism that subjects everyone in that world—the poem’s speaker no less than the oppressed masses of which he speaks—to its powerful influence. 43 The speaker’s dream vision is one of metonyms of agent for act (or cause for effect). “Murder,” for example, “had a mask like Castlereagh,” while “Fraud” wears “an ermined gown” like Lord Eldon, and “Hypocrisy,” clothes itself “with the Bible” like Viscount Sidmouth (Poetry, ll. 5–6, 14–15, 22–24). 44 There is even a dark echo of Cythna’s analysis of the tendency to “give/ A human Heart to what ye cannot know,” replete with its ironic echo of Wordsworth. Murder-Castlereagh is followed by seven fat bloodhounds symbolizing the seven nations besides Great Britain that agreed, in 1815, “to postpone final abolition of the slave trade” (Poetry, 301n.). The condition of these symbolic dogs is the result of Murder-Castlereagh’s feeding regime: “He tossed them human hearts to chew/Which from his wide cloak he drew” (Poetry, ll. 8–13). The metonymic prime mover responsible for this reign of oppression is Anarchy himself who, on his brow, bears the legend “I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!” (Poetry, l. 37). The joke here, if it can be so characterized, is complex. To begin with, the legend rings hyperbolic changes on a similar

34

O

Shelley among Others

legend—that at the base of the statue in “Ozymandias” (1818): “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair” (ll. 10–11).45 The irony of the latter inscription and its relative understatement—”King of Kings” may mean ‘God’ but does not name one ‘God’ as such”—are reduced to bathos by Anarchy’s decision “to name [his putative] names.” Then, there is matter of how Anarchy, a satirization of kingship worthy in the medium of political poetry of comparison with similar productions of the Cruikshanks in the medium of political cartooning,46 is himself deluded into “naturalizing” his contingently metonymic status. The king of England is nominally God’s vice-gerent, that is, one who acts (governs) in God’s name, not God himself. Anarchy succumbs to the delusion fostered by metonymy of agent for act, however. The joke is compounded by the fact that England in 1819 was in fact not even ruled by its king, the aged and incompetent George III, but rather by his son, the future George IV, acting as prince regent—a place taker for a place taker, in other words, a second-order metonym, as it were. In “The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment” (1818– 20?), arguably addressed to the prince regent close to the time of his accession to the throne, Shelley makes it clear that he does not believe that the king of England is God’s vice-gerent, whether vice-gerency is held to be nominal, virtual, or actual. The speaker observes that a monarch cultivates “The art of employing the power entrusted to [him] for the benefit of those who entrust it,” and that speaker subsequently argues, fully aware that doing so will cause him to be lumped with “insidious traitors who devise [the] ruin” of monarchs, that such rulers “are elevated above the rest of mankind simply to prevent their tearing one another to pieces, and for the purpose of putting into effect all practical equality and justice” (Prose, 195). The “place” that the regent “takes,” as Stuart Curran notes, is “the regent’s chair, the emblem [and metonym] of constitutional monarchy.”47 Anarchy is “LAW” only to the extent that he governs in conformity with the English Constitution. As prince regent, George IV, in allowing the “Peterloo Massacre” to take place and being persuaded by his advisors to express “approbation . . . of the execrable enormities at Manchester” (Letters, 2:147–48), implicitly transgressed the principles of that constitution—for example, chapter 40 of the Magna Carta, which prohibits the sale, refusal, or delay of justice, and chapter 45, which specifies that officers of justice, such as justices, sheriffs, and bailiffs, must be law-abiding men. If, as Behrendt claims,

Figures That Look Before and After

O

35

“The Mask presents both a program (to one audience) and a warning (to another),”48 it tenders the latter on the basis of solid legal precedent and principle as well as staunch humanitarianism. Anarchy’s regime is sustained by the metonymic catechism repeated, with variations, by those who stand to benefit from discerning no distinction between such metonymy and the “natural” order. These include “The hired Murderers, who did sing/’Thou art God, and Law, and King,’” as well as the “Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,” who whisper, “Thou art Law, and God,” and a frenzied tutti, crying, “Thou art King, and God, and Lord” (Poetry, ll. 60–61, 66–69, 71). As the example of the lawyers and priests suggests, Anarchy is viewed as the first cause of the respective discursive spaces they inhabit, speaking a Bakhtinian common language that extinguishes by its volume and universality any potential for heteroglossic dissent. As such, he is the perfect exemplification of the sort of metonymic (and most definitely anthropomorphic) projection glimpsed in Cythna’s analysis of the “moonstruck sophist” who worshiped his self-projection in the delusion that it was God. The transformation of “Law” in the first instance to “Lord” in the last is suggestive of the process and result of such projection.49 Under ideal conditions such as those glimpsed briefly at the end of act III of Prometheus Unbound, a humanity that is “Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,/Exempt from awe, worship, [and] degree” is able to refrain from the temptation to perpetrate the sort of self-projection that Shelley views as responsible for oppression of the sort glimpsed in The Mask. Humanity, “Pinnacled dim in the intense inane” (Poetry, III.iv.194–204), is able to let the Power that vouchsafes that silence and solitude are not vacancy, the Power that, in Gnostic terms, is responsible for the fact “that all [stands firm],” operate intensely even though it is subject neither to human understanding nor to human projection and reduction. In so doing, humanity relearns the lesson that Shelley, after Tacitus, ascribes in the Essay on Christianity to the Jews. “The Universal Being can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness ends idolatry and anthropomorphism begin” (Prose, 202). Despite the oppressive opening of The Mask, Shelley believes that it is a propitious moment for setting in motion the events that may lead to a state of affairs such as that depicted in act III of Prometheus Unbound. It is not coincidental that the two speeches that, respectively, halt Anarchy’s procession and inaugurate the events leading to his demise, and instruct Englishmen

36

O

Shelley among Others

on their proper rights and duties beyond the present moment, are female speech, or at the very least nurturing, androgynous, antipatriarchal speech with a strong female component.50 It is also speech that, by virtue of its gender identity, resists metonymic reduction and reification.51 The first speaker is “a maniac maid” who is named “Hope” but actually “looked more like Despair” (Poetry, ll. 86–88). Is she Hope or is she Despair? She is both and neither, a compound of a contingent human identity (Despair) and a transcendent human identity (Hope), not reducible to either. The child of “Father Time” (l. 90) and Mother Earth (ll. 139–46), Hope-Despair is, like Love, “A very powerful spirit . . . and spirits . . . are halfway between God and man.”52 As the agent of such antithetical categories, Hope-Despair marks the return of the free play of language, in the form of “Menippean discourse.” As understood by Bakhtin and Kristeva after him, such discourse “is both comic and tragic, or rather, it is serious in the same sense that it is carnivalesque; through the status of its worlds, it is politically and socially disturbing. It frees speech from historical constraints, and this entails a thorough boldness in philosophical and imaginative inventiveness.” 53 The power of Hope-Despair is as real as it is paradoxical. 54 The last of her line, her Father Time standing “idiot-like . . . /Fumbling with his palsied hands” (ll. 92–93), Hope-Despair exclaims “Misery, oh, Misery!” evoking the refrain that signals the deception, violation, and betrayal (in the name of love) or Martha Ray in The Thorn (WPW, ll. 65, 76, 191, etc.). Despite her plight, however, Hope-Despair seeks no retribution and refuses to confront and vilify Anarchy. To do either would be to enter into dialogue with the aggressor, and doing so would entail identifying with the aggressor by speaking the very metonymic language that reifies him and establishes his power, much as those who seek preferment from Anarchy must speak his language. Instead, Hope-Despair lies down in the path of the processional, “Expecting, with a patient eye,/Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy” (Poetry, ll. 100–101). The decision to lay down and await Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy silently rather than to speak their language is a fateful one. Like Wordsworth’s Martha Ray, Hope-Despair has been deceived, violated (symbolically, at least), and betrayed in the name of love—God’s love for his children or a monarch’s love for his subjects, for example55—but her capacity to love has not been extinguished, as it has been in Murder, Fraud, Anarchy, and their followers. Were she to speak the metonymic language of Anarchy and his

Figures That Look Before and After

O

37

crew, Hope-Despair would experience the extinction of love and the dry-asdust sensation of being no more than the sum of one’s material parts and one’s temporal power that Anarchy and his followers experience. Her decision not to speak that language—a decision that is ratified, it might be noted, by Earth’s injunction to the English to “Stand . . . calm and resolute,/Like a forest close and mute” (ll. 319–20), 56 should troops in the hire of Anarchy or some successor ever attack again—holds open the possibility that the reign of lawship, lordship, and a privileged common language may be followed by a rebirth and reign of love and heterology, as it indeed is in the poem. Indeed, such a rebirth and reign depend absolutely on the decision not to continue acknowledging that common language and those who control it as the standards against which all heterological variants and speakers are measured and found wanting— for example, by not continuing to petition a parliament of gentleman property owners elected by the same for universal or extended male suffrage, only to have those petitions rejected because they are not written in the gentlemanly English of the upper classes.57 A mist arises, hinting at the corrupt insubstantiality of all temporal power, up to and including such mistaken deifications of temporal authority as Jupiter Pluvius. 58 The mist turns to a storm, implying that the transition from lawship and lordship to love is tempestuous if not cathartic outright. Then a knightly “Shape arrayed in mail” and “helm” (Poetry, ll. 110–14) appears. The “Shape” wears a heraldric device: “a planet like the Morning’s” (l. 115)— Venus, that is—both the name of the morning star and, in the form of Venus Genetrix, the generative principle behind all living things.59 This knightly figure—and it is a figure in several senses of the term, as revealed by the onlookers who “knew the presence there,/And looked,— but all was empty air” (ll. 120–21)—is at once a reminiscence of Spenser’s Redcross Knight, whose knightly quest is undertaken to right the wrongs of Faerieland (England) and in so doing to prove himself worthy of its queen (Elizabeth I),60 and also a propadeutic against concealed figurality that seizes interpretive authority and rules in the name of a higher truth to which it presumably has exclusive access. In its aerial passage and its effect of judging between the quick and the dead, the figure is also a type of the merkavah, or Chariot of Judgment, glimpsed in Revelations, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and elsewhere, including Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (1822).61 Hope-Despair lives, sheds the contingent half of her human identity, and becomes transcendent “Hope

38

O

Shelley among Others

that maiden most serene/ . . . walking with a quiet mien” (ll. 128–29). Anarchy, for his part, “Lay dead upon the earth” (l. 131), about to be made one with it, as are the murderers in his train, whom “The Horse of Death” “grind[s]/ To dust” beneath “his hoofs” (ll. 132–34). No longer obscured by a delusory materialism or silenced by the coercion of illegitimate authority, the female generative principle shines out and speaks out as though it were the vision and voice of “Mother Earth” (ll. 135–42). The speech is emphatically figurative rather than descriptive or prescriptive—”as if” (ll. 139, 146) rather than “is” or “ought.” It is also “an accent understood” (l. 145)—poetry accessible to and capable of inspiring the object of its address: “Men of England” (l. 147). To say that the speech is poetry may seem to be stating the obvious since, by virtue of its emplacement within a poem, the speech is so framed. But the “accent understood” subverts the poetic frame that precedes it by inverting the rhythm of that frame. Mother Earth’s as-if speech shifts from the predominantly iambic rhythms of the frame to the predominantly trochaic rhythms evident in her address to “Men of England, heirs of Glory” (l. 147) and her repeated exhortation to “Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number” (ll. 151–52, 368–69). Her as-if speech turns the world upside down, bringing to pass the English establishment’s worst fears regarding the effect of revolution on established order. The subversive nature of Earth’s as-if discourse is underscored by her characterization of her audience as “Heroes of unwritten story” (l. 148). The written story—the “official version” of affairs—is the one canonized as The Book by church fathers, the story promulgated as statute law by the Parliament and the king’s ministers and executed by the latter, the story whose design of which supports the hegemony of the ruling classes, the story engraved (and reified) on Anarchy’s brow. But the “unwritten” is, if anything, at the same time more nearly true and substantial than the written alternative. In Earth’s own as-if words, the English laboring classes are not the demotic manifestation of some Platonic ideal, not A shadow soon to pass away, A superstition, and a name Echoing in the cave of fame. (ll. 214–16) Rather, those laboring classes are, in a very literal sense, substantial, because they produce the material goods that should satisfy their own material wants but instead, owing to the exercise of illegitimate authority by the few,

Figures That Look Before and After

O

39

make possible the accumulation of wealth and exercise of power by the few at the expense of the many. The truth of the matter is that the laboring classes should be both the source and recipients of “clothes, and fire, and food/For the trampled multitude” (ll. 221–22). But the illegitimate exercise of power by the few causes England to be one of the “countries that are [not] free” (l. 223), one of the countries in which “starvation” (l. 224) can and does occur. The “unwritten story” is, in fact, that the “Men of England” are, like the redeemed humanity of Prometheus Unbound, “Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed,” yet at the same time the proper metaphors for and agents of the operation of belief, sovereignty, and law among themselves. Earth as-if says as much. She metaphorizes Englishmen as “Justice” (Law) superior to the justice for hire available in English courts, which protect the property rights of the rich at the expense of the human rights of the poor (ll. 230–33). She metaphorizes Englishmen as “Wisdom” (Holy Law) superior to any dispensed by the priesthood, which compels doctrinal conformity with the threat of damnation for the disobedient (ll. 234– 37). Earth metaphorizes Englishmen as “Peace” (Sovereign Law) superior to that of the divine-right monarchs who banded together in the attempt to quash the French Revolution (ll. 238–41). In fact, she stops just short of metaphorizing Englishmen as God, to the extent that God may be likened to the love that is the originating principle of the virtuous human action in the world,62 including that of resisting the tyranny of illicit social and political power. Englishmen (and, more generally, the masses) are the embodiment of “Love,” the principle that causes the “rich,” like him following Christ, [to] Give their substance to the free And through the world to follow thee Or turn their wealth to arms and make War for thy beloved sake On wealth, and war, and fraud—whence they Drew the power which is their prey. (ll. 247–53) It is no coincidence that Plato—and, through him, Socrates—and Jesus come in for mention at this juncture, both are exemplars of unmediated (and undying) speech, uttered in the throes of poetic inspiration and written

40

O

Shelley among Others

down by others. Properly understood, the process of inspired utterance and appropriate memorialization would serve as a propadeutic against those who would practice reification in the name of some “official history” or “natural” established authority.63

Metonymy and the Process of Reification Perhaps the best synopsis of the process of repetition leading to reification (and deification) in Shelley’s poetry occurs in Asia’s account of the consequences of the Promethean donation in Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus, the archetypal poet, gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the Universe; And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven Which shook but fell not; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song, And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound; And human hands first mimicked and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own The human form, till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold and perish. (II.iv.72–84) In Asia’s account, language comes to humanity as forward-looking (Promethean), thought-creating poetry that renders the universe coherent and intelligible as a function of “measure,” both in the sense of mensuration and in the sense of the basic, recurrent foot of poetic meter. Unconstrained and undetermined, such “measure” is capable of taking as its object nothing less than “the Universe,” which in this context carries not only the standard denotation of the aggregate of all existing things, but also the pun sense of a world in which there are no hard-andfast distinctions between subject and object, no mediations between speaker and hearer. The universe is a unitive verse—one poem of plenitude, in other words. The experience of such plenitude and the knowledge resulting from that experience (“Science”) are almost enough to prevent the backward-looking

Figures That Look Before and After

O

41

(Epimethean) deification of error and the establishment of power relations —almost enough, but not quite. Thus “the thrones of Earth and Heaven/ . . . shook but fell not.” Shortcomings notwithstanding, the primal poetry resulting from the Promethean donation has the potential to alleviate contingent mortal concerns and make those who speak and hear such verses “Godlike.” But something happens to vitiate poetry’s potential to inaugurate self-transcendence. Acting on the preceding deification of error, an unspecified number of “human hands”—not coincidentally, the operative figure here is metonymy—undertake to metonymize the metaphors that fostered the deification in the first place. Looking before and after, the balance of the Promethean and the Epimethean, gives way to the triumph of the latter over the former. Once “marble grew divine,” the human beings who had possessed the potential of an Orpheus or an Amphion to move those stones with “clear billows of sweet sound” were reduced to worshiping those stones. Here as elsewhere—most notably in The Cenci—there is a deeply latent pun operating. Given the primacy of male gods in the Greek pantheon (and the primacy of the patriarch of those gods, Jupiter, among the male gods), the intended worship of a patriarchal celestial order that supposedly underwrites a patriarchal social order is in fact the worship of a petriarchal celestial order that underwrites a petriarchal social order. As with Blake so with Shelley: the world oppressed by an established religion is a stony place (BPW, 2:1, 3:26),64 and the opening scene of Prometheus Unbound, no matter how well it may be said to comport with the essentials of the Prometheus myth or the example of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, is in an important sense eloquent testimony to what happens when, by dint of metonymy, deified errors are reified as stone figures. The failure to acknowledge the responsibility of the human imagination for inaugurating this dialectical process of tropaic decline and delusion results in wholesale destruction. The established religion and marble statuary that stand between the individual and the proper object of human imagination interdict access to that object—indeed they fetishize it and prescribe death as the remedy for attempting to seek access. Moreover, the effect on women of such a religion, with its male priesthood and its phallic statuary depicting a predominantly male pantheon, is to disempower and silence the female speech that is so important to the ongoing balance of the metaphoric and the metonymic. Thus the silenced “mothers, gazing dr[i]nk the love men see/

42

O

Shelley among Others

Reflected in their race”—imbibe love, that is, but are unable to give it, either in the form of female speech or the love drink of the female breast, milk. Deprived of female speech, the mothers are deluded as to the nature and provenance of the love they imbibe, with the result that death and destruction, not love and kindness, follow. As votives of the patriarchy/ petriarchy, the women “drink” the sort of perverted “love” offered by worshipers of the sort that Prometheus characterizes as the votaries of Jupiter, slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise, With toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts. (Poetry, I.6–8) The “mothers, gazing,” drink blood, not milk, in other words, and as such they approach the condition of the Maenads that Panthea presents as the type of debased worship. Panthea likens the (markedly male) pursuit of “truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy,” manifested as “oracular vapour,” by “lonely men . . . wandering in their youth” (II.iii.4–6) to drinking sacramental blood That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain To deep intoxication, and uplift Like Maenads who cry aloud, Evoe! Evoe! The voice which is contagion to the world. (II.iii.7–10)65 Under the circumstances, what is there to do but “behold, and perish”? The answer, as Asia is quick to understand, is that the Promethean donation is a gift the value of which inheres in its exemplary nature, not in the particular power or efficacy of the words per se. It is, in other words, not the specific “speech [that] created thought” that is important, but the idea that creative speech—the “vitally metaphorical” language of poetry—is something that others may also give and should give regularly if the world is to avoid succumbing the delusory throes of patriarchy/petriarchy. The Promethean donation is not words that are material “things” or private property, but a gesture premised on the notions that poetic speech creates thought and that the occasion of poetic speech should serve as an invitation for others to acknowledge poetic speech, both as a gift we all possess and as a gift that is ours to give one another. Asia learns the true significance of the Promethean donation. Before and during her synopsis, she thinks of prophetic language—that of Demogorgon no less than that of Prometheus—as a proprietary privilege. She ap-

Figures That Look Before and After

O

43

proaches Demogorgon with the misconception that some truths are exclusively in his control, to tell or not to tell as he chooses. As much, at least, is implied in her initial question, “What canst thou tell?” (II.iv.8). By the end of her interview, Asia has concluded, at least in part because she has fathomed the fuller significance of the Promethean donation, that “of such truths” as Demogorgon is able to relate to her, “Each [heart] to itself must be the oracle” (II.iv.121–23).66 “Each [heart] to itself must be the oracle” according to its abilities, and its oracular language may in turn be appropriated by each heart according to its needs. This corollary of the Promethean donation is phrased in this way intentionally to echo Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. In the final analysis, it is no coincidence that Shelley’s prose comments on the language of poetry and the workings of power relations and ideology, as well as his poetic renderings of the workings of language, power relations, and ideology, anticipate important aspects of Marxism—not only Marxist ideological criticism, 67 but Marxist literary theory as well. Speaking against a common poststructuralist view of “Shelley’s works . . . be[ing] chiefly or solely about themselves,” Terence Allan Hoagwood notes that “The issues with which Shelley characteristically engages himself entail society more than self, ideology more than psychology, and political argument rather than narcissistic projection.”68 But to hold Hoagwood’s position is not to deny the importance of self-referentiality for Shelley’s poetical and critical undertaking; rather, it is to redescribe that selfreferentiality and to relocate it. Given Shelley’s credo, as expressed in the Treatise on Morals, of “strict skepticism concerning all assertions” (Prose, 185), self-referentiality bespeaks artistic and political self-awareness concerning the status and effect of one’s discourse rather than narcissistic preoccupation and projection. The focus of the awareness is not so much on the writing (or speaking) subject as on the way that language creates that subject and the language that that subject produces in turn. As Shelley conceives it, the poetics of language is ineluctably and inseparably bound up with the politics of language. Understood from Shelley’s perspective, the language of poetry calls attention to itself through its operation on the principle of defamiliarization, which is a disruption of both aesthetic and political “business as usual.” If the everyday norm is that of the fully clothed (metonymized, reified; cf. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus with its materialist Kleiderphilosophie), fully conscious individual, poetry subverts that norm: it “strips the veil of familiarity

44

O

Shelley among Others

from the world and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Poetry, 505). According to Victor Shklovsky, “defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found. . . . An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object—it creates a ‘vision’ of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.”69 Defamiliarization attains its end by social and/or political means— chief among these, the refusal to participate in the annihilation of the poetic imagination by accepting without question “the recurrence of impressions blunted by repetition.” Such a refusal has clearly revolutionary implications, as Shelley himself is quick to note. The poetic imagination, according to him, “is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation” (Poetry, 493). Such “renovation,” it should be added, once set in motion, is destined to fulfill “the circle of its revolution” (495). In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, the refusal entails embracing the authenticity of poetry as a powerful expression of “heterology” and using that “heterology” to call into question the “correctness” of “common language.” The category of common language is the theoretical expression of historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, the expression of the centripetal forces of the language. The common language is never given but in fact always ordained, and at every moment of the life of the language it is opposed to genuine heterology. But at the same time, it is perfectly real as a force that overcomes this heterology; imposes certain limits on it; guarantees a maximum of mutual comprehension; and becomes crystallized in the real, though relative, unity of spoken (daily) and literary language, of “correct language.”70 Bearing in mind this redescription and relocation of self-referentiality, one might well come to the conclusion, as I have, that a self-referential awareness of language—more particularly, figurative language—considered in its social, political, ideological, and aesthetic contexts, is both the subject and project of much of Shelley’s poetry as well as of his philosophical prose.71 Such language is the subject of Shelley’s poetry in the sense that many of his poems present the drama of the individual mind making use of figuration and either seeking to understand or failing to understand how figurative language, as one case in point of the deployed, articulate form systems that one

Figures That Look Before and After

O

45

encounters in the world, operates to create its effects. Thus Shelley engages the philosophical question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” But he takes the question the next two steps of the way: “How does that something signify, and what does that something signify?” Throughout much of Shelley’s mature poetry, from Alastor onward, the drama is that of the individual mind, usually either nescient or mistaken—sometimes temporarily (and comedically), sometimes irrevocably (and tragically)—in its quest to apprehend the manner in which figurative language operates to create the intelligibility inherent in a deployed, articulate form system. When the nescience or error is temporary, as in Prometheus Unbound, the individual mind that overcomes it gains an understanding of how language operates and creates its effects, and what knowledge figurative language properly disposed (and properly understood) may open the way to. But that visionary drama, enacted as it is beyond the realm of historical time, is the exception rather than the rule. In a historically situated play such as The Cenci, it is only as Beatrice and her stepmother are about to be executed for murdering the count—to step out of historical time, as it were—that Beatrice gets a glimpse of how the metonymic “common language” of patriarchal authority has constructed her, and how the situation might have been otherwise if she had refused that language. And by the time of Hellas (1821), Shelley has abandoned any illusion of moving beyond historical time, holding instead to the proposition that it, like nature and like poetic language itself, follows an ongoing cycle of destruction and renovation that gives rise in their turns to Ottoman tyrannies and Greek golden ages, ages of uninspired prose and reason and ages of inspired poetry alike, and prevents the hegemony of either of the two opposed terms in any given dyad. But a darker strain in Shelley’s poetry arose no later than the composition of Julian and Maddalo (1819), which is roughly contemporaneous with Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. This strain arose out of the fear that the individual is not only situated, irrevocably and ineluctably, in historical time and its ideologies, but is further situated within the self and its idioglossia, thus making the goal of attaining a true and meaningful heterology a delusion. Toward the end of Shelley’s poetic career, in poems such as The Sensitive-Plant (1820), Adonais (1821), and The Triumph, Shelley returns to contemplate some of the implications of his idea of language in particular and of his idea of articulate form systems in general. The most powerful of these implications arises from the intimation that human existence itself, once

46

O

Shelley among Others

thought to participate in the “vitally metaphorical,” approaches the condition of an ideology for the very reasons that life is a metonym for an eternity, and that the idioglossically languaged self is a metonym for the collectivity known as the heteroglossic other. Such an intimation casts doubt not only on whether the originary truths of eternity are inaccessible even to the strongest metaphors that can be framed by living poets, but also on whether what is usually taken to be inspired discourse is any more than a form of circularity or solipsism that is accepted and privileged by a certain consensus. Shelley represents his enterprise, much as Blake does in undertaking to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land,72 as one that can do without a good deal of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought—if not that of the philosophers of and commentators on language discussed in the introduction, then at least that of “reasoners and mechanists,” by whom Shelley apparently intends Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (500 and n.). Moreover, reprising Peacock’s examplars of Enlightenment thought verbatim (and thereby contradicting his own deep esteem for Rousseau’s thought and work), Shelley allows that “The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind.” But “the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived,” Shelley argues, would have been substantially the same. Far greater the loss, according to Shelley, “if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed . . . if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place” (502 and n.). But as the preceding examples, especially those of Hebrew poetry and Greek literature, suggest, the enterprise could not do without a golden age. Although Blake and Shelley may differ on what age and culture properly deserved the designation “golden,” they both agree on the means of moving back toward that age: language, the rough basement that must be transformed into the foundation of any worthwhile cultural renovation. Although there may appear to be little difference between this view of the goal of poetry and Bacon’s view of the goal of an Adamic language, the difference is great, and it underwrites much of what Shelley finds to quarrel with in his culture. The end of Baconian knowledge proposed in The Advancement of Learning (1605) is power; its means, metonymic.73 To speak the effect is to

Figures That Look Before and After

O

47

imply the cause; to speak the act is to imply the agent. The movement from effect or act to cause or agent establishes the dominion of the speaker as allpowerful, while the spoken and that to which the spoken refers become the subjects of the speaker. Bacon’s rather unpleasant agenda of his sexualized project for making “Nature,” a feminized metonym, yield up her secrets is a goal in point.74 The end of Shelleyan knowledge is love; its means, metaphoric. To speak the effect implies no cause; to speak the act implies no agent. Rather, such loving speech is an attempt to inscribe itself as well as its object within a plenum of relationality created by a first cause as good as it is unknowable. Dominion in such a case is shared dominion—not so much full equality as shared responsibility for making the life-world a place of rich if contingent experience, a place in which language attains the status predicated of it in the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound: that of “a perpetual Orphic song” (Poetry, IV.415) of creative affirmation and affirmative creation. As with any worthy goal, the difficulty of attainment testifies to the value of what one hopes to attain, and the failure of attainment does not gainsay that value, but rather shifts the focus to the drama of the processual struggle itself.

48

O

Shelley among Others

O

Chapter 2 Nothing Beside Remains

Revision and Reading Tests Shelley views the object world as one of ceaseless change and evanescence. In “Mutability,” he states that “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon,” passing to another place or state, as clouds do. And he warns against the “dream [that] has power to poison sleep” and the “wandering thought [that] pollutes the day” (Poetry, ll. 1, 9–10)—against positing an alternative permanence, in other words. Shelley’s conclusion—”Nought may endure but Mutability” (l. 16)—would seem to be an affirmation of the proposition “that changing and opposing forces govern the expression of our experience,” 1 were it not that the triumph of mutability is proclaimed in durable language that is not what it says. The relationship between this language and its message is ironic— the presence of the words themselves gainsays the message of processually ordained absence. Indeed, this relationship illustrates a “fundamental Shelleyan perception[s],” according to which “every ‘relation’ of thought or words in the poetry ‘develops out of and turns into another’ at once.”2 What remains, in other words, is a deployed, articulated, and contrastive structure of formal relations that is subject to a broad range of transformational or revisionary strategies, ranging from complete renovation (by “new poets”) to reduction and reification (by those who are “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse”). The line “Nought may endure but Mutability” serves as a “reading test” of sorts, an entrance examination for a given interpretive community.3 The “new poets” who note the ironic tension between the line’s message and its

O

49 Nothing Beside Remains

O

49

situation of mutable transcendence are empowered to articulate the poetic response that continues the cyclical renovation of poetry and the language that frames it. Those who are “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” fail to note the ironic tension between message and situation and, taking the line as summative, are prone to what Shelley sees as the failed eighteenth-century philosophical humanism that he associates with “The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples” (Poetry, 502). Shelley’s revisionary strategies optimally result in the sort of metaleptic transformations glimpsed in Adonais. Early on, however, as Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi notes, “Shelley’s struggle to reach the core point where the ‘influence’ streaming from the primary relationship is ‘durable in its original purity and force’ [Poetry, 504] puts him, as ‘Alastor’ records, at constant risk of abjection in the face of the maternal experienced as dissolution, death, nonbeing. It is a risk he continues to take, nonetheless, for the sake of a renewed subjectivity to be found where the maternal and the linguistic co-exist.”4 But even an optimal effect bespeaks a process that confirms Tilottama Rajan’s view of romantic literature in general (and Shelley’s poetry in particular) “as a literature involved in the restless process of self-examination, and in search of a model of discourse which accommodates rather than simplifies its ambivalence towards the inherited equation of art with idealization.”5 The success or failure of a given revisionary strategy depends on how one views the poetry—or any other deployed, articulate, and contrastive structure of formal relations—that one encounters. Does it exist solely for the purpose of an imaginative or experiential encounter, or is it there to be mastered? Does it partake of an autonomous existence, or does it exist as the projected sum of one’s needs or desires? Does it have a “life” of its own, or does it exist only as the object of the perceiving subject? To take the last of these questions first: Shelley is clearly of the mind that there is no object independent of the perceiving subject. Quoting Milton’s Satan to make his point, Shelley proclaims, “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” (505). 6 The cautionary tale embedded in the Miltonic allusion suggests that any deployed, articulate, and contrastive structure of formal relations, linguistic or otherwise, is there to be encountered but not mastered—not to be willfully taken, because

50

O

Shelley among Others

to do so is to mistake, to violate the self-present potential of the object that will be seen to exist by the perceiving subject able to make a heaven of hell and not the opposite. Properly encountered and perceived—by the poet, for example—such an object is continually renovated. In Hogle’s words, “The poet never finds that an object is ‘killed’ by the signifying of it, only reconstituted in the passage from one state of awareness to another, and he certainly never proposes a prenatal existence or nihilistic abyss as the most basic referent of images.”7 The reconstitution discussed by Hogle is made difficult by the fact that, although there is not a readily accessible “prenatal existence or nihilistic abyss as the most basic referent of images,” and although the historical context never serves to replace these as “the most basic referent,” the “prenatal existence or nihilistic abyss,” no less than the historical context, furnishes highly seductive contingent referents. Used carelessly and premeditatedly by those who aspire to power and authority beyond their proper scope and competence, such referents soon appear to shed their contingent status and to become the reified standard against which other images and other referents are evaluated. In “Ozymandias,” the “traveller from an antique land” reports that the pedestal of shattered statue of Ozymandias (Rameses II) bears the following legend: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (ll, 1, 10–11). The legend was ostensibly intended by the statue’s historical subject to elicit the viewer’s awe while pondering the pharaoh’s giant effigy and contemplating his stupendous achievements as a ruler—achievements such as the erection of the pyramids that one might arguably despair of ever equaling thereafter, not even to mention equaling Rameses II’s exalted place in the afterlife. The reason for such despair is not far to seek: while the pharaohs generally were esteemed as gods, Rameses II grounds his authority in a basic referent that makes him into not a god but God himself, usurping the pride of place that his monotheistic predecessor, Akhenaton (1375–1358 B.C.), had reserved to a supreme being alone. It is difficult, given the nearly sixty-seven-year reign of Rameses II (1292–1225 B.C.)— a reign that must have made him seem eternal to subjects whose average life-span that reign more than doubled—to ignore the similarities between Shelley’s phraseology and that of the conclusion of Handel’s Messiah (“The King of Kings, and Lord of Hosts/And he shall reign forever and ever”) in his rendering of the statue’s legend. And if not The Messiah, then one of the

Nothing Beside Remains

O

51

coronation anthems: Handel wrote a number of these for the two Hanover kings who preceded the infirm incumbent, George III. Notwithstanding its supposed intent, however, the legend may be read as subverting that intent. If this greatest and most powerful of all the pharaohs can be reduced to a poor sum of “lifeless things”—such petrific and reified detritus as “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone. . . . [a] shattered visage,” comprising a “colossal Wreck” (ll. 2–4, 13)—then all who would aspire to temporal power and ground their claims for such power on some transcendent authority would do well to despair. Save for the disembodied wreckage of statuary and the disempowered pharaoh that that statuary was intended to immortalize, there are only the words on the pedestal, which comment ironically on all such aspirations to temporal power. In the words of the traveler, “Nothing beside remains” (l. 12). By means of a cunning use of allegory—the “traveller from an antique land” is a type of the knight-errant of such romances as The Faery Queene, whose adventures allegorize the current events of the author’s own time—Shelley turns Rameses’ self-characterization as God, his “abuse of metaphor to a literal purpose,” and the ironic status of the legend on the pedestal into a cautionary tale for God’s supposedly anointed kings in Shelley’s own time as well. The comparison is obscured by the fact that Shelley uses the Pharaoh’s Greek rather than his Egyptian name. The former obscures the fact that each Pharaoh (e.g., Rameses II), like each monarch of Europe (e.g., George III) was known to his own people by both his given name and his numerical place as bearer of that name. Despite its near effacement, however, the implied comparison points to at least three important parallels between the reigns of George III and Rameses II that drive the sonnet to its moral. Like the second Rameses, who reigned for nearly sixty-seven years, the third George reigned for an extraordinarily long time—nearly sixty years (1760–1820). Known by the Greek historians with whom Shelley was familiar as Sesotris, Rameses II was depicted by those historians—Thucydides, for example— as something of a colonialist: he was credited with major conquests in Africa, Asia Minor, and Europe. George III was similarly a colonialist, refusing to relinquish the American colonies and consolidating British holdings in the Caribbean, Canada, India, and elsewhere. Finally, it was Rameses II who, by refusing to emancipate the Hebrew slaves, precipitated the plagues and death by drowning that befell the Egyptians as the consequences of the Exodus from Egypt. George III’s gov-

52

O

Shelley among Others

ernment and that of his son, the prince regent, similarly subverted any number of initiatives, by the likes of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire; and the conditions of the laboring classes in England during his reign were not much better, relative to their own time, than those of the Hebrew slaves during the reign of Rameses II. Less pronounced but no less telling is the analogy between Rameses II and another latter-day tyrant, Napoleon, who conquered what remained of the former’s Egypt in 1798, defeating the Mamelukes twice in the process, the last of these defeats occurring at Embabeh, within sight of the pyramids. The sonnet “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte,” published two years before “Ozymandias” in the Alastor volume of 1816, contains a striking anticipation of the shattered statuary in the latter sonnet. The republican speaker laments the fact that Napoleon, who could have been the champion of liberty, became its murderer. Thou mightst have built thy throne Where it [Liberty] had stood even now: thou didst prefer A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept In fragments towards Oblivion. (SPW, ll. 4–7) Like Rameses before him, Napoleon considered himself “King of Kings” (or emperor of emperors), seizing the crown from the pope to bestow it upon himself at his own coronation. It is precisely this sort of abuse of metaphor to which the republican speaker turns in his concluding observation, That Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time. (ll. 12–14) From the timeless narrative perspective of Queen Mab, the contingent referents and the corrupt and illegitimate social order to which they give rise may be seen for what they are. Speaking of the effect of time on tyrants such as Ozymandias, Mab offers this analysis: Pyramids, That for millenniums had withstood the tide Of human things, his [Time’s] storm-breath drove in sand Across the desert where their stones survived

Nothing Beside Remains

O

53

The name of him whose pride had heaped them there Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp, Was but the mushroom of a summer day, That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust. (Poetry, IX.26– 33) From the perspective of the individual, the ceaseless change and evanescence of natural process may not be readily apprehensible. That process, however, personified as Time’s “storm-breath,” driving the sands of time and the dust of generations before it, effaces the names of the tyrants, which had been formerly engraved on their pyramids. Those pyramids, as the verb “heaped” implies, are heaps—mausoleums, burial piles—and as such they suggest that the pharaohs whose remains they contain are in death, as they were in life, “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.” Those pharaohs who, in their “solitary pomp,” had a reified, patriarchal presence that seemed nearly as substantial as their petriarchal pyramids, are seen from the perspective of Mab to have been, in several senses of the term, “mushroom[s]”—as insubstantial as mushrooms are (when compared with stone), to be sure, but also “mushrooms” in the sense of being parvenus, individuals who aspire to social standing (and power) not theirs by claim of either birth or merit.8 The problem with a timeless and visionary “fairy” perspective such as Mab’s is that it may be envisioned but not inhabited. Human beings are always in time (and space), always in history. In her own words, which echo Wordsworth’s in the Intimations Ode, human beings are ensconced in a checkered and phantasmal scene That floats above our eyes in wavering light, Which gleams upon the darkness of our prison. (VI.192–94) This particular situation creates a powerful temptation, often unconscious and unexamined, for people to valorize the contingent referent as the means of arrogating authority to themselves, ordaining canons of social praxis, or establishing social relations. Indeed, it takes an uncommon courage to do other than valorize the contingent referent—witness the case of the “atheist” whose death at the stake is recounted by Ianthe’s spirit. He is able to look beyond the ephemeral historical present: “Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye/Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth” (VII.6–7). As such, he is able to enact gesturally what he has already enacted verbally: a

54

O

Shelley among Others

refusal to valorize—in fact, a refusal to acknowledge the very existence of—the contingent referent as the basic. Having freely said, “There is no God” (l. 13), for which he is being burned at the stake, the atheist looks beyond the “dark-robed priests,” who confer around the pile about what to say in God’s name, to a characteristically passive and silent “multitude” (ll. 3–4). It is an audience that will play its socially constructed role by passively and silently accepting what the priests have to say. Up to the very end—his “death-groan” (l. 14)—the atheist refuses to name names, to call upon (and, in so doing, to reify) a God in which he does not believe. Mab commends the atheist’s position and his actions. Echoing William Drummond, she first debunks the argument that God is metonymically knowable as the transcendent cause of apprehensible effects in a causal chain of being. Let every part depending on the chain That links it to the whole, point to the hand That grasps its term! (ll. 17–19)9 Were it merely the case that God as a reified contingent referent were the product of a “human pride” that “Is skillful to invent most serious names/To hide its ignorance” (ll. 25–27), then humanity would be foolish but not dangerous. The reification in question, however, is undertaken in the service of a self-dissembling will to power. The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers, Whose names and attributes and passions change, Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, Even with the human dupes who build his shrines. (ll. 26–31) Shelley himself struggles to overcome the dilemma posed by not validating the contingent referent (or cause) as the basic, a dilemma discussed at some length by Drummond. To concede Drummond’s point that “the Deity is undoubtedly one [‘of the beings, of whom we can form no notion,’]” is to be left wanting to know more about that “one cause, which has been original and primary” in the causal chain that leads to the existence of the thinking human mind in any given present moment.10 As a young collegian intoxicated by the vision of originary, Neoplatonic plenitude set forth

Nothing Beside Remains

O

55

by Wordsworth in his Intimations Ode, yet not willing to accept the totality of the anamnesis that makes “Our birth . . . but a sleep and a forgetting” (WPW, l. 58), Shelley apparently succumbed on at least one occasion to such a temptation.11

Wordsworth’s Enslavement and Its Discontents The poetic vision of the Intimations Ode is the standard against which the young Shelley measured himself and his poetic achievement. And Wordsworth’s betrayal of that vision, which is duly noted in Shelley’s sonnet “To Wordsworth,” but manifested far more complexly than this one short lyric poem can do full justice to in Alastor, was the efficient cause of Shelley’s embarking on his own course of “obstinate questionings/ Of sense and outward things” (WPW, ll. 142–43).12 Through his interrogation of Wordsworth, Shelley came to understand both the older poet’s vision and its failure, which Shelley located in The Excursion (1814). Wordsworth’s valorization of the contingent referent as the basic, his submission to a new control of his own (re-)creation, was, for Shelley, of dubious legitimacy. And it is something like this valorization and submission that elicited Mary Shelley’s by-now famous verdict, in which Shelley apparently concurred: “Shelley . . . calls on Hookham, and brings home Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion,’ of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave.” 13 The verdict, at once surprising and understandable, is indispensable to understanding Alastor. That poem at once “corrects” Wordsworth, as Yvonne M. Carothers has argued, 14 and offers a trenchant critique of the metaphysical misprision that results from Wordsworth’s use of poetic language in a manner that is self-serving rather than self-critical. If by “slave” Mary intends “bondsman” or a person subject to the control of a higher power, then Wordsworth proclaims himself a slave in the very two-volume 1807 edition of Poems in which Shelley found— and found admirable—the Intimations Ode. The “Ode to Duty” concludes with this apostrophe to Duty: “And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!” (WPW, l. 56). And the Wordsworthian speaker of “Elegiac Stanzas” proclaims, “I have submitted to a new control:/A power is gone, which nothing can restore” (ll. 34–35). These poems point toward Wordsworth’s failure of vision and the decline and the excesses of his later style, with its “fallen

56

O

Shelley among Others

sublimity of classicizing or poetic diction blend[ed] with the naturalism of elemental speech-acts of wishing, blessing, naming.”15 However, the two Shelleys did not take them, but rather The Excursion, as sure evidence of Wordsworth’s enslavement. What distinctions, if any, in the poems themselves may be said to account for the change of opinion? To be sure, the “Ode to Duty” and “Elegiac Stanzas” display the sort of deification of error that Shelley remarks in A Defence as an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of visionary poetry written under the sort of cultural constraints typified by organized, established religion. But the two poems stop short of abusing to a literal purpose the metaphors responsible for enacting that deification. Not so with The Excursion, however: in “the conclusion of the first book of ‘The Recluse,’ [which] may be acceptable as a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole Poem” (WPW, 410), Wordsworth takes as his subject “the Mind of Man—/[The] haunt, and the main region of [his] song” (ll. 793–94). He does so, Abrams suggests, with the intent that “the heights and depths of the mind are to replace heaven and hell, and the powers of the mind are to replace the divine protagonists, in Wordsworth’s . . . successor to Milton’s religious epic. Following this model, Wordsworth goes on to identify the supreme power of that mind, whose function it is to restore us to ‘the blissful Seat’ of the lost paradise.” 16 What Abrams does not say about this replacement—indeed, it is beside his point to do so—is that its effect is to make the human mind at once a metonym for the divine and its reified form here on earth. In fact, Wordsworth’s didactic ambitions are far grander than Milton’s. While Milton seeks, by his “great Argument,” to “justify the ways of God to men” (MPP, I, 24–26), thence allowing them, by the exercise of their own free will, to choose good or evil as their way, Wordsworth, for his part, would, by words Which speak of nothing more than what we are, . . . arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures. (WPW, ll. 811–15) He would undertake the conversion of “the sensual . . . the vacant, and the vain,” in other words, for the purpose of demonstrating for all to see that the

Nothing Beside Remains

O

57

fit of the properly bestowed mind to the natural world (and the fit of the natural world to the mind) is a metonym for the fit of the mind of God to his first creation (and of that creation to its God). Wordsworth celebrates the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish. (ll. 822–24) He bases his authority on the understanding that this fit of mind and natural world, duly recognized and solemnized in a “great consummation” (l. 811), has the apocalyptic potential to recreate heaven and earth in their first, paradisiacal dispensation. Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, A mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. (ll. 800–808) If the fit of mind and natural world is as Wordsworth says it is, then the mind in the act of “finding” is the mind in the act of speaking and understanding. In much the same way, the God of the first creation account in Genesis (1:1–2:4a), by a series of “let there be” commands and observations that what he saw “was [very] good/so,” speaks the natural world into orderly, validated coherence. Thus the mode of argument by which converts are to be won in The Excursion is that of natural theology’s argument from design. Indeed, it is the argument most frequently invoked by the poem’s two avatars of duty and piety, the Wanderer and the Parish Priest. Speaking for the natural world is tantamount to usurping its autonomous (and autochthonous) speech—”this mighty sum/Of things for ever speaking” (ll. 25–26), as the Wordsworthian speaker characterizes it in “Expostulation and Reply.” Once the natural world is spoken for—betrothed to the speaker, as it were—that speaker may force the natural world to submit to his will, making it alike the sum and object of his desire. 17 One of the darker aspects of the marriage of the mind to nature, an aspect that the “Prospectus” to The

58

O

Shelley among Others

Excursion optimistically denies, is the resulting oppression—not just for the female object of that marriage, but for the male subject who presses for its consummation as well. Thus the Wordsworthian speaker in “Nutting,” who ravages the “silent trees” so that they “patiently gave up/ Their quiet being,” feels “a sense of pain” when he realizes, retrospectively, that “there is a spirit in the woods” that he has violated (ll. 47–48, 52–53, 56)—that there is, in other words, an emanative source of articulate breath (L. spirare ‘to breathe’), of speech in the natural world “of things for ever speaking”—and that he, by his actions, has defiled and silenced that source. For Drummond, and for Shelley after him, the natural world as the sum and repository of perceivable ideas preexists the mind in such a manner that desire for the object cannot be willed prior to or in the absence of the object of perception, but is recognized rather after the fact of the object of perception. Accordingly, the proper relationship between the desiring (poet-) subject and the desired object of perception, if that relationship is to be figured in gendered terms, is rather the relationship of (male?) child to mother than that of bridegroom to bride. Moreover, the mother in question is the parent of her child in much the same way that “The Child is Father of the Man” in “My Heart Leaps Up” and, more pertinent to the discussion at hand, in use of that line in the epigraph to the Intimations Ode (WPW, 353). According to Hogle, Shelley “answers, as Freud does not, the masculine drive to be or rival a father with the traditionally feminine urge to dissolve outward into myriad forms of being. . . . Indeed, his self-reproducing and self-altering transference is the otherness-of-self so long consigned to ‘woman’ by patriarchal discourse and recently revived in French theory as the feminine ‘unconscious’ on which the construct ‘man’ (including the Freudian version) is actually based without recognizing the fact.”18 Hogle’s “fact” is absolutely crucial for what it has to say about the issue of the will (“volition”) as it is raised by Drummond. The speaking subject may will his actions, including those actions which give rise to language, but he may not will the actions or violate the autonomy of the object, nor does he do so when he uses poetic language to image forth (imagine) rather than to control. But the choice between loving the autonomous object and subjugating it is a choice that must continually be made anew. The subject is always between loving and willing, the erotic and the thanatic, desire and nostalgia, metaphor and metonymy. By dint of the same natural process that drives the sands of time and turns human beings to dust, love harbors

Nothing Beside Remains

O

59

the potential to decay to will, just as the erotic harbors the potential to decay to the thanatic, just as desire harbors the potential to decay to nostalgia, and just as metaphor harbors the potential decay to metonymy. In any instance, choosing the former term potentially entails arriving at the latter. Choosing the latter, however, does not entail the former, although choosing the latter may offer the transient consolations of temporal power grounded on the fear of death, the hope of an afterlife without the loss of one’s human identity, the emplacement of an anthropomorphic god to vouchsafe such an afterlife, and the reification of temporal, patriarchal authority in his name. The only way for the poet-subject to overcome this situation of betweenness is through the free, imaginative, empathic, noncontrolling, nonhierarchical use of poetic language as the vehicle of temporary transcendence.19 It is precisely this situation of betweenness—”one of the most interesting situations of the human mind” (Poetry, 69), as Shelley terms it—that the preface to Alastor engages. There, Shelley presents a poet-protagonist as his case in point. The Poet in Alastor, who enacts in his preternaturally rapid aging and death the killing off of the younger Wordsworth (and metaphor) by the older Wordsworth (and metonymy), functions both as cautionary example and as moral imperative. That Poet is both Wordsworth’s double and Shelley’s double, the latter in the sense that the younger Shelley, who emulated the younger Wordsworth, must kill off both the younger Wordsworth and the Wordsworthian aspects of the younger Shelley if he is to avoid becoming an older Shelley on the order of the older Wordsworth. The Poet-protagonist of Alastor is “a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountain of knowledge, and is still insatiate” (69). Words such as “inflamed” and “insatiate” suggest that the Poet’s encounter with the universe provokes the appetite that is responsible for his situation of betweenness. One possible response to the situation is a form of desire that may, at first glance, seem to anticipate the definition of love in A Defence: “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” (487). In the words of Shelley’s “Preface,” the Poet, “so long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite . . . is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed” (69). 20 There is a dark undertone to this characterization. One reason that the

60

O

Shelley among Others

Poet “drinks deep of the fountain of knowledge and is still insatiate” is that knowledge does not suffice to quench a thirst such as his if it is not loving knowledge but is, rather, Baconian knowledge-as-power, the sort of knowledge that proceeds on the assumption that the world exists to be possessed as the sum of one’s needs. In the fragment On Love, using a variant of the imbibing metaphor, Shelley defines love in part as that “something within us which from the instant we live and move thirsts after its likeness.” That likeness is not to be found in “objects thus infinite” but rather in “the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with every thing which exists” (473). Nor does possession, whether it be self-possession or the will to possess the other, have anything to do with love. Love deals in resemblance or correspondence, not possession. It is, in other words, of the order of metaphor rather than that of metonymy. Moreover, love is the antidote to the problem of evil. Shelley says as much, in language that anticipates Epipsychidion (1821) and echoes book IV of Paradise Lost, in which Satan “overleaps the bounds” (MPP, 277) of Paradise and sets in motion the events leading to the Fall, as well as Alastor (“He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!” [Poetry, l. 277]).21 According to Shelley, love is “a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it” (474). But even though that a loving response to his “thirst” is possible, the Poet is seduced to a thirst for “intercourse,” in the several senses of that term, that constitutes the object as something to be possessed. The seduction takes place when the Poet willfully misunderstands the very metaphors that were at once the expression and validation of that desire. He finds that “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” (69). As the poem’s epigraph, drawn from Augustine’s Confessions, suggests, this imaging is a metabasis—a category mistake resulting from strong emotions and willfulness as much as from naiveté and inexperience.22 The Augustinian context reveals features of self-hatred and spiritual dryness that Shelley’s quotation and redaction efface.23 More to the point, the self-hatred and spiritual dryness latent in Shelley’s text and manifest in Augustine’s do not allow Shelley’s poet or Augustine’s youthful self to open himself to that immanent presence that Shelley calls “intellectual beauty” and Augustine calls God. In Augustine’s words, “For within me was a famine of that inward

Nothing Beside Remains

O

61

food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it.”24 The Poet’s response is at once that of anthropomorphic projection; metonymic reduction of the other; a gendering, sexualization, and reification of the natural universe; 25 and a bit of narcissism as well.26 All of these unfortunate characteristics arise from the Poet’s decision to will the end of metaphoric transference and replace metaphor with a single, presumably transcendent “sign[s] for portions and classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts” (482). As Shelley describes the problem, “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” (69; emphasis added).27 As Shelley is quick to add, the Poet’s tragic misapprehension of “Power” and the resulting narcissistic quest to seek it and possess it, although unfortunate, are preferable to the banal evil that results when those who presume to speak in the name of such power do so merely out of considerations of temporal authority and without any firsthand knowledge of the entity they presume to speak for. There is a difference between those who, owing to “too exquisite a perception of [power’s] influences,” earnestly pursue a metaphor to an end, however tragic, and those who, “deluded by no generous error,” cynically abuse one to a literal purpose, “yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind” (69–70). The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that power which strikes the luminaries of the world with a sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. . . . They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing of this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they,

62

O

Shelley among Others

have their apportioned curse. . . . They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. (69–70) The reference to those who “keep aloof from sympathies with their kind,” an apparent echoing of Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” (“Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,/Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!” [WPW, ll. 53–54]), is problematic. It is worth noting that Wordsworth bids farewell in the same poem in which he declares his submission “to a new control” (l. 34), usually taken to be Anglican orthodoxy. Shelley suggests that the very move that Wordsworth sees as bringing him into the communion and community bespoken by Anglicanism has the opposite effect, marking the end of his “sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge” and the onset of his moral death. 28 Indeed, the cumulative effect of this echo and the Wordsworthian echoes that pervade Alastor’s narrative frame is to present a Wordsworthian narrator continually in the act of unsaying or missaying himself, reading the poetry from earlier years of true imaginative power from the perspective of his moral enslavement, and creating the locus of a verbal confusion that Shelley presents for comparison with the original in order to set the record straight and “correct” the distorted echoes. 29 The larger purpose of this strategy is to present a narrator unable to understand the point of his past poetry from his current diminished perspective of moral enslavement and spiritual dryness, and unable to understand the point of the tale he is about to tell. The tale must be read against itself, both as a corrective critique of its teller and as a corrective critique of its subject. The “corrections” are anticipated by the quotation from book I of The Excursion, on which the “Preface” closes: “[Oh, Sir!] the good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust Burn to the socket!” (WPW, I.500–502) These are the lines with which the Wanderer begins the tale of “poor Margaret” (I.504), a woman “Tender and deep in her excess of love” (514)—and in her hope for the triumph of this love over worldly circumstance—for the Poet. For one such as Shelley, who did not see life and death as naturalized equivalents of good and evil, the lines are problematic. They also implicate the aged Wanderer, who is the process of “Burn[ing] to the socket,” as one

Nothing Beside Remains

O

63

who is subject to the very spiritual dryness he decries, and therefore as one who simply does not get the point in matters spiritual and metaphysical. To the extent that Wanderer and Poet both ultimately advert (and revert) to the Wordsworth of The Excursion,30 the implication is that he similarly does not get the point in such matters, having betrayed his true earlier intuitions for the comforts of Anglican orthodoxy, high Toryism, and a comfortable government sinecure. The “corrections” themselves begin in the poem’s invocation (Poetry, ll. 1–49), spoken by an ostensibly Wordsworthian narrator—ostensibly rather than truly, because the range of relationships between the mind and nature described as being possible does not include the “great consummation” figured forth in the “Prospectus” to The Excursion. The components of nature, “Earth, ocean, [and] air” constitute, along with the narrator, a “beloved brotherhood” (l. 1), a relationship between equals not subject to the constraints or limitations of gender or power relations. All four are nature’s children —offspring of “our great Mother” (l. 2), subsequently apostrophized as “Mother of this unfathomable world!” (l. 18). Hence any mention at this juncture of the marriage of the mind to nature would be tantamount to announcing the commission of incest, and “negative” rather than “positive incest” at that, to use Hogle’s distinction. 31 The task of “our great Mother,” according to the speaker, is to “imbue” his “mind” with “natural piety” (ll. 2–3). The echo, as Reiman and Powers note, is of the last line of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” (70n.) which, as noted earlier, also serves as an epigraph to the Intimations Ode. But the speaker apparently forgets that the closing lines of Wordsworth’s poem turn filiation on its head. The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. (ll. 7–9) This Wordsworthian missaying suggests the manner in which the moral authority and artistic insight of childhood are co-opted by the very institutions that the imagination of humanity in its infancy—or in a state of transferential free play approximating infancy—gives rise to. In A Defence, Shelley talks of how “in the infancy of society,” which is to an established society as the child is to the adult, “the social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the

64

O

Shelley among Others

moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed” (Poetry, 481). In this analogy, which echoes Goethe’s notion of the Urpflanze (archetype), 32 one glimpses one way in which the child is father to the man. A society in its childhood identifies the pieties, natural and otherwise, best suited to imbue the mind. Through time, such pieties become naturalized to the point of ordaining the conduct of the individual citizens of that society in its maturity. The point is not that such pieties have—or ought to have—no standing; rather, the point is that such pieties ought to be periodically renewed by means of their reimagination. In A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley applauds what he takes to be the mobilization of this principle in the then nascent American government, mistakenly transforming Jefferson’s idea that the nation should begin de novo from a revolution every twenty years to “a law by which the constitution is reserved to revision every ten years.” This supposed provision, were it the case, would distinguish the United States from “Every other set of men who have assumed the office of legislation and framing institutions for future ages, [who] . . . assumed that their work was the wisest and best that could possibly have been produced” (Prose, 234).33 In his apostrophe to the “Mother of this unfathomable world!” (Poetry, l. 18), the Wordsworthian speaker gainsays an earlier article of faith, namely, the statement in “Tintern Abbey” that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy. (WPW, ll. 122–25) For Shelley’s Wordsworthian speaker, Nature is not to be followed joyfully as a leader so much as she is to be tailed grimly as a suspect. Despite his protest that “I have loved/Thee ever, and thee only,” the Wordsworthian speaker acts more like the detective in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) than like Dorothy’s brother in “Tintern Abbey.” I have watched Thy shadow and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. (Poetry, ll. 20–23)

Nothing Beside Remains

O

65

The greatest of the “mysteries” for the Wordsworthian speaker—the one which caused Wordsworth to “submit[ted] to a new control,” in fact— is the mystery of death, which collects expended human lives and accounts these “trophies” won from nature. The speaker testifies, I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee. (ll. 23–25) The earlier Wordsworth, writing in the Intimations Ode, had suggested that the prize—in this instance not a trophy, but “palms”—is won by the individual who lives a seasonable, heartfelt life under Nature’s “more habitual sway”: “Another race hath been, and other palms are won./Thanks to the human heart by which we live” (WPW, ll.192, 200–201). To live such a life is to cultivate “the philosophic mind” (l. 187) that comes with maturity, and such cultivation entails the Socratic interrogation of one’s passage through the natural world. Thus Wordsworth declares, I raise The song of thanks and praise . . . for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things. (ll. 140–43) The Wordsworthian speaker, as Reiman and Powers note (Poetry, 71n.), echoes the passage just cited, but the echo opposes the sense of the original, with its talk of Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. (ll. 26–29) The “lone ghost”—someone who is presumably “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse”—is the Wordsworth of The Excursion and after. This Wordsworth proclaims, in a passage cited earlier from the conclusion of The Recluse (which is also the “Prospectus” to The Excursion) his intention, by words Which speak of nothing more than what we are, [To] arouse the sensual from their sleep

66

O

Shelley among Others

Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures. (WPW, ll. 811–15) Yet with a final comic twist, and for reasons that he does not (and cannot) understand, the Wordsworthian speaker misspeaks to the end of getting something right. He awaits the immanent inspiration of Mother Nature to 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. (Poetry, ll. 46–49) With this pronouncement, the speaker unwittingly revokes the “Prospectus” to The Excursion, revising it in favor of earlier statements of what matters. In the “Prospectus,” it is not “the deep heart of man,” but rather his vertiginously deep mind that is Wordsworth’s burden. Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— My haunt, and the main region of my song. (WPW, ll. 788–94) The comparison of the mind to infernal pits, coupled with the mention of “fear and awe,” recalls the condition of solipsistic damnation that Satan experiences in Paradise Lost,34 a condition alleviated for Wordsworth by the sacramental marriage of the mind to nature, as a result of which the paradisiacal innocence that precedes all falls—Satan’s as well as Adam and Eve’s—can be restored. But the Wordsworth of The Excursion forgets the way that the heart mediates the threat of solipsism. Discussing how the charity of the householders mediates the isolation and suffering of the old Cumberland beggar in the poem of the same title, a younger Wordsworth observes that these householders, no matter how poor, have been kind to such As needed kindness, for this single cause, That we have, all of us one human heart. (WPW, ll. 151–53)

Nothing Beside Remains

O

67

And in the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth renders “Thanks to the human heart by which we live . . .” (l. 201). This “human heart,” contributing “its tenderness, its joys, and fears” to human existence, causes Wordsworth, as he confronts all living things— even “the meanest flower that blows”—to have “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (ll. 202–4). These thoughts touch on the unified trajectory and destiny of all living things. They are thoughts tempered with the feeling supplied by the “human heart.” Although the narrator is able to understand the young Poet of Alastor as someone whose heart linked him to all living things, the narrator himself is never moved by the immanent, inspirational influence of Mother Nature that he awaits at the end of the “Preface.” The narrator unequivocally states, as his Poetsubject declines, that his heart has been his link to all living things, that the Poet’s blood Which ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still. (Poetry, ll. 651– 53)35 If the narrator were of the same order as his Poet-subject—and the Wordsworth of the Intimations Ode—he, too, would have “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—powerful thoughts that touch on the common destiny of all living things and, in so doing, supplant grief. Instead, the Wordsworthian narrator succumbs to his post-Excursion mental enslavement. “Art and eloquence,/And all the shews o’ the world are frail and vain,” he laments, “To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade./It is a loss ‘too deep for tears’” (ll. 710–13; p. 87n.). To speak so uncharitably about the Wordsworthian speaker of the narrative frame is by no means to exculpate the Poet-subject of Alastor. As Hogle observes, “the opening apostrophe in Alastor shows how a dogmatic Wordsworth and a young Shelley in quest of absolute centers . . . can be turned from a healthy uncertainty toward an obsessive search for the ‘inmost sanctuary.’”36 If the Wordsworthian narrator missays or unsays the pre-Excursion Wordsworth, the Shelleyan Poet-subject enacts the transgressions that the narrator speaks. The Poet-subject does not live up to his designation as a poet, at least not to the extent of writing and poetry of lasting value. 37 Moreover, the Poet is retrograde, reversing both the westward movement of the child-subject of the Intimations Ode and his acceptance, by means of his growing maturity, of the outcome of that movement.

68

O

Shelley among Others

As Wordsworth describes him, The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. (WPW, ll. 72–77) The Wordsworthian speaker’s account of Poet-subject echoes Wordsworth’s own account. “By solemn vision, and the bright silver dream,/His infancy was nurtured” (Poetry, ll. 67–68), according to that speaker. And the Poet does experience the loss of a “vision splendid”—that of the Indian Maiden—to “the light of common day.” After his erotic dream of her, Roused by the shock he started from his trance— 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? (ll. 192–98)38 But these apparent echoes should not be allowed to obscure this distinction: the “Youth” of the ode travels “daily farther from the east,” while the Poet-subject of Alastor undertakes a doubly retrograde journey to the East—by way of Athens, Tyre, Balbec, Jerusalem, Babylon, Memphis and Thebes, Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and the Karman Desert (ll. 106–28, 140–45)—that terminates in the Vale of Cashmir in the Indian Caucasus. 39 The Poet-subject’s journey goes against the movement of both celestial time, which is metonymized by the apparent westering of the sun, and historical time, at least to the extent that the place-names on the Poet’s itinerary are metonyms for the civilizations that inhabited those geographical sites. The retrograde movement in question is overdetermined by the echo of Wordsworth’s “Boy of Winander” (1798; 1800) on which the narrative proper begins. As Christopher Heppner observes, “There was a Poet” (l. 50) echoes “There was a Boy” (WPW, l. 1). Heppner is correct in his assertion that the echo operates to identify “a specifically Wordworthian topos”—that of “a consciousness that, motivated by love, asks for a response from the natural

Nothing Beside Remains

O

69

scene and, when finally answered by silence, becomes so unified with the ‘visible scene’ that he necessarily dies, leaving the Narrator to tell his story.”40 But what Heppner fails to emphasize sufficiently is the threshold condition in which both Boy and Poet find themselves and, perhaps more important, their failure to move beyond the primal narcissism underlying the will to retrogression. Both attempt to reattain an unattainable paradisiacal realm—the Boy by dying into nature, the Poet by erotic embrace—and both “overleap the bounds” in so doing. William A. Ulmer rights the balance, noting the Poet-subject’s unchecked tendency toward narcissism, even after the fact of his failed dream, and the strong satanic and narcissistic implications of “He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!” (Poetry, l. 207).41

Alexander or Pyrrho? Such retrogression leads to at least two outcomes. For nearly a century, as Joseph Raben reminds us, we have known that the full circuit of the Poet’s travels to the Vale of Cashmir and back—past Aornos and Petra, Balk and Parthia, and Chorasmia, thence across the Caspian Sea to the Russian Caucasus—approximates closely the “circuit . . . of Alexander the Great during the triumphant years between his initial conquests in the Near East and his glorious extension of his empire beyond the borders of the Persian domains.” 42 But the first part of this circuit, at least— the itinerary from Athens to the Vale of Cashmir—has other associations. As C. E. Pulos observes, “The emergence of true scepticism in Greek thought coincides with the expansion of the Greek consciousness in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of the first school of scepticism, had accompanied Anaxarchus, a philosopher travelling with Alexander’s army, as far as India. . . . Observing how different peoples disagreed in matters of custom and opinion, he concluded that men’s knowledge is confined to their impressions, and that life is governed not by rational principles, but by conventions and instincts.” 43 When he reaches the Vale of Cashmir, the Poet-subject confronts the imperative to choose between an Alexandrian and a Pyrrhonist outcome, between ideology and skepticism, between subjugation based on hierarchical power relations and freedom based on nonhierarchical relationality, between human action founded on willing and human action founded on loving. If he chooses the Alexandrian outcome, the Poet-subject will speak in

70

O

Shelley among Others

the metonymic vein and embrace matters of facticity; if he chooses the Pyrrhonist outcome, he will speak in the metaphoric vein and embrace matters of fact. The choice, however, is not so unconstrained as it may appear. As the Poet wanders through a landscape of monumental ruins along the route of his journey toward the vale, he misses the point concerning the fate of those who would choose the Alexandrian path over the Pyrrhonist. The ruins, which look forward to the monumental ruins that are the setting of “Ozymandias,” are at once the ruins of empire and the ruins of the metonymic language that is implicated both in the founding and the preservation of empire. That it is not the “vitally metaphorical” language of poetry but the “dead” metonymic language of empire is clear from the Poet’s encounter with “ruined temples,” the result of which prefigures his own subsequent muteness. The Poet views “Stupendous columns, and wild images”—places where “dead men/Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around.” The shapes depicted in these ruins are “speechless shapes.” Predisposed by his imperial quest for origins to make something of his eastering—to conquer in the name of understanding, if nothing else— the Poet continues to gaze at the walls and the shapes depicted thereupon. till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. (Poetry, ll. 126–28) Just as the Poet’s subsequent muteness is prefigured in this passage, so is his subsequent tendency to confuse the issue by means of metabasis, or category mistake. He mistakes “meaning” for “strong inspiration”— effect for cause. As Shelley notes in A Defence, poetry that results from “strong inspiration” gives rise to “meaning” but is not reducible to any one meaning or even the received sum of its meanings. “Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed” (500). The Poet arrives at the vale’s “loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine/Beneath the hollow rocks, a natural bower” (ll. 146–47). Like the Eden of Paradise Lost, especially book IV, this is a contested site. This arrival is two-fold, however, for the conditions conducive to facticity arrive at the bower simultaneously with the Poet. Indeed, the facticity assumes the form of the bower. By the terms of Hoagwood’s definition, “Facticity is the arrival unbidden of the object or event . . . independent of our will.” As perceived effect,

Nothing Beside Remains

O

71

the “object or event” in question may be taken as evidence of a cause, and a transcendent cause at that. Both historically and philosophically, there are two main lines of response to such a situation—the skeptical and the dogmatic. “Skeptics—Sextus, Hume, Drummond, Shelley—respond to that question [of what causes ‘the arrival unbidden of the object or event’] by deconstructing the conventional assumptions of cause; they do not answer dogmatically . . . ‘never satisfied with uncertainty,’ the multitude and the dogmatists alike rush desperately back toward the now discredited dogmas, convinced that their rigidity is somehow safer than the suspension of judgment that skeptics, since Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, have repeatedly advocated and induced.” Hoagwood’s comparison of the skeptics and the dogmatists, though correct, does raise the question of how skeptics in general—and Shelley in particular—deal with the matter of facticity, if not by ascribing to a given effect a given cause. How, in other words, do the skeptics talk of cause(s) without mobilizing the metonymic logic of effect for cause that results in the Alexandrian outcome and in words becoming, “through time, signs for portions and classes of thoughts instead of integral thoughts” (482)? Hoagwood brings Shelley to the bar in order to respond, quoting in part from On Life, where Shelley characterizes cause as being “only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to each other.” 44 If the metaphoric mode is primarily relational, and if the word cause is “only a word expressing” the relationship between “a certain state of the human mind” and the object(s) of that mind’s apprehension, then skeptics in general—and Shelley in particular—discuss cause by choosing metalepsis over metonymy. As defined by Hogle in his discussion of Adonais, metalepsis is “the metaphor of a metaphor,” a figure that transfigures by the ongoing deferral of figural closure. Thus, in Adonais, by deferring figural closure, metalepsis defers the inevitable outcome of thanatos. “The resulting composite . . . points to the inevitable conversion of the dead person into several metaphors for what he was or still seems, into alternative figures for what is already the sign of an absence (the body) looking to other signs (other memorials: epitaphs, gravestones, eulogies) as the only available counterparts to which the remnant can refer.”45 As with grand mort, so with petit mort: to extend Hogle’s insight, what metalepsis does for thanatos it does for eros as well, so long as the subject understands love as Shelley proposes that it be understood. Fatigued by his travels, the Poet “Beside a sparkling rivulet . . . stretched/

72

O

Shelley among Others

His languid limbs” (ll. 148–49). He immediately goes to sleep, a seemingly natural response, but one that suggests an insensitivity to the evanescent natural process all around him, as well as to the nature of love. In On Love, Shelley observes, “There is eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing of brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone” (474). 46 The strong feelings in question arise on the basis of a metaphoric logic that points toward the metaleptic, a glimpsing of the “inconceivable relation” of the world of evanescent natural process to a certain “something within the soul” that is responsible for such noble human tendencies as those toward “patriotic success” and passionate (but selfless) love. Neither such “success” nor such love may be willed; neither exists as the sum of one’s needs. Rather, such “success” and love, viewed in the context of their “inconceivable relation” to the world of evanescent natural process, suggest that all that has existed, exists, and will exist is connate in its origins and coadunate in its ends, although knowledge of those origins and ends is beyond human comprehension. Although he cannot know as much, the Poet’s journey has brought him to an authentically originary site. Within the symbolic economy of Alastor, the Vale of Cashmir is not only the originary site of metaphysics but the originary site of the Indo-European languages as well. Shelley knew the Asiatic scholarship of Sir William Jones, whose Works (1807) Shelley ordered in a postscript to the letter of 24 December 1812 to Clio Rickman (Letters, 1:344). From Jones’s “Third Anniversary Discourse” (1786), Shelley would have known that “The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity . . . than could possibly have been produced by accident.” And Shelley would also have known that Sanskrit itself is a language “in which books of religion and science were composed, and which appears to have been formed by an exquisite grammatical arrangement, as the name itself implies, from some unpolished idiom.” A living language very similar to the one that Jones proposes as the precursor of Sanskrit “was current in the districts around Agrà.” Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, lies in the north of

Nothing Beside Remains

O

73

India, and the Vale of Cashmir lies to the north and west of Agra, arguably included in the “districts around” it.47 Like the bower—indeed, informed by its facticity—the Poet’s subsequent dream is contested ground. At issue is whether he is capable of recognizing the “inconceivable relation” between “the melody in the flowing of brooks”—in this case, that of the “sparkling rivulet” beside which he sleeps—and “the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.” If he succeeds in this recognition, the Poet will demonstrate that he possesses the ability and deserves both to love and to be loved selflessly. If he fails, the Poet will demonstrate that his conception of love is a selfish one that causes him to reduce the object world, natural and human alike, to the sum of his needs. As Shelley observes, “So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was” (474). Effect for cause, part for whole: a chilling consequence of the failure of recognition is to become the very sort of metonym that one beholds.48 The Poet fails, his failure marked both by his narcissistic dream of the Indian maiden, 49 and by his reaction to the dream. The dream contains intimations of what the Poet takes to be “the enthusiasm of patriotic success.” As the Indian maiden begins to speak, she speaks of “Knowledge and truth and virtue . . ./And lofty hopes of divine liberty” (ll. 158–59). But such intimations are cast into doubt by the very qualities of her voice itself, qualities that suggest the operation of nescience rather than knowledge, deceit rather than truth, viciousness rather than virtue, and oppression rather than “divine liberty.” It is a “voice stifled in tremulous sobs/Subdued by its own pathos” (ll. 164–65). Nevertheless, the Poet takes the voice of the Indian maiden as “the voice of one beloved singing to” him “alone,” despite the presence of overt effects that complicate and ultimately gainsay such an interpretation for the Poet and the reader alike. The poet’s mistake results from viewing the world as the ground of his fulfillment, rather than as the locus in which all manifestations of process testify to the operation of something larger and more important. The Poet could do nothing but fail: his problem is not one of original sin or some sort of Cainic curse, but rather that he lacks models for how to love or, indeed, for how to speak the metaphoric language of love.50 The poet’s “early youth” is spent by “a cold fireside and alienated home” (ll. 75–76). Though his is a “sweet voice,” the Poet learns in his travels that language,

74

O

Shelley among Others

sweet or otherwise, serves the purpose of meeting one’s basic material and physical needs. In the Poet’s case, that voice, along with an equally sweet gaze, is the Poet’s means of buying “His rest and food” (ll. 79– 81). Language thus used is language used in behalf of “the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation,” and such language is as different from the language of poetry as Mammon is from God (503). The Arab maiden who tends the Poet’s material needs and grows to love him51 is no more able to speak the metaphoric language of love than he is. Hers is a “cold home” (l. 138) no less than the home of the Poet’s early youth is. Thus it is that, “Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe/ To speak her love” (ll. 133–34), the Arab maiden herself becomes implicated as a symbol of the material and the quantifiable, the latest purveyor of the Poet’s rest and food, as she brings him “Her daily portion, from her father’s tent,/And spread[s] her matting for his couch” (ll. 130– 31). The potential for a language of love that is based on an awareness that its origins and end are also the origins and end of evanescent natural process is deeply latent, even in this alienated and alienating relationship. As the Arab maiden watches the sleeping Poet before the onset of his fateful dream of the Indian maiden, she observes “the regular breath/ Of innocent dreams” (ll. 136–37) arising from his lips. In Prometheus Unbound, such breath is juxtaposed to “that common, false, cold, hollow talk/Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes” (III.iv.149– 50). 52 But that potential is extinguished by the Poet himself, when he represses his own breath and potential for affirmation in apparent emulation of one whose breath has already been characterized as “stifled” and “subdued” 53 and seeks to penetrate a tissue of deceptive complication and almost serpentlike (i.e., satanic) fabrication—a “sinuous veil/ Of woven wind” (ll. 176–77), to possess the Indian maiden: His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom. (ll. 181–84) The figures of fabric and fabrication, of “sinuous veil” and “woven wind,” are picked up again in the Indian maiden’s response to the Poet’s advances, which takes the form of folding him to conform to her fabricated contours. Just before he wakes, she is reported as having “Folded his frame in her dissolving arms” (l. 187). While it may be a stock item of Wordsworthian dic-

Nothing Beside Remains

O

75

tion meaning “body,”54 the word frame has another meaning that extends and complicates the figural play. In Shelley’s time, the word was also used to mean a weaver’s loom of the sort used in the textile factories of the industrial North. The Poet’s vision of his frame being folded into a body and fabric that are disappearing in the very enactment of an embrace contains its antiapocalyptic element—apocalypsis, after all, betokens an unveiling—and the vision foreshadows the overleaping and other metabases, or category mistakes, to follow. The frame holds the fabric in the act of its fabrication, not vice versa, and the fabric issues from the frame, but it does not gather the frame to itself. Taken collectively, these figures, and most particularly the figure of the “veil,” suggest the operation of an extended, multilingual Shelleyan pun. The Poet, who is attended in his travels by a presumably veiled, explicitly “Arab maiden” (l. 129) falls asleep in the sensuous Vale of Cashmir, where he dreams of a sensuous woman wearing a “sinuous veil” of cashmere. If the Poet does not confirm the Schopenhauer of The World as Will and Representation (1817), then he at least confirms the Schopenhauer of “The Metaphysic of the Love of the Sexes.”55 That the veil is of “woven wind” suggests that it serves as a sight pun for the word text, the Latin roots of that term (textus ‘constructed’ or ‘woven’, from tessere ‘to construct’ or ‘to weave’) meaning something that is woven. 56 The veil also functions metonymically to mark gender and sexual desire in a tellingly fetishized fashion.57 As M. H. Abrams notes in his discussion of metonymy, “typical attire can signify the male and female sexes: ‘doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat’ (Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.iv.6).”58 The Poet “pursues veil” in the way that a latter-day seducer might “chase skirt.” The garment is fetishized because it serves as the material entry point for the pursuer, the tangible marker for absent sexual favors that he aims to acquire through the pursuit of associations and, ultimately, of the object that gives rise to those associations. As the result of denying the Promethean, affirmative linguistic power of breath itself and instead “pursuing veil”—in point of fact, the Poet “eagerly pursues/Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade” (ll. 205–6)—he is condemned to talk that affirmation-denying “common, false, cold, hollow talk” which is the lot of those who privilege the material world and the apparent distinctions that obtain in that world, deluded by the metonymic language, which

76

O

Shelley among Others

actually serves to construct the world in question. The metonymic logic in question is that of effect for cause, a view of the world not unlike the one advanced by natural theology, which views the mechanism, order, and value of the material world as testimony for the existence of a powerful and transcendent first cause. 59 Before he repents the curse that empowers Jupiter and defines the character of that deity’s relationship to him, Prometheus himself speaks such a language, nowhere more obviously so than in his opening speech to the “Monarch of Gods and Demons, and all Spirits/But One” (I.1–2). In this speech, value, meaning, relationality—indeed, the very person of Jupiter—are constructed by distinctions of person and tense that serve to reify his identity. 60 There is a first-person “I” (Prometheus) who claims a special relationship with the second-person “thou” (Jupiter) who, along with Prometheus, exists distinct from other, third-person “living things (and who, as Demogorgon characterizes him, “is the supreme of [third-person] living things” [II.iv.113]). This relationship dates back to an action completed in the past, as the result of which Jove, having chained down Prometheus and decreed his ongoing punishment by the Furies, has caused Prometheus to “reign and triumph” in the present moment in despite of Jove’s putative omnipotence. Prometheus, for his part at the outset, looks forward to a future moment of vengeance, at which time one of the “wingless, crawling hours” (I.48), acting —As some dark Priest [who] hales the reluctant victim— Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet. (I.49–51) Elsewhere, Shelley holds that distinctions of person and tense are artificial and insubstantial, that such distinctions in fact create the realities they pretend to report, and that such distinctions are extremely dangerous in their capacity to blur the distinction between reporting reality and fabricating it. Distinctions of person, not properly understood, lead to alienation, and ultimately to solipsism, creating the fiction of the individual mind as something separate and distinct from what would appear to be Shelley’s version of the Platonic nous. The movement toward such “common, false, cold, hollow talk” occurs in stages, the first and most important being the moment in which the Poet “overleaps the bounds.” With its echo of Paradise Lost and strong satanic overtones, this overleapingis a symbolic gesture, the enactment of a sublime

Nothing Beside Remains

O

77

metabasis that occasions the solipsism and despair to follow, leaving the subject unable to find a way out of his predicament. The inextricably related conditions of metabasis, solipsism, and despair, and their distinctly satanic provenance, are clear in one section of Paradise Lost that Shelley knew. Regaining his senses after being hurled into the abyss by the Son’s victorious legions, Satan comforts and exhorts his minions to put their hope in regaining heaven. At one point, Satan is presented as “Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair,” and he is presumably still so racked when he urges his minions to seek such “reinforcement” as they “may gain from Hope,/If not what resolution from despair.” But the acme of the speech is Satan’s exposition of the horrible dynamics of despair—specifically, the solipsism that is its precondition and the metabasis that is its result. Farewell happy Fields Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (MPP, I, 126, 191, 249–55) When Shelley quotes part of this passage in A Defence, he argues that without poetry, which partakes of the flowing linguistic—that is, transferential and metaphoric—movement that is characteristic of the dynamics of evanescent natural process and creates the effect, by means of its operations, of defamiliarization, the mind is condemned to be its own place. And if the mind is thus isolated—if it is reified through a process that works metonymically to create a divide between perceiving cultural subject and perceived natural (or naturalized) object—access to any intimations of the mind’s relationship to the origins, flux, and ends of evanescent natural process is disrupted or interdicted. “But poetry,” as Shelley notes, “defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. . . . It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the uni-

78

O

Shelley among Others

verse after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” (Poetry, 504–5). 61 The overleaping is directly responsible for the next stages of the Poet’s transformation to the transgressive and despairing “Spirit of Solitude” named in the poem’s subtitle, a figure whose speech approaches the condition of “common, false, cold, hollow talk.”62 One metabasis leads to another: speaking for the Poet—and at this juncture in the poem the usurpation of speech, previously naturalized as a narrative convention, takes on ominous overtones—the narrator asks, “Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined/Thus treacherously?” (ll. 208–9). The answer is no: “limbs” are humanity’s perishing mortal part rooted in “the common universe of which we are portions and percipients”; “being” is the cause of eternal and evanescent natural process that is responsible for the creation and reclamation of all that constitutes “the wonder of our being.” “Breath,” the middle term, occupies that position by reason of its function as the transferential and metaphoric basis of the poetry that mediates between perishing and pathetic “limbs” and imperishable and wondrous “being.” After metabasis comes despair, then total and complete solipsism, ending in the loss of the poetic voice. The narrator, having rehearsed his version of the Poet’s doubts and the questions that arise from his overleaping, questions his own immortality with sudden tide flowed on his heart, The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung His brain even like despair. While day-light held The sky, the poet kept mute conference With his still soul. (ll. 220–24) Because he is not able to recognize and correct his initial category mistake by breaking off the pursuit of his dream object, the Poet must continue to suffer. The narrator likens his agonies to those of as eagle grasped In folds of the green serpent, [who] feels her breast Burn with poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest and calm, and cloud. (ll. 227–30)

Nothing Beside Remains

O

79

The gender reversal in this heroic simile, which anticipates one of the narrative framing motifs of The Revolt of Islam, is revealing. The eagle to which the Poet is likened is female (cf. “her breast”); the serpent, by implication likened to “the bright shadow of that lovely dream” (l. 233) of the Indian maiden, is traditionally male and phallic in its implications. The confusion of genders, and of gendered anatomy, speaks neither to the incest motif nor to the androgynous ideal, but rather to the consequences of metabasis. The very fact that the eagle and snake are entangled in the first place is revealing in light of one possible source for the simile, Proverbs 30:18– 19. 63 In addition to testifying to the incomprehensible “way” of love between a man and a woman, which is in part the subject of Alastor, and testifying to the miraculousness of a ship under way, which is echoed in the Poet’s miraculous sea voyage from “the Chorasmian shore” in “A little shallop” (ll. 272, 299), Solomon makes it very clear that the “way” of the eagle and the “way” of the serpent are categorically very different. One consequence and symptom of metabasis, despair, and solipsism for the Poet is the onset of spiritual dryness that is echoed by his physical decline. Echoing in deed if not in word Satan’s “myself am Hell” (MPP, IV, 75), and showing himself as a hellish “darkness visible” (I.63), the Poet, with sere hair, “listless hand” and “withered skin,” continues on his way. Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone. (Poetry, ll. 252–54) Like the Ancient Mariner, the Poet is a “spectral form” (l. 259), but without the onset of something like the gushing, pentecostal “spring of love” (CPW, 1: l. 284) that causes the Mariner to bless the water snakes,64 the Poet is condemned to wander silently, more like a “Brocken-spectre” than a human being. Those whom he encounters—most particularly, the “youthful maidens, taught/By nature”—intervene to speak for him, but these maidens are able only to “interpret half the woe/That wasted him.” That is, the maidens are able to understand the woe as a symptom of unrequited love, but they are unable to understand that the object of the love itself is a dream image rather than a woman. When the Poet reaches “the lone Chorasmian shore” (l. 272), where he regains the power of speech, the effects of his overleaping are clear. He encounters a male swan and immediately launches into an embittered compar-

80

O

Shelley among Others

ison of his circumstances to the bird’s. In one sense, the comparison seems apt. Both the Poet and the swan are living creatures, and, as such, their informing life rhythms and articulated forms—both the physical and the social, as well as the vocal—may be said to demonstrate that their blood . . . ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature’s ebb and flow. (ll. 651–53) But the bitter diatribe proceeds out of a colossal category mistake that causes the Poet to assume that he is in some way privileged because superior to the swan, and that the Indian maiden of the Poet’s dream is as categorically and physically real and palpable as the swan’s mate and is, in fact, the only proper mate for the Poet—the only mate of his kind, as it were—thus conveniently ignoring the obvious fact that he, like the swan, is a mortal, flesh-and-blood creature, and that the flesh-and-blood maidens that the Poet encounters in his wanderings would be more readily suitable as a mate than the maiden of his dreams. The diatribe’s initial emphasis on the importance of “home” both adverts to the Poet’s crucial lack of a childhood home in which to learn the language of love and raises the teleological issue of how one “goes home,” while at the same time suggesting, in conjunction with the death motif elicited by the reference to the swan’s song, that “going home” in the teleological sense means passing through death to the “inaccessibly profound” (l. 503) source of life. Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thy home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts? (ll. 280–90) Seduced by his own rhetoric, the Poet succumbs to “A restless impulse . . . to embark/ And meet lone Death on the drear Ocean’s waste” (ll. 304–5).

Nothing Beside Remains

O

81

His miraculous sea voyage through a stormy seascape (ll. 316–70) is an externalization of his Wertherian, Sturm und Drang state of mind. This journey does not cause death, but an accelerated westering and concomitant aging. Beginning on “a silver vision” (l. 316) and ending in gloomy “Daylight” (l. 370), the account of the voyage is also a dark reading of a passage in Wordworth’s Intimations Ode.65 While Wordsworth’s “Youth” is apparently passive and affectless in his passage from the visionary to the quotidian, Shelley’s, although calm and resolute, indulges in many of the same mistakes, projections, and denials that have brought him to his desperate pass. He metonymizes and sexualizes the sky: daylight’s “fair front and radiant eyes” yield to twilight’s “duskier wreaths” and “braided locks,” and both of these ultimately to “Night . . . clad with stars” (Poetry, ll. 337–40), while all around him the seas “Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock/The calm and spangled sky” (ll. 343–44). And his last speech, before daylight brings with its advent the insight requisite to the Poet’s renunciation of willfulness, is an obstinate refusal of categories. “Vision and Love!” The Poet cried aloud, “I have beheld The path of thy departure. Sleep and death Shall not divide us long!” (ll. 366–69) The Poet shows the misunderstandings that can arise when one assumes the role of “Nature’s Priest” and undertakes to speak for an articulate nature that does not require a spokesman, thus depriving it and its other observers of alternative voices and visions. Visions are not love objects in the sense the Poet intends here, nor is sleep the same as death. But as the use of and rather than or suggests, the Poet, still in the throes of vision, splendid or otherwise, is unable or unwilling to make the requisite categorical distinctions. As was suggested earlier, the Poet’s will has a good deal to do with how he figures and responds to desire. Specifically, his will causes him to figure evanescent natural process as the sum of his needs rather than as the sum of all phenomena occurring in conformity to a telos and teleological norms prior to and independent of his existence. The role of the youthful will is, in an important sense, anticipated by the Intimations Ode, because there is no necessary distinction between what a child wills and what he perceives as truly existing. The six-year-old of Wordsworth’s poem creates “Some frag-

82

O

Shelley among Others

ment from his dream of human life,/Shaped by himself with newly-learned art” (WPW, ll. 92–93), and it is so. Whether the six-year-old’s doing so is hopeful or a good thing—whether it makes him a “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” (l. 115), or, as Blank suggests, sets him up to become “an avenging spirit, or the victim of an avenging spirit”—is debatable, even if such a progression of events is necessary or inevitable. 66 It is significant that in the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth places the discussion of the child’s willed imaginative activities after the admission that “the vision splendid” must ultimately “fade into the light of common day,” as though the reverie on the child’s reverie might offset or gainsay the admission. No such reverie follows the onset of daylight in Alastor, however, and not necessarily, as William Keach argues, because Shelley “explores a darker form of the Wordsworthian ‘reverie.’”67 At dawn, the narrator observes that “The boat pursue[s]/The winding of the cavern” (Poetry, ll. 369–70) into which the storm had driven the boat while it was still dark. The cavern, a not-too-distant relative of the cave in Plato’s Symposium, has a symbolic function here as elsewhere in Shelley’s poetry. It is the place where the will is cured, and love and its language are perfected. This function is perhaps most clearly in evidence in The Revolt of Islam, in Cythna’s narration of her imprisonment in an undersea cavern.68 Before embarking on the final, curative stage of his voyage, the Poet’s distance from Cythna’s perception of “clear elemental shapes” (SPW, l. 3111) is suggested by the simile used to describe his appearance as his fragile shallop nears the cliffs of the western Caucasus. It appears “As if that frail and wasted human form,/Had been an elemental god” (Poetry, ll. 350–51). The difference between “elemental shapes” and “elemental god” is the difference between shapes still possessing transferential potentiality and a shape in which metonymy has operated in the service of the will to power—the narrator’s and the Poet’s both. During the ascent from the cavern, until the point in the poem where the shallop’s sail fills with “A wandering stream of wind,/Breathed from the west” (ll. 369–98, esp. 397–98), the cure of the Poet’s will is in doubt. Following a number of prior critics, Sperry notes that “the direction of the Poet’s boat is at first upstream, against the current. It is only after he discovers the impossibility of pursuing his vision back to and beyond the sources of human consciousness that he redirects his course downstream, in order to resolve the question of the reality or illusion of his dream through death.” 69

Nothing Beside Remains

O

83

The Poet in this instant begins to cure his will and the resultant Sturm und Drang state of mind, and to make these and the language in which they are expressed conformable to the tendencies of evanescent natural process symbolized by the “wandering stream of wind,/Breathed from the west”70 and the stream alike. The beginning of the resultant change is suggested by the shifting of the sound balance that occurs as the small boat gets under way. “The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar,/With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods” (ll. 402–3). The workings of such change, although incomplete, are validated on the first occasion on which the Poet’s resolve to cure his will is tested. He sails into a symbolically (self-) enclosed “cove” whose yellow flowers For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, reflected in the crystal calm. (ll. 406–8) Stuart Sperry notes that the “yellow flowers” are narcissus, and their identity is confirmed by their gestures as much as by their color.71 While sensorily lush, the domain is one of moral vagrancy and lewdness, a place that is spiritually arid and corrupt, as suggested by the narrator’s observation that, prior to the Poet’s coming, only “vagrant bird, or wanton wind,/Or falling speargrass, or their own decay” (ll. 410–11) had previously disturbed narcissus-land. 72 The Poet’s resolve to cure his will is tested by the presence of the flowers, with their symbolic temptation to play at Narcissus, and, by so doing, to deny the workings of evanescent natural process. He is, on this occasion, able to resist the temptation, although not the delusion of pursuing the Indian maiden to some end. The Poet longed To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, But on his heart its solitude returned, And he forebore. Not the strong impulse hid In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame, Had yet performed its ministry: it hung Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods Of night close over it. (ll. 412–20) In the preceding passage, the Poet’s confusion of eros with thanatos is

84

O

Shelley among Others

suggested by the likely source of the statement that “the strong impulse,” which the Poet takes to be one of erotic pursuit, “Had [not] yet performed its ministry.” The opening line of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (1798) declares, “The Frost performs its secret ministry” (CPW, 1: l. 1). But to be confused about the relationship of the erotic to the thanatic is not to deny that such a relationship obtains. The Poet’s journey next takes him to a landscape of twining and twinning, where entities presumably antithetical exist in inseparable dyadic pairings that look forward to the opening of The Triumph of Life.73 It is a landscape of “huge caves” paired with “aëry rocks,” a place where “Silence and Twilight . . . twin-sisters, keep/Their noonday watch” (ll. 420–68). The ultimate of these twinings and twinnings—the one that the Poet’s journey leads him to—is the dyad of life-and-death. Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld Their own wan light through the reflected lines Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth Of that still fountain; as the human heart, Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave, Sees its own treacherous likeness there. (Poetry, ll. 469–74) What the Poet sees is complex, an example of what Keach calls “reflexive imagery,” and, as such, it corrects an earlier instance of such imagery in the poem. What the Poet mistakenly thought he “saw by the warm light of their own life”—the Indian maiden’s “glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil” (ll. 175–76)—he is shown retrospectively to have seen by the light, albeit not “wan light” at that time, of his own eyes. The language narrating this stage of the Poet’s journey may be, as Keach argues, “Shelley’s attempt to find a stylistic equivalent for the mind’s involuted descent into the depths of a restless and distorted self-consciousness.” But that language, with its rhyme (Hither, Their, hair, there), alliteration (distinct-dark-depth, human-heart, Gazing-gloomy grave), and anagrammatical movement (own-wan-own), begins to move toward the condition of the language of “Mont Blanc” (1816), where, “As a dimension of poetic form wrought from the mysterious arbitrariness of language, Shelley’s rhyme becomes both a stay against and a means of marking the chaos and blankness that are Mont Blanc’s special concerns.”74 Here, as in Mont Blanc, “chaos and blankness,” at least insofar as these

Nothing Beside Remains

O

85

can be taken to betoken death, are also “special concerns.” But at this stage of his journey, the Poet still lacks insight and wisdom of the sort dispensed by the Earth in Prometheus Unbound. After telling the story of an encounter between “The Magus Zoroaster” and his dark double— ”his own image walking in the garden”—the Earth points the moral. For know, there are two worlds of life and death: One which thou beholdest, but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them, and they part no more: Dreams and the light imaginings of men And all that faith creates, or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime, and beauteous shapes. (I.195–202) Armed with the Earth’s insight, the Poet would view the “gloomy grave” as being entirely otherwise—a threshold across which the completionthrough-union of worshiper and deified object, lover and beloved, takes place. But the Poet, although he has left off his willful pursuit, has not yet experienced an access of the power responsible for all deployed, articulate, and contrastive forms, for the evanescent natural process in the course of which such forms manifest, and for the teleology in which forms and process alike are implicated. Not quite yet, that is: immediately after his specular self-confrontation, the Poet senses “An unaccustomed presence” (l. 477) that looks forward to the namesake of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). That presence may be, as Ulmer argues, “the Poet’s final intimation of his ideal,” 75 but it is an ideal far different from the eidola specus that the Indian maiden was. She was veiled, glowing, and visible virtually to the point of palpability—reified by means of habitual thought and the assumption of physical constancy, or “accustomed presence.” The “unaccustomed presence” is not a material thing but a “Spirit” who manifests, clothed in no bright robes Of shadowy silver or enshrining light, Borrowed from aught the visible world affords Of grace, or majesty, or mystery. (ll. 480–83) The “Spirit” in question is the spirit or soul of all deployed, articulate,

86

O

Shelley among Others

and contrastive form, natural and cultural alike. Deployment and articulation are, in their turn, dependent on the principles of contrast and difference. At first, the Poet seems to consider the manifestation of this “Spirit” as solipsism in a different guise. But, undulating woods, and silent well, And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was,—only. (ll. 484–88) As the Poet comes to understand, this spirit or soul of all deployed, articulate, and contrastive form is a presence that is immanent in all forms, natural and cultural alike—indeed, this spirit or soul is immanent in and responsible for the creative consciousness itself. The Poet comes to know the “Spirit” through his encounter with the mirrors or inlets of its soul— its “starry eyes” (l. 490)—which, in revealing the immanent presence of the “Spirit” in nature, also reveal the immanent presence of that “Spirit” in him. In “pursuing/The windings of the dell” (ll. 493–94), the Poet is at the same time walking alongside the banks of the stream that symbolically centers, or is immanent in, the dell, much as “Alph, the sacred river” (CPW, 1: l. 3), centers and is immanent in the Xanadu of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1798). The stream is at once the consummate symbol of evanescent natural process, of the fundamentally transferential character of all deployed, articulate, and contrastive phenomena, and of the inability of either ontology or epistemology to render a full and satisfying account of teleology. The speaker of “Mont Blanc” knows that he can no more attain direct and unmediated knowledge of the “Power” that is the source of “The everlasting universe of things” (ll. 1, 16) and live to talk about it than he can attain direct and unmediated knowledge of the source of the Arve and live to talk about it. The speaker of Adonais, in instructing the reader to “Die,/If thou would be with that which thou dost seek! (ll. 464–65), makes explicit his understanding that the price of such knowledge is death. But the Poet of Alastor holds out the hope, albeit a faint one, of gaining such knowledge and living to tell of it. While accepting the principle of plenitude, found in the statement in the Intimations Ode that “The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star/Hath had elsewhere its setting,/And cometh from afar” (WPW, ll. 59–61), the Poet wants not only to accept the principle,

Nothing Beside Remains

O

87

but somehow also to know, in the several senses of that verb, the principle—to understand the stream that exemplifies it as the type of the transferential and evanescent, as the object of cognition, and as a love object. As the Augustinian epigraph suggests, the Poet’s quest is to see what there is “out there” to be loved, nor does this quest end with Alastor; rather, it continues for Shelley up to the end of his life. In the letter of 18 June 1822 to John Gisborne, which deals in part with Emilia Viviani, Shelley confesses, “I think one is always in love with something or other. The error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal” (Letters, 2:434).76 To the end of getting “to know” it, the Poet interrogates the stream in his last speech of the poem. The cumulative effect is that of a strenuous attempt to know still more, to “overleap the bounds” of life and human knowledge, and thereby to attain both transcendent, transfigurative love and knowledge of the transcendent. The language, given its perplexing rhetorical situation of being love talk without a definite object, fights just shy of the sensual. And at the conclusion of the speech, the possibilities of the erotic give way to the limits of the thanatic, although not without the sly suggestion that the Poet will, by the very fact of his death, deflower the stream. O stream! Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs, Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course Have each their type in me: and the wide sky, And measureless ocean may declare as soon What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud Contains thy waters, as the universe Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste I’the passing wind. (Poetry, ll. 502–14) Silence and solitude: the stream does not answer the question about its teleology, and its failure to provide fellowship through the language of such an answer leaves the Poet utterly bereft of what he might regard as compan-

88

O

Shelley among Others

ionship. The speaker of “Mont Blanc” later implies, by his concluding question, that the silence of the mountain and its rivers viewed at a distance does not mean that “to the human mind’s imaginings/Silence and solitude [are] vacancy.” Rather, the silence means that The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! (ll. 139–41) As Reiman and Powers observe in their note on this passage, “The very power of imagination to realize the nature of Power, so remote and foreign to all mortal experience, illustrates the supremacy of the imagination over the silence and solitude that threaten it. The Poet is equal to Mont Blanc, for although the amoral Power can destroy him, only he can comprehend its meaning” (93n.). But the Poet of Alastor does not possess such imaginative supremacy. As he pursues the course of the stream toward his final resting place, he encounters the deployed, articulate, and contrastive phenomena that signal the presence of Power. The passage in lines 543–70 is a virtual catalog of such phenomena, which include Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. (ll. 556–59) But such displays are lost on the rapidly aging Poet, who makes his way calmly past them (ll. 539–40), arriving at last at the site where the erotic and the thanatic merge to become one,77 aptly situated in the genital and gravelike “lap of horror.” . . . one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks, It overlooked in its serenity The dark earth and bending vault of stars. It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile, Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped The fissured stones with its entwining arms,

Nothing Beside Remains

O

89

And did embower with leaves for ever green, And berries dark, the smooth and even space Of its inviolated floor. (ll. 572–82) The site has at least two possible antecedents in Wordsworth’s poetry. The former is the putative gravesite of the child borne by Martha Ray after she is seduced and abandoned by Stephen Hill in “The Thorn” (1798). The latter is the “nook” of “Nutting” (1799), alternately characterized as “dear” and “shady,” a “green and mossy bower” that the rapacious speaker reduces to a “mutilated bower,” having reached it by “Forcing” his “way” “O’er pathless rocks,/Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets” (ll. 14–50). The Poet of Alastor, who has learned a lesson about what may legitimately be possessed as the result of his dream in the Vale of Cashmir and subsequently undertaken to cure his will, has no design to seduce, abandon, or rape. His entry into the “silent nook”—and it is his “One human step alone, [that] has ever/Broken the stillness of its solitude” (Poetry, ll. 589–90)—transforms the Poet into a type of Orpheus, a metamorphosis that marks a stage of progress beyond the primary narcissism of his former self and a movement toward the reconciliation of the erotic and the thanatic unrealized within the margins of Alastor itself.78 He inspires the bower’s “echoes” and moves “the loveliest among human forms” to scatter the bower’s “music on the unfeeling storm” (ll. 591–97), much in the same way that Orpheus, forever bereft of Eurydice, inspires and moves—first moving with his song the tigers and the oaks as he mourns the loss of Eurydice at the brink of the underworld, and then, after he has been dismembered and thrown into the River Hebrus by the Thracian maidens, moving the shores themselves to responsive song. Curiously enough, the movement from the full transferential potential of the dyad Eurydice-Orpheus, to the unconsummated desire of the bereaved Orpheus, to the singing head of Orpheus that is but a metonym (or synecdoche) of himself enacts the sort of figural decline that concerns Shelley in A Defence, while at the same time functioning as a cautionary tale as to the nature and uses of desire with which to gloss Alastor. Orpheus’s song—as heard in this world, at least—ends shortly thereafter, when the Muses gather up and bury his body at Liberthra. And the Poet, after displaying the previously discussed power to inspire and move, is effectively unlanguaged as the onset of his death draws near. “Language is a perpetual Orphic song” (IV.415), says the Earth in Prometheus Unbound, but she

90

O

Shelley among Others

says nothing that would imply the immortality of the singer. Indeed, as Paul Michael Privateer observes, “Orpheus dies in the world as a source of human communion; his immortality is not a supernatural gift, but a human one.”79 But the verse paragraph describing this onset effects a rather curious break of tone and reference from what precedes, a break that is to some extent adumbrated by and understood in view of the Wordsworthian echoes discussed earlier. The verse paragraph begins with a reference to “The dim and horned moon” (l. 602), which Reiman and Powers here and in The Triumph (ll. 79–85) trace to the epigraph to Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode (1802 [84, 457nn.]).80 The loss of the authentic voice of inspiration is as much the subject of Dejection as of “Elegiac Stanzas,” witness Coleridge’s plaintive “My genial spirits fail” (CPW, 1: l. 39). Wordsworth’s recuperative strategy in The Excursion of wedding the mind to nature is likewise Coleridge’s. “O “Lady!” he exclaims to Sara Hutchinson, “in our life alone does Nature live:/Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!” (ll. 47–49). As seems clear from Alastor and the echoes of “The Thorn” and “Nutting” that underwrite the verse paragraph preceding the one here under discussion, Shelley holds that we live our lives in, and in relation to, nature, echoing in the course of our life processes the passing of the deployed, articulate, and contrastive phenomena of nature, not the other way around. No recuperative wedding can alter this state of affairs. One sign of the failure of Coleridge’s “genial spirits” in Dejection is his reaction to a sunset and night sky that he describes at length. Of the moon and stars, he says, “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are” (ll. 30– 38). Shelley rings the following changes: Yellow mist Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger’s grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace. (Poetry, ll. 604–9) While the personification of the winds as “Danger’s grim playmates” looks back to “Elegiac Stanzas,” Shelley’s “yellow mist” obscures the moon and stars in the skyscape reminiscent of Dejection. It would seem, by extension, that the “yellow mist” is responsible for extinguishing both the sight of that

Nothing Beside Remains

O

91

skyscape and Coleridge’s (or anyone else’s) empathic identification with it. What is the yellow mist? On the most obvious level, it is an atmospheric condition suggestive of a swampy terrain—marsh gas resulting from the decay of animal and vegetable matter, with political resonances that turn on the idea of corruption: the repressive anti-Jacobin government of William Pitt the Younger was known as “Old Corruption.”81 The dates of the Pitt government— 1783–1801, and 1804–6—bracket the date of Dejection, and the second term overlaps precisely the dates of the “Ode to Duty” and “Elegiac Stanzas.” In “To Wordsworth,” published in the Alastor volume of 1816, Shelley comments on Wordsworth’s change of estate, echoing Wordsworth’s own account of the death of Lucy, who likewise “ceased to be” in “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” (WPW, l. 10). 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 shouldst cease to be. (Poetry, ll.11– 14) The betrayal of republican and revolutionary ideals by Coleridge, and above all by Wordsworth, has political as well as moral implications. In a passage that looks forward to The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, and, ultimately, The Triumph of Life, Shelley assigns the management of an unseeing, indiscriminate “storm of death” to “Ruin,” a colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls His brother Death. A rare and regal prey He hath prepared, prowling around the world. (ll. 611–20) “Ruin,” a “Skeleton” like Anarchy in The Mask (see l. 74), or the “Shape” in The Triumph (l. 87), is symbolic of established order that presides over the temporal affairs of this world—its battlefields, hospitals, scaffolds, and

92

O

Shelley among Others

thrones, to be sure, but also the private lives of its subjects as well, down to and including the beds of those subjects and what those subjects do in their beds. “Ruin” is the metonymic vice-gerent of the God presumed to be the cause that justifies his actions as an effect. These actions, like those of Anarchy, or Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, result in suffering, loss—of life, of limbs, of patriotism, of innocence—and, above all, in oppression. The fact that Ruin is figured explicitly as a “colossal Skeleton” suggests both the spiritual aridity of the position he represents—the Greek root skeletos means dried up—and underscores his status as an embodiment (or disembodiment) of that state of mind in which a language of fresh metaphorical associations gives way to words that are “signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts” and language itself is “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (482). No wonder, then, that “Ruin calls/His brother Death.” “Ruin”’s language, “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse,” deadens that “intercourse” by the very naming of it. Such betrayal becomes, by a curious twist of logic, mistaken selfsacrifice. The reason that Coleridge experiences a failure of his “genial spirits,” that Wordsworth declares himself first the “Bondman” of the namesake of the “Ode to Duty” and submits to the “new control” of Anglican orthodoxy (WPW, ll. 56, 34), is that each in his turn betrays his imaginative powers and the revolutionary ideals those powers underwrite. By extension, the Poet is guilty of betraying his own imaginative powers, with the result that he sacrifices himself to no good cause and to no good end. The Poet is, with the pun on regal alluding to the burgeoning royalist sympathies of Wordsworth and Coleridge duly noted, the “rare and regal prey” to which “Ruin calls/His brother Death,” a human sacrifice that propitiates no good outcome in the world. The Poet, for his part, is one of those men [who] Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms, Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine The unheeded tribute of a broken heart. (Poetry, ll. 621–24) But by an equally curious and offsetting twist, the Poet’s self-sacrifice holds out the possibility of larger insights and some answers to questions answerable only beyond the bounds of human life as he dies into the flux of nature. But the Poet is also made one with nature in the ambivalent way that Wordsworth’s Lucy is made one with it—ambivalent from the standpoint of

Nothing Beside Remains

O

93

those who remain behind to mourn, that is. “His last sight/Was the great moon” (ll. 645–46), as the narrator states, and his death is symbolized by and tied to the setting of that moon, just as the speaker of “Strange Fits of Passion” (1800) ties his premonitions or prefigurations of Lucy’s death to the sight of the symbolically setting moon. The symbolism, resulting in a gender switch that associates a traditionally female symbol with the male Poet in Shelley’s poem, is instructive. It may be, as Diana Long Hoeveler states, that the moon represents “the ambivalent power of the female within,” and that the Poet’s struggle turns on whether he can transform “his fantasy of the mother” to “figurations he can psychically control (the veiled maiden), or must he accept the reality of embodiment (the Arab maiden) and accept the loss of the mother?” But such a reading only takes account of physis and psyche, not of telos: the Poet dies out of human life into a nature that, if not a condition of higher androgyny, at least serves as the androgynous source of genders and the distinctions that obtain between them. 82 As is the case for Wordsworth, dying out of human life is a transition that makes for a good deal of ambivalence. Echoing the speaker of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” who proclaims, albeit proleptically, “I had no human fears” (WPW, l. 2), the Alastor narrator says of the Poet, “no mortal pain or fear/Marred his repose” (Poetry, ll. 640–41). But as the polysemous repose, meaning alternately (or, better, simultaneously) rest, sleep, and the lying in state of a dead body, suggests, the repose in question means relinquishing one’s human identity, even if that identity is in some manner compromised by the presence of “mortal pain or fear.” The alternative is a condition characterized by “No sense, no motion, no divinity” (l. 666) and reminiscent of the conclusion of “A Slumber”: No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. (WPW, ll. 5–8) The apparent distinction between the two accounts is ultimately an important equation. Both propose that death consists of an absence of “motion” and an absence of “sense” (“She neither hears nor sees”). But what the narrator of Alastor views as an absence of “divinity,” the speaker of “A Slumber” views as an absence of “force.” The Wordsworthian source calls into

94

O

Shelley among Others

question whether the “divinity” in question ever existed, or whether it was rather the figment of a metonymic and anthropomorphic projection, of “force” projected onto the other to make it do the bidding of the subject’s will. The third stanza of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” bears importantly on this question, suggesting that what is one speaker’s “divinity” is, in actual point of fact, projective “force.” No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given— Therefore the name of God and ghosts and heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells—whose uttered charm we might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. (ll. 25–31) But “Doubt, chance, and mutability,” as empty as they may be of some orthodox version of numinous presence, are not utterly devoid of some other informing power or presence. The narrator, in his final speech in the poem, characterizes the Poet’s nearly bygone existence in the following terms: A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander—a bright stream Once fed with many voiced waves. (ll. 667–69) These terms at once look back to Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1795) and forward to “Mont Blanc,” both of which celebrate the existence of an immanent power responsible for all articulate forms. But the implicit conflict between the two poems—”The Eolian Harp” retreats from such celebration of the object world when the Coleridgean speaker cannot reconcile his panentheistic vision of it with orthodox Christianity, whereas the speaker of “Mont Blanc” proposes such celebration on the basis of a Platonic conception of the object world—once again points up the extent of Shelley’s differences with what are, to him, his deluded precursors, as well as what the proper choice to make is when one is confronted with such differences. The Coleridgean speaker of “The Eolian Harp” speculates, for his part, that “the long sequacious notes” of the harp’s windswept strings are emblematic of

Nothing Beside Remains

O

95

the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where. (CPW, 1: ll. 26–29) But after speculating as to whether “all of animated nature/Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,” and speculating as to whether the causative power responsible is “Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/At once the Soul of each and God of all[?],” this speaker backs down to uttering conventionally Christian pieties after “pensive Sara” reproves him with her “more serious eye” (CPW, 1: ll. 47–49). The Shelleyan speaker of “Mont Blanc,” for his part, is unrepentant in his assertion that “The everlasting universe of things/Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,” and that the natural analogue of this universe operating on the mind is the Ravine of the Arve, a “many-coloured, many-voiced vale,” through which “Power in likeness of the Arve comes down” (Poetry, ll. 1–16). The emphasis on the object world’s motion in particular and on its incessant natural process in general, underscored by the speaker’s apostrophic characterization of the Ravine as “pervaded with ceaseless motion” (l. 32), stands in contrast to his characterization of Mont Blanc itself as “still, snowy, and serene” (l. 61). The relation of mountain to ravine is much like that of unmoved mover to world in the Timaeus or like that of ideal form to form in the Symposium. What is important to note about these manifestations of power is that they are transferential and, by extension, metaphoric. Power does not “come down” (or “come across”; cf. Gr. metapherein, L. transferre) unmediated, but rather “in likeness of the Arve,” setting an epistemological limit beyond which “the adverting mind” (l. 100) may not go. To transgress the limit is to move beyond the realm of what may properly be known and predicate the existence of a metonymic and anthropomorphic cause for known effects.83 Unlike the speaker of “The Eolian Harp,” who invokes the quintessentially human quality of “Soul” and suggests that ensoulment is the means by which a living being comes to exist in the image of “the God of all,” the speaker of “Mont Blanc” refuses to transgress the limit. But the Poet of Alastor, it must be remembered, “overleaps the bounds” (l. 207), and he dies in between these two speakers’ positions. In the words of Rajan, “the Poet’s death still has the force not of transcendence but of a double negation: a negation both of the ordinary and of the visionary.”84 In

96

O

Shelley among Others

his closing dirge, the Wordsworthian speaker seems predictably mindful of the fact that the Poet’s death—and, by extension, the death of that speaker’s first self, the poet of the Intimations Ode, for whom there will be no fitting second self when that first self is gone—constitutes a negation of the visionary, but the Wordsworthian speaker does not seem similarly mindful of the fact that the death also constitutes a negation of the ordinary. Thus, while the Wordsworthian speaker remarks the passing of “The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful/The child of grace and genius,” he argues at the same time that the ordinary and the quotidian persist unaffected. Heartless things Are done and said i’ the world, and many worms And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, In vesper low or joyous orison, Still lifts its solemn voice. (ll. 689–94) Not unexpectedly, however, the Wordsworthian speaker cannot sustain this position and unsays himself at least partially with regard to the earlier assertion that the ordinary and the quotidian persist unaffected. His concluding words make reference to “Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, /Birth and the grave, that are not as they were” (ll. 719– 20). One of the reasons that the speaker is not able to salvage the ordinary and the quotidian is that, to borrow a turn of phrase from Hopkins, it is Wordsworth that he mourns for—both the earlier Wordsworth of the Intimations Ode now imaginatively lost to the older Wordsworth of The Excursion, and the older Wordsworth who must persevere in full knowledge of that imaginative loss and the deflected poetic ideals that follow upon it. The magnitude of the loss and its potential for harm are made clear by a series of three apostrophes at the beginning of the last verse paragraph of Alastor. Taken together, the three mount, with monstrous irony, a scathing self-indictment by the Wordsworthian speaker. In the first of the three, the Wordsworthian speaker invokes Medea’s wondrous alchemy, Which wheresoe’er it fell made the earth gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! (ll. 672–75)

Nothing Beside Remains

O

97

Reiman and Powers note that the source of the allusion is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, VII.275ff., where “Medea, sorceress of Greek legend and tragedy, brewed a magic potion to revive Aeson, [and] she spilled some on the ground, whereupon flowers and grass sprang up” (86n.). But Reiman and Powers do not tell the whole story. Medea concocts her brew not merely to revive Aeson, who has been forced to commit suicide by Pelias, but to rejuvenate him. The same “hot foam” that makes “the earth . . . like a garden of flowers/And green between them . . . new ferns and grasses” transforms the dead and aged Aeson similarly. . . . his hair grew black and straight, all greyness gone. His chest and shoulders swelled with youthful vigour His wrinkles fell away, his loins grew stout, His sallow skin took on a swarthy color; And Aeson, dazed, remembered this new self Was what he had been forty years ago.85 “Medea’s wondrous alchemy” would rejuvenate not only the too-rapidly-aged and deceased Poet, but also the aging Wordsworthian speaker, whose language from the time of The Excursion on is “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (482). It is also possible that Shelley is having fun, at Wordworth’s expense, with some of the implications of “The Child is father of the Man” (WPW, l. 7), the first line of the concluding triplet of “My Heart Leaps Up,” the entire triplet having been superadded to the Intimations Ode as its epigraph. In the second of the three apostrophes, the Wordsworthian speaker invokes the presumably God-given chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever Lone as incarnate death! (Poetry, ll. 676–81) As Reiman and Powers observe, the allusion is to “Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew” (86n.). The speaker invokes an apostasy, in other words. In other contexts in Shelley, such as Queen Mab (1813) and Hellas (1821), Ahasuerus is a visionary for all the ages, and in Julian and Maddalo (1819), the title’s

98

O

Shelley among Others

namesake Julian expounds apostasy as his classical namesake did, making it into a reasoned and reasonable position to assume. In Alastor, however, the invocation is in the mouth and words of the Wordsworthian speaker, suggesting that the apostasy is, from a Shelleyan perspective, real, a renunciation of an earlier vision and idealism in favor of a dogmatic orthodoxy. Part of the irony, then, is that the Wordsworthian speaker of the post-Excursion era does not need to invoke apostasy: it is already present, writ large in his poetry and politics alike. In the third and last of the apostrophes, the Wordsworthian speaker again invokes alchemy: O that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lovely world! (ll. 681–86) Reiman and Powers gloss these lines as follows: “An alchemist searching for the elixir of life and the power to change base metals into gold within a cave in which he sees visions” (86n.). In alchemy, one calcines base metals in the attempt to remove the dross that conceals their golden essence. What the alchemist of the invocation seeks in “the cinders of the crucible,” in other words, is gold, which is at once the elixir of life and the visionary standard of the “visioned cave.” The values that cause the alchemist to seek such gold —to live and envision and create on the gold standard, as it were—are as far as possible from the values of the Wordsworth who, “In honoured poverty did weave/Songs consecrate to truth and liberty” (ll. 11–12). Taken all in all, the three apostrophes work a killing kindness, invoking on behalf of the dead Poet exactly those elements that have killed off the poetry of the Wordsworthian speaker. Hence we are back to Rajan’s position that “the Poet’s death has the force not of transcendence but of a double negation: a negation both of the ordinary and of the visionary.” Beyond Alastor, then, Shelley must offset this “double negation” by undertaking a recuperation of voice that heals the rift between the ordinary and the visionary by locating the one in the other and making the two, as mediated by the play and idea of language, the subject of his poetry.

Nothing Beside Remains

O

99

O

Chapter 3 “Mont Blanc,” the Recuperation of Voice, the Way of “Power,” and the Fate of Love

“This Mighty Sum/Of Things for Ever Speaking” The preconditions allowing for the recuperation of metaphoric (and transferential) poetic voice in the poetry written after Alastor are in fact present within that poem. Near its conclusion, the narrator remarks that the Poet’s blood, That ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still. (Poetry, ll. 651–53) Although the realization comes too late in the Poet’s life to change his fate—and although the Poet, even when near enough to death to renounce his willfulness, never does get the point—the narrator recognizes that the rhythms that make for pulse, respiration and voice are the same rhythms that inexplicably, even mystically, make for all the articulate and deployed forms of nature itself. This recognition is important, leading ultimately, in Prometheus Unbound’s moment of visionary culmination, to the strongly trochaic and chantlike imperative to “weave,” or textualize, the union of voice and articulate, deployed forms figured as what the chorus of Spirits and Hours terms “the web of the mystic measure” (IV.129). As a semichorus of Hours notes, there are three prerequisites to this moment. The reified metonymic language of oppression—”the figured curtain of sleep/Which covered our being and darkened our birth”—must be “drawn back” (IV.58–59). The delusions that that language fostered, keeping its victims “Cradled in visions of hate and care” (IV.62), must be expunged. And

100

O

O

100 among Others Shelley

“the lute of Hope,” hitherto heard only “in sleep”; “the voice of Love,” hitherto heard only “in dreams”; and “the wand of Power,” hitherto “felt” only at second hand, must become manifest concomitants of waking reality, not merely dream figments, apprehended only at second hand. Shelley makes a start toward this moment in “Mont Blanc,” which is, as Sperry notes, “in many ways a preliminary sketch for Prometheus,”1 by pressing his attack on “the figured curtain of sleep” and “visions of hate and care,” while at the same time conceding a human nescience that places an insurmountable barrier between human desire and understanding, on the one hand, and whatever is causally responsible for producing the sounds and effects of “the lute of Hope,” “the voice of Love,” and “the wand of Power,” on the other. In “Mont Blanc,” that nescience is all but overwhelming. “Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled/ The veil of life and death?” the Shelleyan speaker asks, do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly In circles? For the very spirit fails. (ll. 54–57) In both “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” as Blank notes, Shelley continues his conversation-by-allusion with Wordsworth, although he is obviously engaged with Coleridge as well. For Blank, the allusive scheme of the conversation in “Mont Blanc” is constituted primarily by “Tintern Abbey” and The Excursion.2 But there is another focus of Wordsworthian allusion that both permeates and brackets Shelley’s poem. The resulting allusive scheme recalls Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply” (1798). Along with its companion piece, “The Tables Turned” (1798), “Expostulation and Reply” pits the autobiographical “William,” who is of the party of nature, against the scholarly “Matthew,” arguably William Hazlitt, who is “somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy.”3 Given the apparent plenitude of the natural world, “William” asks “Matthew,” “Think you, ‘mid this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?” (WPW, ll. 25–28; emphasis added)

“Mont Blanc”

O

101

“Mont Blanc” presents that “mighty sum/Of things for ever speaking,” refigured as “The everlasting universe of things,” which contains “waterfalls” that “leap for ever”; a river that “ceaselessly bursts and raves”; and the “dark, deep Ravine” of Arve, a “many-voiced vale.” Moreover, the speaker represents his mind as “Holding an unremitting interchange/ With the clear universe of things around” (Poetry, ll. 1–40; emphasis added). But unlike “William,” the Shelleyan speaker is not situated in the midst of the “mighty sum.” Near the end of the poem, he designates his point of view as being one from which, “Below, vast caves/Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam” (ll. 120–21), and from which, above, “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high” (l. 127). Nor is Wordsworth’s “mighty sum” all that there is. The speaker can also see the mighty sum of things forever silent. Foremost among these, “Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene” (l. 61; emphasis added). The adjective “still” says it all here, punning on its two senses—that of persistence or duration, on the one hand, and that of silence, on the other. And in an important sense, the site says it all: stillness or silence, far from being at odds with “Poesy,” is an essential component of it. To begin with, the contrastive values of sound could not exist without the intervals of silence that serve as the temporal gradient of contrast. “Things” make themselves known to the “mind” by such contrastive distinctions, figured as rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour. (ll. 2–4) Moreover, what is silent can itself be articulate, perhaps even more so than what “speaks.” Poets, according to Shelley writing in A Defence of Poetry, “are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers.” As to the timelessness of poetry so construed, “The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive” than that of poetry defined “in a more restricted sense” as the “arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man” (482, 483). That “imperial faculty,” naturalized and figured in the landscape of “Mont

102

O

Shelley among Others

Blanc” as “the etherial waterfall, whose veil/Robes some unsculptured image” (ll. 26–27), will be discussed more fully. For now, it is important to note that, as a result of his sojourn in “the still cave of the witch Poesy,” the speaker turns to the landscape of Mont Blanc spread out above him and finds that the things forever silent up there are every bit as mighty and articulate in their silence as the “things for ever speaking” down below are. Far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mount Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene— Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile round it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps. (ll. 60–66) If the Arve River, emanating from a “secret throne” and sending “its loud waters to the ocean waves” (ll. 17, 125), is the articulate emblem of the temporal and auditory sublime, Mont Blanc, “piercing the infinite sky” and overlooking “unfathomable deeps,” is certainly an articulate emblem of the spatial and visual sublime. Shelley accordingly propounds the faith that something, not “nothing . . . will come,” or may come, of one or both of the “mighty sum[s]”— that of “things for ever speaking,” and that of things forever silent. Thus there is no need “still [to] be seeking” in either case. In “Mont Blanc,” neither the ultimate source of articulate sound nor the ultimate source of articulate silence may be sought, let alone approached, in this life. The Valley of the Arve, the locus of articulate sound, is an awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne. (ll. 15–17) Reaching the “secret throne” of “Power” would, accordingly, be tantamount to besting the current of the Arve River and penetrating Mont Blanc to reach its source. To the extent that the river symbolizes time, one would also have to overcome the constraints of time, reaching its infinite source, to do so. But so, too, do the “primæval mountains/Teach the adverting mind” (ll. 99–100) the futility of seeking further. To reach “Power” there, one would have to overcome the constraints of space itself, overleaping an infernal “city

“Mont Blanc”

O

103

of death, distinct with many a tower/And wall impregnable of beaming ice” (ll. 105–6), not to mention the consciousness that, no less than space itself, is an effect of “Power,”4 in order to reach its infinite source, “Power [that] dwells apart in its tranquillity” (l. 96). “William” is not without his redeeming insights, however. In his stance before “Power [that] dwells apart in its tranquillity” (l. 96), the Shelleyan speaker adopts the stance of passivity described earlier in the poem. There, the speaker’s “mind . . . passively/Now renders and receives fast influencings” (ll. 37–38; emphasis added), and seeks “among the shadows that pass by/Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee [i.e., the Universal Mind]” (ll. 45–46). In so doing, the speaker emulates the stance endorsed by “William” thusly: “Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our mind impress That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.” (WPW ll. 21–24; emphasis added)5 Surveying the site of Mont Blanc for the last time in the poem, the Shelleyan speaker remarks “The still and solemn power of many sights,/ And many sounds, and much of life and death” (Poetry, ll. 128–29). But the speaker advances the argument one step beyond where “William” takes it. For “William,” while nothing comes of nothing, something comes self-evidently of something. That is, the subject, by means of sight and audition, totalizes and validates the “mighty sum” of presence figured as visible “things for ever speaking.” In so doing, the subject credits the evidence of the senses as sufficiently compelling to proclaim the existence of a naturally originated plenitude. For Shelley’s speaker, however, something—love, poetry, revolution, or some other manifestation of change for the better—may come of what registers sensorily as nothing, of what resists totalization. “The secret strength of things/Which governs thought”—not only the “things” or objects of consciousness but consciousness itself—”inhabits” the mountain (ll. 139–41; emphasis added). Accordingly, both the subject’s sight and audition, and the limits or failure of these two senses to totalize and validate the existence of an aggregate sufficiently oxymoronic in its metaphoricity, 6 bespeak the existence of the supernaturally or transcendently originated plenitude. This plenitude is figured both as visible and invisible things, both as things that

104

O

Shelley among Others

speak and things that are silent. Such a plenitude is one that surpasses human understanding and can only be accounted for by “Power [that] dwells apart in its tranquillity.” In addition to “The still and solemn power of many sights,/And many sounds,” the speaker of “Mont Blanc” remarks the unseen “snows [that] descend/Upon that Mountain,” the “Winds [that] contend/Silently there,” and “The voiceless lightning in these solitudes.” (ll. 131–37). Taken all in all, the seen and the unseen, the voiced and the voiceless, testify to the existence of a “Power” that is at once transcendent in the sense of resisting totalization by sensory means and immanent in the mountain. The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, [and which] inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (ll. 139–44) The narrator’s rhetorical question presumes the response that, far from betokening nothingness, or “vacancy,” “silence and solitude” betoken its opposite, plenitude—albeit a plenitude much of which lies beyond the ken of human apprehension. 7 Shelley has this situation in mind when, in A Defence, he characterizes poets as “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration” (Poetry, 508). With the demise of Jupiter at the end of act III of Prometheus Unbound comes the destruction of the reified fabric of metonyms confused with “real life,” and with that destruction comes emancipation from hierarchy, worship, and homage. In the Spirit’s words, which look back to the rending of the veil that surrounded the Ark of the Covenant in the Second Temple in the hour of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45), and anticipate those of the semichorus of Hours regarding the fate of the “figured curtain of sleep,” The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colors idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside. (III.iv.190–92) But this unveiling, the harbinger of apocalypse, only provisionally suggests that silence and solitude may in fact betoken plenitude. Human beings, the Spirit reports, are

“Mont Blanc”

O

105

Not yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance and death and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III.iv.200–204) As long as humanity must contend with “chance and death and mutability,” it is subject to a partial nescience that prevents it from “oversoar”ing—that is, transcending, space and time, and attaining direct and unmediated apprehension of Power, the Unmoved Mover, or whatever it is that, defying formal articulation and deployment itself, is nevertheless the final cause of all articulate, deployed form and the proof that “silence and solitude” do not betoken “vacancy.” 8 Beyond merely making the case that Wordsworth’s two quatrains play a part in the allusive thematizing of “Mont Blanc,” however, I would like to pause briefly to consider how the editorial politics of originality underwrites the appropriation of earlier texts in “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” as well as how this politics furnishes a context for Shelley’s reaction to the two poems and their politics in “Mont Blanc.” I do so on the basis of the assumption that both this politics of originality, and Shelley’s reaction to it in “Mont Blanc,” bear importantly on the issue of the recuperation of poetic voice. Wordsworth’s two poems replaced Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) in the point position in the first volume of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), presumably as a defense and illustration of the doctrine of poetic originality advanced in the “Preface” to the second edition. Ostensibly a rehearsal of the books-versus-nature dispute that was waged throughout the eighteenth century,9 the two poems pit “William” as the party of nature (and originality) against “Matthew” as the party of books. The apparent irony underwriting this confrontation is that “William,” although by his own account a student of nature and an original poet, speaks the language of Shakespeare and Milton. Apparent only: at least one version of the politics of originality in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries held that to be original was to write like Shakespeare and Milton. “Shakespeare,” according to Young, “mingled no water with his wine, lower ’d his genius by no vapid imitation.” Along with Shakespeare, Milton is one of those whom Young cites as a case

106

O

Shelley among Others

in point of the proposition “that the winds cannot blow the British flag farther, than an original spirit can convey the British fame.”10 Indeed, in his critical introduction for an early-nineteenth-century edition of Milton’s poetry, John Aikin praises what he takes to be Milton’s “originality of imitation,” which “becomes particularly conspicuous on a critical examination of his similes. In most of these he may be detected taking a hint from Homer or some other ancient; but he has made it so much his own, both by added circumstances in the description and by novelty in the application, that his merit of invention is little less than if the whole idea had been primarily of his own growth.” Accordingly, to be original in the sense that Milton is means to appropriate the figurative language of eminent precursors and to renovate it to one’s own ends.11 If one is Milton, of course, “a hint from Homer or some other ancient” will suffice nicely as the raw material to be appropriated for the sort of transformation Aikin has in mind. But if one is Wordsworth and not Milton (or Shakespeare), there is a risk that the text appropriated may in fact make the appropriator its own. In “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” poetic originality hews extremely close to Aikin’s “originality of imitation.” But there is some question as to whether “William,” who speaks like Shakespeare and Milton, is overwhelmed by his precursors by reason of “taking a hint” from them. For example, “William”’s advocacy of a “wise passiveness” before certain unnamed (but capitalized) “Powers” echoes Raphael’s injunction to Adam in book VIII of Paradise Lost: “Heav’n is for thee too high /To know what passes there; be lowly wise” (MPP, VIII, 172–73).12 Read against this putative source, “William”’s statement that there are “Powers/Which of themselves our mind impress” has the effect, however unintended, of putting not only the language of Paradise Lost back in play, but its theology as well, in which “powers” are an order of angels.13 For example, when the seraph Abdiel, having defied Satan, returned to the angelic minions, he mixt Among those friendly Powers who him receiv’d With joy and acclamations loud. (VI, 21–23) Accordingly, by opting for “Powers” rather than “Power,” “William” reproduces what Shelley, in A Defence, calls “The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized,” rather than re-

“Mont Blanc”

O

107

inforcing the insight that such “notions . . . are merely the mask and mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.” Moreover, his actions make “William” the agent who perpetuates the erroneous “popular creed” that good (God) will, and ought to, triumph over evil (Satan). In this matter, Shelley’s position, typical of the writers of his age, is that “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy . . . with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments” (Poetry, 498). In the other quatrain under consideration, which is much more nearly central to the discussion at hand, “William,” in positing of the possibility “nothing of itself will come” in the midst of “things for ever speaking,” recalls King Lear (1608)—specifically, Lear’s injunction to Cordelia after she, having been asked, “what can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your sisters?” and commanded to win her portion of Lear’s kingdom by speaking of her love for her father, replies, “Nothing, my lord.” To confirm that he has heard correctly, Lear commands, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again” (I.i.87–91).14 “William”’s offense lies in letting Lear’s words in act I be the last words in the matter. If, in speaking like Milton, “William” gets Milton’s art wrong by getting his theology right, in speaking like Shakespeare, “William” gets both Shakespeare’s art and the moral thrust of King Lear wrong. Cordelia, unwilling to engage in the same empty flatteries and professions of love as her sisters Goneril and Regan, declines to do so despite her love for her father. As the result of her refusal, Cordelia loses what was to have been by right her portion of Lear’s kingdom. Lear in his turn loses any hope of finding a safe haven in England with Cordelia and her husband-to-be, the duke of Burgundy, for whom her portion of the kingdom would have served as a dowry. But something does come of nothing, and in short order: the king of France, moved by love and empathy, takes Cordelia to be his queen, even without a dowry (I.i.253–60). Later, when Kent causes news of Lear ’s mistreatment to be sent to Cordelia at the French court, she is moved to tears by his plight (IV.iii.11–31), and her husband the king sends an army to England, thus setting in motion the events that lead to the temporary rescue of Lear and the downfall of Goneril and Regan. Before these events come to

108

O

Shelley among Others

pass, however, Lear undergoes the harrowing on the heath of act III. There, in the midst of a fierce storm, Lear learns the emptiness of kingship and command, and of the language that constructs and privileges these activities, in the context of the elemental forces of the universe. The Fool’s ditty sums up Lear’s insight. He that has and a tiny little wit— With hey, ho, the wind and the rain— Must make content with his fortunes fit, For the rain it raineth every day. (III.ii.74–77) Rain reigns: it presides over “every day.” And reigns rain: mighty monarchs fall like the rain itself, “every day.” No individual can withstand change and evanescence figured as “the wind and the rain.”15 As the result of this experience, which is synopsized by the ditty, Lear understands the imperative to empathize, as Cordelia does, rather than to command, as Lear had previously done and as Goneril and Regan still do. Outside the hovel on the heath, Lear reflects, Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From reasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. (III.iv.28–36) Later in the play, Lear has occasion to reflect back on his harrowing and on the language of command as it was perverted and subverted by Goneril and Regan. Ultimately, Lear exhibits a shrewd awareness of the way that the language of command falsely constructs kingship as omnipotence that causes a monarch to think himself “everything” with the power to nullify others (i.e., to declare “nothing”) by decree. They flattered me like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say “ay” and “no” to everything that I said! — ”Ay” and “no” too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me

“Mont Blanc”

O

109

once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ‘em, there I smelt ‘em out. Go to, they are not men of their words. They told me I am everything; ’tis a lie, I am not agueproof. (IV.vi.97–107) When the French army, accompanied by Cordelia, lands in England to avenge Lear’s mistreatment, Lear, chastened by his harrowing and the memory of his previous actions, offers Cordelia the opportunity to exact retribution through wielding the language of command. “If you have poison for me, I will drink it,” he tells her. Exacting such a penalty would be as just for Cordelia as it would be unjust for Goneril and Regan, according to Lear. “You have some cause, they have not” (IV.vii.72– 75), he says. Cordelia, who has previously kissed Lear awake with the wish that the kiss “Repair those violent harms that my two sisters/Have in thy reverence made” (IV.vii. 28–29), will not allow anything to be done to Lear. Her very words in response to his offer to drink poison are “No cause, no cause” (IV.vii.75). Subsequently, after Lear and Cordelia are captured by Edmund’s army, Lear predicts their happiness, even in captivity. It is a happiness that turns on a mutuality and reciprocity of voice shorn of the language of command, voice that, in its tidal rhythms, anticipates Shelleyan voice in general and the passage from Alastor on “nature’s ebb and flow” in particular. We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage; When thou dost aske me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness, so we’ll live ................................ And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon. (V.ii.9–19) After her death, Lear recognizes that Cordelia’s way of conveying her love was not by a hierarchical language, but by the voice that is the ground of language itself. Standing over her lifeless body, he reflects, “Her voice was ever soft,/Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman” (V.iii.272–73). If, in getting Paradise Lost wrong, “William” muddles the “bold neglect of a direct moral purpose” that is, for Shelley writing in A Defence, “the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius” (Poetry, 498), “William” ’s

110

O

Shelley among Others

lapse in getting King Lear wrong is even more egregious. His misreading gives short shrift to the reparative comedic element of the play. The comedy of King Lear, by which Shelley must intend the comedy of learning the limits of human language and the power that that language expresses, is “universal, ideal, and sublime.” Because it blends comedy of this order with tragedy, Shelley argues, King Lear may stand comparison with the Aeschylean trilogy or the Oresteia, “unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged the most perfect specimen of dramatic art existing in the world” (489). But getting King Lear wrong means more than merely failing to understand what may be “the most perfect specimen of dramatic art existing in the world.” It means failing to understand one of the most profound influences on Shelley’s evolving notion of voice.16 Shelley himself quotes the passage from Lear’s harrowing on the heath cited earlier in the Dedication of “The Witch of Atlas” (1821). There, Shelley’s ostensible purpose in citing Lear’s speech is to use it as a vehicle for poking fun at Wordsworth’s labored voice in “Peter Bell” (1819) in comparison with his freely flowing alternative. But by invoking that alternative, Shelley also recalls the prison speech, in which Lear says that he and Cordelia will “wear out” their detractors, “the packs and sects of great ones,/That ebb and flow by the moon.” Shelley confides to Mary, the dedicatee, My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature As Ruth or Lucy, whom his [i.e., Wordsworth’s] graceful praise Clothes for our grandsons—but she matches Peter Though he took nineteen years, and she three days In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre She wears: he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress Like King Lear’s “looped and windowed raggedness.” (Poetry, ll. 33–40)17

The Probable Voice(s) of “Power” Informed by his reading of “Expostulation and Reply,” both in and of itself and as a misinterpretation of the idea of voice found in King Lear, Shelley’s

“Mont Blanc”

O

111

“Mont Blanc” is preoccupied with the concept of voice as a possible articulation of “Power.” “The everlasting universe of things” is figured in its flux and mutability as “a vast river [that]/Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves” (ll. 10–11). The “Ravine of Arve” is, among other things, a “many-voiced vale” (ll. 12–13). The ice caves of the mountain are characterized as “echoing the Arve’s commotion,/A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame” (ll. 30–31). But the focal center of this preoccupation is Mont Blanc itself. Underwriting all of these many voices that claim the right to erect systems of governance and belief is the one voice that both gives rise to the others and unsays them. 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. (ll. 76–83) The silence of that “mysterious tongue” teaches the skepticism (“awful doubt”) or idealism (“faith so mild”) that is necessary precisely to resist and avoid assenting to the proposition that “this mighty sum/Of things for ever speaking” and the “Large codes of fraud and woe” that ground their authority upon “this mighty sum” totalize the possibilities of the articulate. 18 The mountain’s “voice,” unlike the one figured by the waters emanating from the Ravine of Arve, is silent, but the mountain’s voice is, if anything, more eloquent than the river’s, despite the silence. The effect of the mountain’s eloquence can be seen in the speaker’s wondering questions in response to its “voice.” Is this the scene Where the old Earthquak-dæmon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire, envelope once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. (Poetry, ll. 71–75) By his questions, the speaker creates an ekphrastic tableau that “marries” the

112

O

Shelley among Others

natural and the supernatural personified by the “Earthquake-dæmon” and “her young,” the loud and violent movement of the imagined earthquake itself with the silent stillness of the present scene, and the imagined “sea/Of fire” with the present vista of “silent snow.” Such questions testify to the operation of “the secret alchemy” of poetic inspiration, as that is described in A Defence. “Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed: it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things” (505). The paradox underwriting the power of the mountain’s “voice . . . to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe” by dint of poetic inspiration derives from the fact that it at once testifies to the existence of “Power”— the source that is prior to and more powerful than what in Prometheus Unbound is called “The painted veil . . . called life” and “the figured curtain of sleep/Which covered our being and darkened our birth,” and what in “Mont Blanc” is called “The veil of life and death”—and interdicts unmediated access to this source. Earlier in the poem, Shelley focuses on the etherial waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desart fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity. (ll. 26–29) The “veil”—here, as in Alastor, a homonymic pun on vale—if not painted, is nevertheless part of the palette of a “many-coloured, many-voiced vale” (l. 13). It is certainly a setting that demonstrates how poets “can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world” (505). But the Shelleyan speaker knows that nature deployed in this guise, while something to be celebrated in poetry, veils or conceals something in the very act of textualizing it; that, while it may be a source of the articulate, cannot be named, let alone totalized, by humanly conceived articulation. Although a source of voice, it is voiceless “in its own deep eternity.” Because human beings are subject to “chance and death and mutability,” they cannot apprehend without some kind of mediation—indeed, can only conceive dimly—what is on the other side of the veil. The problem is not so severe for visionary immortals such as Asia and Panthea, however: in their visit to the Cave of Demogorgon, the two find that when “The veil has fallen” from the

“Mont Blanc”

O

113

“veiled form [that] sits on that ebon throne,” what is revealed to their apprehension is a variant of the “unsculptured image” of “Mont Blanc.” As Panthea describes her encounter, I see a mighty Darkness Filling the seat of power; and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian Sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless—neither limb Nor form—nor outline; yet we feel it is A living spirit. (II.iv.2–7) How does the “wilderness” teach its “mysterious tongue”? How does Mont Blanc’s “voice” work “to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe”? In answer to the first question, the wilderness teaches by means of a never-ending, rhythmic language or languagelike articulations. These articulations at once underwrite and participate in the never-ending rhythms and forms of nature and inform the correspondent rhythms and forms of the mind in the act of perceiving nature and responding to it. Shelley captures this dynamic finely in the letter of 22 July 1816 to Peacock, which offers these impressions of the valley of Chamounix and Mont Blanc. “All was as much our own as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others, as now occupied our own.—Nature was the poet whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest” (Letters, 1:497). The articulations of language constitute a record of those acts of perception and response. What must be emphasized is that the perception of and response to objects as objects is entirely secondary to the perception of and response to rhythmic or articulative process. As Shelley states in A Defence, “In the youth of the world men sing and dance and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order” (481). Taken all in all, these rhythmic articulations adumbrate the existence of a “mysterious” source for or cause of this “tongue.” This source or cause Shelley denominates “Power.” In answer to the second question, the mountain’s “voice . . . repeal[s]”—that is, calls into question or nullifies—the sociopolitical efficacy of “Large codes of fraud and woe,” such as established religion and divine-right kingship, by showing the referential nescience, arbitrariness, and provisionality of even the most fully articulated human linguistic response to the rhythms in question. 19 The ground of proof in “Mont Blanc” for demonstrating that

114

O

Shelley among Others

“The wilderness has a mysterious tongue/Which teaches awful doubt or faith so mild,” and that the “voice” of the poem’s namesake possesses the power “to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe,” is not a historical setting, as in The Cenci, or a mythic setting, as in Prometheus Unbound, but “the wilderness” itself—the natural setting that the poem’s speaker surveys—and the speaker’s response to that setting. Taken together, setting and response demonstrate how a human language of poetic process can at once participate in and provide the field of action for unending linguistic reconfiguration, poetic refiguration, and mythic refabulation. At the same time, the tumultuousness with which these activities occur in the poem’s setting, no less than the tumultuousness with which they are reported by the speaker, suggests that “Mont Blanc” is calculated to enact a harrowing of the speaker (and perhaps the reader as well) not unlike the one that Lear endures during the storm on the heath. The linguistic reconfiguration in question takes place on the levels of phonology, diction, and syntax, as though to demonstrate the extent to which poetic “language,” which “is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone,” nevertheless possesses the ability that Shelley ascribes to Bacon’s language. As Shelley characterizes it, in terms reminiscent of “Mont Blanc,” that language is “a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer’s mind, and pours itself together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy” (485). Obviously, the groundwork for the argument I am making here has already been laid by Keach, who cites the similarities between Shelley’s characterization of Bacon and the images near the outset of “Mont Blanc” in his discussion of Shelley’s tactics of rhyme. As Keach observes, “There is much in the syntax and versification of Mont Blanc that invites us to apply these images . . . of distending, bursting and pouring—to Shelley’s own style.” Keach bases his argument on the tension to be observed between “the impression of blank verse with its massive periods and very frequent enjambment” 20 and the shrewd deployment of rhyme, surely one marker of the “harmonious recurrence” that Shelley refers to, in “Mont Blanc.” However, “harmonious” does not mean invariantly regular or repetitive. In music, for example, the notion of harmony assumes the existence of a melodic line and variant lines sung or played at the appropriate interval(s) to achieve a multivocal yet unified effect. As Shelley states, “metre”—and, in most modern languages, the rhyme that accompanies it—is “a certain sys-

“Mont Blanc”

O

115

tem of traditional forms of harmony of language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to the traditional form, so the harmony which is its spirit, be observed” (Poetry, 484). “Mont Blanc” is the poem in which “traditional forms of the harmony of language” are reconfigured to the greatest extent possible in order to illustrate the extent to which “the harmony which is its spirit [can] be observed”—and preserved .21 Shelley sets up a dense texture of repetition, which is in itself a technique that foregrounds the arbitrariness of the sign and anticipates its reconfiguration, while appearing to empty it of meaning in the process. He creates this texture by making use not only of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance, but of identical rhyme and anaphora as well. The “there” (l. 48)–”there” (l. 127)–”there” (l. 132) rhyme noted by Keach is not the only example of identical rhyme in “Mont Blanc,” merely, as Keach himself notes, Shelley’s “finest exploitation” of this tactic.22 Then, through the use of what can only be described as irrepressible, echoic, and, above all, harmonic self-revision that combines elements of metathesis and metamorphosis, Shelley reconfigures, adds, and subtracts phonological markers at the level of the individual word, demonstrating how such linguistic reconfiguration can alter meaning radically. For example, the first stanza of “Mont Blanc” concludes with a description of the Valley of the Arve as a place Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (ll. 9–11) The “for ever”–”river”–rhyme may be “faint or imperfect,” as Keach notes; 23 however, when juxtaposed with “Over,” the first word of the third line, “for ever”–”river” not only produces a rich verbal texture of consonance augmented by the strong w alliteration and the anaphora of lines 9–10, but also suggests by demonstration the difference that one syllable more or less —and, ultimately, one syllable or another— can make in constituting the meaning of language. Augmented by the first line of the second stanza, “Thus thou, Ravine of Arve— deep, dark ravine—” (l. 12), Shelley takes the discrimination to an even finer level, showing how the same letters, when reconfigured in an anagram, “rave[s]” into “Arve,” 24 produce a meaning so

116

O

Shelley among Others

different as to preempt Saussure’s insight into the arbitrariness of the sign by more than three-quarters of a century.25 “Ravine” is more than the basis for an anagram. It is also the basis for a naturalized pun that, by putting two possible meanings in play and harmonizing them, as it were, marks some of the lexical reconfiguration that transpires on the level of diction. In the letter to Peacock, Shelley writes of ascending not the “Ravine of Arve,” but “the valley of the Arve—a valley surrounded on all sides by immense mountains whose jagged precipices were intermixed on high with dazzling snow” (Letters, 1:496). The valley that Shelley describes is every bit as terrible as what is described in “Mont Blanc.” Yet in Shelley’s poem it is “Ravine”—twice in line 12 and once again in line 24. Ravine of course denotes a long deep valley formed by a water-course, but it is also a near homonym of raven, meaning to prey or plunder. In Middle English, in fact, raven was spelled ravine.26 The repetition of “Ravine” marks the Valley of the Arve and the other valleys similarly described in the poem not only as valleys of the shadow but also as sites of predation on and destruction of all by all. For example, the Shelleyan speaker describes the “broad vales between” Mont Blanc’s “subject mountains” as A desart peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracts her there—how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high Ghastly, scarred, and riven. (Poetry, ll. 67–71) In this instance “riven,” a near-anagram of “ravine,” helps to clinch the point. Elsewhere in the poem, “the glaciers creep/Like snakes that watch their prey” (ll. 100–101), and a glacier-induced rockslide has overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil. (ll. 112–15) On the level of diction, there are also a number of homonymic pun rhymes, such as “vale” (l. 13) and “veil” (l. 26), “Throne” (l. 17) and “overthrown” (l. 112), and “lie” (l. 19) and “lie” (l. 54). In these instances, phonologically identical items have different yet suggestively interconnected meanings.

“Mont Blanc”

O

117

The first two rhymes have been discussed at some length by Keach as instances of “the ways in which even flamboyantly fortuitous rhyme could help him mark the mind’s response to the inaccessible.”27 The third is perhaps the richest of the three, because both of the pun meanings comprised by the homonym in question—to lie, meaning both to rest passively and to prevaricate—are fully operative in each instance. Addressing the Ravine of Arve, the speaker describes it in part as follows: “thou dost lie,/Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging” (ll. 19–20). The most obvious reading of this passage is that the ravine, maternalized by means of metaphor, reposes with her trees much as a large fowl might with a brood of young birds. However, this is the same ravine characterized previously as a “many-coloured, many-voiced vale” (l. 13), a site that is arguably capable of lying, of coloring or voicing the truth as best suits the moment—say, conveniently eliding the identities of “Power” and “Ravine.” 28 Again, when the Shelleyan speaker looks at the mountain, he muses, Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread around far and inaccessibly Its circles? (ll. 53–57) The phrase “lie/In dream” could signify repose in “the mightier world of sleep,” or it could signify a self-deluding reverie not unlike that of the Poet in Alastor, with the truth of the matter, “the mightier world of sleep/ Spread around far and inaccessibly.” On the syntactic level, the poem’s pervasive enjambment accounts in large measure for the effect of linguistic reconfiguration. As Keach notes, 73 of “Mont Blanc”’s 144 line endings were unstopped by any punctuation whatever in the published 1817 version of the poem—this in comparison to “one of Shelley’s formal models, Milton’s Lycidas,” in which 33 of the poem’s 193 line endings are unstopped.29 In the Reiman-Powers version of “Mont Blanc,” 72, or exactly half, of the lines are unstopped. This lack of end-stopping has a profoundly disconcerting effect on the reader who is used to finding some sort of guidance for what is to follow syntactically, let alone closure, at line’s end.30 To take the first two lines of the poem—”The everlasting universe of things/Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” (ll. 1–2)—for example: the subject of the main

118

O

Shelley among Others

clause is separated from the verb by a line break, thus creating an ironic tension between the clause’s declaration of all-permeating flux and the eye’s tendency to see the two lines of iambic pentameter as a discrete thing that exemplify a “universe of things” through which nothing flows. Further on in the poem, the Shelleyan speaker describes the failure of his “spirit,” which he characterizes as being “Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep/That vanishes among the viewless gales!” (ll. 58–59). Predication that at first glance appears to have reached closure in the first line, despite the absence of punctuation, is reopened by the relative clause of the second line, a relative clause that “squints” sufficiently, as the result of the intervening prepositional phrase “from steep to steep,” to modify with equally good sense either “cloud” or “steep.” Still further on, the speaker discusses the lessons taught by the “mysterious tongue” of “the wilderness,” among these either awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith with nature reconciled. (ll. 77–79) Here, the enjambment has the effect of negating what the preceding line would have said with closure of almost any sort. On the levels of phonology, diction, and syntax, then, Shelley demonstrates that language, although it may testify to the operation of an originary and revisionary “Power,” does not and cannot grant one the license to apprehend or to speak in the name of “Power,” precisely because “Power” exists prior to human language and informs that language without being named by its words, enclosed by its rhymes, personated or agentified by its syntax, or otherwise “captured” by it. As Shelley observes in “On Life,” “How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being” (Poetry, 475). But if words cannot penetrate the mystery, they can, at the very least, participate in it, wielded by the poet-as-”hierophant,” as it were. And while such participation does not lead to such designations as those referred to in A Defence as “The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons and the distinction of place,” this participation is authenticated by “a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry” (483, 484). If, for Shelley, “language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone,” figuration is no less arbitrary, no less self-

“Mont Blanc”

O

119

referential in its operation, but no less true in some important respects for its arbitrariness and self-referentiality. This apparent paradox has a good deal to do with the poetic calling as Shelley understands it. “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves” (508). Hierophants of the unapprehended, reflectors of the shadows that mark not light but its absence, speakers of the uncomprehended, unfeeling singers, and unmoved movers are all characterizations that bespeak the operation of an agency—”Power”—that must be figured and refigured not only arbitrarily, but paradoxically as well. Although “poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions,” poetry does not lead to some dogmatic truth in place of those impressions or the paradoxes that they give rise to. Rather, poetry leads to to pithanon, or the probable,31 to the extent that nescient human beings are capable of apprehending it, whether poetry “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from the scene of things” (505). Figuration thus understood is an instrument of the skeptic’s way of knowing. Shelley invites a skeptical approach to “Mont Blanc” by having the poem’s speaker confess, Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse upon my own separate phantasy. (ll. 34–36) In this context “phantasy” is a term of art borrowed from skeptical philosophy. As Hoagwood notes, the word “phantasia in Greek accounts” denotes “perception or impression of x; idea of x or physical sensation (sight) of x.” But as Shelley’s adjective “separate” would seem to suggest, he holds with the skeptics the position that phantasia does not mean “phantasia katalepsia, the perception that confirms its own absolute truth.” What follows from phantasia is isosthenia, or “a balancing of arguments on both sides of the question,” leading not to some tertium aliquid, “synthesis[,] or resting place,” but to “the skeptic epoche, ‘suspension of judgment.’” 32 The figuring and refiguring of “Power” in “Mont Blanc” represents precisely the sort of “balancing of arguments on both sides of the question” and “suspension of judgment” that Hoagwood discusses. Primarily in the first

120

O

Shelley among Others

two stanzas of the poem, but elsewhere as well, “Power” is figured as the immanent cause of the eternally audible and multicolored, a source of life with a lesson to teach the passive, reverting mind through which its manifestations and artifacts flow. Primarily in the next two stanzas of the poem, but elsewhere as well, “Power” is figured as the transcendent cause of the eternally silent and colorless (white), a source of death with a lesson to teach the active, “adverting mind” that travels through its manifestations and artifacts. At the end of the penultimate and throughout the final stanza, “Power” is figured as at once an immanent and a transcendent cause, at once a source of life and a source of death, giving rise to effects at once eternally audible and eternally silent, at once multicolored and colorless, with a lesson to teach to both the reverting mind and the “adverting mind.” That all figuration is to a large degree arbitrary seems clear from the first stanza, where the speaker figures an epistemology of immanence (“The everlasting universe of things/Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” [ll. 1–2]), then elaborates the inaugural metaphor33 with an epic simile that displays its artifice in the attempt to “naturalize” the metaphor and makes very clear the provenance of the speaker’s “inspiration.” The “rapid waves” in question are represented as Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from the 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, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (ll. 3–11) The “universe” in question informs the “mind” by its contrastive articulations, thus allowing the mind to perceive the universe as articulate and to reflect on why such articulation exists. In much the same way, “Power” informs both that “universe” and the “mind” that perceives it as articulate, leaving the “mind” to ponder the source and cause of all articulation. “With a sound but half its own” suggests that the speaker has an intimation, however obscure, of the metaphysis beyond physis. This intimation would seem to be an instance of how poetry, as Shelley observes in A Defence, “repro-

“Mont Blanc”

O

121

duces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and . . . purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity that obscures the wonder of our being” (505). But to “reproduce,” or represent, “the common universe” is not to transcend either that “universe” or the arbitrariness and radical contingency of one’s encounter with it. Immediately after the intimation of metaphysis, the speaker reverts to “the common universe,” reasserts control, and launches into the epic simile, which likens the mind in relation to “Power” to a “feeble brook” meandering through “the wild woods” in relation to leaping waterfalls and “a vast river [that]/Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.” Both the inaugural metaphor and the epic simile that follows upon it are summed up as types of the figure on which the second stanza opens, its inaugural “Thus” suggesting that the first two tropes are proposed in relation to the third as variants in relation to a master trope. This master trope figures “Power in likeness of the Arve” (l. 16), that is, the master trope figures “Power”-as-immanent-cause as the Arve River. As an immanent cause, “Power in likeness of the Arve” is responsible not only for the many colors and sounds of its locale, the “Ravine of Arve,” a “many-coloured, many-voiced vale” (ll. 12–13), but also for the apportionment and harmonization of those colors and sounds as “rainbows stretched across the sweep/Of the etherial waterfall” and “an old and solemn harmony” (ll. 24–26). “Power in likeness of the Arve” is also an inexhaustible source of life, figured as “one majestic River,/The breath and blood of distant lands,” the “loud waters” of which will roll “for ever” (ll. 123–25). One salient lesson that “Power in likeness of the Arve” teaches the reverting mind is that “Power” is immanently responsible for the sounds and colors of “Poesy,” here intended in the larger sense that includes music, dance, architecture, sculpture, and painting as well as poetry. Apostrophizing the “Dizzy Ravine” generally, but the “Power” that is responsible for the “commotion” and “ceaseless motion” more particularly, the speaker observes, “thou art no unbidden guest,/In the still cave of the witch Poesy” (ll. 30–34, 43–44). Because of its immediate effect(s) on the subject, the operations of “Power”as-immanent-cause are readily sensed if not apprehended outright. The effects of “Power”-as-transcendent-cause are of the order of action at a distance, hence less immediate and less readily apprehended. Thus, although “Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene”—early in the third stanza of the poem and seems to be the overarching, or transcendent cause

122

O

Shelley among Others

of “its subject mountains” of “ice and rock” and “the broad vales between/Of frozen floods” (ll. 61–64), it is not until the fourth stanza that the figuration of “Power” proceeds to another stage. At this stage, “Power,” like Mont Blanc, no less that “Power in likeness of the Arve,” the source of which is no more attainable than the mountain’s landscape of ice, snow, and rock, “dwells apart in its tranquillity” (l. 96), and not until the fifth and final stanza that “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there” (l. 127). As a transcendent cause, “Power” residing in Mont Blanc is responsible for the virtual absence of color and sound in its locale. The mountain is, for all intents and purposes, “A desart peopled by the storms alone” (l. 67), a white waste where “None can reply—all seems eternal now” (l. 75). Rather than being responsible for apportionment and harmonization, “Power” residing in Mont Blanc is responsible for territoriality, predation, and conflict. It is a site where “the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,/And the wolf tracts her there” (ll. 68–69), where “the glaciers creep/Like snakes that watch their prey” (ll. 100–101). “Power” in likeness of Mont Blanc is also an inexhaustible source of death, figured as dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. (ll. 104–6) One salient lesson that “Power” in likeness of Mont Blanc teaches “the adverting mind” is that “Power dwells apart in its tranquillity/Remote serene and inaccessible” (ll. 96–100) and, as such, is transcendently responsible for the silences and blanknesses of “Poesy.” The speaker metaphorizes these silences and blanknesses as a flood of ruin . . . that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream. (ll. 107–9) At the end of the fourth, and throughout the fifth and final stanza, the Shelleyan speaker moves toward isosthenia, and the identification of “Power” as to pithanon, the probable cause of all that he surveys, by representing the hitherto separate tableaux of the Valley of the Arve and Mont Blanc as one tableau containing two complementary figurations of “Power.” To judge from its effects, the causal efficacy that the speaker ascribes to the “Power” at first said to reside with Mont Blanc belongs both to it and to the Arve

“Mont Blanc”

O

123

River. It is at once “The still and solemn power of many sights,/And many sounds, and much of life and death” (ll. 128–29). In moving toward the sort of balancing of the arguments that isosthenia denotes, the previous figurations of “Power” are refigured as their opposites. The Arve River, hitherto figured as an exclusively immanent cause, is refigured as the transcendent cause of life “in distant lands” (l. 124). Mont Blanc, hitherto figured as an exclusively transcendent cause, is refigured as an immanent one with the statement that The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! (ll. 139–41) “Power,” or “The secret strength of things,” creates effects at once eternally audible and eternally silent, such as the “Winds [that] contend/ Silently there” atop Mont Blanc, and “The voiceless lightning in these solitudes” (ll. 134–37). “Power” creates effects at once eternally colored and colorless, such as the snowflakes that redly “burn in the sinking sun” and glow colorlessly when “the star-beams dart through them” (ll. 133–34). “Power” teaches both the reverting mind and “the adverting mind” that it operates and is known by effects that inform the life-world and the mind of the perceiving subject alike, no matter whether that subject wills himself or herself to turn from “Power” and attempt to flee it, or to turn toward “Power” and attempt to approach it. That is, “Power” operates and is known by its contrastive and articulate effects in the world independent of any willed avoidance, pursuit, or apprehension of it. The mythic refabulation in “Mont Blanc” demonstrates the tendency to view inspired fable as something to be allegorized, on the one hand, and the limits of the allegory that results, on the other. The occasion of making fable into allegory is not unlike the one that Shelley discusses in A Defence, where he notes the manner in which “that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion” creates mythic discourses that “are allegorical, or susceptible to allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true” (482). That is, “that partial apprehension” is a valid religious encounter, but the terms in which it is reported are no more than the contingent and necessarily flawed alternative to ineffability. 34 As the speaker of the “Hymn” observes, in noting the absence of any authoritative answer(s to questions having to do with the problem of evil,

124

O

Shelley among Others

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given— Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. (ll. 25–31) What mythic refabulation, as opposed to a single instance of mythic fabulation, gives rise to is a corpus of accounts that allows one to understand the difference between the timeless poetic spirit as it initiates each account in the attempt to close with “some sublimer world”—and in so doing transcend “Doubt, chance, and mutability”—and the timebound allegorical letter as it delimits the form in which each account must, perforce, be cast. 35 The Shelleyan speaker of “Mont Blanc” has mythengendering encounters with three vistas: the Valley of the Arve, the slopes of Mont Blanc itself, and the glacier known as the Mer de Glace. The initial fabulation and the two succeeding refabulations collectively demonstrate how the temptation to allegorize increases, as well as how the imperative to resist the temptation to do so becomes increasingly crucial. The increased temptation to allegorize is both a function of figural practice and of history read as precedent and pretext. That is, in the space of these three encounters and the allegories that result, Shelley synopsizes and recapitulates the history of Indo-European religion, as he defines that cultural practice. The fabulation of the Valley of the Arve suggestively figures that locale in terms reminiscent of Hindu mythology, albeit with some important anticipations of the Greek and Judeo-Christian refabulations to follow. Shelley renders the “awful scene” of the valley as one Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest;—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”

O

125

Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desart fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity. (ll. 16–29) The religious aura of the scene seems unquestionable. Chernaik states that “the ravine suggests a natural religion. The mountain, hideous and magnificent, suggests primitive myth.”36 And her observation of what could be characterized more accurately as an agrarian natural religion devoted to the personification and worship of natural processes of fertility and fecundation is certainly plausible. The account presents clear gender markers—”Power” here is prone, potent, male, and phallic; the ravine, supine, fertile, female, and vaginal.37 Moreover, the account presents a descriptive sequence that proposes “Power in likeness of the Arve” as cause, and ravine gotten with “giant brood of pines . . ./Children of elder time” as effect. But it is useful to remember, as Curran does, that “what distinguishes Shelley [from the euhemerists, who favor ‘a mythography reducing its subjects to historical actuality’] is his endeavor to enlarge his mythic conception to include a catholicity of intepretations.”38 Shelley’s initial fabulation is, in effect, a refabulation in its own right, recalling Francis Wilford’s mythic representation of Mount Meru, which is “the sacred and primeval Linga,” or phallus, and the supine “Earth beneath[, which] is the mysterious Yóni [vagina] expanded, and open like the Padma or Lotos.”39 The refabulation of the Valley of the Arve in terms reminiscent of Hindu beliefs concerning Mount Meru is more than just that. It is also an attempt to render a “mind, which passively/Now renders and receives fast influencings” (Poetry, ll. 37–38) in the act of refabulating on the basis of a narrative of process that informs mind and landscape alike.40 Although the exemplary landscape in the prose fragment “On Life” is a softer and gentler one than the Alpine landscape of “Mont Blanc,” with “flowing . . . brooks” rather than “a vast river” that “ceaselessly bursts and raves,” and “tongueless wind” rather than “chainless winds,” the fragment suggests a condition of mutuality in which the landscape, in telling its own story, tells the soul’s story as well, thus rousing the creative faculties (“spirits”) to an act of affective creativity figured as “a dance of breathless rapture.” “There is eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing of brooks and the rustling

126

O

Shelley among Others

of reeds beside them which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone” (Poetry, 474). The more extensive and, in some ways, more explicit refabulation of the slopes of Mont Blanc recalls Greek mythology. Those slopes are A desart peopled by the storms alone Save when an eagle brings some hunter’s bone, and the wolf tracts her there—how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.—Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake—dæmon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? Or did a sea Of fire, envelope once this silent snow? (ll. 67–74) On the level of the obvious, the allusion to a “dæmon” the type of “a spirit intermediate between the gods and men, usually personifying natural forces” (91n.)—in this case, earthquakes—evokes the pantheon of Greek mythology, with its tendency to use metaphor to anthropomorphize natural forces, from Jove on.41 But the references to “some hunter’s bone” and “a sea/Of fire” are also allusions to Greek mythology—specifically, to the myths of Diana and Actaeon, and Phaeton, respectively.42 Vico thematizes the myth of the goddess Diana and the mortal hunter Actaeon in a way that both validates Shelley’s allusion and attests to its thematic appropriateness in the context of a poem in which “Power in likeness of the Arve” confers on the river a life and aura of its own. As the result of “seeing Diana naked (the living spring) and being sprinkled with water by the goddess (to signify that the goddess cast over him the greatest awe of her divinity),” Actaeon is “changed into a stag (the most timid of animals) and torn to pieces by his dogs (the remorse of his own conscience for the violation of religion). Hence lymphati (properly, sprinkled with lympha or pure water) must have been originally a term applied to the Actæons who had been maddened by superstitious terror.” This story of purity, its violation, and the consequences of that violation, according to Vico, has a moral not lost on “the god-fearing giants . . . settled in the mountains,” who, like Actaeon, were hunters, and who “must have become sensible of the stench from the corpses of their dead rotting on the ground near by,

“Mont Blanc”

O

127

and must have begun to bury them; for enormous skulls and bones have been found and are still found, generally on mountaintops.”43 “A sea/Of fire” is what results when Phaeton, panicked by the sight of a scorpion (the constellation Scorpio), lets go of the reins of his father Apollo’s Chariot of the Sun and loses control of it. Before he falls into the Eridanus—by Vico’s reckoning, “the Danube in Greek Thrace, which flows into the Euxine” 44—dashed from the sky by one of Jove’s thunderbolts, Phaeton, held hostage in the chariot by its unrestrained, runaway team, sees the wayward chariot set holocausts that consume cities, nations, and mountains and mountain ranges, many of which were familiar to Shelley and mentioned in his poetry. Among the individual mountains are numbered the peaks of Caucasus, Ossa, Pindus, and Olympus; among the ranges, the Alps and the Apennines, the latter the site of “The Smokeless altars of the mountain snows” (Poetry, l. 5) in The Triumph.45 And the extensive refabulation of the Mer de Glace suggests the JudeoChristian mythology of Milton’s Paradise Lost, notwithstanding Shelley’s opinion that Milton, will he, nill he, subverts that theology. In that locale, 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. (Poetry, ll. 100–106) The figuration of the glacier’s movement as serpentlike and predatory is reminiscent of Satan’s method of approaching the as-yet unfallen Eve. “At first, as one who sought access, but feard/To interrupt, side-long he works his way” (MPP, IX, 511–12), in Milton’s account. The “city of death” in “Mont Blanc” is a conflation that draws upon two Miltonic precursor texts. The former of these is the description of the architecture of that “Fabrick huge,” Pandæmonium, in book I and, more particularly, the nature of the architecture of “dome, pyramid, and pinnacle” with which it is compared. Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence

128

O

Shelley among Others

Equal’d in all their glories, to inshrine Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat Thir Kings, when Ægypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxurie. (MPP, I, 717–22) The latter of these texts is the description of the “Alpine” geography that “th’adventrous Bands” of Satan encountered in their exploration of Hell. . . . through many a dark and drearie Vaile They pass’d, and many a region dolorous, O’re many a Frozen, many a Fiery Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death A universe of death. (MPP, II, 618–22) However, following the second refabulation, the Shelleyan speaker takes a turn that suggests both the futility of using allegory to record even the simplest “partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world” and the vanity of the human intellect that would attempt to do so. As he views the Mer de Glace and ponders the glaciers’ inexorable progress and the path of destruction that they leave,46 the Shelleyan speaker observes, 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. (Poetry, ll. 117–20) Reiman and Powers suggest as a source for the passage Psalms 103:15– 16: “As for man, his days are as grass. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more” (Poetry, 92n.). An at least equally plausible alternative is found in the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which presents the reasoning of “the ungodly” on the purpose of life thusly: For we are born at all adventure: and we shall be hereafter as though we had never been: for the breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart; which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have our works in remembrance, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist that is driven away by the beams of the sun,

“Mont Blanc”

O

129

and overcome with heat thereof. For our time is a very shadow that passeth away; and after our end there is no returning: for it is fast sealed, so that no man cometh again (Wis. 2:1–5).47 That the author of The Necessity of Atheism (1812) and the critic who finds Milton’s Satan morally superior to his God should assume the guise of “the ungodly” near the close of “Mont Blanc” is hardly surprising, especially in light of the apocryphal text’s characterization of the lot of “the souls of the righteous”: “They shall judge the nations, and have dominion over the people, and their Lord shall reign for ever” (Wis. 3:1, 8). Of such a role, “the ungodly” are, in the common acceptation of the term, highly skeptical. In planning to oppress “the just man,” the minions of “the ungodly” speculate, “Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him. For if the just man be the son of God, he will help him and deliver him from the hand of his enemies” (3:17–18). Beyond serving as an implicit critique of those who would play God by speaking for her or him, Shelley’s appropriation has other implications worth considering. For example, by means of a figural substitution based on terms in common, humanity’s material “work and dwelling,” which “Vanish, like smoke,” are likened to “the breath in our nostrils,” which “is as smoke.” That breath, given the cosmogony of “the ungodly,” who “are born at all adventure,” is neither inspired nor articulate, but rather a brute, inarticulate material entity. Only through the operations of “Power” become articulate as voice—human voice or the voice of the landscape in “Mont Blanc,” such as that of “secret chasms in tumult welling” (Poetry, l. 122)—has human works or human breath the potential to transcend the limits of mortality. Indeed, by dint of an oscillating paradox not unlike the one found in “Mutability” (and discussed in chapter 2), words that mark the everlasting passage of humanity’s “work and dwelling” do not themselves pass; neither do those remembered words that declare, “and no man shall have our works in remembrance.” The lesson of what finally suffices as a stay against human mortality is lost on “the ungodly,” who, with the decision to “enjoy the good things that are present,” elect to embark on a course of gluttony and sensuality—a filling up on “costly wine and ointments” (Wis. 2:6, 8)—calculated to end in inarticulate voicelessness. By way of contrast, the Shelleyan speaker of “Mont Blanc” elects the via negativa as the means to remaining articulate, charting the op-

130

O

Shelley among Others

eration of “The secret strength of things/Which governs thought,” and demonstrating by the very language of “Mont Blanc” that “Silence and solitude” are not “vacancy” (Poetry, ll. 139–44). “The tempest’s stream” remarked in the biblical appropriation discussed earlier is but one manifestation of the storm imagery that pervades “Mont Blanc.” The Arve River flows “like the flame/Of lightning through the tempest” (ll. 18–19); the geography around Mont Blanc is that of “A desart peopled by the storms alone” (l. 67); and the glacier of the Mer de Glace is a flood of ruin . . . that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream. (ll. 107–9) Throughout the poem, the imagery of violent weather and cataclysmic natural processes works to enact a harrowing of the speaker (and perhaps the reader as well) not unlike the one that Lear endures during the storm on the heath, an event that grants Lear, Shelley, and the reader a valuable insight into the true origins and false trappings of power. 48 As Lear experiences the storm on the heath and his correspondent interior turmoil—”The tempest in my mind” (III.iv.12), as he terms it—he ponders the ingratitude of Goneril and Regan, whom he taxes “with unkindness” (III.iii.16) for failing to support his claims for a retinue, then allowing him to wander out onto the moor and into an impending storm. Subsequently, Lear engages in a conversation with Edgar, who impersonates a madman who was formerly a dandified servant. As Edgar characterizes the persona, it is of “A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her” (III.iv.87–90). Lear concludes, while involved in this conversation, that clothes are figures that disguise the untroped human figure, fallacious and deceptive metonyms,49 effects in compliance with sumptuary laws and other canons of social distinction that presume social and political hierarchies that have no basis in human nature or nature more generally. With this realization comes an insight into what the human condition finally is when stripped of such trappings, followed by the imperative to rid oneself of them, if only symbolically. Of Edgar’s persona, Lear says, “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! come, unbutton here” (III.iv. 111–14).

“Mont Blanc”

O

131

In “Mont Blanc,” the violent weather acts in an analogous fashion, stripping away reified false appearances and establishing an important distinction between what is properly draped or concealed and what is not. Only a manifestation such as that of “Power,” figured as “some unsculptured image,” should be concealed by something like “the etherial waterfall, whose veil/Robes” (ll. 26–27) it.50 All the rest of what the Shelleyan speaker surveys is figured as “this naked countenance of earth,/On which I gaze” (ll. 98–99), and it is the absence of those deceptive and reified false appearances as much as the presence of the landscape itself that serves to “Teach the adverting mind” (l. 100) to renounce its willful pursuit of that which is “named,” essentialized, and fetishized by the operation of human language in the act of reciprocally constructing the mind by constructing the mind’s object. In the “Hymn,” in fact, renouncing willful pursuit and forgoing the willful impulse to totalize through naming are the preconditions for a visitation from the “Spirit of BEAUTY,” that “awful shadow of some unseen Power/That floats though unseen among us” (ll. 1–2, 13). It is only after the Shelleyan speaker renounces “pursuing/High hopes of talk with the departed dead” and forgoes invoking the “poisonous names with which our youth is fed” (ll. 51–53)—because neither tactic suffices— that the “Spirit of BEAUTY” visits, her arrival causing the onset of a shrieking, demonic “extacy” (l. 60). But something besides renunciation must occur before the “Spirit of BEAUTY” visits. After his attempts at pursuit and naming, the Shelleyan speaker recollects musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of buds and blossoming. (ll. 55–58) His state is very much like the state of selfless love that Shelley describes in the long passage from “On Love” cited earlier. If the love in question is selfless and wholly disjoined from willful pursuit and the willful abuse of metaphor that naming-to-totalize enacts, then being “in love with loving,” the situation that the Augustinian epigraph of Alastor describes, need not describe the circumstance of spiritual dryness nor lead to failed pursuit, desperation, and death. Rather, being “in love with loving” can lead to an intimation

132

O

Shelley among Others

of the “inconceivable relation” between the colors, shapes, and odors of the natural setting, not to mention the “eloquence” and “melody” of “tongueless wind” and “flowing . . . brooks,” respectively, and “something within the soul.” That moment of “extacy,” when the Shelleyan speaker has an out-of-body experience and is provisionally made one with nature, suffices for Shelley to establish the probability of such an “inconceivable relation” and the idea of “Power” that underwrites both halves of it. The renunciation of which Shelley writes, like the last judgment that for Blake occurs “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth” (BPW, p. 562), is a personal conversion experience, not a collective one, but no less valid for being personal. Bearing witness to, facilitating, and effecting this experience for others, for Shelley as for Blake, became the work of an artistic lifetime. All of Shelley’s major poetic texts from “Mont Blanc” onward deal to some degree with the imperative to renounce willful pursuit and willful naming-to-totalize, as well as the benefits that follow from renunciation. But as was subsequently the case with Gandhian passive resistance, which Shelley’s thought underwrites strongly,51 Shelley’s position serves him better as the basis of a sociopolitical critique than as the basis of a workable sociopolitical praxis. Thus the Shelleyan speaker of The Triumph, having sought for some time to implement by example the lesson of “Mont Blanc” and foster the sort of personal realization recorded in the “Hymn,” is disconsolate as to “how power and will/In opposition rule our mortal day” (Poetry, ll. 228–29). And it seems clear that the problem lies not with “power,” but with “will.” The latter, according to the Rousseauvian speaker, produces the likes of Voltaire, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Kant, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Holy Roman emperor Leopold II—”Chained hoary anarchs, demagogue, and sage” (l. 237)—who sought futilely and at great cost to others to impose their wills to power on such aspects of “real life” as politics, religion, and philosophy. However, as the Rousseauvian speaker observes, “in the battle life and they did wage/She remained conqueror” (ll. 239–40). Of his own situation, the Rousseauvian speaker confides that, having campaigned against daunting foes who equate power with the will, and for the sort of love that contact with “Power” fosters, he was bested by his own “heart alone.” After seeking what it might love, loving to love, that heart, “which neither age/ Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb / Could temper

“Mont Blanc”

O

133

to its object” (ll. 241–43), simply broke. The fact that this situation is not remedied by death itself—not even “the tomb” can “temper” the Rousseauvian speaker’s “heart . . . to its object”—raises the specter of an unending and universal history of heartbreak, a universal history that has painful personal implications for Shelley, as he himself makes clear in such poems as Adonais and “The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise” (1822).52 But during the summer of 1816, when he was at work on “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn,” that universal history was still far in the future.

134

O

Shelley among Others

O

Chapter 4 Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

Beyond the “Gloom and Misanthropy” of the Historical Moment Recognizing that he is better able to frame a sociopolitical critique than a workable sociopolitical praxis, Shelley’s undertaking, in The Revolt of Islam, is to articulate, in the language of the poem’s original subtitle, “a vision of the nineteenth century.” 1 Specifically, the poem’s vision is of nineteenth-century Europe in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Napoleon and the reestablishment of the national boundaries and divineright monarchies that characterized the pre-Napoleonic era. The vision is not a flattering one. It is a vision, as Shelley states in his preface to The Revolt, of moral ruin, of “the melancholy desolation of . . . cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows” (SPW, 33–34). But all is not lost for Shelley, nor is the poem’s vision unequivocally dark. “Mankind appear . . . to be emerging from their trance,” he observes. “In that belief I have composed the following Poem” (34). Because people need to know what went wrong, Shelley proposes to supply a poetic analysis, not only of the failure of the French Revolution but of the failure of any European revolution that proceeds on the assumptions set down by what Shelley contemptuously refers to as “modern philosophy.” In a letter of 13 October 1817 to an unnamed publisher,2 Shelley describes The Revolt as “a tale illustrative of such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation, acted upon by what has been called . . . the modern philosophy,

O

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century 135

O

135

& contending with antient notions & the supposed advantage derived from them to those who support them. It is a Revolution of this kind that is, as it were, the beau ideal of the French Revolution, but produced by the influence of individual genius, & out of general knowledge” (Letters, 1:563–64). However, a poetic analysis is by no means omniscient or transcendent, and Shelley, true to his skeptical creed, is quick to delimit the authority of his analysis by owning its historical situatedness. Despite an acquaintance with the landscapes of Europe; despite seeing firsthand “the more visible ravages of tyranny and war”; despite conversing “with living men of genius”; despite drawing on “the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country [i.e., England]” for “the materials for the imagery of [his] Poem”; despite augmenting his readings in poetry with readings in “the Historians and the Metaphysicians, whose writings have been accessible to [him]”; and despite avoiding “the imitation of any contemporary style,” Shelley freely owns that “there must be a resemblance, which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. . . . And this is an influence which neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can escape; and which I have not attempted to escape” (SPW, 34–35). Shelley’s acceptance of his situatedness and the “resemblance” that follows from it is evident in his decision to present his protagonists, Laon and Cythna, as the authors and narrators of the piece, thereby eschewing any pretense to thirdperson omniscience. However, Shelley does insist on dialogism; witness the implied contention between “the modern philosophy” and “antient notions” and the implied multivocal authorship. By emphasizing his contemporaneity, Shelley owns his historical situatedness. Indeed, Shelley embraces his contemporaneity, and much in the manner of Spenser, his avowed formal and tropological model in The Revolt,3 Shelley uses his major characters to allegorize his own times. One way to approach this allegory is through its onomastics—specifically, through analyzing the polysemous etymological possibilities of Laon and Cythna’s names. 4 As befits the names of characters in a poem “laid in modern Greece & Constantinople,” the etymology of the two names is Greek. Laon’s name takes its rise from the Attic Greek word lâïon, a cognate of the Doric form of leïon ‘standing crop’ or ‘cornfield’ (i.e., field of grain) in its first acceptation and the variant form of lâon ‘plowshare’ in its second. Cythna’s name is the plural form of the Attic Greek word kythnón, a synonym of sperma ‘seed’. Given her association throughout the poem with looms and with

136

O

Shelley among Others

light garments such as veils, Cythna’s name also suggests a pun or anagram on chiton, a light garment usually worn next to the skin by both sexes in ancient Greece.5 In one sense, Laon-as-plow/cornfield and Cythna-as-loom/chiton allegorize, through their travails, the contemporary condition of agriculture and the textile industry, respectively, and those travails serve as a political comment on agriculture and the textile industry in post-Napoleonic England.6 Successive bad harvests and the Corn Laws combined to keep English grain prices artificially high while subjecting agrarian labor to near famine conditions. In the textile industry, the passage of the Frame Work Bill (1812) for the purpose of quelling industrial sabotage and the use by the government of agents provocateur, spies, and self-incrimination to attempt to identify, convict, and execute labor leaders all combined to create a climate of fear and oppression among the textile workers. Both situations contributed to widespread civil unrest, demonstrations, and riots that threatened the established government of England. 7 That Shelley was concerned with these conditions and events hardly needs be demonstrated. He deals with the conditions and events explicitly in We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird. An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte (1817).8 And he returns to the conditions and events repeatedly in the poetry. In The Mask, for example, the voice of the Earth laments circumstances that have conspired to make it appear that the laboring classes, agricultural and textile workers foremost among these, exist both at and for the pleasure of the ruling classes, “So that ye for them are made/Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade” (Poetry, ll. 164–65). And in “Song to the Men of England” (1819), the Shelleyan speaker asks, Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? (SPW, ll. 1–4) For this speaker, as for Laon and Cythna, work as a form of social witness becomes the means of taking back the very nation itself, which the “lords” and “tyrants” have unjustifiably appropriated. The work of making one’s death one’s own becomes, paradoxically, the work of making one’s life and one’s nation one’s own, and as such, this active form of engagement is preferable to submitting passively to the will of “lords” and “tyrants.”

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

137

With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet, till fair England be your sepulchre. (ll. 29–32) In another sense, Laon-as-plowshare and Cythna-as-seed allegorize a potential for self-reformation, which, when extrapolated as a cultural practice, reveals the possibility for enacting millenarian, nonviolent social transformation. Laon-as-plowshare, or engine of millenarian, nonviolent social transformation, exists in posse all along; witness his commitment early on to arise and waken The multitude, and like a sulphurous hill, Which on a sudden from its snows has shaken The swoon of ages . . . burst and fill The world with cleansing fire. (ll. 784–88) But Laon-as-plowshare must fashion himself out of Laon-as-sword. Despite a nominal commitment to the nonviolent revolution that the twelve-year-old Cythna describes, Laon must come to terms with the role to be played by his will in effecting such a revolution, just as Cythna must come to terms with the role to be played by her own will. Mistaken in his assumption that a successful nonviolent revolution can be accomplished by hearts beating “with such intent/As renovates the world; a will omnipotent” (ll. 1034–35), Laon unthinkingly draws his “small knife” (l. 1165) when he goes to seek That voice among the crowd—’twas Cythna’s cry! Beneath most calm resolve did agony wreak Its whirlwind rage. (ll. 1166–69) And despite Cythna’s pleas to let her captors “bear/Their mistress to her task” (ll. 1181–82) of women’s emancipation and worldwide social revolution more generally, Laon, “unheeding,” succumbs to an “impulse,” killing three of Cythna’s captors and menacing a fourth (ll. 1189–96). It is only after Laon, under the Hermit’s care, has recovered physically and mentally from his imprisonment that he learns the secret of self-reformation and millenarian, nonviolent social transformation alike: language. As the Hermit informs Laon, he has

138

O

Shelley among Others

collected language to unfold Truth to my countrymen; from shore to shore Doctrines of human power my words have told. (ll. 1517–19) “But,” the hermit laments, he is “both unknown and old,” and “cold/In seeming” (ll. 1558–62). In his stead, the Hermit gives Laon the opportunity to reform himself. Perchance blood need not flow, if thou at length Wouldst rise, perchance the very slaves would spare Their brethren and themselves; great is the strength Of words. (ll. 1567–70) Despite Laon and Cythna’s best efforts, their nonviolent revolution, with its goal of full freedom and equality, is doomed, like the French Revolution which it echoes, to failure in its own time. Yet Cythna is aware of having planted, through her words and deeds, the seeds of a future that is not like the past. Speaking as “the prophetess of Love,” Cythna-as-loom/chiton produces herself as Cythna-as-seed by undertaking to “clothe the shapes which rove/Within the homeless future’s wintry grove” (ll. 3641–44). Cythna prophesies a renovated future in which “violence and wrong are as a dream/Which rolls from steadfast truth, an unreturning stream” (ll. 3647–48). The agent of the changes that Cythna prophesies is her words and the words of other poets—winged words figured as “the wingèd seeds” that “The blasts of Autumn drive . . ./Over the earth” (ll. 3649–50). In a scenario that anticipates, and provides an allegorical subtext for, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819),9 Cythna observes that even though “The seeds are sleeping in the soil” during “This . . . winter of the world,” while established tyranny and religion prevail and “The moon of wasting science [i.e., higher knowledge] wanes away/Among her stars” (ll. 3676–85), all hope is not lost. Such “seeds” are of one’s own making, and the springtime that they betoken exists within. Echoing Michael’s valedictory advice to Adam in Paradise Lost, Cythna advises Laon, if he would gaze on the dawning of a new age and a new order, Alas! gaze not on me, but turn thine eyes On thine own heart—it is a paradise Which everlasting Spring has made its own.” (ll. 3697–99)10

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

139

What makes one’s “own heart” into the sort of “paradise” that Cythna has in mind is its function as a seedbed. It is the metaphysical space in which everyperson-as-loom/chiton, acting through his or her cultural memory and poetic proclivities, harbors the potential to produce everypersonas-seed. One’s “own heart” is where Heroes, and Poets, and prevailing Sages, . . . leave the vesture of their majesty To adorn and clothe this naked world;—and we Are like to them. (ll. 3714–17) To return to Shelley’s epistolary description of The Revolt: foremost among the intellectually valid “antient notions” to which Shelley refers is what Cythna-called-Laone characterizes as that “Eldest of things, divine Equality!” (SPW, l. 2212)—and, above all, equality between the sexes. 11 As examples of the erroneously denominated and intellectually questionable “modern philosophy,” Shelley lists “Metaphysics”—with Drummond’s “Academical Questions; a volume of very acute and powerful metaphysical criticism,” duly excepted—”and inquiries into moral and political science” (34). The obvious villains of Shelley’s dichotomy are the philosopher-moralists and political economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shelley has harsh words for “sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus,” for example, “sophisms” that Shelley claims are “calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph” (34). And in A Defence, Shelley minimizes the importance of “The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity,” going on to say that “it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed” (Poetry, 502).12 But “divine Equality,” like other divine donations, is itself implicated in a theodicy of sorts, one that is replete with a fall as the result of which it must give way to power relations at least once, until human beings realize that equality inheres in the subject’s state of mind, not in property: not in the mind’s object—and, above all, not in the mind’s object fetishized in its absence, or reified and quantified in its scarcity or dearness.13 Before “divine Equality” can reappear for Cythna-called-Laone and the multitudes to whom she sings in canto V, she must be able to proclaim a condition of un-

140

O

Shelley among Others

mediated plenitude and, perhaps more important, she must be able attest to the widespread recognition that this condition has, in fact, come to pass, that Nature, or God, or Love, or Pleasure, Or Sympathy the sad tears turning To mutual smiles, a drainless treasure, Descends amidst us. (SPW, ll. 2205–8) Under this newly proclaimed regime of “divine Equality,” what are, for Shelley, one’s basic needs—food, sexual companionship, and creative freedom—may be satisfied without regard for questions of property. The nurturing, maternal “Earth bears her general bosom to thy [i.e., Equality’s] ken” (l. 2224); “man and woman,/Their common bondage” under the laws of property and contracts underwriting marriage “burst, may freely borrow/From lawless love a solace for their sorrow” (ll. 2229– 31); and mental toil from thought all glorious forms shall cull, To make this Earth, our home, more beautiful, And Science, and her sister Poesy, Shall clothe in light the fields and cities of the free! (ll. 2253–56) How does Shelley propose to create his “vision of the nineteenth century” as “beau ideal . . . of the French Revolution . . . Produced by the influence of individual genius, & out of general knowledge”? How does he propose to lead the readers of his poem beyond “their trance” and toward a fully articulated artistic, social, and political consciousness? Shelley considers his poem to be “an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live.” The purpose of such “an experiment” is to educate that “thirst” and the visions that it gives rise to, by means of visionary poetry, “in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of . . . readers a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind” (32). Violence, misrepresentation, and prejudice are behaviors learned by indoctrination, behaviors that stifle or subvert authentic, primal human feel-

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

141

ing, according to Shelley. The way to set human behavior aright, accordingly, is not to substitute one doctrine or technique of indoctrination for another, but rather to return to primal intuition as the ground of all human action, value, and belief. In choosing “a story of human passion in its most universal character,” Shelley hopes to appeal, “in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions, to the common sympathies in every human breast.” And doing so means making “no attempt to recommend the motives which [he] would substitute for those at present governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument.” The Revolt, then, is “narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind,” a narrative that reaches beyond the bounds of a life depicted as being successively fraught with oppression, emancipation, betrayal, ignorance, and error, to offer a glimpse of the Temple of the Spirit. From that vantage point, “the temporary triumph of oppression” is known to be the “earnest of its final and inevitable fall,” just as “the transient nature of ignorance and error” is known to be earnest of “the eternity of genius and virtue” (32). That primal intuition, identified by Cythna in The Revolt, is the intuition of equality. “Eldest of things, divine Equality!” she exclaims in canto V, “Wisdom and Love are but the slaves of thee,/The angels of thy sway” (ll. 2212–14). Equality is the perception of likeness, the precondition for transference. Equality, in other words, is the cognitive and affective basis of both metaphor making and the morality that allows one to look and imagine beyond the self and leads to a relational understanding of and identification with the other.14 In A Defence, Shelley’s comments on the dynamics of such equality provide a useful gloss of Cythna’s speech. Shelley argues that “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 intensively and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (Poetry, 487–88).15

The Materiality of Language Shelley’s comments—most particularly, those having to do with how the language of poetry acts on the imagination—also bear importantly on the

142

O

Shelley among Others

conception of linguistic process that underwrites The Revolt and is, in large part, the poem’s subject, at least insofar as such a process is responsible for creating such conditions as violence, misrepresentation, and prejudice, or for eradicating these conditions. Poetry does a number of things to the imagination. The “thoughts of ever new delight” of which Shelley speaks textualize the imagination in the process of conferring upon it both pleasure and articulate form. By so doing, poetry instills in the imagination the passionate desire to seek out other texts that operate in a similar fashion. Those “other thoughts” thus attracted collectively constitute the textual space in which passionate desire operates to fill those “new interstices and intervals whose void for ever craves fresh food” (488). The comments from A Defence are in fact an abstracted or universalized account of the processes comprised by the “material metaphor” of weaving that pervades the speeches of both Laon and Cythna throughout The Revolt and is used “to capture their sense of the effects of metrical language.”16 “Interstices and intervals” is one way of characterizing the warp in the loom, “whose void,” made both articulate and desiring by the textualizing effect of poetry, “for ever craves fresh food”—in weaving, the weft, which weaves through the warp from selvage to selvage, giving material form to passionate desire. The process under discussion is always, to an extent, reversible: passionate desire articulated and thus textualized results in poetry; poetry results in passionate desire articulated and thus textualized. Laon reports the effects of Cythna-calledLaone’s song, which is an expression of such passionate desire, on its audience. She, like a spirit through the darkness shining, In tones of sweetness silence did prolong, As if to lingering winds they did belong, Poured forth her inmost soul, a passionate speech With wild and thrilling pauses woven among, Which whose heard, was mute, for it could teach To rapture like her own all listening hearts to reach. (SPW, ll. 2274–80) And the process is always liable to subversion. To hold that poetry gives material form to passionate desire is to concede the materiality of the language that is poetry’s medium.17 Even if, as Shelley argues in A Defence, poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms,” poetry cannot tran-

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

143

scend the materiality of its own language. The pictorial metaphor of “naked and sleeping beauty” suggests the sort of drapery that frames, reveals, and, in part, conceals that beauty.18 Shortly after venturing the preceding argument, Shelley states that whether poetry “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being” (Poetry, 505). The implication would seem to be that in “withdraw[ing] life’s dark veil,” poetry allows for the spreading of the “figured curtain,” but that language always supplies some sort of material intermediation, be it that “dark veil” or that “figured curtain.” What Shelley, in Adonais, calls “the white radiance of Eternity” cannot be glimpsed in this life without the material, first-order intermediation of “Life” itself, which “stains” that radiance by breaking it down into the colors of the spectrum (ll. 462–63). And the experience of life’s material, first-order intermediation cannot be expressed without the material, second-order intermediation of something like poetry’s “figured curtain,” which is a troping or doubling of that first-order intermediation. For Shelley, language is always already the skein, thread, or material basis that, when woven into poetry, frames, reveals, and conceals beauty or passionate desire. In the preface to The Revolt, for example, Shelley disclaims any intention to imitate “any style of language or versification peculiar to the original minds of which it is the character,” but he does state instead that “I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appear to me to be the most obvious and appropriate language” (SPW, 34). While Shelley does not revert to the neoclassical notion held by the likes of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson of language as the dress of thought, neither is he willing to go to the extreme of someone like Wordsworth, who may very well be one of those “original minds” to whom Shelley refers, and who, in the third of his Essays upon Epitaphs (1810), would characterize language as incarnational. 19 Language for Shelley may “name” or otherwise be informed by transcendence—poets are, for example, the authors of “the words which express what they understand not” (Poetry, 508)—but language cannot enact transcendence either for its author or for its audience. Language in its own formal (and material) articulateness nevertheless foregrounds both its own coherence, and the limits that such articulateness and coherence demarcate. Much of Cythna’s power as an advocate of a nonviolent revolution intended to bring about equality for all stems from attain-

144

O

Shelley among Others

ing this insight as part of her own “education in language . . . in the cave,” which, as Ulmer observes, “stresses the materiality of signification.”20 The first step in attaining wisdom regarding such materiality is to acknowledge the limits that must inevitably result. In the calm aftermath of a number of traumas, including her rape and impregnation by the Tyrant Othman, and her subsequent incarceration in the sea cave where she gives birth to a child, who is immediately taken from her, Cythna uses her newly regained reason to contemplate the meaning of such limits—her own limits and limits more generally. Her first important insight is that one is apt to mistake projection for transcendence. As Cythna observes, We live in our own world, and mine was made From glorious fantasies of hope departed: Aye we are darkened with their floating shade, Or cast a lustre on them. (SPW, ll. 3091–94) As the result of her contemplations, Cythna reaches a state in which she is receptive to intimations of a higher realm of ideal forms, a realm that she cannot apprehend or know other than by such intimations. Her state is not unlike the passive one that the speaker of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” attains when he leaves off with his futile pursuing and name-calling to bear ecstatic witness to a visitation from the “shadow” of Intellectual Beauty (Poetry, ll. 59–60). In Cythna’s version of this moment, My mind became the book through which I grew Wise in all human wisdom, and its cave, Which like a mine I rifled through and through, To me the keeping of its secrets gave. (ll. 3100–3103) Here the provenance of the “shadow” in the “Hymn” becomes clear. It is a shadow much like the sort that one might find on the cave wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic, VII.514a–517a). 21 Cythna’s mind, like a Platonic dialogue, becomes the material textual record (“book”) of insights such as those which Socrates propounds in his allegory, as well as a microcosmic “cave” of “human wisdom,” in which shadows much like those on the walls of Plato’s cave manifest themselves to her. The allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave is particularly apt at this juncture, because Plato posits the cave as a prison house, its inhabitants, like Cythna, prisoners against their will and

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

145

eager for any intimation of what transpires beyond the open mouth of the cave. Plato’s allegory of the cave characterizes causation as paradoxical, and human nescience as unable to transcend the paradox. The cause of the material shadows that occlude or obscure light is their opposite—an immaterial light that is so bright that the inhabitants of the prison house cannot look directly at it without suffering “sharp pains.”22 Immaterial first causes here and elsewhere in Platonic texts—in the Timaeus, for example—tend to be both paradoxical and unapprehendable. In surveying her own mind, Cythna herself glimpses just such a cause of mind and object world alike. Among the “secrets” she discovers is One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave Whose calm reflects all moving things that are, Necessity, and love, and life, the grave, And sympathy, fountains of hope and fear; Justice, and truth, and time, and the world’s natural sphere. (SPW, ll. 3104–8) While human nescience cannot solve the paradox of immaterial Platonic first causes, it can attain a clearer, albeit still dim, sense of these causes by understanding the way that they manifest through the intermediation of material mathematical operators. In book VIII of the Republic, for example, as Socrates states, “that which is of divine birth has a period which is contained in a perfect number.” Jowett’s note explains that by “perfect number” Socrates intends “A cyclical number, such as 6, which is equal to the sum of its divisors 1, 2, 3, so that when the circle or time represented by 6 is completed, the lesser times or rotations represented by 1, 2, 3, are also completed.” Socrates continues, “but the period of a human birth is comprehended in a number in which first increments by involution and evolution [or squared and cubed] obtaining three intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning numbers, make all terms commensurable and agreeable to one another.” Jowett glosses this passage in part by conjecturing, “Probably the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 of which the three first = the sides of the Pythagorean triangle.” 23 Cythna undertakes just such an exploration of these material operators—most tellingly, the Pythagorean ones, which constitute the “subtler language” to which she refers.

146

O

Shelley among Others

And on the sand would I make signs to range These woofs, as they are woven, of my thought; Clear, elemental shapes, whose smallest change A subtler language within language wrought: The key to truths that once were dimly taught In old Crotona. (ll. 3109–14)24 Cythna narrates events that bear a very strong resemblance to the events comprising the self-narrated conversion experience of “John Newton— Evangelical preacher, writer, curate of Olney, friend of Cowper, minister of St. Mary Wolnoth and confidant of the Abolitionist Wilberforce.”25 Both narratives bear importantly on the insight that all enslavement begins, in an important sense, with self-enslavement, and that the refusal to submit to self-oppression is the first step in subverting oppression wielded by the other.26 Throughout her contemplations and explorations, Cythna remains aware of the fact that the truths she seeks can only be “dimly taught.” They are, nevertheless, truths of surpassing wisdom and power. Armed with these truths, Cythna dreams of sitting with Laon on the seashore as she used to, but armed with knowledge of what truths proceed from the “One mind” and what falsehoods do not. Cythna characterizes Laon and herself as Happy as then, but wiser far, for we Smiled on the flowery grave in which were lain Fear, Faith, and Slavery; and mankind was free, Equal, and pure, and wise, in Wisdom’s prophecy. (SPW, ll. 3123–26) In a marvelous turn of self-awareness, Cythna shows herself able to distinguish between the visitation of truths, however “dimly taught,” and her own self-projection as a type of false transcendence. Of her dream, which is not unlike the Poet’s dream of the Indian Maiden in Alastor, Cythna observes, “For to my will my fancies were as slaves/To do their sweet and subtle ministries.” Cythna understands the role of the will to power in these “fancies,” even though they are the stuff of dreams. Through empathic identification, Cythna is able to understand that the influence of this will to power on her fellow humans is what is responsible for what she terms “the shock and the surprise/And war of earthly minds.” As the result of her insight into the operation of the will to power in other minds, Cythna is able

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

147

to draw “The power which has been mine to frame their thoughts anew” (ll. 3127–35). While Cythna’s Power does not exempt her from the nescience and mortality that characterize the human condition—she freely owns that even if not confined to her sea cave, she would subject to the “prison” of “the populous earth”—it does allow her to dream of Religion’s pomp made desolate by the scorn Of wisdom’s faintest smile, and thrones uptorn, And dwellings of mild people interspersed With undivided fields of ripening corn. And love made free. (ll. 3139–43) Cythna’s self-awareness exerts a crucial influence on her style of speaking and the message of the Power sermon at the outset of canto VIII. Discovered by sailors in a precarious but otherwise typically Shelleyan stance, perched between the heights of the sky and the depths of the sea after an earthquake has destroyed her sea cave (ll. 3163–80), Cythna uses her voice to enchant her rescuers. Upon hearing it, they stood And moved as men in whom new love had stirred Deep thoughts. (ll. 3196–98) Like Shakespeare’s Cordelia, the characteristics of whose voice her own voice recalls, 27 Cythna possesses a sweet and low voice that has the power to soften all but the most hardened heart. Cythna begins cultivating this voice intentionally before her abduction, rape, and confinement by recalling the example of “a slave in tortures doomed to die,” who, as he was being led to his execution, “Was saved, because in accents sweet and low/He sung as song his Judge loved long ago.” But she at first embarks on her project with the mistaken intent of using the will to power as the means to abolishing temporal power. Cythna prophesies, “All shall relent/Who hear me—tears, as mine have flowed, shall flow,” because she manifests “such intent/As renovates the world; a will omnipotent” (ll. 1027–35). During her time in the sea-cave, Cythna learns to identify empathically, renouncing in the process the will to power.

148

O

Shelley among Others

The Uses and Abuses of Materiality When she comes to deliver her Power sermon, Cythna is mindful of the imperative not to replace another person’s anthropomorphic projections with her own. This awareness is made evident by her choice of the interrogative mode, which in the discourses of English romanticism manifests, in Susan J. Wolfson’s fine phrase, “the active power of dislocation.” 28 Rescued by the mariners, Cythna boards their ship. After a brief prologue near the beginning of canto VIII, in which she asserts the common humanity of “millions who the selfsame likeness wear” (ll. 3222– 25), but who will not hear the Power sermon, Cythna launches into a series of questions that include interrogations into foundational assumptions (“What dream ye?” [l. 3226]), metaphysics (“Dream ye some Power builds for man in solitude?” [l. 3234], “What is Power?” [ll. 3235, 3244], and “Alas, what strength?” [3271]), and teleology (“has some immortal power/ Such purposes?” [ll. 3232–33]; “Whence come ye, friends?” [ll. 3346, 3352, 3397]).29 These are the questions to which the Power sermon speaks. Cythna’s central point is that, owing to the materiality of languageas-effect, humanity imputes materiality to its cause—indeed, to the cause of all deployed, articulated phenomena. As she puts the case, What is Power? Ye mock yourselves, and give A human heart to what ye cannot know: As if the cause of life could think and live! ’Twere as if all man’s works should feel, and show The hopes, and fears, and thoughts from which they flow, And be like to them! (SPW, ll. 3235–40)30 Humanity compounds this faulty imputation by projecting itself into the realm of cause, then ascribing to that anthropomorphic projection the ultimate life-and-death authority of a transcendent God.31 Because such projection is ego involved, one’s psychic economy-as-theodicy comes to be represented as the theodicy. In lines that anticipate the trope of the “Brocken-spectre” in Coleridge’s “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1826), Cythna repeats her question. What is Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

149

Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world’s vast mirror shown; And ‘twere an innocent dream, but that a faith Nursed by fear’s dew of poison, grows thereon, And that men say, that Power has chosen Death On all who scorn its laws, to wreak immortal wrath. (ll. 3244–52) What Cythna characterizes is precisely the sort of “dark idolatry of self” (l. 3390) that leads to the “abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose,” a phenomenon that Shelley analyzes in A Treatise on Morals and implicates as producing “much of the confusion which has involved the theory of morals. It is said that no person can be just or kind, if, on his neglect, he should fail to incur some penalty. Duty is obligation. There can be no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law to which it is the will of the lawgiver that we should conform, which will we should in no manner be bound to obey, unless some dreadful punishment were attached to disobedience. This is a philosophy of slavery and superstition” (Prose, 188). Shelley here attempts to expose the folly of morality in the name of the other, as opposed to morality in the name of oneself, otherwise known as the Golden Rule, the principle that undergirds the Sermon on the Mount.32 Cythna, who echoes the Sermon on the Mount herself, also attempts to expose the folly of morality in the name of the other. In its alterity, Power is “One shape of many names,” each of those names in some sense anthropomorphic. In the name of those names, men like the mariners serve the temporal rulers who are the names’ avatars or vice-gerents as “slave or tyrant; all betray and bow,/Command, or kill, or fear, or wreak, or suffer woe.” As Cythna observes, those anthropomorphic “names” that humanity confers on Power are each a sign which maketh holy All power—ay, the ghost, the dream, the shade Of power—lust, falsehood, hate, and pride, and folly. (ll. 276–82) Cythna’s contention is that one’s anthropomorphic projection and naming of God prescribe the very conditions for sinning against humanity that such a God’s code of behavior nominally forbids. And although such a contention may, at first glance, appear to be singular or even extraordinary,

150

O

Shelley among Others

there is an intertextual basis for venturing it. Shelley concludes “Necessity! thou mother of the world!” one of his extensive notes to Queen Mab, with an account of precisely this sort of prescription. The account, drawn from George Sale’s “Preliminary Discourse” to The Koran (1734), is “A Mahometan story . . . wherein Adam and Moses are introduced disputing before God.” Moses begins by characterizing Adam in terms of the J-account of the creation and fall (Gen. 2:7–3:24), in response to which Adam ventures a characterization and a question: “Thou art Moses, whom God chose for His apostle and entrusted with His word, giving thee the tables of the law, and whom he vouchsafed to admit to discourse with Himself. How many years dost thou find the law was written before I was created?” Moses replies that the law was written forty years before Adam’s creation, causing the latter to continue his line of argument thusly: “And dost thou not find . . . these words therein, And Adam rebelled against his Lord and transgressed? Which Moses confessing, Dost thou blame me, continued he, for doing that which God wrote of me that I should do, forty years before I was created, nay, for what was decreed concerning me fifty thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth?” (SPW, 812).33 Cythna’s proposed solution to the problem of oppressive temporal power begins with the invocation of “Love, who to the hearts of wandering men/Art as the calm to Ocean’s weary waves!” (ll. 3289–90). Love, a reflection of the “the moveless wave/Whose calm reflects all moving things that are” (ll. 3104–5), exercises a healing effect by doing away with strife, heights, and depths, all symbolized by the “weary waves.” Love, in other words, is the means to the practice of morality in the name of oneself. As Shelley notes in A Defence, “The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own” (Poetry, 487). It is this act of identification through love that leads to equality. Such love has the power To give to all an equal share of good, To track the steps of Freedom, though through graves She pass, to suffer all in patient mood, To weep for crime, though stained with thy friend’s dearest blood. (SPW, ll. 3294–97)

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

151

Here and throughout the subsequent stanza (12), Cythna’s speech patterns shift, and she makes use of an accretive style of infinitive phrasing that is apposite to her purposes and anticipates both the style and the content of Demogorgon’s concluding speech in Prometheus Unbound.34 The infinitive, or “name” of the verb, is like that “Eldest of things, divine Equality!”—a primal form, from which all declensions or conjugations of the verb follow. As such, the infinitive is not merely impersonal, as are the present and past participle, and the gerund, but prepersonal, serving to point up Cythna’s contention that “we have one human heart—/ All mortal thoughts confess a common home” (ll. 3361–62).35 To acknowledge that we are “a portion of it [i.e., one mind],” that “we have one human heart—/All mortal thoughts confess a common home”— is to take as self-evident the fact that there is neither alterity nor alienation, that life is emphathic identification with “thought, action, or person, not our own.” In Cythna’s words, it is “To live, as if to love and live were one” (SPW, l. 3304). As an experiential practice, an existence premised on these terms would revise all object relations, including the alienated power relations that obtain between parents and children, masters and slaves, and men and women, under the auspices of which “life is poisoned in its wells” (ll. 3307–15). The failure of object relations arising from the alienation that Cythna summarizes entails other kinds of failure arising from alienation as well: alienation of capital and alienation of labor, not to mention self-alienation that results in the loss of any meaningful personal point of reference against which to assess the ethics of one’s conduct. Man seeks for gold in mines, that he may weave A lasting chain for his own slavery;— In fear and restless care that he may live He toils for others, who must ever be The joyless thralls of like captivity; He murders, for his chiefs delight in ruin; He builds the altar, that its idol’s fee May be his very blood; he is pursuing— O, blind and willing wretch!—his own obscure undoing. (ll. 3316–24) A skilled orator, Cythna is able to take advantage of her external setting as well as her command of rhetoric to move her audience. Having begun by noting that “The sinking moon is like a watch-tower blazing/Over the

152

O

Shelley among Others

mountains yet” (ll. 3201–2)—no doubt a crescent moon symbolizing Islam in decline—Cythna, nearing the end of her Power sermon, uses that moon to indict Islam for its opulence and its subjection of the powerless, women chief among these. She expresses the hope that evil faith, grown hoary With crime, be quenched and die.—Yon promontory Even now eclipses the descending moon!— Dungeons and palaces are transitory— High temples fade like vapour—Man alone Remains, whose will has power when all beside is gone. (ll. 3337–42) But Cythna propounds a doctrine that is eminently liable to abuse and subversion to serve someone else’s purposes. Here, a statement like “Man alone/Remains, whose will has power when all beside is gone”— if man were taken literally to denote the human male, and not generically (and figuratively) to denote the human race at large—would have the effect of reimposing the very gender bias that Cythna has been at pains to deconstruct. The statement also harbors the potential for its abuser to begin anew the reification of categories such as will and power. Nor is this the only instance in which Cythna’s eloquence reveals its underlying flaws. Indeed, her most eloquent performance, the paean to Equality in canto V, reveals the extent to which Cythna-called-Laone’s eloquence, by reason of the materiality of language, participates in its own subversion and co-optation. To make such an observation is not to construct Cythnacalled-Laone as a victim, then blame her for the failure of her revolutionary enterprise. It is, rather, to suggest that Shelley represents Cythnacalled-Laone as a best-case example of poetic eloquence to demonstrate how even such a best case lends itself to the worst-case scenario in which those who are invested in attaining temporal power through strategies of anthropomorphic projection and alienation, among others, are able to use that eloquence against itself. Cythna-called-Laone begins by figuring her audience “As new-fledged Eagles, beautiful and young,” triumphant over “writh[ing] Faith, and Folly,/ Custom, and Hell, and mortal Melancholy” (ll. 2183–86). In figuring her enlightened listeners as eaglelike and the bad and benighted old ways that they have cast off as serpentlike, Cythna-called-Laone reverses the associations forged at the outset of the poem, where the eagle is “the Spirit of evil”

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

153

(l. 361), and the serpent is “the great Spirit of Good” (l. 373). On one level, her choice of tropes underscores the arbitrariness of signification—Shelley does hold, after all, that “language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone” (Poetry, 483). But on another level, her figurations show how easily that arbitrariness can be exploited.36 The next stanza of the paean presents similar problems. Apostrophizing the causal “Spirit” of all articulate and deployed form, Cythna-calledLaone does make a telling claim for women’s place in the world by characterizing the “Spirit” as “Mother and soul of all” (SPW, ll. 2197–98). But no sooner has Cythna-called-Laone done so than she deploys figures that are readily subverted by proponents of monarchy and established religion, echoing in the process those lines in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in which the Spirit’s “shadow fell” on the Shelleyan speaker (Poetry, ll. 59–60). Lo! thou dost re-ascend the human heart, Thy throne of power, almighty as thou wert In dreams of Poets old grown pale by seeing The shade of thee. (SPW, ll. 2200–2203; emphasis added)

Containing the Materiality of Language While the materiality of language is inevitable, Shelley holds that language’s potential for doing harm is limited if its materiality is foregrounded. To accept its materiality is to know language for what it is. A language that “creates a being within our being” both enacts transference and makes one aware of language’s transferential potential for creating as-yet unimagined identifications. Such a language both makes one mindful of her or his ontological commitments and harbors the potential to destabilize or defamiliarize those commitments. Such a language is also by definition metaphoric, establishing the conditions of transferentiality under which both sorts of “being” interact with one another. Accepting the materiality of language means working for the party of poetry and love, in other words. To deny the materiality of language is to insist that it is no more than a transparent referential medium that reports, with varying degrees of accuracy, on a world of causes and effects that are “really out there.” One result of such a denial is that it causes “life’s dark veil” to be left in place as a totalizing, reified fabric of metonymy—of presumed causes and effects, the master nar-

154

O

Shelley among Others

rative of which is the “official story” of the party of oppression and temporal power.37 Language in the service of poetry and love is figured as a veil or light garment, such as a chiton, something that at once tropes the figure of its wearer and suggests the emplacement of garment and wearer alike in a transferential chain too extensive and complex to come to anything like final terms with in matters of cause and effect. This transferential chain extends at least up to the Temple of the Spirit, which looks out on the universe itself. Through the diamond roof of the temple, which is veiled by a “woof/Of spell-inwoven clouds,” the narrator glimpses That work of subtlest power, divine and rare; Orb within orb, with starry shapes between, And hornèd moons, and meteors strange and fair On night-black columns poised—one hollow hemisphere! (ll. 588–94) Cythna spiritualized is presented in a similar manner. she was known To be thus fair, by the few lines alone Which through her floating locks and gathered cloak, Glances of a soul-dissolving glory shone. (ll. 661–64)38 But the flesh-and-blood Cythna, Cythna-called-Laone, is similarly draped. Laon, cured of his madness and steeped in the lore of his aged rescuer, the Hermit, returns to Argolis to find the city at liberty and Cythnacalled-Laone made the priestess of a new religion of peace and freedom. As he approaches his beloved, “a female Shape upon an ivory throne,” filled with anticipation of his first glimpse “Of those divinest lineaments,” Laon is repelled by what he sees. “I turned in sickness, for a veil shrouded her countenance bright” (ll. 2106–15), he reports. However, a seeming impediment becomes the medium of enchantment when Laon hears Cythna-called-Laone’s veiled voice. Like music of some minstrel heavenly-gifted, To one whom fiends enthral, this voice to me; Scarce did I wish her veil to be uplifted, I was so calm and joyous. (ll. 2125–28)

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

155

Notwithstanding its own materiality, Cythna-called-Laone’s veiled voice “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.” In Laon’s words, I could see The platform where we stood, the statues three Which kept their marble watch on that high shrine, The multitudes, the mountains, and the sea; As when eclipse hath passed, things sudden shine To men’s astonished eyes most clear and crystalline. (ll. 2128–33) When the lovers meet for the first time since Cythna’s abduction, she plays a symbolic game with her veil that reinforces Laon’s experience by suggesting that veiling in the service of art transfigures and thereby idealizes what is on either side of the veil, whether it be the voice of the subject or the image of the object.39 Cythna-called-Laone greets Laon, tells him she has sought him out, proclaims him “our first votary here,” states that Laon reminds her of “a dear friend”—Laon—whom she believes “is dead!” and declares, I spread This veil between us two, that thou beneath Shouldst image one who may have been long lost in death. (ll. 2136–42) When Cythna-called-Laone sings her hymn to freedom and equality, her veil participates in an analogous process of idealization, causing her voice to take on elements of the palpable and affective, and her gestures to take on elements of the spoken. As Cythna relates the experience of Cythna-called-Laone’s hymn, “Laone’s voice was felt, and through the air/Her thrilling gestures spoke, most eloquently fair” (ll. 2180–81). Only after completing her hymn and descending from her throne does Cythnacalled-Laone “unwind /Her veil” (ll. 2320–21). The materiality of language used in the service of oppression and temporal power is figured metonymically—in one instance, tellingly, by Cythna herself—as a veil, and on another as a robe. Indeed, the dual or ambiguously symbolic functions of veiling, like the ambiguous symbolism of snake and eagle discussed earlier, point to the instability of symbolism throughout The Revolt in general. In the case of the veiling game that Cythna-called-Laone

156

O

Shelley among Others

plays, for example, it might as readily be argued that the veil, rather than serving as the medium of metaphoric transference that transfigures and idealizes Laon’s face, serves as the metonymic cause that implies the effect of the distortion caused by obliterating the signs of suffering that his face bears.40 Shelley’s own comments in A Treatise on Morals, where he discusses how “the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose” converts metaphor to metonymy, suggest that “purpose” or intent is the final determinant of whether a tool or technique serves the party of freedom or that of oppression, the cause of peace or that of oppression—whether, in fact, the tool or technique is just that, or a weapon or tactic.41 In the case of a veil or a robe, the question is whether it is part of the process that “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms,” or whether it is the means of preserving that familiarity and concealing “the naked and sleeping beauty” in question. In at least two instances, it seems clear that language is figured as the metonymic veil or robe that is used as a weapon or a tactic. The former instance is Cythna’s recollection of how her prophetic speaking on behalf of female freedom and equality “strips the veil of familiarity” from gender and power relations between men and women, adumbrating a new era of freedom and equality. For, with strong speech I tore the veil that hid Nature, and Truth, and Liberty, and Love,— As one who from some mountain’s pyramid Points to the unrisen sun! (ll. 3523–26) Cythna’s narrative is a recapitulation and verification of what the Hermit has already reported to Laon.42 And while Cythna herself does not give an example of what she intends by the classification “strong speech,” the Hermit recounts her words: “these quiet words—’For thine own sake/ I prithee spare me’” (ll. 1574–75). The speech is a stunningly artless bit of artifice. By the Hermit’s report, it instilled such “ruth” in All hearts, that even the torturer who had bound Her meek calm frame, ere yet it was impaled, Loosened her, weeping then; nor could be found One human hand to harm her. (ll. 1576–79)

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

157

In less than two lines, Cythna establishes an I-Thou relationship with her captors, a relationship that, while empty of the sexual component that her relationship to Laon boasts, is nevertheless loving, mutual, and transferential.43 Four of the eight words of her speech are wholly or partly given over to cases of the first- and second-person singular pronouns. In terms of Martin Buber’s categories of I-Thou and I-It, the effect of these pronouns is not difficult to understand. “When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds.”44 No wonder, then, that by Cythna’s own report, “Those who were sent to bind me, wept, and felt/Their minds outsoar the bonds that clasped them round” (SPW, ll. 3559–60). Cythna’s speech is also profoundly subversive of orthodoxy and of authority wielded in the name of orthodoxy. She does not ask to be spared “for God’s sake,” “for Christ’s sake,” or “for pity’s sake,” but for the would-be torturer’s “own sake.” Such an appeal lodges ultimate moral authority with the individual and makes the claim that such authority lodges with all individuals, who are responsible for thinking and acting justly. Under such circumstances, it becomes distinctly more difficult to commit acts of judgment or violence against others in the name of some presumably omniscient or omnipotent authority figure than is the case in a regime underwritten by orthodoxy. And by refraining from the commission of such acts, the individual lessens the likelihood that such acts can be committed against her or him. Predictably, the Tyrant’s response to Cythna’s speech is to attempt to reestablish the illusion of some semblance of higher authority to which the access of the multitudes is interdicted, so that he can appeal to that authority as the sanction for imposing anew a regime of oppression put and kept in place by the threat of sanctioned institutional violence. Not only does the Tyrant send “Priests . . ./To curse the rebels” by praying publicly “For Earthquake, Plague, and Want” (ll. 3583–85), he also bribes grave and hoary men . . . to tell From seats where law is made the slave of wrong, How glorious Athens in her splendour fell, Because her sons were free,—and that among Mankind, the many to the few belong,

158

O

Shelley among Others

By Heaven, Nature, and Necessity They said, that age was truth, and that the young Marred with wild hopes the peace of slavery, With which old times and men had quelled the vain and free. (ll. 3586–3594) The logic of Cythna’s brief argument to refrain from violence for one’s “own sake” is not all that far from the logic of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), with which Shelley was quite familiar. In fact, Jesus in Matthew’s account gives ample reason for why one should practice the sort of mercy that Cythna advocates. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus begins, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. (Matt. 5:3–7) In practicing the sort of passivity that Jesus advocates and embracing one’s secular powerlessness, the individual attains moral, intellectual, and ethical power, albeit in “the kingdom of heaven.” This power is metaphorized as kingship, comfort, inheritance, fulfillment, and acquisition. In practicing the sort of passivity that Cythna advocates, one obtains such power, metaphorized as intellectual and moral armor, in the here and now. Cythna reports the effects of her “strong speech” as follows: Thus, gentle thoughts did many a bosom fill,— Wisdom, the mail of tried affections wove For many a heart, and tameless scorn of ill, Thrice steeped in molten steel the unconquerable will. (ll. 3528–31) The purpose of such armor is to protect hearts and wills against what Laon and the Hermit both characterize as “custom.” According to Laon, “custom maketh blind and obdurate/The loftiest hearts” (ll. 1486–87). Laon, by his choice of the metaphors of blinding and hardening, here recognizes that the effect of repetition itself—say, in the form of indoctrination—has the effect of brutalizing even “The loftiest hearts.” The Hermit takes up the theme of brutalization shortly thereafter, indicating by the choice of the

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

159

“iron mace” as his metonym, that this is the sort of brutalization that passes easily for the regime of institutional or establishmentarian business as usual, devastating both the party committed to changing that regime and the party committed to upholding it. the Queen of Slaves, The hoodwinked Angel of the blind and dead, Custom, with iron mace points to the graves Where her own standard desolately waves Over the dust of Prophets and of Kings. Many yet stand in her array—”she paves Her path with human hearts,” and o’er it flings The wildering gloom of her immeasurable wings. (ll. 1622–29) The parallel between Cythna’s speech and the Sermon on the Mount is not mere coincidence. As is the case in “Mont Blanc,” Cythna’s mention of her “strong speech” alludes to the rending of the veil surrounding the Ark of the Covenant in the Second Temple at the time of Christ’s death, as reported in three of the Gospels (Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). The veil itself is a metonym—a fetishized effect that testifies to the efficacy of a putatively powerful but absent (first) cause— that came into existence by divine (or Mosaic) fiat during the time of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, and that by the time of Jesus had become a reification of power relations exalting the priestly caste and separating it from the other castes of the Jews.45 Although Shelley does not credit this reported rending as a miraculous event, 46 the allusion nevertheless works on a number of levels. To begin with, the rending of which Cythna speaks, far from revealing some patriarchal lawgiver or unutterable name, reveals “Nature, and Truth, and Liberty, and Love.” But that is precisely Shelley’s point. It is Cythna’s “strong speech,” no less than Jesus’ before her, that reveals the immanent workings of what Christianity calls God in the life-world. In his Essay on Christianity, Shelley argues that “God is represented by Jesus Christ as the Power from which or through which the streams of all that is excellent and delightful flow; the Power which models, as they pass, all the elements of this mixed universe to the purest and most perfect shape which it belongs to their nature to assume” (Prose, 204). Cythna herself courts comparison with Jesus, as well as “a maniac wild and

160

O

Shelley among Others

lost,” “The Prophet’s virgin bride,” and “a fiend,” in the stanza that follows the allusions just discussed. some said I was the child of God, sent down to save Women from bonds and death, and on my head The burden of their sins would frightfully be laid. (ll. 3537–40) Cythna does take up the emancipation of women as her cause, although in doing so she subverts what “some said,” that is, the orthodox Christian notion of Jesus as the messianic figure who takes on the sins of a fallen humanity, thereby ransoming it from everlasting perdition. Although they are represented as inspired and exemplary, the account of Cythna’s actions is no more and no less than the account of the actions of an accomplished human being with a commitment to reforming a morally bankrupt sociopolitical system. But the same might as well be said— indeed, is said—by Shelley about Jesus as Shelley understands him. According to “I will beget a son,” one of his Notes on Queen Mab, “Jesus was sacrificed to honour that God with whom he was afterwards confounded. It is of importance, therefore, to distinguish between the pretended character of this being as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, and his real character as a man, who, for a vain attempt to reform the world, paid the forfeit of his life to that overbearing tyranny which has so long desolated the universe in his name” (820). Hence the aptness of Cythna’s punning comparison of herself to “one who from some mountain’s pyramid/Points to the unrisen sun.” Engaged in the work of reform and as the agent of a new dawn of peace and liberty, Cythna assumes that her lot will be that of an unrisen daughter, just as she assumes that the lot of Jesus was that of an unrisen son. The Temple of the Spirit, where Laon and Cythna reside after their ordeal in the service of reform on earth, is not the place of a patriarchal God in heaven, but rather the figuration of neoplatonic plenitude. 47 That temple, is, like the geography of the Faerie Queene, or like the sites of the afterlife described by “original religions,” an “allegorical” place, with “a double face of false and true” (Poetry, 482). The latter instance of language figured as the metonymic veil or robe that is used as weapon or tactic is recounted in Laon’s narrative of the Tyrant Othman’s conspiracy to subvert the reign of equality and return to power.

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

161

“For traitorously did that foul Tyrant robe/His countenance in lies” (ll. 3847–55). Robing, as Laon describes it, is a form of encrypting the truth in the very act of fetishizing the absent sanction for absolutist monarchy and established religion. If “custom maketh blind and obdurate,” thereby occluding the truth of the matter, robing is a conspiratorial attempt to occlude the truth of the matter to the end of (re)establishing custom. The passage that Laon intends in referring to the moment “When he [i.e., the Tyrant] was snatched from death” makes as much clear. Saved from summary justice at the hands of the angry mob surrounding him because of Laon’s Christlike intercession,48 the Tyrant Othman is conveyed to “a home for his repose assigned.” There, Laon argues, if his heart could have been innocent, As those who pardoned him, he might have ended His days in peace; but his straight lips were bent, Men said, into a smile which guile portended. (ll. 2039–42) The encrypting of message and motive begin here, with the smile that conceals murderous rage, the passivity that conceals the will to power. As is the case with Cythna’s account of the rending of the veil, Laon’s account, by means of indirect allusion, traces the rise of priestcraft and absolutist leadership to Mosaic origins during the time of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. The encrypted communication “With smoke by day and fire by night” recalls Exodus 13:21: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” The Lord leads the Israelites, minus Moses, 49 to Canaan, where, under the generalship of Joshua, they begin to establish their nation, conquering thirty-one other nations and killing their kings in the process (Josh. 12). In fact, as it is presented in the Book of Joshua, the establishment of Israel in Canaan is virtually nothing but one unending war of retribution and vengeance, a war that has the effect of replacing the heteroglossia of the place with the common language of the law of Israel. The Lord commends Joshua to his task, instructing him to be both vigilant and secretive: Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee. . . . This book of law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt

162

O

Shelley among Others

meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe and do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. (Josh. 1:7–8) Paradoxically, to speak differently is to have something in common, and it is in this way that an understanding of heteroglossia leads the way to an understanding of “divine Equality.” Wars of retribution and vengeance aimed at suppressing heteroglossia and replacing it with a common language also characterize the lives of the “Kings and Priests” to whom Laon refers, “their mutual wars,” a way of life (and death), suspended only by reason of the “Strange truce” brought on by a threat to all variants of absolutist monarchy and established religion. And even this truce seems in danger of failing when an outbreak of plague caused by the wholesale slaughter they have perpetrated causes these avatars of absolutist monarchy and established religion to suspect divine retribution for their deeds. Worshiping, like Cythna’s “moon-struck sophist,” their own hearts’ image, dim and vast, Scared by the shade wherewith they would eclipse The light of other minds. (SPW, ll. 4055–57) the kings and priests move to the brink of internecine religious warfare. And Oromaze, Joshua, and Mahomet, Moses and Buddh, Zerdusht, and Brahm, and Foh, A tumult of strange names, which never met Before, as watchwords of a single woe, Arose; each raging votary ‘gan to throw Aloft his armèd hands, and each did howl ”Our God alone is God”—and slaughter now Would have gone forth. (ll. 4063–70) Only the inquisitorial intervention of the “Iberian Priest,” who states that on “the Day/Of Judgement,” everyone who is mistaken “fearfully shall pay/The errors of his faith in endless woe!” (ll. 4099–102), and who prescribes the fiery sacrifice of “Laon and Laone” as the only fit expiation of the present curse (ll. 4135–38), serves to defuse the incipient conflict. “The Tyrant . . . surrounded by the steel/Of hired assassins” (ll. 3857–58) makes it clear that he is most at ease prosecuting campaigns of retribution

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

163

and vengeance aimed at suppressing heteroglossia and replacing it with a common language. Like Hitler dancing a little victory jig upon the fall of France, the Tyrant’s footsteps reel On the fresh blood—he smiles. “Ay, now I feel I am a King in truth!” he said, and took His royal seat, and bade the torturing wheel Be brought, and fire, and pincers, and the hook, And scorpions; that his soul on its revenge might look. (ll. 3859–64) The Tyrant’s revenge is not limited to defeating the rebels militarily. He commands his troops to kill them, not because of their potential might in arms, but because of their potential might in heteroglossic discourse to raise questions about his authority and the basis on which it rests. “The weakest with one word might turn/The scales of victory yet,” he says. Nor will the Tyrant brook any semblance of heteroglossia from this inferiors. A superstitious soldier, reporting on Cythna’s battlefield rescue of Laon, attributes the rescue to supernatural powers and asks that further action against the rebels be delayed slightly, stating that “we fear/The spirits of the night, and morn is drawing near” (ll. 3872–73). The Tyrant responds by sentencing the soldier to be broken on the wheel, and offers a reward for Cythna’s apprehension. Besides “gold and glory,” the reward contains a suitable modicum of vengeance. “Whoso will drag that woman to his [i.e., the soldier’s] side/That scared him thus, may burn his dearest foe beside” (ll. 3880–82). Motivated by the fear of his vengeance no less than by the Tyrant’s incentives, the troops go forward, and in horrific, parodic reversal of the P-account of the creation in Genesis, enact a decreation that brings the earth and all of its inhabitants to the brink of extinction. As Laon reports on the troops, Five days they slew Among the wasted fields; the sixth saw gore Stream through the city; on the seventh, the dew Of slaughter became stiff, and there was peace anew. (ll. 3888–91) After the slaughter, Laon reports, there was a spate of drought, then “a rotting vapour passed/From the unburied dead, invisible and fast” (ll. 3908–9),

164

O

Shelley among Others

a bitterly ironic reference to “the mist from the earth” that “watered the whole face of the ground” (Gen. 2:6). Plague and famine follow. Then The fish were poisoned in the streams; the birds In the green woods perished; the insect race Was withered up; the scattered flocks and herds Who had survived the wild beasts’ hungry chase Died moaning, each upon the other’s face In helpless agony gazing. (ll. 3919–24) The project of the Tyrant Othman and the Iberian Priest is to reduce a heteroglossic humanity to the status of such animals as these—creatures retaining inarticulate voice, but stripped of language, or at the very least ready to take up without question the language of the aggressor. Sentencing the soldier to the wheel answers to such motives. Plague plays its part as well (ll. 3969–70). But it is the pyre that the Iberian Priest causes to be built that plays the major role in stripping heteroglossic speech from voice for both its victims and their witnesses alike. ’Tis said a mother dragged three children then, To those fierce flames which roast the eyes in the head, And laughed, and died, and that unholy men, Feasting like fiends upon the infidel dead, Looked from their meal, and saw an Angel tread The visible floor of Heaven, and it was she! And, on that night, one without doubt or dread Came to the fire, and said, “Stop, I am he! Kill me!”—They burned them both with hellish mockery. (ll. 4207–15) What is notable about this stanza is that it does not describe Laon and Cythna as partaking of the moaning, howling, raving, laughter, or mockery that surrounds them. To do so would be to participate in the linguistic economy of the oppressor, to ignore the Earth’s advice in The Mask to “Stand . . . calm and resolute,/Like a forest close and mute” (Poetry, ll. 319–20). In fact, there are two options for those who would resist the stripping of speech from voice. One of these is to be as mute as the mutes who officiate at Laon and Cythna’s auto-da-fé. As Laon reports of Cythna and himself on the pyre,

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

165

She smiled on me, and nothing then we said, But each upon the other’s countenance fed Looks of insatiate love. (SPW, ll. 4579–81) The other option is to give up one’s heteroglossic speech and voice in the very act of giving up life itself, a gesture that makes clear the relationship between the cause of liberty and the heteroglossia that underwrites it. The “young maidens” who approach the pyre after Laon and Cythna’s execution do just this. Although the outcome of their sacrifice casts Cythna’s earlier position that “accents sweet and low” can cause oppressors to “relent” in something approaching ironic relief, the maidens’ exemplary gesture does make clear their position that without heteroglossia there is neither free will nor freedom. And, one by one, that night, young maidens came, Beauteous and calm, like shapes of living stone Clothed in the light of dreams, and by the flame, Which shrank as overgorged, they laid them down, And sang a low sweet song, of which alone One word was heard, and that was Liberty; And that some kissed their marble feet, with moan Like love, and died; and then that they did die With happy smiles, which sunk in white tranquillity. (ll. 4216–24) Joined by Cythna’s child, who dies of plague after their execution, in the realm of the Spirit, Laon and Cythna learn from her of changes afoot on earth. These changes have their start when “one . . . among the multitude” (l. 4686) rises up and takes back language from the Tyrant and the Iberian Priest for the purpose of locating their crimes in historical context. It is no comforting exercise, since the unnamed speaker has no faith that the actions of Laon and Cythna and the others, although exemplary, will be memorable. These perish as the good and great of yore Have perished, and their murderers will repent,— Yes, vain and barren tears will flow before Yon smoke has faded from the firmament Even for this cause, that ye who must lament The death of those that made this world so fair,

166

O

Shelley among Others

Cannot recall them now; but there is lent To man the wisdom of a high despair, When such can die, and he live on and linger here. (ll. 4693–4701) Rather than relive the nightmare that is history, watching “Hope pursue[s] immortal Destiny/With steps thus slow,” the unnamed speaker “sheathed a dagger in his heart and fell,” and although the child herself is near death at the time, she reports that “There came a murmur from the crowd, to tell/Of deep and mighty change which suddenly befell” (ll. 4716–19). With this final gesture, Shelley attempts to situate a happy ending to history within the happy ending of his narrative in which, led by the child, Laon and Cythna embark in the service of “The better Genius of this world’s estate” (l. 4724). But as Shelley knew all too well, such representations, despite possessing a materiality of their own, also possess an arbitrariness of their own. The sociopolitical critique that is The Revolt of Islam could not both come to terms with history as it exists and come up with the means of making “Hope” comport with “immortal Destiny.” As a result, Shelley ends up splitting the critique into visionary and historical components.

Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century

O

167

O

Chapter 5 The Poet Situated—between the Failed Past and a Hopeful Future

Toward Opposing Voices Shelley’s attempt in The Revolt to hold the historical and the visionary together by sacrificing any pretense of transcendent knowledge fails by his own admission. In the dedication of The Cenci, addressed to Leigh Hunt, Shelley makes an act of public contrition not unlike that of Keats in the preface to Endymion (1818). Shelley admits, “Those writings which I have hitherto published have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehension of the beautiful and the just” (Poetry, 237)— that is, poems in which the visionary serves as the supplement to the historical. Shelley claims by way of contrast that, in The Cenci, he presents history unsupplemented, albeit not uncolored, by the personal and historical situatedness of its author.1 Up to this point, Shelley had taken note of two conditions or forms of language—the metaphoric and the metonymic, the former being the linguistic form taken by that ineffable first principle or Power responsible for all articulate, deployed form, the latter being the perversion of that form by those who would wield temporal power in the name of that ineffable first principle or Power anthropomorphized and thereby reduced and misunderstood. The comments in the preface are the announcement of a retheorization already undertaken. “Dreams of what ought to be, or may be,” are figured in unconstrained metaphoric language, in opposition to that which is figured by derivative but similarly unconstrained metonymic language and ought not to be. In between these oppositional extremes is to be found “a sad reality” of what is, figured by the mutually constrained and constraining opposition of the metaphoric and the metonymic.

168

O

O

168 among Others Shelley

“Reality” is the result of contested, often dialogical, and always heterological language, as opposed to “visions which impersonate [one’s] own apprehension of the beautiful and the just,” presented in a monological and uncontested manner. As Wasserman notes in his own discussion of Julian and Maddalo, the “sad reality” of which Shelley speaks results in part from the effect of Julian’s and Maddalo’s arguments on each other: “Each of the opposing views is skeptically undermined in the very act of being advanced.” 2 In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in language that looks backward to The Revolt and forward to the “Ode to the West Wind,” Adonais, and The Triumph of Life, Shelley sketches much the same dynamic, tellingly unaffected by such undermining. He ascribes the need to retheorize his idea of language to a preponderance of “unconscious passenger[s]” over “the more select classes of poetical readers,” thus making for a reading audience unaware of contested language’s visionary and emancipatory potential. Shelley states that his “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” (Poetry, 135).3

Killing Off the Monologist The retheorization that Shelley announces in these two prefaces is worked out in a number of troubled texts that are either contemporaneous with or follow closely upon the completion of The Revolt. These include the fragmentary Prince Athanase (1817?),4 Rosalind and Helen, Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, and Julian and Maddalo. All of these texts have in common the death of a male poet—or, at the very least, the avatar or double of a male poet. This recurrent motif is not coincidental. Shelley’s retheorization mandates the necessity of “killing off” his prior poetic voice, out of the ashes of which the new poetic voice will arise.5 In the first of these texts, the seemingly unthinkable happens: Prince Deathless (Athanase, from Gr. Athanasius, from athanasia ‘immortal’ or ‘deathless’) dies, and he does so, as Mary Shelley’s note suggests, on a Platonic (and perhaps Augustinian) quest “through the world [for] the One whom he may love” 6 (SPW, 158–59). But instead of finding the true object of

The Poet Situated

O

169

his quest—Urania, originally the muse of astronomy, who for Shelley as for Milton before him supplanted Calliope as the muse of visionary poetry—Athanase “meets, in the ship in which he is embarked, a lady who appears to him to embody his ideal of love and beauty.” But she proves to be Pandemos, or the earthly and unworthy Venus; who, after disappointing his cherished dreams and hopes, deserts him. Athanase undertakes his quest after meeting with his “one belovèd friend” (l. 125), the sage Zonoras, also formerly Athanase’s tutor. Zonoras recognizes the symptoms of love-longing and urges Athanse to act on his feelings. Zonoras asks Athanase to remember how, just a year previously, the two had read Plato’s Symposium, the story of the feast; And Agathon and Diotima seemed From death and dark forgetfulness released. (ll. 227–29)7 Zonoras refers to that point in the Symposium at which Socrates turns to Agathon, with whom he has just concluded a lengthy dialogue on the nature of love, to “rehearse a tale of love . . . heard from Diotima of Mantineia, a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge” (201). Among these “kinds of knowledge” is one way of knowing that both confounds and transcends Socrates’s dialectical method, with its eitheror logic. Socrates uses dialectic with Agathon to bring him to the conclusion that, “in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good” (201). He then rehearses the encounter with Diotima,8 which subverts such a conclusion. First I said to her in nearly the same words which he [i.e., Phaedrus] used to me, that Love was a mighty god, and likewise fair, and she proved to me as I proved to him that, by my own showing, Love was neither fair nor good. “What do you mean, Diotima,” I said, “is love the evil and foul?” “Hush,” she cried; “must that be foul which is not fair?” “Certainly,” I said. “And is that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?” “And what may that be?” I said. “Right opinion,” she replied; “which, as you know, being incapable of giving a reason, is not knowledge (for how can knowledge be devoid of reason? nor again, ignorance, for neither can ignorance attain the truth), but is clearly something which is a mean between ignorance and wisdom.” (201–2)

170

O

Shelley among Others

Love, as Diotima construes it, represents a return of the excluded middle raised to a transcendent status, and as such it leads to an alternative means of attaining the truth. But the truths attained by means of love are not apprehended literally, but rather by means of demonized metaphor. “What then is Love?” Socrates asks. “Is he mortal?” Diotima answers in the negative. “As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.” “What is he, Diotima?” “He is a great spirit [daimon], and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.” “And what,” I said, “is his power?” “He interprets,” she replied, “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all intercourse and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on” (202–3; emphasis added).9 Two ironies mark Athanase’s quest. Thinking that he has at last found Urania, he learns that he has in fact found Pandemos. And when, at the very last moment, with Athanase “On his deathbed, the lady who can really reply to his soul comes and kisses his lips” (SPW, 159), this kiss, far from reviving Athanase, may actually hasten his passing. The poet describes her [i.e., Urania] in the words of the final “fragment” (166). Based on this description, Urania looks more like the Indian Maiden of Alastor (or Endymion) than the blonde, blue-eyed daughter of Jove and Mnemosyne. Her hair was brown, her spherèd eyes were brown, And in their dark and liquid moisture swam, Like the dim orb of the eclipsèd moon. (ll. 312–14)10 Looks are deceiving. Athanase, already deceived once by the looks of Pandemos—she appeared fair enough to him, after all, to be confused with Urania—is deceived again. He fails to see Urania, who is figured in celestial terms, for what she is—a muse, a mediator, like love, between the earthly and the celestial. To gaze deeply into Urania’s brown eyes and thus transcend their materiality is to see them as blue—to see beyond the momentary

The Poet Situated

O

171

dimness “of the eclipsèd moon” and to recognize that under different circumstances, her “spirit” shines through. Yet when the spirit flashed beneath, there came The light from them, as when tears of delight Double the western planet’s serene flame. (ll. 315–17) Athanase never has the kind of encounter with Urania described by this last-quoted stanza. That is, he never sees “the western planet’s serene flame,” whether “Double” or otherwise, only “the dim orb of the eclipsèd moon.” Athanase is silent throughout his encounter with Urania, unable to marshal the eloquence that would bring the encounter to some happy culmination, despite the fact that Urania appears prepared to carry on a “conversation.” She is “the lady who can really reply to his soul” (emphasis added), and when Urania “comes and kisses his lips,” she does prompt a reply. Yet the fragment ends with Athanase not responding, whether because of failing health or a more profound failure, such as that of the imagination or the ability to love. When Urania kisses him, she makes it possible for Athanase to experience what Shelley describes in On Love when he talks of encounters that “awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.” But these are encounters that work best when carried on between those of shared values, or at least kindred sympathies. It is only when “in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathise not with us” that it is fitting to “love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky” (Poetry, 474) or “one beloved.” Shelley’s argument assumes that love is learned in human interactions and then generalized to encompass a wider range of object relations. Earlier in the essay, Shelley characterizes love as “the bond and the sanction that connects not only man with man, but with every thing that exists. . . . There is something within us which from the instant we live thirsts after its likeness” (473). Athanase’s likeness stands before him, and he fails to recognize or act upon it.

Toward Dialogical Engagement Getting at “the genuine elements of society” entails heroic struggle as much as it entails the sophisticated deployment of dialectic. It means looking

172

O

Shelley among Others

through the dark to find the light, through matter (or body) to find spirit, through history to find irreducible and essential humanity. It is a quest that, when enacted in the theater of history rather than in the theater of unmediated visionary poetry, can cost even a “deathless” protagonist such as Prince Athanase his life. Getting at “the genuine elements of society” also requires generic and rhetorical strategies that Shelley had not yet devised and attempted, whether in his more ambitious “narrative” works such as the quest romances Alastor and The Revolt of Islam, or in his expressive “lyric” works such as “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” The distinction between “narrative” and “lyric” in Shelley’s earlier poetry is ultimately one of degree rather than kind, for both kinds of poetry are monological,11 and hence they lack the dialogical (and metaphorical) enactment that Diotima identifies when she talks of the language of love “conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods.” In the final analysis, as Charles J. Rzepka suggests, the retheorizing that culminates in “Julian and Maddalo reflects Shelley’s growing uneasiness, during his first year in Italy, with the impassioned and highly personal lyric form as a means of establishing a true community of minds by which to potentiate social change.” 12 The problem with the personal lyric as the vehicle of intellectual and social organization is clearly demonstrated in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. The same trait that made the lyric the appropriate form in which to celebrate Mont Blanc’s monitory and didactic possibilities—that is, lyric’s ability to house the reverting mind at a distance from its kind and the mountain, yet feel and sing its informing power and its value as an exemplar for the “adverting mind”—is the trait that makes it the wrong form for engaging specific, historically situated social issues and the people affected by them. Figured by Shelley as “Many a green isle . . . /In the deep wide sea of Misery” (Poetry, ll. 1–2), the hills are a landscape of isolation (It. isola ‘isle’) and alienation, providing a temporary safe haven for “the mariner, worn and wan” (l. 3), but little more in the way of comforting companionship.13 The poem’s initial figures of hill-island; storm-wracked “sea of Misery”; and “mariner, worn and wan” distance the speaker from those he would address. The figures overwhelm the particularities of the landscape by reducing those particularities to their figural terms. The figures also reduce the reader or audience to their terms. Looking down from the hills, the speaker sees, “spread like a green sea,/The waveless plain of Lombardy”

The Poet Situated

O

173

(Poetry, ll. 90–91). This sort of reduction-by-universalizing figuration is what Shelley is at pains to overcome. In Julian and Maddalo, for example, Julian uses a variant of the hill-island trope, likening the Euganean Hills to “a clump of peaked isles.” But—and this is a mark of Shelley’s success up to that point in moving away from the powerful overwhelming-by-universalizing tendencies of lyric figuration—the likeness bespeaks its own radical contingency, not its universality. Or rather, the likeness attains its universality by means of, not in spite of, its radical contingency. Julian watches the sunset from the Lido, remarking Those famous Euganean hills, which bear As seen from Lido through the harbour piles The likeness of a clump of peaked isles— And then—as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. (Poetry, ll. 77–85) But the same figures of hill-island; storm-wracked “sea of Misery”; and “mariner, worn and wan” do more than overwhelm by universalizing. The figures may, as Reiman suggests, combine to produce an extended “metaphor—a favorite one with Shelley—of life as a voyage over a dangerous sea of time-mortality.” 14 But the figures also drive the poem from landing-place to landing-place, much as the storms drive the mariner(s) from isle to isle. There is some reason to believe that such voyages are ironic. In relation to the metaphor of a “waveless plain,” the metaphor of a “green sea” begins to resemble an oxymoron—to conflate the two figures, a “waveless sea.” The metaphor figures forth boundaries and isolation, not inclusiveness and unity. This sea is “Bounded by the vaporous air,/Islanded by cities fair” (ll. 92–93), among these “Ocean’s nursling Venice . . . /A peopled labyrinth of walls” (ll. 95–96). “A peopled labyrinth” is like the site at which the Minotaur waited to devour the sacrificial offering of seven youths and seven maidens sent annually to Minos, king of Crete, by Ægeus, king of Athens, as tribute. Venice is here aptly figured as an exemplar of “Islanded . . . cities,” not only in the

174

O

Shelley among Others

sense that it is all but surrounded by water, but also in the sense that the “Celtic anarch,” or “Austrian tyrant” (107n.) exacts tribute from the subjugated Venetians much as Minos and Crete once exacted tribute from Ægeus and Athens. Having proposed the figure of a “peopled labyrinth,” the speaker of Lines finds himself held captive by his own figures, powerless, accordingly, to embark as Æegeus’s son Theseus did on a mission of rescue. Lyric figuration can “name” human misery, but that figuration can not engage or alleviate it. Powerlessness in the face of ongoing sacrifice is evident in the speaker’s rendering of the sun rising over Venice to the east from his vantagepoint in the Euganean Hills. In the red light, Venice-as-island is transformed to Venice-as-Delphi, a transformation foregrounded by a triplet (skies, sacrifice, rise) and reminiscent in this aspect of the propitiatory sacrifices to the oracle ascending To the sapphire-tinted skies; As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. (ll. 110–14)15 The delphic prophecy that follows is no less grim than the speaker’s manifest sense of helplessness. Venice, which arose out of the Adriatic marshes, and which acknowledges its bond with the sea in the annual ritual of its wedding to the sea presided over by the doge, must, unless it contrives some way to free itself from the chain of tyranny that creates it alternately as conqueror and conquered, sink “among the waves” (ll. 115–25).16 In so doing, Venice will perish as will the other city- and nation-states, similarly unable to free themselves from this chain. But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch’s hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band

The Poet Situated

O

175

Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime. (ll. 150–56) With this meditation on the birth and death of city- and nation-states comes an insight like one expressed at several points in A Defence, namely, that poets “are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers” (482). City- and nation-states are memorable to the poets who participate in their founding and cultural articulation; poets are not particularly memorable for their nationality or citizenship in a particular state. For the speaker of Lines, Venice will be memorable not for its rise from or its descent into the Adriatic, but for the fact that Byron, a tempest-cleaving Swan Of the songs of Albion, Driven from ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams Found a nest in thee. (ll. 174–78) Byron’s “songs of Albion” make Venice memorable for the speaker in much the same way that Homer makes “Scamander’s wasting springs” memorable, the same way that “divinest Shakespeare’s might/Fills Avon and the world with light,” the same way that “the love from Petrarch’s urn” makes the village of Arqua, his burial place in the Euganean Hills, and Venice, which was a place of “refuge” for him, memorable (ll. 194– 205). But none of this lyric eloquence can retard or reverse the decline of city- or nation-states, whether they have passed, as Athens has, or are passing, as the speaker implies Venice and England are. Homer, Petrarch, and Shakespeare represent both a chronological sequence of poets and a “westering” of decline as it moves from Greece, to Italy, to England. From his vantage point in the Euganean Hills, the speaker perceives and images decline “westering” from Venice to Padua. From the sea a mist has spread, And the beams of morn lie dead On the towers of Venice now, Like its glory long ago. By the skirts of that grey cloud

176

O

Shelley among Others

Many-domed Padua proud Stands. (ll. 210–16) No less an image of isolation and alienation than Venice—the speaker terms it “a peopled solitude” (l. 216)—Padua is similarly in decline, beset, like Venice, by the Austrian occupation. But Padua’s situation rings important changes on the concept of a chain of tyranny that Shelley had advanced with respect to Venice, naturalizing the notion by linking it to the motif of the seasons. The speaker views the gathering of crops in progress on “the harvest-shining plain” below and transforms the scene from one of bucolic plenitude to one of anticommunion, illustrating an apocalyptic allegory of vengeance and retribution. On that plain, Force from force must ever flow— Or worse; but ’tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge. (ll. 232–35) Ultimately, the speaker westers along with the presence of evil in the world, figured as the Miltonic Satan’s incestuous offspring, “Son and Mother, Death and Sin” (l. 238). In a bit of political allegory, Shelley equates Death with Napoleon; Sin with the Austrian tyrant’s “Vice-Emperor” over all the conquered territory lying between the River Po and the eastern slope of the Alps; and Sin and Death together with the unending cycles of vengeance, retribution, and the reestablished, tyrannical civic and religious order. In order to cheer up Sin, who has lost to him at dice—and, in so doing, has lost possession of the soul of Ezzelino da Romano, thirteenth-century tyrant of Padua (109n.), Death promised, to assuage her, That he would petition for Her to be made Vice-Emperor, When the destined years were o’er, Over all between the Po And the eastern Alpine snow, Under the mighty Austrian. Sin smiled so as Sin only can. (ll. 243–49)

The Poet Situated

O

177

How to break such cycles? The choice of Plato rather than Aeschylus as a model, announced in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, makes it clear that neither the acceptance of sovereignty nor the catharsis that comes from learning and accepting one’s fate will suffice. On the other hand, knowledge of the Good (to agathon), figured as the flame(s) of knowledge, will suffice. That flame is absent from Padua, as the speaker reports. In thy halls, the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, Its gleams betrayed and to betray. (ll. 256–60) The flame’s absence is not tantamount to extinction. As the speaker announces, “Now new fires from antique light/Spring beneath the wide world’s might” (ll. 265–66). The Greek Revolution was more than two years ahead in 1818, so the speaker’s announcement is personal rather than historical—Shelley’s way of encrypting in Lines a statement that he is at work, following Platonic rather than Aeschylean principles, on the drama Prometheus Unbound which, in detailing the ordeal and triumph of the donor of “antique light,” will start “new fires from antique light.” The speaker distances the depressing landscape by means of a heroic simile. The simile compares the anticipated effect of Prometheus Unbound on “tyranny,” which, notwithstanding its “purple pride,” has been unable to “trample[d] out” the “sacred flame,” to the effect of a forest fire on a “Norway woodman” who is unable to extinguish a small-scale brush fire before it becomes a large-scale forest fire. The “woodman,” recalling the brush fire, starts to see the flames it fed Howling through the darkened sky With myriad tongues victoriously, And sinks down in fear: so thou, O tyranny, beholdest now Light around thee, and thou hearest The loud flames ascend, and fearest: Grovel on the earth; aye, hide In the dust thy purple pride. (ll. 262–84)

178

O

Shelley among Others

Contemplating this anticipated effect suffices to transfigure the landscape, to suffuse it with Promethean plenitude in the form of “the noon of autumn’s glow,” figured as “a soft and purple mist,/Like a vaporous amethyst” (ll. 286–88). This “mist,” alternatively figured as “an air-dissolved star/Mingling light and fragrance” (ll. 289–90), unifies the landscape From the curved horizon’s bound To the point of heaven’s profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath. (ll. 291–95) To be sure, contrast and demarcations may be observed in this landscape—as, for example between “the red and golden vines” and “The rough, darkskirted wilderness that “their trellised lines” penetrate (ll. 299–301)—but these do not betoken the same sort of isolation and alienation as the formerly glimpsed “plain of Lombardy,” then “Bounded by the vaporous air,/Islanded by cities fair.” When features are “islanded” under the aspect of Promethean plenitude,” they are, like the olive-sandalled Appenine In the south[,] dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; And of living things each one; And my spirit which so long Darkened this swift stream of song,— Interpenetrated lie By the glory of the sky. (ll. 306–14) The speaker is not sure what to make of this plenitude, Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of all Which from heaven like dew doth fall, Or the mind which feeds this verse Peopling the lone universe. (ll. 315–19)

The Poet Situated

O

179

But his certainty that the aspect of Promethean plenitude implies being under the aspect of love is soon confirmed by the waning of the day and the appearance of “the infantine moon,” which appears to be led by Venus as Vesper, the evening star (ll. 321–26). However, the sunset also puts the speaker in mind of “the soft dreams of the morn,” which had given way, and now give way again, to “remembered agonies”—both the agonies of those in the “islanded” cities, to whom the speaker would minister with his poetry, and the agonies of the speaker himself realizing the ineffectuality of that poetry in its failure to minister adequately. What is to prevent a recurrence of the sorrowful voyage made previously by “The frail bark of this lone being,” a voyage made all the more imminent by the fact that “its antient pilot, Pain,/Sits beside the helm again” (ll. 326–34)? The speaker’s hope rests on the vocation of poet-as-unacknowledged legislator. “Other flowering isles must be/In the sea of Life and Agony” (ll. 335–36), he speculates, invoking the motif of island refuge that recurs in Epipsychidion (1821) and “With a Guitar. To Jane” (1822). 17 The hope is to locate one of those “flowering isles,” a poetic and civic site out of time where, in “a windless bower—an edifice of art, reared by a visionary art not subject to the vicissitudes of social upheaval figured as violent natural process—he and his loved ones can create a “healing Paradise.” Such a site would possess, by the very power of its articulated form and the collective imagination of its articulate inhabitants, the potential to reform The polluting multitude; But their rage would be subdued By that clime divine and calm. (ll. 355–57) One thing that makes the speaker’s “healing Paradise” different from the biblical original or its Miltonic descendant is the agent of ensoulment, which in Shelley’s version is Power, manifested not as “the breath of life” itself (Gen. 2:7), but as the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood. (ll. 366–69) Under the sway of “the love which heals all strife,” there would be no hierarchy of sovereignty, such as that of God, the angels who are his sons and a

180

O

Shelley among Others

little lower than he is, and a humanity that is a little lower still (see Gen. 6:1–3). And there would be no interdiction, such as that which prevents eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:3). Given such circumstances in that “healing Paradise,” there would be no motivation for “the polluting multitude” to persist in its ways of hierarchy, interdiction, and control. They, not it, would change, and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again. (ll. 370–73) The reader is left on the brink of Prometheus Unbound—left, in fact, with an anticipatory echo of Prometheus’s repentance speech (“It doth repent me: words are quick and vain” [I.303; emphasis added]), as well as a synopsis of act IV, where, indeed, “the earth [does] grow young again.”

Eclogue as Transitional Genre Rosalind and Helen But as Rzepka observes, getting from twilight in Italy to the morning of the world means moving beyond “the impassioned and highly personal lyric form as a means of establishing a true community of minds by which to potentiate social change.” Underwritten by his preference for the dialogical (and metaphoric) over the monological (and metonymic), such a move entailed for Shelley some intermediate attempts with the eclogue. Rosalind and Helen, subtitled A Modern Eclogue, is one attempt; Julian and Maddalo, which calls attention to its affiliation with the genre through its epigraph, is another. The eclogue’s chief virtue as the generic basis for such experimentation, as Rzepka notes, is that it is “a genre that includes both dialogue and lyric,”18 and is accordingly a step in the direction of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. The eclogue also brings a thematic virtue to “establishing a true community of minds by which to potentiate social change.” Such change is, for Shelley, dependent on one’s being able to find a basis and the strategies for speaking the metaphoric language of love, as well as to conduct oneself in accord with that language in an exemplary manner. But to speak that language in the aftermath of the French Revolution means being able to over-

The Poet Situated

O

181

come the despondency that arises from love gone wrong, love betrayed, love lost—if only for the time being. The genre of pastoral—and the subgenres of pastoral elegy and the eclogue—take as two of their principal themes the suffering that results from a failure of love and the consolations, such as they are, that obtain in the aftermath of such a failure. Like other eclogues, Rosalind and Helen is a singing contest between two contestants disappointed in the quest for love. In their contest, Rosalind and Helen, who have endured terrible hardship and abject powerlessness in a world that worships male domination, wealth, and temporal power in the name of law, morality, and religion, rehearse “necessarily long stories, accounts of utter ruination cataloguing every variation on tyranny and oppression Shelley could think of.” 19 But the contest is not one directed toward determining which of the singers has had the more terrible life or has crafted the more affecting song—or if the contest is so directed, it is a draw. Nor is the poem a trifle. Mary Shelley’s note states that it “was begun at Marlow and thrown aside—till I found it; and, at my request, it was completed. Shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind and develop some high or abstruse truth” (188). In this account, Rosalind and Helen was to have been, in Shelley’s own estimation, the low-genre exercise that he worked on to beguile intervals at Marlow during the composition of The Revolt.20 Rosalind and Helen is more. It is, above all, a poetic account of cultural and artistic ruination, and an attempt to elaborate artistic if not reformist cultural strategies for moving beyond this low point—in this world, if not exactly in this life. Lacking either an available, transcendent safe haven such as The Revolt’s Temple of the Spirit, or the optimistic, foresightful Promethean perspective, the two singer-namesakes nevertheless find themselves at that pass synopsized by Demogorgon, when he states that “Life, Joy, Empire and Victory” depend in part on being able “To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Poetry, IV.573–78). The ability to endure lovingly—and above all, to love without let or qualification—is, in Demogorgon’s speech, the sine qua non of cultural and artistic renovation. It is the ability to love in this manner under trying conditions that informs the singing contest between Rosalind and Helen, a contest to determine not who is able to love better under the circumstances but, rather, whether it is possible to love at all under those circumstances. Mary Shelley’s desire to see Rosalind and Helen completed arose largely from her

182

O

Shelley among Others

sense that Shelley’s “modern eclogue” could make a start at answering the second of these questions, as well as her conviction that Shelley’s strength as a poet lay not in “develop[ing] some high or abstruse truth” but rather in his imaginative grasp of love’s potential, as enacted through the metaphoric language of love, as an engine of social and artistic renovation. When he does touch on human life and the human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more subtle, or more pathetic. He never mentioned Love but he shed a grace bestowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed, on that passion. When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. (SPW, 188–89) Initially, the contest seems unequivocally Helen’s. Her opening speech is compounded of love and the desire to elicit Rosalind’s fellowship, despite the fact that both are English exiles in Italy with English childhood memories that “Weigh[s] on the heart like that remorse/Which altered friendship leaves,” and despite the fact that she discerns that Rosalind would much prefer to deal with what Helen calls “the memory of me,/ And not my scornèd self” (ll. 28–29, 38–39). Rosalind is as out of sympathy with her former friend as she is in harmony with her natural surroundings. By Helen’s account, Rosalind possesses a “sweet voice to each tone of even/United,” and has “eyes reply[ing]/To the hues of yon fair heaven” (ll. 8–10). But Rosalind is wracked by guilt and a compulsion to moralize her actions and those of others. She calls Helen “frail Helen,” meaning morally, not physically unsteady, and would, but for the fact that “former years/Arise and bring forbidden tears,” seek to “flee” from Helen’s “tainting touch” (ll. 41–43). Helen’s “taint” has to do with the fact that she “dwelt with Lionel” (l. 596)—shared his bed, that is— without being married to him, except, in Helen’s words, in the eyes of the “church” of the “starry night” (l. 852). 21 But as Rosalind confesses, she, too, shared a bed without benefit of marriage—and shared it with her half-brother in the bargain—an experience that caused a full range of guilt-induced symptoms and precipitated his death when the blood-relationship came to light. And Rosalind endured a loveless marriage. When probated, the will left by her husband, “a man/

The Poet Situated

O

183

Hard, selfish, loving only gold” (ll. 248–49), effectively disinherited and exiled her, charging her with adultery and atheism and threatening the disinheritance of her children if Rosalind did not leave her home within three days (ll. 484–504). Rosalind knows whereof she speaks when she declares outright to Helen, “I share thy crime” (l. 46). This declaration has an interesting effect, bringing Rosalind to the verge of the realization that “to be greatly good,” as Shelley argues in A Defence, means to “imagine intensively and comprehensively.” Shelley’s Poet “must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (Poetry, 487– 88; emphasis added). In making her declaration, Rosalind does just that. The tears that she sheds for Helen’s imagined “grief” make her feel less oppressed by her own “grief” as well as by Helen’s. Rosalind also realizes that her love for Helen has remained strong all the while, despite the moral judgment of “wickedness” that the “evil world” has levied against her. Rosalind, however, sees shedding such empathic tears as an act of weakness, stating that she “seldom stoops to such relief” on her own behalf. And before her discovery, Rosalind did nothing to contest the judgment of Helen by “the evil world,” and this she deferred any hope of empathic identification with Helen. In her silence, Rosalind discovered the “dire despair” that comes from the perception that one is no longer able either to love or to be loved. Because it records the psychological movements laid out earlier with such exact attention to process, the passage relating Rosalind’s feelings is cited at length. I share thy crime. I cannot choose But weep for thee: mine own strange grief But seldom stoops for such relief: Nor ever did I love thee less, Though mourning o’er thy wickedness Even with a sister’s woe. I knew What to the evil world is due, And therefore sternly did refuse To link me with the infamy Of one so lost as Helen. Now Bewildered by my dire despair,

184

O

Shelley among Others

Wondering I blush, and weep that thou Should’st love me still,—thou only! (ll. 46–58) There is a bond of fellowship between the two that is greater than the sum of their collective sorrow, a bond symbolized by a lock of braided hair, perhaps theirs braided together. Helen speaks to Rosalind in the hope of renewing that fellowship, appealing to her “by this cherished token/Of woven hair, which thou wilt not disown” (ll. 36–37).22 Despite Rosalind’s guilt-wracked reminiscences, the appeal works. She agrees to stay “Till our mournful talk be done” (l. 60). Because the sound of Lake Como reminds her too much of her “native land,” and because those memories will arouse “Too much of suffocating sorrow” (ll. 63–67) without mitigation or external object of sympathy if discussed on the lakeshore, Helen suggests that they talk elsewhere: at “a stone seat” in the “dark chestnut wood” that Helen represents as a neutral “solitude /Less like our own” (ll. 69–70). In fact, Helen’s is a more complex recuperation than she owns, or is able to own. The “site is one where a domestic tragedy far sadder and more terrible than her own or Rosalind’s had occurred. A mob discovered “a sister and a brother” who, on this site, “Had solemnized a monstrous curse” (ll. 156– 57) of incestuous union, and who had borne a child as the result. A “multitude:/ Tracking them to the secret wood,” tore the child “limb from limb . . . / And stabbed and trampled on its mother.” The young father was taken into custody and burnt at the stake—in the narrator’s bitterly ironic words, “for God’s most holy grace” (ll. 161–66). The goal that Helen sets for Rosalind and herself is to come to terms with the troubled bonds between the sexes that haunt their English past.23 The process does not arouse the sort of “suffocating sorrow” that would extinguish both Helen’s memories of the peace and joy of remembered English settings and the pleasure that she derives, by association, from the setting of Lake Como. But the site to which the two go to speak is one where it is possible to experience not “suffocating sorrow,” but sorrow that respires—and aspires to empathic identification. “The great secret of morals” is this sort of identification, as Shelley argues. “A man [or woman], to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he [or she] must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his [or her] species must become his [or her] own” (Poetry, 487–88). And

The Poet Situated

O

185

“Fenici’s seat” (SPW, l. 74), so identified by Helen’s son Henry, is the sort of site that fosters empathy. As the narrator relates, Helen came From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow So much sympathy to borrow As soothed her own dark lot. (ll. 169–71) Fenici’s seat is a site “peopled with the spectral dead” (l. 147). And the sort of empathic identification that Helen practices is a way of laying such specters—her own as well as those of others—to rest. The process is crucial for avoiding the metabasis that confuses “the spectral dead” and the sites that they inhabit with “The ghost of Peace” and the sites that it inhabits. As Helen reassures Rosalind, The ghost of Peace Will not desert this spot. Tomorrow, If thy kind feelings should not cease, We may sit here. (ll. 70–73) Fenici’s seat is a complexly symbolic site entirely apposite both to the manifest coming to terms that Helen has in mind, and to the latent coming to terms that informs the poem’s larger thematic agenda. Like Wordsworth’s Vale of Grasmere, Fenici’s seat is, by day, a site of natural plenitude, unity, and harmony that the ghosts of the incestuous family and others of the spectral dead can scarcely disturb. Long before the coming of the Christianity that destroyed that family in the name of a vengeful patriarchal God and his son, the columned wood did frame A roofless temple, like the fane Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain, Man’s early race once knelt beneath The overhanging deity. (ll. 107–11) Though this “early race” has been supplanted by “new creeds” and new races to profess them, the site itself retains the aura of sensuous innocence that made it the ideal place at which to commune with the sun, worshiped as “The overhanging deity.” It is innocent of all except human carnage. During the daylight hours, snakes and eagles do not contend in the environs

186

O

Shelley among Others

of Fenici’s seat; rather, they commune. “The pale snake” comes to drink, as do the birds. . . . he floats on that dark and lucid flood In the light of his own loveliness; And the birds that in the fountain dip Their plumes in fearless fellowship Above and round him wheel and hover. (ll. 114–22) 24 But every day at Fenici’s seat recapitulates a theogonic dialectic of plenitude and absence, unity and isolation, harmony and silence—and the natural and the human. Noon and midnight at the seat are as much metaphysical as chronological antipodes. There is emotion In all that dwells at noontide here: Then, through the intricate wild wood A maze of life and light and motion Is woven. But there is stillness now: Gloom and the trance of Nature now. (ll. 126–31) The only light is supplied by “the glow-worm,” and all but one of the nocturnal birds are absent. “The owls have all fled far away/In a merrier glen to hoot and play.” However, The accustomed nightingale still broods On her accustomed bough, But she is mute; for her false mate Has fled and left her desolate. (ll. 132–45)25 This place at night is the ideal spot for the nightingale’s two human counterparts to talk about the men who have “fled” by reason of death and left them “desolate,” and about failed human bonds, flight, and desolation more generally. And talk they do. At issue is the question begged by the framing narration of the incestuous family’s fate. Which is worse: the incestuous couple’s crime or its punishment? Which is the greater offense against human nature: a free if “monstrous” bond, such as that of incestuous marriage, 26 or a coercive bond, such as is underwritten by organized religion or the state, in which the party holding power simultaneously strives to natu-

The Poet Situated

O

187

ralize that power by claiming to wield it in the name of the father, thereby creating the impression that dissent of any sort is unnatural or otherwise perverse? The poem suggests that a knowingly incestuous bond of the first sort, if freely accepted, is preferable to a bond of the second sort. The issue of freely chosen versus coercive bonds is, however, not restricted to the sexual.27 Underwriting the sexual politics that Shelley explores in Rosalind and Helen is politics pure and simple. The political analog of the human bond is union—both the union that obtains between geopolitical entities such as nations, and the union that creates such entities. The question about bonds above may also be recast in political terms. Which is the greater offense against human nature: a free if “monstrous” political union, such as that of the young United States, 28 or a coercive political union underwritten by the state or organized religion, such as the English Constitution as interpreted by the established church and government, or the union between Great Britain and Ireland, in both of which the party holding power simultaneously strives to naturalize that power by claiming to wield it in the name of the father, thereby creating the impression that dissent of any sort is unnatural or otherwise perverse?29 It seems clear enough that coercive political unions lead to coercive personal bonds. Rosalind’s, for example, is the story of a life of suffering lived under the sway of coercive bonds, especially those religious bonds ordained by the Church of England and upheld by the monarch, who is the head of that church, to govern marital relations. She has lived her life passively, voicelessly, unquestioningly. In her own words, As to the Christian creed, if true Or false, I never questioned it: I took it as the vulgar do: Nor my vexed soul had leisure yet To doubt the things men say, or deem That they are other than they seem. (SPW, ll. 512–17) These bonds forbid her marriage to her half brother, cause his insanity and death, and cause Rosalind’s heart to turn to stone (ll. 297–314). Ironically but not unexpectedly, these very bonds, which are meant to regulate the expression of love in a community of belief, extinguish the most selfless form of that love— caritas—at the same time fetishizing it as a commodity

188

O

Shelley among Others

that gives a value to social relations. After her father’s death, which follows closely the death of her half brother, Rosalind relates, we grew quite poor, So that no one would give us bread: My mother looked at me, and said Faint words of cheer, which only meant That she could die and be content; So I went forth from the same church door To another husband’s bed. (ll. 319–25) This second marriage is disastrous. Rosalind’s unnamed husband, at whose death she “could not weep” (l. 224), at whose death his three children “laughed aloud in frantic glee” and “clapped their hands and leaped about” (ll. 234–35), is elsewhere described as having little by way of an inner life and as projecting and denying that inner life which he does have. The specific symptoms of his condition are selfishness, avarice, repression, and alternating cowardice and bullying. Having no heart, he has no cause to speak it. In Rosalind’s words, her husband was a man Hard, selfish, loving only gold, Yet full of guile: his pale eyes ran With tears, which each some falsehood told, And oft his smooth and bridled tongue Would give the lie to his flushing cheek: He was a coward to the strong: He was a tyrant to the weak, On whom his vengeance he would wreak. (ll. 248–56) After her husband’s death, from “the quenchless thirst of gold,/ Which, like fierce fever, left him weak” (SPW, ll. 424–25), neither Rosalind nor her children are able to mourn his passing. To the contrary, the family’s shared though unspoken hope is that its time “Will pass in happy work and play/Now he is dead and gone away” (ll. 454–56). However, the husband is as controlling and intimidating in death as he was in life, imposing his will and his language to play on the same familial fear of poverty that caused Rosalind to marry him in the first place.

The Poet Situated

O

189

The will Imported, that if e’er again I sought my children to behold, Or in my birthplace did remain Beyond three days, whose hours were told, They [i.e., the children] should inherit nought. (ll. 484–89) The grounds for Rosalind’s disinheritance and the threatened disinheritance of her children, characterized as “just” by “A sallow lawyer, cruel and cold,” who stands next in the line of inheritance after Rosalind’s children, are two charges made by the husband in his will. She is adulterous, and doth hold In secret that the Christian creed Is false, and therefore much need That I should have a care to save My children from eternal fire. (ll. 500–504) Shunned by the others at the reading of the dead man’s will and allegations, Rosalind finds her own will to speak so severely suppressed that she chooses not to say her farewells to anyone—not even her children, Rosalind takes to the road, not pausing until she reaches “the brink of the ocean green,” where she has an encounter that adumbrates Helen’s subsequent relation of her visit to the shrine of Fidelity (ll. 1049–1101). At land’s end and wit’s end, Rosalind meets up with an old woman, a former servant of her mother, who forces upon Rosalind “a purse of gold” that amounts to half of what she had saved to retire upon (ll. 529– 35). Although Rosalind does not pause to reflect on this encounter, merely to relate it, it seems clear that this encounter with its simple fidelity and caritas is all that prevents Rosalind from going over the brink, as it were, and drowning herself, in much the same way that only the simple fidelity of a family dog prevents Lionel’s mother from drowning in the ocean subsequently. The encounter also raises a question: what abides in a world such as the one that Rosalind traverses narratively and experientially? If the question concerns human attributes or emotions, then fidelity is certainly one of the attributes that abides, just as love is one of the emotions. Gazing on the summit of Chiavenna, where she ultimately is buried (ll. 1297–1311), Rosalind recalls not only her love for her half brother, but “a wild and playful

190

O

Shelley among Others

saying” of his that she elects for her “epitaph” (ll. 559–62). The gist of that saying is that love abides like one of nature’s powers—indeed, like nature itself. Rosalind’s description of a mountainscape in which those “buried there” have the potential to partake of “their own eternity” in “the allsurrounding air” (ll. 548–58) reprises “Mont Blanc” with a very important difference. Rosalind implies by the narrative framing her beloved’s “wild and playful saying” that not only love abides but also that the language of love abides. The “saying,” originally spoken by him, is repeated by Rosalind, then made durable, if not eternal, both by the stone or monument on which it is to be inscribed, and by the poem in which it is complementarily inscribed. The important difference between this dialogical description and the monological one in which “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high” (Poetry, ll. 127–44), and on which “Mont Blanc” concludes, is that the speaker’s lyricism in “Mont Blanc” suppresses the mountain’s other, potentially lyric voices—”Winds contend/Silently there,” for example, just as “The voiceless lightning in these solitudes/Keeps innocently.” The beloved’s words imagine what it would be like to be on the mountaintop and amid its processes and their sounds, not at a distance from them. Those sounds, to the extent that they are the voices of nature, are not suppressed, just as the beloved’s voice is not suppressed in its turn. The result of such dialogical deployment is memorability and affectivity. When Rosalind, after repeating her beloved’s words and asking that they be made her epitaph, turns to Helen and declares, “Thy memory for a term may be/My monument” (SPW, ll. 363–64), Rosalind commends her memorability to Helen on the basis of those words no less than on the basis of her personal narrative. In fact, in asking that Helen remember her, Rosalind also asks Helen to forgive her, as much as admitting that the worldliness that led her to do all the wrong things for all the “right” (socially correct) reasons—to marry to avoid poverty, for example—caused Rosalind to devalue those who, like Helen, might offer her something more valuable, such as an abiding bond of affection. Wilt remember me? I know thou wilt, and canst forgive Whilst in this erring world to live My soul disdained not, that I thought

The Poet Situated

O

191

Its lying forms were worthy aught And much less thee. (ll. 564–69) Helen reaffirms this abiding bond, declaring it strong enough to overcome the “grief” that made her feel as though she were “severed . . . /From all who weep and groan”—even strong enough to last beyond the grave, “if death be not division” (ll. 573–78).30 Given leave to tell her tale by Rosalind, Helen continues to reinforce her abiding bond with Rosalind as she narrates that tale. Helen introduces her story by making explicit reference to the fact that living with Lionel came at the heavy cost of breaking off her friendship with Rosalind, ostensibly because of him. Thou well Rememberest when we met no more, And though I dwelt with Lionel, That friendless caution pierced me sore With grief. (ll. 594–98) Helen at that time deemed the cost acceptable, if heavy, because of Lionel’s role as a poet and a revolutionary dedicated to bringing about reforms of the sort glimpsed in The Revolt. (For this role if for no other reason, Lionel must be killed off, given Shelley’s rueful acknowledgment of failure in the preface to The Cenci.) But in a post-Napoleonic Europe suffering under “the counterrevolutionary repression of Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Quadruple Alliance,”31 Helen narrates a story of failed revolutionary aspirations and lost hope. These themes—the anticipation of the triumphant dawning of a second golden age, and the disappointment of witnessing its defeat when the human will subverts the institution of radical reform—and the language in which they are introduced anticipate later works such as Hellas and The Triumph. Alas! all hope is buried now. But then men dreamed the agèd earth Was labouring in that mighty birth, Which many a poet and a sage Has aye foreseen—the happy age When truth and love shall dwell below Among the works and ways of men;

192

O

Shelley among Others

Which on this world not power but will Even now is wanting to fulfill. (ll. 601–9)32 Lionel is an idealization of Shelley-as-revolutionary-poet, with a touch of Wordsworth-as-Jacobin thrown in for good measure. He is true to his nature, which is loving. Unlike everyone else, for whom “First life then love its course begins,” Lionel is someone for whom “love and life . . . were twins,/Born at one birth” (ll. 622–24). Because of this remarkable endowment, Lionel is someone for whom sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage mute in death. (ll. 618–21) With his combination of love, inspiration, and poise, Lionel “stood at the throne of armèd power/Pleading for a world of woe.” Simultaneously, Lionel uses this combination of traits, as the speaker of Shelley’s earlier sonnet, “To Wordsworth” (1816), claims that the older poet once used a similar combination of traits, to prevent a violent insurrection by the English masses. Secure as one on a rock-built tower O’er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro, ’Mid the passions wild of human kind He stood, like a spirit calming them. (ll. 633–36)33 Lionel has the ability to touch “to tears/The unpersuaded tyrant,” to sting “The torturers with their victim’s pain,” and to unlock “the hearts of those who keep/Gold, the world’s bond of slavery” (SPW, ll. 647–54). But Lionel has no designs on temporal power, whether in the form of “luxury,” “Fame,” or “Power.” He espouses the “trampled creed” of atheism, pays no heed to “ancient rights and wrongs,” and will not undertake the “toil” necessary to attain “Power” (ll. 655–66). These behaviors leave his contemporaries wondering about his motives—all except the priests, that is. For he made verses wild and queer On the strange creeds priests hold so dear, Because they bring them land and gold. (ll. 680–82)

The Poet Situated

O

193

Lionel’s poetry threatens the priests, here figured as aphids (“withering honey dew” [l. 677]), on the laity, who give the priests the “flower” of their earthly goods in return for the services of the priests in matters of doctrine and salvation.34 Helen says of Lionel’s “verses wild and queer” that “whoso heard or read [them]/Would laugh till he were almost dead.” The verses give rise to a famous proverb: “Don’t get old/Till Lionel’s ‘Banquet in Hell’ you hear, / And then you will laugh yourself young again” (SPW, ll. 684–88). The title in the proverb suggests a number of possibilities: dark or satiric versions of Plato’s Symposium or Dante’s Convito, perhaps, although the former would not give the lie to Christian orthodoxy; Lucianic satire on the order of Menippus or Icaromenippus more likely, especially the former, which presents a highly unflattering vision of the afterlife of the rich and powerful in Hades.35 But as surely as the hopes of the French Revolution gave way to the Reign of Terror, as surely as Metternich followed Napoleon, for Lionel smiles and joyance quickly died, For public hope grew pale and dim In an altered time and tide, And in its wasting withered him. (SPW, ll. 690–93) Unable to bear the return of the bad old days and “outworn creeds” (l. 718), 36 Lionel renounces his credo of love, faith, hope, and courage. He flees the city and moves to the coast, where he becomes Helen’s neighbor. Over time, their “sad and sweet” discourse frees Lionel from the throes of “desolation.” In a heroic simile that evokes one of the central symbols of Mary’s Frankenstein (1818), the lightning-struck oak, Helen likens Lionel’s recovery to an instance in which the lightning’s blast Has parched some heaven-delighting oak, The next spring shows leaves pale and rare, But like flowers delicate and fair, On its rent boughs. (SPW, ll. 787–91)37 Despite renewed hope, Lionel’s health continues to decline, but the decline serves to etherealize him, to make him more attractive to Helen. The two consummate their relationship, uniting “All in us that was yet divided” (l. 845). Owning the horror of a church-sanctioned marriage, Helen takes

194

O

Shelley among Others

responsibility for solemnizing the bond, becoming, as it were, the voice of (mother) nature figured forth as (mother) church. As Helen recalls the exchange: For when he said, that many a rite, By men to bind, but once provided, Could not be shared by him and me, Or they would kill him in their glee, I shuddered, and then laughing said— ”We will have rites our faith to bind, But our church shall be the starry night, Our altar the grassy earth outspread, And our priest the muttering wind.” (ll. 846–54).38 Soon troops sent by “The ministers of misrule” (l. 857) appear and convey the captured Lionel to “a dreary tower” (l. 859). These troops confirm Lionel’s fear of vengeance by decreeing that after a trial, the verdict of which is predetermined, he will be burned at the stake for his blasphemies, and that “his soul must roasted be/In hell’s red lakes immortally” (ll. 862–66). But the strength of Helen’s freely chosen bond is evident. Though divided by force from Lionel, she follows him, As a widow follows, pale and wild, The murderers and corse of her only child; And when we came to the prison door . . . I prayed to share his dungeon floor. (ll. 876–79) Although separated by force from Lionel, Helen subsequently takes up residence “beside the prison gate” (l. 902), awaiting the disposition of his case. As he is being led into the tower, Lionel summons the strength to utter one last prophecy. Likening what Shelley elsewhere calls “Power” or “Necessity” to a river, as Shelley does in “Mont Blanc,” Lionel puts the temporal power of his persecutors in perspective. Fear not the tyrants shall rule forever, Or the priests of the bloody faith; They stand on the brink of that mighty river, Whose waves they have tainted with death: It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,

The Poet Situated

O

195

Around them it foams, and rages, and swells, And their swords and their sceptres I floating see Like wrecks in the surge of eternity. (ll. 894–901) That this is prophecy and not merely political philosophy is confirmed shortly when Lionel’s captors, “Soon, but too late, in penitence/Or fear . . . released him thence” (ll. 907–8). The release is motivated both by the pathos of Lionel’s declining health, and by political expediency. Lionel is near death, and were that to occur in prison, he would become a martyr as well as a prophet. Helen reports that Lionel’s death is gradual, and it is revealing. As his health declines, Lionel returns to mere dust, apparently reversing the creation-by-ensoulment narrated in the transition from the P-account of the creation to the J-account in Genesis. As Helen recollects, death seemed not like death in him, For the spirit of life in every limb Lingered, a mist of sense and thought. (ll. 1012–14)39 Lionel’s death is positive—an etherealized escape from the prison house of life. In Helen’s words, Alas! the unquiet life did tingle From mine own heart through every vein, Like a captive in dreams of liberty, Who beats the walls of his stony cell, But his, it seemed already free, Like the shadow of fire surrounding me! (SPW, ll. 1033–38) But Lionel’s death is also, in Helen’s words, the source “Of all the woe that now I bear” (l. 1048). Her characterization of the loss as bearable depends on Helen’s memory of their last visit to the Temple of Fidelity. An edifice built by Lionel for his mother, in memory of a family dog that demonstrated its love and loyalty by rescuing her from the surf, the temple is an enduring monument to the power and beauty of freely undertaken bonds. The principal celebrant is Lionel’s mother, who practices a religion, a principal tenet of which is the constancy to which one’s heart and mind aspire. Helen terms the mother’s practice “The rites of a religion sweet,/Whose god was in her heart and brain” (ll. 1077–78).

196

O

Shelley among Others

In that last visit to the temple with Lionel, Helen learns that through the experience of freely undertaken bonds, one may attain at least a dim apprehension of immortality, which makes itself known in this life through a range of apperceptions. Such apperceptions occur when, having freely entered into the bond of love, one experiences sexual intercourse, sleep, thought, or music with one’s beloved. A nightingale sings intermittently, and for Lionel both the presences and absences of that song are inspiring. The song becomes the stuff of what can only be regarded as the highest form of a freely engaged bond—a Neoplatonic communion that emphasizes the proposition that to “drain the cup,” is to attain immortality. Heardst thou not, that those who die Awake in a world of ecstasy? That love, when limbs are interwoven, And sleep, when the night of life is cloven, And thought, to the world’s dim boundaries clinging, And music, when one beloved is singing, Is death? Let us drain right joyously That cup which the sweet bird fills for me. (ll. 1123–30).40 Lionel seals the communion with a demonizing, metempsychotic kiss— ”like spirit his words went/Through all my limbs with the speed of fire” (SPW, ll. 1132–33), as Helen recalls it. The kiss fuses Helen’s identity with Lionel’s, inspiring her momentarily to take up a harp belonging to Lionel’s mother. Before, Helen had played the harp indifferently—”I had awakened music soft/Amid its wires,” she recalls. After the kiss, however, Helen recalls, ’twas his soul that did inspire Sounds, which my skill could ne’er awaken; And first, I felt my fingers sweep The harp, and a long quivering cry Burst from my lips in symphony. (ll. 1139–43) As she approaches ineffability in her song, Helen suggests that the “unutterable thing” (l. 1148) she struggles with marks the boundary between life and death. 41 It is a boundary passed by everyone who dies, but it cannot be overleapt by human language—not even the metaphoric (and transferential) language of human love at its most fervent. Moved by her song, Lionel, who

The Poet Situated

O

197

is about to straddle, then cross, that boundary, begins a silent transfiguration toward death in terms that anticipate the conclusion of Adonais. . . . [i]n some mood Of wordless thought Lionel stood So pale, that even beside his cheek The snowy column from its shade Caught whiteness; yet his countenance Raised upward, burned with radiance Of spirit-piercing joy. (SPW, ll. 1148–54) Inspired once more, Helen harps “Circles of life-dissolving sound” (SPW, l. 1166). She and Lionel speak the extremest language of love and devotion—in her words, “words I dare not say/We mixed” (ll. 1176– 77)—but this transferential love talk only serves to reemphasize the proposition that the boundary between life and death cannot be crossed by human language, which, although eloquent, either is that boundary or, at the very least, adverts to it.42 Then Helen, noting Lionel’s silence, knows that he is dead, wishing that she, too, were bereft of language, gaze, and motion, so as to join him. No word, no look, no motion! yes, There was a change, but spare to guess, Nor let that moment’s hope be told. I looked and knew that he was dead. (SPW, ll. 1180–83) After a brief but violent swoon that presages a temporary spate of madness, Helen comes to her senses long enough to contemplate suicide, only to recall that Lionel’s “dying murmurs . . . forbade” (ll. 1187–89) her killing herself. Ultimately, Helen rejects both madness and suicide as options, since these are, respectively, the forfeiture of one’s right to form bonds freely and the willful and unnatural pursuit of a transferential bond dissolved in this life by the end of another’s life. Helen has her tranferential bonds in this life—one loving relationship with Rosalind, and another with Henry. It is to these bonds that she turns, acknowledging in retrospect that transferential language may represent bonds such as those between lovers—may, even, in fact, imitate those bonds— but that language is not, in and of itself, such a bond. The proof of this conundrum for Helen is that Lionel is gone, but

198

O

Shelley among Others

that his language and the language that passed between the two remains behind as the memorial of their bond. In Helen’s words, O that I once again were mad! And yet, dear Rosalind, not so, For I would live to share thy woe. Sweet boy, did I forget thee too? Alas, we know not what we do When we speak words. (ll. 1190–95) Helen also rejects madness because it gives rise to the delusion of an idylic and unchanging afterlife, not unlike that of the domain of the Spirit as it is figured in The Revolt. Helen relates her brief descent into madness in terms reminiscent of Cythna’s sea-voyage passage, as well as of the passage narrating the awakening of Laon into the domain of the Spirit, but without any of the positive associations manifest in those earlier passages. Madness came upon me. . . . ....................... .. Then I heard strange tongues, and saw strange flowers, And the stars methought grew unlike ours, And the azure sky, and the stormless sea Made me believe that I had died, And waked in a world, which was to me Drear hell, though heaven to all beside. (ll. 1197–1206). 43 Following her descent into madness, Helen lapses into a coma, during which Lionel’s mother, who has tended her throughout much of her ordeal, dies, and Henry is born. Helen recovers enough presence of mind not only to mourn the passing of the mother and to love Henry for the “solace” (SPW, l. 1227) he provides, but also to defend her and Henry’s inheritance of Lionel’s “great wealth” in courts of law against “slaves, to vindicate/The very laws themselves do make” (ll. 1235–36). Although she may lose it at any time, this wealth provides Helen with the wherewithal to live in a “clean and white” casement-windowed, vine-covered cottage that, although situated in Italy, is one in which “all things . . . were planned,/As in an English home” (ll. 1255–61). At first extremely “Disturbed” (l. 1262) by the recollections and associations that this home evokes,

The Poet Situated

O

199

Rosalind breaks down and weeps. But over time, the sustaining power of bonds freely entered into reasserts itself, exhibiting the power to recuperate the sentiments of the past, if not the past outright. So Rosalind and Helen lived together Thenceforth, changed in all else, yet friends again, Such as they were when o’er the mountain heather They wandered in their youth through sun and rain. (ll. 1275–78) From this reunion other unions follow: Rosalind’s daughter is reunited with her; Henry falls in love with the daughter, and the two wed, conferring upon Rosalind and Helen “The shadow of the peace denied to them” (l. 1291). The victim of circumstances that leave her “cankered” to the “heart”; Rosalind dies “ere her time” (ll. 1293–94), but the bond of love prevails. Under Helen’s direction, and true to Rosalind’s wishes, her survivors bury Rosalind and “raise[d] a pyramid of lasting ice” upon “Chiavenna’s precipice” (1298–99). And every year, on the anniversary of Rosalind’s death, Helen and the other “sad inhabitants” of her “home” climb Chiavenna “With willing steps” in order to renew the memory of their bond with Rosalind symbolically. They hang long locks of hair, and garlands bound With amaranth flowers, which, in the clime’s despite, Filled the frore air with unaccustomed light: Such flowers, as in the wintry memory bloom Of one friend left, adorned that frozen tomb. (ll. 1307–11)

Julian and Maddalo In closing, the narrator of Rosalind and Helen expresses the hope that the bond of love itself, if not the words expressing it, may outlast the bounds of life and language both. And know, that if love die not in the dead As in the living, none of mortal kind Are blest, as now Helen and Rosalind. (ll. 1316–18) But as Helen’s renunciation of madness suggests, Shelley after The Revolt holds that the proper and enduring focus for poetry and the imagination is not the domain of the Spirit or the proposition of “happily ever after,” but the turbulent and conflicted historical present, whether rendered whole or

200

O

Shelley among Others

figured in terms of another age.44 Rosalind and Helen comes some but not all of the way back toward a focus on this present. The fate of dialogism, emblemized by the presumed eternal dialogue of the two “blest” dead friends, is too pat, too easy. Julian and Maddalo takes up the genre of the eclogue and the question of dialogism once again in a manner calculated to move beyond the pat and easy formula of “happily ever after.”45 Shelley himself was aware of, if not comfortable with, what he was undertaking. Though ready for publication no later than 15 August 1819, when Shelley sent it to Leigh Hunt as “a little Poem to Ollier for publication but without my Name” (Letters, 2:108 and n.; Shelley’s emphasis), Julian and Maddalo was not published until it appeared in Mary’s edition of Posthumous Poems (1824 [Letters, 2:108n.]).46 Shelley distinguishes Julian and Maddalo from Prometheus Unbound on the one hand, his “favourite poem,” even if it “cannot sell beyond twenty copies,” and The Cenci on the other hand, “which is written for the multitude and ought to sell well” (Letters, 2:174). Throughout the course of his correspondence with Ollier, Shelley is adamant about the format for publishing Julian and Maddalo: anonymously, and under no circumstances between the same boards as such comedic poems as Prometheus Unbound or The Witch of Atlas (1820).47 Julian and Maddalo demonstrates that it is the next step beyond Rosalind and Helen by its generic hybridization. The poem is strongly informed by the genre of the eclogue, as suggested by its epigraph, drawn from the tenth and last of Vergil’s Eclogues. Eclogue X, a pastoral elegy for Gallus, who is dying for love of Lycoris, is one in which Gallus clearly wins the singing contest. Approximately half of the poem—slightly less than thirty-nine lines of the seventy-seven-line Latin original—is his inconsolable farewell to pastoral love. Moreover, it is a farewell against the advice (and song) of Apollo and Pan, both of whom try to persuade Gallus to place his love-longing in perspective. A part of Pan’s exhortation, translated by Shelley to read “The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme,/The goats with the green leaves of budding spring,/ Are saturated not—nor Love with tears” (Poetry, 112), serves as the epigraph to Julian and Maddalo. 48 Shelley uses Eclogue X to frame the overall narrative structure of Julian and Maddalo. Its focal center is the 210–line speech of the inconsolable Maniac, which centers Julian and Maddalo much as the inconsolable Gallus’s speech centers Eclogue X. And in the speeches of the optimistic Apollo, who attempts to put the best face on Gallus’s misfortunes by reminding him

The Poet Situated

O

201

of how Lycoris has ended up,49 and the gloomy Pan, who announces Love’s insatiable appetite for human tears, one glimpses the rudiments of Julian and Maddalo, respectively. Unlike Rosalind and Helen, which follows the dramatic format of setting off the speaking parts that is adopted in eclogues I, III, V, VII, VIII, and IX, Julian and Maddalo uses the narrative format adopted in eclogues II, IV, VI, and X, resulting in a more nearly seamless dialectic, its sense of intellectual give-and-take more immediate. In his letter of 14 May 1819 to Ollier, Shelley contradistinguishes Julian and Maddalo from Prometheus Unbound by characterizing the former as “an attempt in a different style, in which I am not yet sure of myself, a sermo pedestris way of treating human nature quite opposed to the idiom of that drama” (Letters, 2:196). Whether Shelley intends sermo pedestris specifically to denote “the proper language for tragic lament,” as well as to denote more generally “any colloquial style that seemed to derive from Horace’s manner in his satires or sermones,” as Cronin suggests, is not entirely clear.50 But what seems clear enough is that Shelley realized at some point that the eclogue is not the vehicle for an extensive dialectic or an intensive discussion of the problem of evil. To the extent that Julian and Maddalo engage this problem, with Julian implicating human pride and Maddalo implicating human nature itself, they do so in the “colloquial style.” The poem’s subtitle describes it as A Conversation (Poetry, 112). In Shelley’s description of the piece to Ollier, he specifies that that conversation is of the order of high colloquy, in “a certain style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms” (Letters, 2:108). “Tragic lament,” such as it is, pervades the Maniac’s 210 lines. Generic hybridization allows Shelley to hedge his bets on the question of “tragic lament” versus colloquy, or even comedic celebration, to resist the temptation to create a facile ending, and thus to defer closure in a manner fully apposite to the condition of a socially situated user of language speaking from within it and its network of social relations, and informed by both. 51 If by Shelley’s intentions one understands his narrative “moral” or “point,” it seems clear enough that such clarity can come only at the price of simplification. Shelley is not tweaking his reader, as does Wordsworth to the “gentle Reader” of “Simon Lee” (1798), who would find “A tale in every thing” (WPW, ll. 67–68). 52 ButShelley does recognize that such clarity comes at the priceof textual closure that falsifies even as it reveals. 53

202

O

Shelley among Others

No less skillfully than Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Julian and Maddalo defeats any attempt at closure, whether by Julian or his double—Shelley himself or Shelley’s reader.54 Maddalo’s daughter, who has grown up into a woman “of transcendent worth,/Like one of Shakespeare’s women (Poetry, ll. 591–92),55 narrates the conclusion of the Maniac’s life. Julian learns That the poor sufferer’s health began to fail Two years from my departure, but that then The Lady who had left him, came again. Her mien had been imperious, but she now Looked meek—perhaps remorse had brought her low. Her coming made him better, and they stayed Together at my father’s—for I played As I remember with the lady’s shawl— I might be six years old—but after all She left him. (ll. 597–606) What to make of this synopsis, upon which the entire surrounding narrative depends, and into the aporia of which the entire surrounding narrative implodes? Is the synopsis ultimately tragic? Is it ultimately comic? Does the synopsis allow for further colloquy toward some end, either in the vein of Vergilian eclogue or that of Horatian sermo pedestris— most particularly, colloquy that will lead to some narrative closure in the matter? Julian engages Maddalo’s daughter in stichomythia, which she ends by characterizing for him the information that he seeks as a final imprint or textualization of the narrative—in her words, “Something within the interval which bore/The stamp of why they parted, how they met” (ll. 609–10). Maddalo’s daughter agrees to supply at least some of the information on the condition that Julian’s response is both strong and empathic. If not, the final imprint or textualization will consist either of a concealing veil—the cerements of unspeaking time itself—or of the silent gravestones that mark the final resting place of the Maniac and the Lady. In the daughter’s words, Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet Those wrinkled cheeks with youth’s remembered tears, Ask me no more, but let the silent years Be closed and ceared over their memory As yon mute marble where their corpses lie. (ll. 611–15)

The Poet Situated

O

203

Julian does not fulfill the conditions set by Maddalo’s daughter. The last two lines of the poem—his account—report that he “urged and questioned still,” but not that he wept, and that “she told . . . how/All happened,” but not why it happened. That “the cold world shall not know” (ll. 616– 17) confirms the likelihood that Julian’s failure prevented him from learning all that he might have wished to learn, and the resultant decision to withhold additional intelligence from “The cold world” is projection and denial of Julian’s part. His affective disengagement—his cold nature, in other words—prevents him from gaining empathic knowledge of why things fell out as they did. Without the self-knowledge necessary to live in the turbulent and conflicted historical present without succumbing to or being overwhelmed by it, there can be no narrative closure to Julian and Maddalo. Such closure would have to mediate the opposition between Julian’s contention, continuing the power-will debate that ends without resolution in The Triumph, that “it is our will/That thus enchains us to permitted ill,” and Maddalo’s contention that we are “weak—and we aspire/How vainly to be strong!” (Poetry, ll. 170–71, 177–78). Nor is self-knowledge easy to acquire, especially for those living in the hellish world of the poem. Julian likens his colloquy with Maddalo to the “forlorn/Yet pleasing” colloquy that “The devils held within the gates of Hell/Concerning God, freewill and destiny” (ll. 39–43), by this likening evoking a colloquy on similar subjects by the fallen angels in Paradise Lost.56 Nor is self-knowledge comforting, if the Maniac is an example of what can go wrong in the acquisition process—or, worse yet, an example of where the process must ultimately lead. Julian and Maddalo are themselves seemingly as irreconcilable as the positions they hold. Maddalo’s name is an anagram for “Old Adam” 57—an almost exact reversal of the latter name, in fact—a perfect label for someone of Byron’s gloomy Calvinist proclivities, not to mention someone whose fatalistic view of human nature is that it is weak and that any attempt to demonstrate otherwise is every bit as prideful as the original sin that caused the fall of Eve and Adam and their resultant weakness in the first place. Shelley hints at the Adamic connection in the preface, describing Maddalo as “a Venetian nobleman of antient family and great fortune” (Poetry, 112). In the JudeoChristian account, there is no line more ancient than Adam’s, no family possessing greater fortune than his, especially before the fall,

204

O

Shelley among Others

when “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Gen. 2:15).58 The preface contains additional hints at the Adamic connection. Shelley characterizes Maddalo as “a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life” (112–13). Adam’s fall was also his enlightenment. In eating the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” his “eyes . . . were opened” (Gen. 2:17; 3:7). The besetting sin that causes the fall is, of course, pride—in turn, the serpent’s, Eve’s, and Adam’s. As to the “nothingness of human life,” the list of punishments that Jehovah pronounces against Eve and Adam (Gen. 3:16–19) paints a vista of a life full of hard work and suffering, with no happy endings, transcendent or otherwise. Maddalo, of the party of “destiny,” similarly sees humanity as being rooted in the body and debarred by it from transcendent knowledge if not transcendence outright. As he and Julian approach the asylum in his gondola, Maddalo laments the perishing mortality of the body and likens the human soul to the asylum bell in the following terms: “And such,”—he cried, “is our mortality And this must be the emblem and the sign Of what should be eternal and divine!— And like that black and dreary bell, the soul, Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll, Our thoughts and our desires to meet below Round that rent heart and pray—as madmen do.” (ll. 120–26) Julian, of the party of “freewill,” is by Maddalo’s characterization, an apostate. 59 Shelley characterizes him as “an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may yet be susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all

The Poet Situated

O

205

things reputed holy” (Poetry, 113). Maddalo corroborates Shelley, characterizing Julian as “Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel” (l. 116). His apostasy does more than repudiate the Judeo-Christian theodicy. The etymology of apostasy is from the Greek apo ‘above’ plus stasis ‘body’, meaning to rebel by rising up against and over the body, in much the same way that ecstasy, as it is used in the Hymn (“I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy!” [l. 60]), means out of the body. Julian, in rebelling against Christianity, rises against the multitude and its body of received wisdom, just as Maddalo concedes to, no matter whether he concurs with, that multitude and its body of received wisdom. But as one who prefers the realm of the mind, Julian is, in another sense that sharply contradistinguishes him from Maddalo, above the body. The place that epitomizes Julian—the Lido, where he and Maddalo are accustomed to riding—is all but devoid of bodies, an uninhabitable sea-side Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons, and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree, and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired. (ll. 7–11)60 As Julian confides to the reader, I love all waste And solitary places, where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be. (ll. 14–17) By way of contrast, the place that epitomizes Maddalo is A building on an island; such a one As age to age might add, for uses vile, A windowless, deformed and dreary pile; And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung; We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue. (ll. 99–104) Although the description of the site is Julian’s, Maddalo’s subsequent interpretation (ll. 120–30) of what the site symbolizes makes it clear that Julian understands Maddalo’s motives in commending it to his notice. The asylum on the island is w h a t M a d d a l o h i m s e l f w i l l c a l l “ t h e emblem and the sign/

206

O

Shelley among Others

Of what should be eternal and divine!” (ll. 121–22) but is neither by reason of its fallenness. It emblemizes the soul trapped in the isolated prison house of the body and “hoarse” with proclaiming its existence by means of an uninspired “iron tongue.”61 These two symbolic sites—the Lido and the lagoon just off the island where the asylum stands—serve, to use Maddalo’s term, as “station[s]” (l. 87) from which to view the sun setting over Venice. As such, the sites are also the symbolic, microcosmic basis of Julian and Maddalo’s antithetical positions on the problem of evil in the world, westering in space and time as the setting sun does. 62 Such westering, as it is symbolized by the sunset and the language used to characterize it, may be interpreted as harboring the potential for transcendent change or as demonstrating the inescapability of unchanging repetition. Julian views sunset in the former manner; Maddalo, in the latter. For Julian, the sunset over the mainland as seen from the Lido is the harbinger of a higher unity signaling the end of human isolation and the beginning of a higher collectivity, as well as the dominion of thought over matter. His first response to the sunset remarks in part the unifying and etherealizing effects of the light-as-spirit as it descends. How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas and vineyards and the towers Of cities they encircle! . . . ...................... And then—as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. (Poetry, ll. 55–59, 80–85) In its depiction of the sun as the symbol of multeity in unity, of the realm of all in all, Julian’s description looks toward the human triumph celebrated near the end of Prometheus Unbound. Earth proclaims the ascendancy of Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not,

The Poet Situated

O

207

Compelling the elements with adamantine stress— As the Sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze, The unquiet Republic of the maze Of Planets, struggling fierce towards Heaven’s free wilderness. (IV.394–99) Indeed, in one debate with Maddalo, Julian figures the landscape of human aspirations in a way that recalls his description of the sunset over the mountains. The only obstacle preventing the landscape so figured from becoming the landscape in fact is the pernicious effect of the will on desire. According to Julian, it is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill— We might be otherwise—we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek But in our mind? and if we were not weak Should we be less in deed than in desire? (ll. 170–76) Julian describes the effect of the sunset in terms that closely anticipate Maddalo’s analysis of the site’s symbolic meaning. This second view of the sunset presents a microcosm in which the backlighting of the scene serves as a harbinger of the individual’s ultimate isolation and reification, incarcerated within the body. The asylum and its belfry tower, far from being bathed, along with the surrounding scene, in the unifying and etherealizing light of the setting sun, blocks out the sun and stands out against it as the word made at once audible and material. “The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled/In strong and black relief” (ll. 105–6), according to Julian. Maddalo subsequently observes that like that black and dreary bell, the soul, Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll Our thoughts and desires to meet below Round the rent heart and pray—as madmen do For what? they know not. (ll. 123–27) This depiction of the sunset, as glossed by Maddalo, looks toward Prometheus’s description of his situation before he repents and recalls his curse.

208

O

Shelley among Others

Like the bell (or the soul to which it is compared), Prometheus finds himself in a black setting, hung . . . here Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured. (I.19–21) And like the bell (or the soul to which it is compared), Prometheus “must toll/[His] thoughts and desires,” as he does in part by means of the refrain, “Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever” (I.23, 30). No less than the madmen who pray in Maddalo’s analysis, Prometheus does so with a “rent heart”—in his case, the result of an eagle or vulture sent at Jupiter’s command. That bird, as Prometheus reports, “tears up/My heart” (ll. 35– 36). 63 The unrepentant Prometheus is a creature of willful “high language” (Poetry, 133). As the refrain cited suggests, such language expresses weakness and is characterized by repetition. Maddalo views the human condition as an unchanging one of weakness, notwithstanding a desire that the situation were otherwise. For Maddalo, the irony is that the greater human aspirations become, the more willful they become, and the more conclusively they demonstrate human weakness. Maddalo makes no distinction in this regard between Julian and the Maniac, suggesting by this failure to distinguish that he views Julian’s denunciation of the human will as a manifestation of the will displaced rather than extinguished. Remarking Julian’s apostasy, Maddalo observes, “You talk as in years past. . . ./’Tis strange men change not” (ll. 114–15). Answering Julian’s question about the disjunction caused by the will between “deed” and “desire,” Maddalo assents, “Ay, if we were not weak —and we aspire/ How vainly to be strong!” (ll. 177–78). Ultimately, the wages of such striving is madness. He represents the Maniac to Julian as one “With whom I argued in this sort, and he/Is now gone mad” (ll. 197–98). Maddalo commends the Maniac to Julian as a case in point of “How vain are such aspiring theories” (l. 201) as Julian’s. Julian and Maddalo, the onomastics of their names, the sunset landscapes associated with each, and the “stations” from which they expound on these landscapes and other matters, collectively bracket the Maniac and his tale of suffering in the pursuit of love.64 In an important sense, the Maniac’s speech identifies him as what Michel Serres “might call [the] third man[,] the demon, the prosopopeia of noise.”65 Representing by his speech a return of the Aristotelian excluded middle,66 the Maniac is utterly subversive of

The Poet Situated

O

209

dialogism generally and of dialectic in particular. As such, the Maniac exacerbates the undermining by Julian and Maddalo of each other’s dialectical positions. And dialectic is most certainly what Julian has in mind. He invokes “those kings of old philosophy/Who reigned, before Religion made men blind” (ll. 188–89)—Socrates and his school—as exemplary teachers of both the doctrine that humanity has the power to attain “something nobler than to live and die” (l. 187) and the method of ascertaining what that “something” might be. Julian, in other words, makes a commitment to dialectic as the means of working through (ergon) language (logos) to attain an apprehension of the true and, above all, of the good (to agathon).67 Maddalo, Julian’s partner in dialectic, doubts the validity of the method and its outcome. In addition to holding that “aspiring theories” are “vain,” Maddalo sees no necessary connection between language, the true, and the good. As he confides to Julian, my judgement will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go. (ll. 192–95)68 The question is not whether Maddalo believes in the method’s potential to identify the true or the good, but rather whether he agrees to participate. The situation is much the same in the Cratylus, where Socrates and Cratylus, each unpersuaded by the other’s arguments, agree to continue their discussion of whether names name a Heracleitan flux, or whether names identify the stable and “eternal nature in things.” If names do not identify that “eternal nature,” as Cratylus holds, then it follows that he must question the method no less than its putative outcome. Both parties nevertheless agree to “continue to think about these things” (440a–b). “To hold a dialogue,” as Serres observes, “is to suppose a third man and seek to exclude him.” Such is the fate of Hermogenes, who starts out in the Cratylus doubting “that there is any principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement” (384b). Hermogenes’s exclusion turns on the difference between the assumptions held by the two parties engaged in dialectic and the assumptions held by the “third man.” To allow the “third man” into the conversation, even if he were able to participate, would be either to abandon the terms of the conversation (“either x or y”) or to see

210

O

Shelley among Others

those terms subverted (“neither x nor y,” or “both x and y”). It is no wonder, then, that Serres insists that the “most profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety—or a variation— of the Same, it is the problem of the third man.”69 While Maddalo sees no necessary connection between language, the true, and the good, the Maniac-as-”third-man” represents a more serious threat to dialogism than he does. Maddalo does not challenge the premise that language is representational; rather, he seeks to limit what it can represent. When Maddalo accuses Julian of “talk[ing] Utopia” (Poetry, l. 179), he implies that it is possible to talk otherwise, of something or somewhere rather than nothing or nowhere—to talk topically, as it were. When Maddalo acknowledges Julian’s ability to use “words” to make his “system refutation-tight,” (ll. 194–95), he implies a necessary relationship between “words” and “opinion,” even if “judgement” is somehow exempt from such a relationship. When Maddalo claims that the Maniac’s “wild talk will show/How vain are such aspiring theories” (ll. 200–201), he implies that language need not be “wild,” but might rather be domesticated to some useful end. In these three instances, Maddalo leaves open the possibility that language deployed in some fashion can represent the operations of the mind. But Maddalo’s statement hints at a much darker view of language than either he or Julian holds, the view that the Maniac advances. “[w]ild talk” that does not represent the operations of the mind gives rise to “vain . . . theories,” or ideological formations without representational value. Maddalo ascribes the fault in this instance to circumstance, not nature. However, when the Maniac exclaims “How vain/Are words!” (ll. 472–73), he calls into question the ability of language by its nature to represent the operations of the mind. Shelley would seem to be of the party of Julian, for whom language retains a Promethean ability not only to represent the mind, but to reform it by virtue of representing, through the regularities of poetic language, a mind in harmony both with the world of articulate and deployed form and with the Power that gives rise to that form. In A Defence, for example, he talks of how “the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound” and ascribes the existence and effect of this recurrence to “harmony in the language of poetical minds” (484). But in A Treatise on Morals, Shelley casts doubt on language’s ability to represent the operations of the mind. There, Shelley distinguishes between meta-

The Poet Situated

O

211

physics, “the science of all that we know, feel, remember, and believe inasmuch as our knowledge, sensations, memory, and faith constitute the universe considered relatively to human identity,” and logic, “or the science of words.” The latter “must no longer be confounded with metaphysics, or the science of facts. Words are the instruments of mind whose capacities it becomes the metaphysician accurately to know, but they are not mind, nor are they portions of the mind” (Prose, 185).70 For Julian and for Shelley, striving to create an idealized moral science, the Treatise on Morals begins with the proposition that “That great science which regards the nature and operations of the human mind is popularly divided into morals and metaphysics” (Prose, 182). The Maniac’s speech provides precisely what Serres characterizes as the “cacography [and cacology], interference, and noise” that make the dialogue with Maddalo “aporectic,” that is, characterized by aporia. The Maniac’s speech internalizes the aporia that centers his speech and Julian and Maddalo more generally. The “discursive gaps and discontinuities” in the Maniac’s speech are not, strictly speaking, “almost entirely the result of his ‘conversing’ with an imaginary interlocutor (his former lover),” as Rzepka would have it.71 Those aporiae—and aporia is what the Maniac’s speech continually verges on—call into question whether the dialectic that the Maniac’s speech parodies can ever do other than reinscribe such “discursive gaps and discontinuities.”72 Above all, the Maniac’s speech demonstrates that he cannot summon poetic language to give material form to his sufferings and, by giving them form, to mediate or alleviate them. It should be noted at this juncture that the Maniac is a poet.73 His speech, in fact, is the love poem that he dictates to himself while thinking of the Lady, whom he claims “Would[st] pity [him] from [her] most gentle eyes/If this sad writing [she] should[st] ever see” (Poetry, ll. 339–40). At first, the Maniac suggests that his is not inability but rather the result of repression or self-censorship. He states that he does not “dare/To give a human voice to [his] despair” (ll. 304–5). Subsequently, he refers to his “incommunicable woe” (l. 343), suggesting that he cannot give voice to the despair he feels. And yet, the Maniac holds to the position that the only fit material form for his feelings and thoughts is language in general, and the language of poetry above all. That is the “one road/To peace and truth” (ll. 347–48) that the Maniac urges his few friends to follow, proclaiming the ideal of poetry, notwithstanding any personal misfortunes in love (and in poetic self-expression).

212

O

Shelley among Others

Believe that I am ever still the same In creed as in resolve, and what may tame My heart, must leave the understanding free Or all would sink in this keen agony. (ll. 358–61) The reasons for the Maniac’s constancy to his ideal become clearer when he simultaneously suggests and rejects the other ways in which feelings such as his can take material form as strategies for oppressing the other. Nor dream that I will join the vulgar cry, Or with my silence sanction tyranny, Or seek a moment’s shelter from my pain In any madness that the world calls gain, Ambition or revenge or thoughts as stern As those which make me what I am, or turn To avarice or misanthropy or lust. (ll. 362–68) Rather than enter into such oppression, the Maniac prefers to be known for willingly sacrificing himself for love—love of the Lady who, by his account, has caused his suffering, or love of his country, which “May ask some willing victim” to die “On the red scaffold” (ll. 370–76) in reprisal for the death of some tyrant. In its turn, the Maniac’s inability to summon such language calls into question at least a part of Julian’s contention, advanced before his encounter with the Maniac, That we have power over ourselves to do And suffer—what, we know not till we try; But something nobler than to live and die. (Poetry, ll. 185–87) That contention is reprised in part after the encounter by Maddalo, who holds that Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song. (ll. 544–46) The wrong done to Maddalo’s powerless subjects, the Maniac chief among these, whose suffering is not of their choosing and is reflexive to that wrong, serves as both the subject and motivation of their poetry.74

The Poet Situated

O

213

The Maniac’s inability to move beyond his personal misfortunes by means of poetry is clear in the passage in which he resolves to “remove/ A veil from [his] pent mind” (Poetry, ll. 382–83), and, on his own report, succeeds in doing so. In A Defence, Shelley uses the same trope when he talks of how poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (505). 75 The Maniac’s rending of the veil lays bare a vision of the nakedness of death. He reports seeing the Lady “pallid as death’s dedicated bride,” and having “made the tomb/[Her] bridal bed” (Poetry, ll. 384–90). The bitter irony is that the Maniac’s vision is no less evanescent than the vision of beauty that both prompts the composition of poetry and is evoked by reading it. Just as the Lady deserted the Maniac in “real” life, so her horrific simulacrum deserts him during his speech, despite his pleadings. Go not so soon—I know not what I say— Hear but my reasons . . . I am mad, I fear, My fancy is overwrought. (ll. 393–95) The Maniac’s vision helps to thematize his problem and the problem at the center of Julian and Maddalo. The vision constitutes a sort of apophades, 76 or day of the dead, who return to overwhelm the living, metaphoric language of poetry with the dead, metonymic language of human history—and above all, with the dead, metonymic chronicle of human injustice and wrongs, detailing the cause and effect of who did or said what to whom and assigning blame. The next five sections of the Maniac’s speech are a tissue of recapitulations and recriminations focused on precisely these issues. The Maniac accuses the Lady of serpentlike ingratitude in wooing him with petulant statements such as “You kiss me not/Ever, I fear you do not love me now” (Poetry, ll. 403–4). The effect of such words is to create a double bind for both the person who uttered them and the one to whom they were addressed. Ironically echoing the universe’s final injunction to Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound—”Speak—thy strong words may never pass away” (IV.553)—the Maniac assesses the effect of the Lady’s “words.” In truth I loved even to my overthrow Her, who would fain forget these words: but they Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away. (ll. 405–7)

214

O

Shelley among Others

The Maniac’s “overthrow” results from the Lady’s words (and his own words) reified as the result of metonymic repetition, and taking on a palpable materiality of their own. Those words cling to his mind no less than hers, “and cannot pass away.” In A Defence, Shelley argues that “At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force” (497). The Maniac is unable to proclaim such a victory in his poem, overwhelmed as he is with precisely those issues. He turns next to his own words to refute the Lady’s characterization of his speech as being “tortured with the wrongs which break/The spirit it expresses” (ll. 409–10). The Maniac justifies his words by claiming that they are the way he “Humbled himself” (l. 411) before her. Humbled or not, the Maniac finds himself trapped in a linguistic embrace that is a death grip. Reflecting on the consummation of his relationship with the Lady, the Maniac recalls the manner in which she afterward cursed him and the relationship, reifying it much as Prometheus does Jupiter with his curse. The Maniac is completely clear in gauging the power of such curses to reify—and deaden—an emotional bond. Thou sealedst them with many a bare broad word, And cearedst my memory o’er them,—for I heard And can forget not. (ll. 432–34) The Maniac holds a chilling view, not only of how love leaves the individual at once reified and desiring the perpetually absent other, but also of how language conspires to create this situation. As he summarizes the end of his relationship with the Lady, “And [thou] didst speak thus . . . and thus . . . I live to shew/How much men bear and die not!” (ll. 459–60). Reduced to brute, sentient, material selfhood despite his best efforts to transcend that condition, the Maniac implicates language— the Lady’s and his own—in bringing him to this pass. How vain Are words! I thought never to speak again, Not even in secret,—not to my own heart— But from my lips the unwilling accents start

The Poet Situated

O

215

And from my pen the words flow as I write, Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears . . . my sight Is dim to see that charactered in vain On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain And eats into it . . . blotting all things fair And wise and good which time had written there. (ll. 472–81) One can grasp the extent to which the Maniac has been reduced by his own language by comparing the focal trope in the last stanza of his speech with a variant of the trope found near the end of the “Ode to the West Wind.” The latter, while echoing the former, also transfigures it. Seeing no hope of reconciliation or recuperation, the Maniac resigns himself to a solitude ended only by death, and he renounces the dead, metonymic language of who did what to whom. Here I cast away All human passions, all revenge, all pride; I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide Under these words like embers, every spark Of that which has consumed me—quick and dark The grave is yawning. (ll. 501–6) The Maniac’s enclosure as a reified object and his consumption by his language, figured as the fading “embers” of emotions, prefigures his enclosure and consumption by death and the grave, where he will become ashes of a different sort. Using virtually the same trope, the speaker of the “Ode” illustrates how one speaker’s life-ending grave can be another’s life-sustaining hearth, how one’s reification can be another’s transcendence, how one’s enclosure can be another’s transfiguration. The speaker of the Ode implores the wind, the object of his address, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among manking. (ll. 65–67) In the final analysis, the Maniac’s is a cautionary tale. Like the subject of Pope’s Essay on Man, “he hangs between”—in this case, between Julian and Maddalo—not wholly of the body and destiny, but not wholly above it and of the mind and free will either. While acknowledging the operation of a

216

O

Shelley among Others

Gnostic fatalism, the Maniac nevertheless harbors yearnings for the operation of a transcendent meliorism. But above all, the Maniac is the type of a failed poet who must be cast off by Shelley if he is to embrace the vitally metaphorical language of poetry, espouse the dialogical, and aspire to poetic greatness. The ignominious final silence and aporia of the Maniac suggest the consequences of failing to cast off the aspect of the Maniac. By the Maniac’s own testimony, he acts out of the best of intentions, nor does the poem’s metacommentary question this self-assessment. If he is tragic, he is so in the manner of an Oedipus, who does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. But in A Defence, Shelley makes it clear that the best of intentions are not only not good enough but are beside the point. The intended or actual moral quality of the life that one lives as a human being has no necessary relation to the quality of the poetry that she or he writes. To prove his point, Shelley puts the following case: “Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins ‘were as scarlet, they are now white as snow’; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer Time” (506). If there is a moral to the Maniac’s tale in Julian and Maddalo, it is the imperative for the poet Shelley somehow to do away with the person Shelley so as to let the former exceed his own depth and test “the waters of oblivion,” as he does in the “Ode to the West Wind,” among other poems. There, Shelley envisions those waters—”the Atlantic’s level powers”—as they “Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below/The seablooms and the oozy woods which wear/The sapless foliage of the ocean, know” the “voice” (Poetry, ll. 37–40) and power of that wind. Testing anything, including waters, implies the assumption that the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. In the final two chapters, I will first examine Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci as attempts at mobilizing the language of poetry to test the waters “outside” and “inside” of history, respectively, then turn to engage the question that my own dichotomy begs: whether it is in fact possible to mobilize the language of poetry to imagine in good faith being “outside” history.

The Poet Situated

O

217

O

Chapter 6 A Perpetual Orphic Song; or, the Name of the Father?

The Dialogical Legacy: Being of Two Spirits The process enacted by the poems discussed in the preceding chapter may be necessary for Shelley to sustain his poetic career. But by eschewing monological lyricism in favor of dialogism, he finds it difficult to move beyond the conflicted, aporectic absence that centers Julian and Maddalo. A number of poems at the margins of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci attest to the difficulty of the transition that he tries to negotiate. For example, “The Two Spirits—An Allegory,” which Reiman and Powers “date . . . tentatively between October 1818 and February 1819” (Poetry, 129n.), presents a pseudodialogue between disembodied voices—the former with important affinities to Maddalo, the latter with important affinities to Julian—that alternately counsel submission to the contingencies of natural or historical process figured as the weather, and transcendence of these contingencies through visionary aspiration. It is a mock dialogue in the sense that while the two voices speak in counterpoint, they apparently have very little to say to one another and, consequently, have virtually no effect on each other. The First Spirit, whom Chernaik characterizes as “the voice of caution, the reality principle”1 repeats the same refrain, “Night is coming[!]” (Poetry, ll. 4, 8, 20, 24), throughout, although the absence of the exclamation mark in the third and fourth instances may be intended to suggest a lessening of emphasis as the pseudodialogue proceeds. “The Second Spirit, faith answering reason, asserts that it contains “‘the lamp of love,’ which turns night into day.”2 Three of his four refrains—”And that is day,” “And make night day,” and “Which make night day” (Poetry, ll. 12, 16, 28)—testify to this efficacy.

218

O O

Shelley 218 among Others

The messages and the refrains of the two Spirits reprise elements of the story of the blind man in John 9. Encountering that man, Jesus answers his disciples, who impute the sins of the man or his parents as the cause of his blindness, by telling the disciples that “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him./I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work./As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:3–5). Jesus demonstrates the truth of his assertions by anointing the blind man’s eyes with a clay compound made of the dirt beneath his feet and his own saliva, then commanding the man to wash the compound off in “the pool of Siloam,” whereupon the man’s sight is restored to him (9:6–7). What enables the blind man to see? To answer the question, one may consult both Shelley and Jesus. For Shelley, the efficacious component of Jesus’ doctrines—the component that makes for what is accounted by some the miraculous—is the poetry that gives them form and makes them memorable. In A Defence, for example, Shelley remarks “The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ” (Poetry, 495). The very “light of the world” to which Jesus refers is a type of the divine Word, or Logos. The “Word [that] was with God, and . . . was God” enters the world as “that Light” to which John the Baptist bears witness (John 1:1, 7–8). What causes the blind man to see, then, is the hortative form-giving power of visionary metaphor—Logos crossing over as the Light that reveals the form of the world even as it confers that form, in other words. To return to the pseudodialogue in “The Two Spirits,” then: at issue is whether the powerful indwelling presence of Logos-made-Light, or Power, has been weakened by the changes wrought by natural or historical process, or whether the indwelling presence of Logos-made-Light announced by Jesus remains constant. Each of the two spirits reads essentially the same meteorological and celestial signs to opposite conclusions. Facing yet another aporectic absence of closure, the Shelleyan speaker defers absence by reverting to the “Some say” formula previously used in “Mont Blanc.” There, the formula, deployed in the lines “some say that gleams of a remoter world/Visit the soul in sleep” (Poetry, ll. 50–51), is used to import into the poem the Neoplatonic doctrine of plenitude in support of the argument that “power,” in Drummond’s sense of the term, is the informing principle of the world. In “The Two Spirits,” the formula imports into the poem the notion that historical or natural process, no less than “gleams from a re-

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

219

moter world,” is a manifestation of power figured, as in the “Ode to the West Wind,” as “Destroyer and Preserver” (l. 14). That process, figured in the penultimate stanza of “The Two Spirits” as “the languid storm,” pursues a “winged shape” (ll. 37–38)—ostensibly the Second Spirit, characterized by the first as being one “who plumed with strong desire/Would float above the earth” (ll. 1–2)—and in the course of that pursuit renews the “aery fountains” (l. 40) of what would otherwise be a scene of unmitigated “ruin” (l. 34). In the final stanza, Shelley ponders the effect of such a manifestation, not on a Spirit, but on a sublunary human “traveller.” Logos-madeLight comes into the world, taking the linguistic form of “sweet whispers” and, like the original of Logos-made-Light, by virtue of those “sweet whispers” defeats death, reproduces “a shape like his [i.e., the traveler’s] early love,” 3 Upborne by her wild and glittering hair, And when he awakes on the fragrant grass He finds night day. (ll. 46–48) The characterization “sweet whispers” suggests that if it indeed does exist as “Some say” it does, Logos-made-Light exists liminally, as a sort of threshold condition. Such a threshold condition calls for closer scrutiny. To move beyond impression (phantasia) and toward the persuasive or the probable (to pithanon) 4 means crossing that threshold in pursuit of the source of those ephemeral articulations. To cross in such a manner is both to overleap the bounds of human knowledge and to enter a realm where liminality ceases to operate. In “Lift Not the Painted Veil,” which Reiman and Powers date “probably before the end of 1819” (Poetry, 312n.), Shelley returns to the site of the transgression undertaken in Alastor, then proclaimed to be ultimately unnecessary in Prometheus Unbound, and proclaims that, under the present circumstances, the aporia that obtains on this materially manifest side of life as effect is preferable to the emptiness that obtains on the immaterial side of life as cause. As Reiman and Powers note (312n.), the sonnet’s conceit is anticipated by that moment in Prometheus Unbound when the Spirit of the Hour proclaims that The painted veil, by those who were, called life, is torn aside— The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man. (III.iv.190–92)5

220

O

Shelley among Others

“The painted veil,” which also harks back to “The veil of life and death” (l. 54) in “Mont Blanc,” is Logos-made-Light. As such, the veil illustrates how language comes to take on reified, material form as the metaphoric carrying across gives way to the metonymic misapprehension that language-as-effect “names” the always-already material world-as-cause, rather than giving it form and coherence through metaphor. What precipitates the destruction of that veil in Prometheus Unbound is the collective resolve to cease and desist from that misapprehension, whether it take the form of “Sceptres, tiaras, swords and chains, and tomes/Of reasoned wrong glozed on by ignorance,” or that of “many a name and many a form/Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable,” all variants of which amount to “Jupiter, the tyrant of the world” (III.iv.166–67, 182–85). Although the historical moment is right for taking that collective resolve in Prometheus Unbound—perhaps considering that moment as the end of historical time is a better description, since the falling of the “painted veil” occurs in the moment marked by Prometheus repudiating his curse and Jupiter’s consequent descent into the abyss of Eternity— the moment is not right in the sonnet, the speaker of which is still stranded in historical time. The surest indicator that the moment is not right is the fact that the “painted veil” must be lifted, that it will not fall of its own accord. That the “painted veil” will not fall of its own accord is largely owing to humanity not yet reaching that transhistorical moment of linguistically totalized self-possession and infinite immanent possibility described by the description of humanity as “Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,/Exempt from awe, worship, degree” (III.iv.195–96). Behind the “painted veil,” according to the sonnet’s speaker, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies, who ever weave Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear. (ll. 4–6) These twins motivate, inform, and ultimately reify and textualize human discourse—by weaving “Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.” Could humanity but overcome the pursuit of “Hope/And Fear” and “The clogs” of “chance and death and mutability,” it might forever leave behind the “chasm” to

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

221

oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III.iv.202–4) The “painted veil” recalls another veil—the one that clothes the Indian maiden in Alastor.6 The speaker makes it clear that lifting the “painted veil” before it is ready to fall is no less a transgression, than the Poet’s overleaping in Alastor. It is, in fact, the very same transgression. The sonnet’s speaker confesses, “I knew one who lifted it,” echoing both the Augustinian epigraph of Alastor and the moment of the Poet’s transgression. The Poet-transgressor is one who sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love But found them not, alas. (ll. 7–9)7 The sonnet’s final characterization of he who lifts the veil as “a Spirit/ That strove for truth, and like the Preacher, found it not” (ll. 13–14) is, as Reiman and Powers suggest, an allusion to Ecclesiastes’ thematization of “‘vanity’ (emptiness)” (312n.). But unless it is a careless allusion, it is an extremely curious one. The Solomonic Preacher of Ecclasiastes finds wisdom and knowledge, leading him to reflect, “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (1:18). And the Preacher finds joy, “For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy” (2:26). Truth, then, must be something that is transhistorical and transcendent, something beyond the seasons and times of Ecclesiastes’ third chapter. And the aporectic emptiness or vanity of the human condition, the utter lack of closure, rests, for both the subject of the sonnet and the Preacher, on the failure to attain this transhistorical and transcendent knowledge. And yet, this failure of attainment is not grounds for abandoning the quest. Although one may fail in the quest for transhistorical knowledge she or he may attain a modicum of transhistoricality, if not transcendence outright, by attaining love and fame. The speaker of “An Exhortation” (1819?), published in the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820) but dated earlier by Mary Shelley (SPW, 579n.), exhorts himself and poets generally not to slack in the quest. But poets do live in historical time, and in the material world, without

222

O

Shelley among Others

any evidence of, only faith in, the transhistorical and the transcendent. No matter how strong the imperative to overcome human contingency—”The clogs” of “chance and death and mutability”—it cannot be overcome in this life and may well not be overcome beyond it. “Fragment: Rome and Nature” (1819), presents a very different take on what is eternal from that presented in Adonais. In both instances, Shelley is clear enough in his position that Rome—not coincidentally, the setting of The Cenci—figured as “the Eternal City” is an oxymoron. “Rome has fallen, ye see it lying/ Heaped in undistinguished ruin” (ll. 1–2), the speaker proclaims, anticipating the pastoral elegist’s Rome, “where . . . wrecks like shattered mountains rise” (Poetry, l. 435). In both instances, Shelley is clear enough in his position that the unending cycles of nature are a manifestation of eternity. But in the fragment, “Nature is alone undying” (SPW, l. 3; emphasis added). It most definitely is not the harbinger of the transhistorical and the transcendent that allows the pastoral elegist to proclaim Adonais’s eternality on the basis of his being “made one with Nature” (Poetry, l. 370). The conflicted, aporectic absence of closure that centers Julian and Maddalo and threatens Shelley’s poetic enterprise can also be seen in “Variations of the Song of the Moon” (1819), a fragment containing some variants and canceled lines from the song as it appears in Prometheus Unbound, IV.450–92, as the Moon’s last speech in her duet-cum-dialogue with the Earth. The wording of the first three lines of the fragment is identical to the wording of IV.485–87. As a violet’s gentle eye Gazes on the azure sky Until its hue grows like what it beholds. (SPW, ll. 1–3) But there are some telling variations in the next three lines. The version of the song appearing in the finished drama reads, As a grey and watery mist Glows like solid amethyst Athwart the western mountain it enfolds. (Poetry, ll. 488–90) The fragment introduces the specter of vanity, describing “a grey and empty mist,” not the “watery” alternative, that “Lies” rather than “glows,” “Over” (SPW, ll. 4–6) rather than “Athwart” the mountain. While harking back to the sunsets in Julian and Maddalo and Lines Written among the Euganean

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

223

Hills, the variant of this heroic simile found in the fragment emphasizes the emptiness, deceptiveness (through the pun on “Lies”) and authority (“Over” rather than “Athwart”) of material appearances. The “Variation” is the canceled variant because of how profoundly subversive it is of the theme and message of Prometheus Unbound. As such, it begs the question that Prometheus Unbound resists, even as the question is engaged by The Cenci. Why unsay one’s high language of temporal power if the unmediated language of poetry rests on no basis more secure than that high language, and if it cannot deliver the transference that metaphor promises?

Saved by the Metaphor Despite the title’s obvious nod in the direction of a precursor-text— the fragmentary Prometheus Unbound of Aeschylus8—it seems clear that the “correction” undertaken by Shelley in his drama of the same title is not entirely directed at the plot of the earlier tragedy, or at the trilogy of which it is a part. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound (Prometheus Lyomenos), according to David Grene, “Heracles, the descendant of Io, frees him [i.e., Prometheus] by killing the eagle [that preys on his liver]. But his final reconciliation with Zeus, confidently predicted in Prometheus Bound, must be deferred to the totally lost Prometheus the Firebearer, the last of the trilogy, which would end in his installation as a god of cult and the establishment of the ritual torch dance which is partly in his honor.” 9 True, Shelley argues in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, he cannot countenance a plot that “suppose[s] the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis,” thereby “reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind” (Poetry, 132–33). And it is not the strength or cunning of Hercules that frees Prometheus from the eagle, which “pollut[es] from thy [i.e., Jupiter’s] lips/His beak in poison not his own, [and] tears up” Prometheus’s heart (I.34–36), not his liver. Rather, it is Prometheus’s own loving empathy that frees him. Hercules himself acknowledges the power of this loving empathy when he unbinds Prometheus, proclaiming him “Most glorious among Spirits,” and stating that even Herculean strength must “Minister like a slave” to Promethean loving empathy,

224

O

Shelley among Others

“To wisdom, courage, and long suffering love,/And thee, who art the form they animate” (III.iii.1–4).10 Shelley’s “correction” is not so much directed at the plot of this Aeschylean trilogy as it is at certain habits of mind that Shelley takes the plot of the original to emblemize. Reconciling with Jupiter on his terms would mean agreeing to think like that god in categories of reified, permanent, despotic power and would result in Prometheus’s own reification and dubious apotheosis. The loving empathy of Shelley’s protagonist is manifest in Prometheus’s comments about the eagle that, under orders from Jove, attacks not the liver, which is the seat of pity, but the heart, which is the seat of that loving empathy, for the purpose of extirpating what Shelley takes to be the true source of Promethean heroism. Indeed, Promethean loving empathy grows exponentially throughout the first act. “What Prometheus has to learn,” according to Marlon B. Ross—and what he does indeed learn in the course of act I—”is how to assert his own speech without deserting the dialogic community.”11 Upon hearing the very language of the aggressor that he appropriated, then used to curse, to reify, and thus to empower Jupiter, Prometheus responds, 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) Gauging the loving empathy of Prometheus here requires that one focus on the grammar of his speech. It illustrates the manner in which “Shelleyan desire seeks a transposition of self into other, a cross substitution of terms modeled on chiasmus as the figure of mirroring in its reversible symmetry.”12 Here, as in Prometheus’s first speech in act I, grammar and word order are at odds.13 Grammatically, “It doth repent me” seems to be a passive construction roughly equivalent to “It causes me to repent,” or “I repent.” But the initial pronoun could have an antecedent: the speaking Phantasm of Jupiter. Perhaps Shelley, here as elsewhere, has created a pun that plays current acceptation off against classical etymology. If repent, in addition to meaning “to feel self-reproach” or “to atone,” also has the sense of “to feel pain again” (re-poenitere), then the speech uttered by the Phantasm, which is “quick” (alive), if “vain,” causes Prometheus to feel the pain of uttering it all over

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

225

again, and in doing so, his loving empathy extends outward—not to the Phantasm, which is a specter of sorts, but to every “living thing,” including “Jove[, who] is the supreme of living things” (II.iv.113), according to Demogorgon.14 Unapologetic and loving empathy is Prometheus’s strength. For example, it is empathy, not repentance in its usual acceptation, that is directly responsible for ending the torture inflicted by the Furies. After one of them presents a dreary analysis of the opposition between “will” and “power,” Prometheus replies, “Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes/And yet, I pity those they torture not” (I.632–33). Prometheus tells the Fury, who is winged, and whose head is encircled by serpents, that her very language reifies her and makes her what she is, and that he pities her if she does not feel the pain that those words inflict. 15 Being made the object of pity rather than of terror causes the Fury to stop speaking the language of reification and to dematerialize. “Thou pitiest them? I speak no more” (I.634), she says, then vanishes.16 Demogorgon celebrates such loving empathy at the end of the drama, when he synopsizes Prometheus’s exemplary attainments and comments on their significance. To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change nor falter nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. (IV.573–78)17 Demogorgon’s synopsis takes on added authority when compared with the Aeschylean original. Having just drafted the first act of his own Prometheus Unbound, Shelley asks a favor of Peacock in a letter of 8 October 1818: “Will you tell me what there is in Cicero about a drama supposed to have been written by Æschylus under this title[?]” (Letters, 2:43 and n.). As Jones notes, Shelley here refers to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which contains the thirty-two-line passage that Jones identifies, and a brief but revealing passage from Prometheus Bound as well. In Tusculan Disputations II.x.23–25, Prometheus does not “suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite”; rather, he suffers woes that he himself knows to be infinite, in the sense of being without end. “Thus nourish I the guard of my sad torture/Which mars my living frame with endless [perenni] woe,”

226

O

Shelley among Others

proclaims the Prometheus of Aeschylus. Likewise, he does not “defy Power which seems Omnipotent”; rather, he acquiesces and succumbs to power that he knows to be omnipotent. Reft of myself I wait the torturing hour Looking for end of ill in hoping death. But far from death Jove’s power repulses me.18 The Prometheus of Aeschylus submits with Cicero’s approval to the Greek theogony and to theogonic time so that he can be reconciled with his oppressor and become the metonymic type of that oppressor in his turn. Shelley’s Prometheus, on the other hand, does not submit to theogonic time and all that follows from it. Even while still bound to a crag in the Caucasus, his Prometheus works to stop speaking the language of retribution and negation, “that common, false, cold, hollow talk/Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes” (III.iv.149–50), and to speak the transferential language informed by the breath of life itself. Contemplating the retribution awaiting those who operate within theogonic time—and of these Jove, above all—Shelley’s Prometheus at once disowns the hate that kept him trapped within theogonic time and expresses sorrow for those who cannot disown their own hate or whatever causes their entrapment. In doing so, Prometheus undertakes to remember his curse—his own language of retribution and negation—so as to unsay, to unbreathe, and thus to revoke the curse, thereby clearing the way for the language of attribution and affirmation. Of Jove, he says, What Ruin Will haunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a Hell within! I speak in grief, Not exultation, for I hate no more, As then, ere misery made me wise.—The Curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. (I.53–59) Unable to remember what he said—or, rather, repressing the memory of what he said—but able to reaffirm that “aught evil wish/Is dead within” (I.70– 71), Prometheus asks for the assistance of the Mountains, Springs, Air, and Whirlwinds, the local spirits present when he uttered the curse, to aid his recollection. The spirits each in turn decline the request, stating that

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

227

they have seen and heard many terrible sounds and sights, but none so terrible as the curse and its aftermath (I.74–106), the effect of which is to ordain misery as the common lot of existence. Earth, the common mother of Prometheus and those he questions, summarizes the effect of the curse thusly: The tongueless caverns of the craggy hills Cried “Misery!” then; the hollow Heaven replied, ”Misery!” And the Ocean’s purple waves, Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds. And the pale nations heard it,—”Misery!” (I.107–11) Shelley’s limited knowledge of the original Prometheus Unbound makes any extended comparison of his with the older drama more likely to reveal the critic’s ingenuity at appropriating texts than Shelley’s. But those thirty-two lines, which bear on Prometheus’s sufferings as the consequence of stealing fire and giving it to the human race, do help to specify an important point of divergence between Shelley’s view of the relationship between history, fate, and free will, and Aeschylus’s view of these. Cicero cites Aeschylus to illustrate the point he is arguing with Caesar, namely, that “pain is a melancholy condition beyond doubt, unpleasing, distasteful, repugnant to nature, difficult to submit to and bear.” In sum, as the example of Prometheus suggests to Cicero, “We seem then scarcely able to say that one so afflicted was not wretched, and if we pronounce him wretched assuredly we admit that pain is an evil.”19 Evil though it may be, pain characterizes the human condition—indeed, the condition of the fallen Titans as well—as Cicero and Aeschylus before him view it. For Shelley, however, pain—and beyond pain, the problem of evil— need not characterize the human condition, or that of the Titans. But one effect of Prometheus’s self-spoken, self-imposed delusional state is to see pain as Cicero and Aeschylus see it. The first two verse paragraphs of his opening monologue end in the same refrain: “Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever” (Poetry, I.23, 30). The third and final verse paragraph of the monologue concludes with Prometheus’s recognition that his curse is responsible for his pain. He reflects upon his change of heart— and mind. —Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within, although no memory be

228

O

Shelley among Others

Of what is hate—let them not lose it now! What was the curse? (I.70–73) It is the curse, after all, in which Prometheus wishes Jove, whom Demogorgon describes as “the supreme of living things” (II.iv.113), to suffer pain. In the words of the curse itself, “And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain/To cling like gold round thy dissolving brain (I.290–91).20 Dimly aware that Jove is, in fact, Jupiter Pluvius—that he is ephemeral, if ubiquitous, by reason of his “dissolving brain,” and that, in the words of Demogorgon, Jupiter “reigns” (II.iv.28, 31), that is, ‘rains’ from on high—Prometheus takes a name written in water and makes it into a name encircled, ennobled, and reified by gold, among the least soluble and most durable of metals. Prometheus seeks to “recall” (I.59) that curse, both in the sense of remembering it, and in the sense of revoking it (137n.). There is another sense of recall to conjure with as well: in recalling the curse, Prometheus recalls Jupiter as governing agent, and in this act of recall Prometheus revises his idea of governance. To the extent that speech creates thought and shapes vision in Shelley’s (re)visionary drama, recall is revision in the sense that Shelley, misunderstanding Jefferson, argues for in A Philosophical View of Reform, when the former remarks “a law by which the constitution is reserved for revision every ten years” (Prose, 234 and n.). In beginning his recall by “wish[ing] no living thing to suffer pain” (I.305), then, Prometheus simultaneously begins to heal himself and to depose Jove, removing the tyrant’s “crown,” as it were. At least part of this “recall” turns on Prometheus’s realization of the “vitally metaphorical” underlay of the curse.21 For example, Prometheus comes to realize that the verb in the first sentence of the curse, “Fiend, I defy thee!” (I.262), from the Latin root de-fidere ‘to distrust’, means just that in its original (originary?) acceptation, rather than “to resist actively or provocatively.” This is also the sense of defy intended by the passive resistance, “With folded arms, and steady eyes,/And little fear, and less surprise” (ll. 344–45), that centers The Mask of Anarchy, not to mention the sense intended by Demogorgon in his concluding speech. The goal of such healing is to restore language to the condition of “a perpetual Orphic song” (Poetry, IV.415). It is worth noting that during the early drafting of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley was very much taken with Plato’s

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

229

Phaedrus. In a letter of 16 August 1818 to Peacock, Shelley remarks, “What a wonderful passage there is in Phaedrus—the beginning, I think, of one of the speeches of Socrates—in praise of poetic madness, and in definition of what poetry is, and how a man becomes a poet” (Letters, 2:29 and n.). The passage in question, according to Peacock’s note, is “Platonis Phaedrus, 245 a.” There, Socrates offers a glimpse of what “perpetual Orphic song” might be like. “The third kind” of madness,” says Socrates, “is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for posterity.” But why perpetual? Poetry, according to Socrates, is the inspired expression of the soul, and “The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal” (245a–b). At issue in the Phaedrus is the relative merit of writing and speech— oratory and, above all, dialectic in the latter category. Of writing, Socrates, purporting to relate the comments of King Thamus to Theuth (i.e., Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes, who in the Roman Pantheon becomes Mercury), argues that Thoth’s “discovery . . . will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have mentioned is not an aid to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth” (275a). Near the conclusion, Socrates revises his position slightly. The question of written versus spoken language is ultimately a question of whether language, be it written or spoken, reveals itself in the context of dialectic to be the embodiment of divine and transcendent truth, or whether, as unquestioned writing, it purports to be the garb of human truth. Socrates speaks explicitly “to Homer and other writers of poems . . . and to Solon and others who have composed writings . . . which they would term laws,” in issuing his challenge. “We are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend them or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious pursuit of their life [i.e., philosophers].” By way of contrast, other writers are no better than tailors, seduced by the materiality of language, creating forms of it that fetishize the absence of thought in purporting to be its dress. “He who can-

230

O

Shelley among Others

not rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been patching and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may justly be called poet or speechmaker or law-maker” (278b). As Shelley deploys it, the distinction is one between the “official language” of hierarchy and governance and the inspired and inspiring language of poetry. Language of the former sort manifests as “that common, false, cold, hollow talk/Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.”22 This denial takes the form of repression that manifests in several forms, one of these being the very “forgetfulness” that Socrates ascribes to written language. Such a dynamic can hardly elicit surprise in a drama that makes use, as Shelley reminds us in the preface, of “imagery . . . drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (Poetry, 133). 23 Prometheus, for example, represses the language of the curse that he utters against Jove. Jove for his part represses the very knowledge that Prometheus gave him the very speech by which to command in the first place. “Evil minds/Change good to their own nature,” Prometheus observes. “I gave all/He has, and in return he chains me here” (I.380–82). Among the other things that Jove represses is knowledge of his own mortality. He is “the supreme of living things,” a fact that also makes him the supreme of dying things. In the attempt to circumvent his fate, Jove sends Mercury to determine “the period of Jove’s power” (I.412). The pun on period could not be more opportune or better placed. As Reiman and Powers note, period means “The end or conclusion” (148n.). But it also means “sentence”—more specifically a long sentence that achieves its length by postponing predication, the action expressed by the verb and all the words that it governs or that modify it. Jove’s “period” lasts almost the entirety of the three-act first version of Shelley’s drama: Jove reigns (act I), rains (act II), and dissolves (act III). Repression is not limited to Prometheus and Jove. Near the outset, most if not all of the speakers suffer its debilitating effects. “Jove’s worldwandering Herald, Mercury” (I.325), as Panthea describes him, represses his own sense of guilt at, and of responsibility for, doing Jove’s bidding. “Awful Sufferer,” he tells Prometheus, To thee unwilling, most unwillingly I come, by the great Father’s will driven down

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

231

To execute a doom of new revenge. Alas, I pity thee, and hate myself That I can do no more. (I.353–57) When asked by her son Prometheus why the Four Voices of the Earth do not answer “The falshood and force of Him who reigns” (I.127), Earth herself replies, “They dare not” (I.130). When asked by her son why she speaks “the language of the dead,” not as “a living spirit,” Earth replies, “I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven’s fell King/Should hear and link me to some wheel of pain” (I.138–41). It is no coincidence, then, when the Furies arrive in the charge of Mercury, prepared to torture Prometheus if he does not provide information as to Jove’s successor, that Ione asks, And who are those with hydra tresses And iron wings that climb the wind Whom the frowning God represses, Like vapours streaming up behind, Clanging loud, an endless crowd? (I.326–30) The party of Jove and the party of Prometheus have distinct and opposed notions of what lies beyond the materiality of language. In a topsyturvy re-enactment of the Crucifixion, one of the Furies cries, “Tear the veil!” (I.539). The scene is one of pain, suffering, nontranscendence, and, above all, the inevitable abuse of metaphors, even the best metaphors of the best of speakers, to a literal purpose. Of the figure on the cross, the chorus of Furies states, One came forth, of gentle worth, Smiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like sweet poison Withering up truth, peace and pity. (I.546–49) According to one of the Furies, the reified materiality of language itself, manifested as “Hypocrisy and custom,” gives way to a literalist, materialist frame of mind that is the besetting sin of humanity. Echoing the words of Jesus on the cross as recorded in Luke 23:24 (154n.), but with a chilling difference, this Fury summarizes the argument thusly:

232

O

Shelley among Others

Many are strong and rich,—and would be just,— But live among their suffering fellow men As if none felt: they know not what they do. (I.629–31) The party of Prometheus holds that the materiality of language masks, but does not extinguish, the transcendent first cause responsible for all deployed, articulate form. Shortly after his account of Thamus’s comments on the Hermetic donation, in language that anticipates Keats’s epitaph no less than the hydrostatics and meteorology of Prometheus Unbound, 24 Socrates puts the case of one who has “the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image,” comparing such an individual with a farmer (“husbandman”). Of the individual who possesses this “living word,” Socrates asks Phaedrus, “Then he will not seriously incline to `write’ his thoughts `in water’ with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?” Phaedrus replies, “No, that is not likely” (276b). “Oratory,” according to Socrates, “is the art of enchanting the soul,” and doing so requires that “an orator has to learn the differences of human souls,” as well as what sorts of discourse are most likely to enchant or persuade the various “classes” (271b), thereby orchestrating the desired response. Asia is affected in this way by the song of the Spirit of the Hour, responding to that song by proclaiming, My soul is an enchanted Boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing, And thine doth like an Angel sit Beside the helm conducting it Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. (II.v.72–77) Returning to the metaphor of “husbandman,” Socrates reserves his highest praise for “the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness” (276b–277a). Shelley ascribes the virtues of the orator and the dialectician to the poet

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

233

and, in so doing, apparently parts company with Socrates, as he does elsewhere in his comments on how the charge of “the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man” (487).25 Reprising the agrarian metaphor that Socrates uses, Shelley argues that poetry “is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought: it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and seed, and withholds from the world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life” (503). But Shelley does not disagree entirely with Socrates’s privileging of the spoken over the written. In The Triumph, for example, the Shelleyan narrator remarks the absence, among “the mighty captives” in Life’s victory parade, of “they of Athens and Jerusalem”—Socrates and Jesus—who are numbered among “the sacred few who could not tame/Their spirits to the Conqueror” (ll. 128–36; p. 459n.). Socrates and Jesus both embrace what Shelley, in the Essay on the Devil and Devils (1819?), terms “the theistical hypothesis” (Prose, 265) and are remembered not for what they wrote, but for what they said, which was written down by their disciples. Indeed, Shelley’s growing tendency in the aftermath of the Alastor volume, and up to and including The Triumph, exceptions such as “Lines,” Adonais, and the love lyrics duly noted, is to move away from the lyric and toward the dramatic, presenting poetry that creates the illusion of living speakers in the moment, whose living language is recorded by a disciple or amanuensis. Shelley’s privileging of the spoken over the written is apparent even in perhaps the least likely instance— that of The Revolt, in which the narrative moves forward almost entirely as the result of the characters telling the stories of their own lives, with the omniscient Spenserian narrator virtually absent from the tale. In fact, the narrator can make no sense of what he sees until the woman with the serpent begins, “Speak not to me, but hear! Much thou shalt learn” (SPW, l. 343). In Prometheus Unbound Shelley deploys living speech against the dead letter, metaphoric transference against metonymic cause and effect, Platonic enchantment against Hermetic deception, Platonic memory against Hermetic reminiscence, Platonic truth against Hermetic semblance of truth. While such a deployment rests on the assumption, as stated by the Shelleyan speaker of The Triumph, that “power and will/In opposition rule our mortal

234

O

Shelley among Others

day” (ll. 228–29), the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound does not yet subscribe to what appears in The Triumph to be the circumstance at least partly responsible for this oppositional situation—that “God made irreconcilable/ Good and the means of good” (ll. 230–31). As Socrates makes clear in the Phaedrus and elsewhere, language deployed as dialectic is the means to the good (to agathon).26 Commenting on Lysias’s attachment to his own writing, Socrates argues that it is writing, not language more generally or dialectic more particularly, that causes Lysias’s failure to apprehend the good, not to mention “a disgrace to him, whatever men may say. For not to know the nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able to distinguish the dream from reality, cannot in truth be otherwise than disgraceful to him, even though he have the applause of the whole world” (277b). In contrast, Socrates names Isocrates, who “has a genius which soars above the [written] orations of Lysias.” Socrates holds that Isocrates has in him “a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still. For he has the element of philosophy in his nature” (279a).27 True, in the first act of Prometheus Unbound, one encounters a statement, cited by Reiman and Powers in a note to The Triumph (Poetry, 461n.), that would seem to validate the worst fears of the Shelleyan speaker. But to accept the statement without qualification is to ignore its source. A Fury charged with torturing Prometheus states that The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful want goodness: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich,—and would be just,— But live among their suffering fellow men As if none felt: they know not what they do. (I.625–31) Fallen and serving the party of self-delusion, the Fury says more than she knows when she foregrounds the polysemous verb want. Repeated four times in short succession and juxtaposed to the nominalized near synonym need, want as the Fury understands it means “lack.” But those very repetitions empty the verb of its intended meaning, allowing Prometheus and his double, the reader, to recall that the verb also means “desire.” Ultimately, the desire of the good for true power, of the truly powerful for goodness, of

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

235

the wise for love, and of lovers for wisdom—a desire that is figured by inspired language—helps to resolve the drama’s initial opposition between will and power. It may be, as Wasserman notes, that “Throughout the play . . . Jupiter is presented as only a cruel parody of Prometheus,”28 but that parody does not result from a fundamental opposition between Jupiter as the party of will and Prometheus as the party of power. Prometheus is caught between will and power, as it were, with Jupiter functioning as the embodiment of will and Demogorgon functioning as the avatar of power. Like the Fury who tortures him with her would-be accurate summary of who “wants” what, Prometheus at first does not understand the true nature of power, mistakenly predicating it of Jove in the very act of cursing him. The Phantasm repeats Prometheus’s very words, which include this challenge: “Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent” (I.272). It is no wonder, then, that Jove boasts to the “congregated Powers of Heaven who share/The glory and strength of him ye serve” at the beginning of act III, “henceforth I am omnipotent” (III.i.1–3). But Jove is omnivolent rather than omnipotent. Even as he celebrates his ascendancy and his conquests, even as he calls for madder music and stronger wine, he is troubled by the impending presence of Demogorgon. Recounting the rape of Thetis (III.i.33–42) in such a manner as to allude to a montage of such conquests (181nn.), Jove is troubled that the issue of this conquest will overthrow him, just as he overthrew his own father, the Titan Saturn. As Jupiter recalls the conquest(s), —even then Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third Mightier than either—which unbodied now Between us floats, felt although unbeheld, Waiting the incarnation, which ascends. (III.i.42–46) Coupled with Jupiter’s expostulation on first viewing Demogorgon— ”Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!” (III.i.51)—Jupiter identifies Demogorgon in terms strongly reminiscent of those on which the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” begins. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats unseen amongst us,—visiting

236

O

Shelley among Others

This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds. (ll. 1–4) Demogorgon is the avatar (“shadow”) of Power cum Intellectual Beauty, just as the Demiurge of the Timaeus is the avatar of the ideal, or just as the Demiurge of Gnosticism is the avatar of Pistis Sophia (Faith-Wisdom). And in both the Platonic and the Gnostic cosmogony, the Demiurge is the agent who creates the world—by divine fiat in the former instance, and by mistake in the latter. Interestingly, Jupiter’s comment indicates that he does not recognize Demogorgon, even though Jupiter knows that “the incarnation, which ascends,” comes “from Demogorgon’s throne” (III.i.48). Neither does Jupiter recognize Demogorgon as what he claims to be: Jupiter’s “child, as thou wert Saturn’s child” (III.i.54). 29 Here, Shelley seems to be exploring the complexities of descent in a manner that echoes the Riddle of the Sphinx and anticipates such poems as Dylan Thomas’s “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” (1939) and Donald Hall’s “My Son, My Executioner” (1955). The life force is also the death force, and with the birth and growth of one’s descendant(s) comes one’s own descent toward death. The motif of descent is announced just prior to Asia’s interview with Demogorgon by the Song of the Spirits, with its refrain, “Down, down!” (II.iii.55, 62, 64, 71, 73, 80, 82, 89, 91.) For the interview itself, Asia, accompanied by Panthea, descends to the Cave of Demogorgon. As Reiman and Powers note, Panthea describes Demogorgon in terms reminiscent of those used by Milton to describe Death in Paradise Lost (MPP, II, 666–71; Poetry, 171n.), as that figure is seen by Satan after he has descended to the gates of Hell. Asia’s questions themselves concern the descent of the world. Demogorgon’s thricegiven, enigmatic answer to Asia’s questions concerning the problem of evil—”He reigns” (II.iv.28, 31)—puns, as has already been noted, on rains. One who reigns in ascendancy ultimately descends like the rain itself. It is this everlasting principle of descent that causes Demogorgon to identify himself to Jupiter as “Eternity” (III.i.52), then to command, Descend, and follow me down to the abyss; I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn’s child, Mightier than thee; and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness. (III.i.53–56)

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

237

Jupiter’s reaction to his impending doom is also noteworthy, given the manner in which it reprises both Prometheus’s curse and the Timaeus, the latter with an interesting difference. Jupiter would drag the whole world down with himself and Demogorgon. In one last attempt to give command, Jupiter says, Let Hell unlock Its mounded Oceans of tempestuous fire And whelm on them into the bottomless void The desolated world and thee and me, The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck Of that for which they combated. (III.i.74–79) But as Jupiter himself observes, The elements obey me not . . . I sink . . . Dizzily down—ever, forever, down— And, like a cloud, mine enemy above Darkens my fall with victory!—Ai! Ai! (III.i.80–83) Jupiter’s reign dissolves into rain, and he views himself descending beneath Demogorgon. Jupiter’s is a “dissolving brain” (I.291), but not because of the Promethean curse; rather, Jupiter falls, as the Titans in Keats’s Hyperion do, according to Oceanus, “by course of Nature’s law, not force.” 30 And in his dissolution, Jupiter recalls a conversation in the Timaeus between “the creator of the universe” and the divine descendants of “Earth and Heaven.” As related by Timaeus, “the creator of the universe” is reported to have said, “Gods, children of gods, who are my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I will. All that is bound may be undone, but only an evil thing would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, having in my will a greater and mightier bond than with those with which ye were bound at the time of your birth” (40b–41a). The world under Jupiter is neither harmonious nor happy; what has been bound is undone—first by Prometheus unsaying the curse that binds him to Jupiter no less than to a crag in the Caucasus, then by his own unbinding. Shelley not only echoes the proposition that “only an evil thing would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy”—as Prometheus states, “Evil

238

O

Shelley among Others

minds/ Change good to their own nature” (I.380–81)—Shelley enacts the converse: only a harmonious and happy thing would wish to undo that which is evil. That harmonious and happy thing is the Promethean donation of Language . . . a perpetual Orphic Song, Which rules with Dædal harmony a throng of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were. (IV.415–17). This donation is responsible for making humanity go with the flow, as it were, thus mitigating—but not eliminating—the problem of evil. Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine controul Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labour and Pain and Grief in life’s green grove Sport like tame beasts—none knew how gentle they could be! (IV.400–405) Going with the flow—the unidirectional flow of time, the cyclical flow of natural process, and the perpetual flow of language by means of which itself and all other sorts of flow are made memorable—is a theme central to the meaning of Prometheus Unbound. The theme, which underwrites the recalling of the curse in act I, is raised again in act II, where Panthea recounts two dreams that she dreamt in “that far Indian vale,/The scene of her [i.e., Asia’s] sad exile” (I.826–27), to Asia—arguably the same Vale of Cashmir that figures so prominently in Alastor.31 Not coincidentally, Panthea’s narrative has striking affinities with the narration of the Poet’s dream in the earlier poem, but the differences are more important than the affinities, most particularly, the absence of any strife or pursuit. The first dream that Panthea recounts is a vision of what going with the flow might mean for the Titans—and, by extension, for humanity, numbered in the “Three tribes of animals [that] remain to be created” after “the creator of the universe” addresses his divine offspring in the Timaeus.32 Panthea glimpses Prometheus’s immortal soul— ”the glory of that form/Which lives unchanged within” (II.i.64–65)— and this perception gives way to a moment of total, pure, and unmediated transference initiated by what Prometheus says. According to Panthea,

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

239

his voice fell Like music which makes giddy the dim brain Faint with intoxication of keen joy. (II.i.65–67) When Prometheus in his Luciferian aspect addresses Panthea, he commands her, “lift thine eyes on me!” (II.i.70). In the moment of eye contact, Panthea experiences her soul flowing together, merging, with Prometheus’s soul. I lifted them—the overpowering light Of that immortal shape was shadowed o’er By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs And passion-parted lips, and keen faint eyes Steam’d forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere Which wrapt me in its all-dissolving power As the warm ether of the morning sun Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew. I saw not—heard not—moved not—only felt His presence flow and mingle through my blood Till it became his life and his grew mine And I was thus absorbed. (II.i.71–82) Because it is love as a manifestation of power, not force as a manifestation of will, that motivates Prometheus, his “all-dissolving power” does not dishonor Panthea or deprive her of her integrity of being, despite the sexually charged metaphors in which Panthea figures her merging of souls with Prometheus. One hallmark of this transfiguration is her speech, which transcends—or at least verges on transcending—its own materiality. As Asia experiences that speech, she remarks, “Thou speakest, but thy words / Are as the air. I feel them not” (II.i.108–9). Asia finds further proof of Panthea’s transfiguration when she looks into her sister’s eyes, the inlets of her soul, and finds indisputable evidence of the perfect union that Panthea has reported, glimpsing “beyond the inmost depth” of Panthea’s eyes very much the same dream vision of Prometheus that she had reported. I see a shade—a shape—’tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles which spread Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon. Prometheus, it is thou—depart not yet!

240

O

Shelley among Others

Say not those smiles that we shall meet again Within the bright pavilion that their beams Shall build o’er the waste world? (II.i.120–26) This is a crucial moment in the drama. Prometheus, whose name means “forward looking,” is, from the moment of unsaying his curse, the avatar of going with the flow. But Asia’s plaint (“Say not those smiles that we shall meet again”[?]) suggests very strongly that she is looking backward as well as forward, and in such a way as to allow the past to overwhelm the future, to allow memory to overwhelm desire. At this juncture, Asia sees Panthea’s second dream, which threatens to divide Asia from Prometheus. If Panthea’s first dream, with its avatar Prometheus, exemplifies what it is like to go with the flow, her second with its unnamed avatar exemplifies what it is like to go with the woe. Although it is but a dream and insubstantial—Asia observes “’tis a thing of air”—it has about it an aspect of violence. As Asia sees it, the central figure in the dream is frightening. Its rude hair Roughens the wind that lifts it; its regard Is wild and quick. (II.i.127–29) Its insubstantiality, coupled with the adjectives Asia uses to describe “its regard”—”wild and quick,” especially the latter—points the way toward an identification of the figure as an aspect of Prometheus, either Epimetheus, his backward-looking twin, or, more likely, the Phantasm of Prometheus. The preferability of the latter identification has to do with the role that the Phantasm of Jupiter has in reminding Prometheus of the curse, after which Prometheus repents, noting that “words are quick and vain;/ Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine” (I.303–4). By dint of his petulance and his curse, Prometheus ascribed virtually all power to Jupiter seen as Other 33 (“O’er all things but thyself I gave thee power,/ And my own will” [I.273–74]), and that ascription, coupled with his own self-acknowledged willfulness, renders Prometheus a mere shadow of himself, yet concerned for no one but himself. To the extent that this process depends upon “imagery . . . drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (Poetry, 133), it reveals the operation of a dynamic of projection and denial that springs from Promethean narcissism and renders the subject a mere phantasm of herself or himself. 34

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

241

The rest of Panthea’s second dream turns on the theme of narcissistic projection and denial, the psychological dynamic that underwrites going with the woe. She recalls the dream vision, in which she observed the flower-infolding buds Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond tree, When swift from the white Scythian wilderness A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost . . . I looked and all the blossoms were blown down; But on each leaf was stamped—as the blue bells Of Hyacinth tell Apollo’s written grief— O follow, follow! (II.i.134–41) As Reiman and Powers note, after Wasserman, “in Pliny’s Natural History . . . the almond is mentioned as first tree to bud in winter (January)” (164n.). As such, the budding almond symbolizes a new year, a new era, the end of what in The Revolt is characterized as “the winter of the world” (SPW, 1. 3676)—that disillusioned time in which the defeat of Napoleon gave rise not to a renaissance of the republic, but to the restoration of hereditary, divine-right monarchy as the law of the land in Europe. What is noteworthy about Panthea’s account is the way that she makes the resurgence of that winter seem an act of God (or of the fates who govern the gods), over which she and other living beings have absolutely no control. Old habits of mind die hard. Even in an act that begins with Asia’s observation that spring has “descended” (II.i.1–6), the fear of the old threatens to overwhelm the wonder of the new.35 The extent to which Panthea has got it all wrong is suggested by the fact that the wind in question is rather closer to the mistral or tramontane, the north wind that is accounted responsible for episodes of irrational behavior in France and Italy, respectively, than to Shelley’s more highly favored west wind. Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, who is jealous of Apollo’s beloved Hyacinthus, kills him by blowing the quoit that he is chasing off course, so that it strikes Hyacinthus in the head. The myth relates that Apollo creates a beautiful purple bloom of Hyacinthus’s blood, marking its petals with the “AI AI, letters of lamentation, drawn thereon.”36 To borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins: when Apollo writes his lament, it is Apollo that he mourns for, since his pleasure in Hyacinthus is fundamentally narcissistic.37 As the poet who also wrote Alastor, and whose “He

242

O

Shelley among Others

overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!” (Poetry, 1. 207) echoes not only Milton but the myth of Narcissus as well, Shelley knew that Narcissus also says “ai! ai!” as he pines away at his own reflected image, and he also knew that Echo returns these very words, making Narcissus think that his reflection indeed has a voice of its own. The tree in Panthea’s dream, then, growing in the wintry political climate of post-Napoleonic Europe,38 is like the tree that Blake describes in “The Human Abstract” (Songs of Experience): it “grows . . . in the Human Brain (BPW, l. 24), but is projected outward and denied. Interestingly, at the moment of his own demise, Jove twice laments his own passing with the original Greek “Ai! Ai!” (Poetry, III.i.79, 83), projecting the responsibility on Demogorgon, denying that it should occur as a matter of course, and denying that, even as what Demogorgon calls “the supreme of living things” (II.iv.113), Jove is, by definition, mortal. Panthea’s relation of her second dream ends in an apparently unrelated exclamation: “O follow, follow!” (II.i.141). These words inaugurate a motif that continues throughout the rest of the scene, taken up in turn by Panthea, Asia, an Echo, and a chorus of Echoes, and brought to closure by Asia in the last line of the scene. The motif points the way to the “ontological transformation” (612) of Asia and Panthea that D. J. Hughes sees as the central activity of act II.39 The letters of the word follow itself may be anagrammatized as flow, lo, or olo, this last coming very close to the Greek verb ululein ‘to wail’. 40 At issue at this point in the drama is the conflict, raised by Panthea’s two dreams, between going with the flow and going with the woe. This is a conflict that both Asia and Panthea have hitherto repressed, and the motif itself both underwrites and heralds the return of the repressed. One indication that the motif works in this manner is the effect that Panthea’s first iteration of it has on Asia. She recalls her own hitherto repressed dream, confiding, As you speak, your words Fill pause by pause my own forgotten sleep With shapes. (II.i.141–43) Asia’s recollection, uncannily like a Wordsworthian “spot of time,” is of a pastoral scene of a cloudy sky at dawn in the mountains. The clouds themselves are described as “wandering in thick flocks along the mountains/Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind” (II.i.146–47). In this context, unwilling means “not exercising the will” rather than “reluctant,”

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

243

thus suggesting that the wind that superintends the processes glimpsed is a manifestation of “power” rather than “will.” Like Shelley’s West Wind, this zephyr is both “Destroyer and Preserver” (l. 14), the avatar of death and life alike. It brings the clouds that water the ground, and with that water, “new bladed grass, / Just piercing the dark earth” (II.i.148–49). And it causes the dew on that grass to evaporate, so that “on each herb from which the Heaven’s dew had fallen / The like [‘Follow, O, follow!’] was stamped as with a withering fire” (II.i.154–55). The clouds themselves bear a similar imprint. On their shadows, as they passed “Athwart the purple mountain slope was written / Follow, O follow! as they vanished by” (II.i.153–53). These descriptions of printing or inscription reprise the myths of Hyacinthus and Narcissus with some important differences. Follow! connotes looking forward; alas!, looking backward. All inscriptions, whether on the petals of the hyacinth, the leaves of the almond tree, the mountain grass, or seemingly more durable stuff are, as the Phaedrus suggests, written on water—or, in this case on the clouds, which are water vapor. Asia moves closer to the resolve to follow the wind, which symbolizes natural process, elsewhere called “Necessity” or “Mutability” by Shelley, and which both manifests and naturalizes the Neoplatonic doctrine of plentitude. Asia continues her recollection. A wind arose among the pines—it shook The clinging music from their boughs, and then Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts, Were heard—O follow, follow, follow me! (II.i.156–59)41 In a sense, Asia is correct. The wind does tend toward the realm of “ghosts,” but by reason of his belief in plenitude, Shelley’s article of faith is that “ghosts” retain articulate form and some power of articulation—”Low, sweet, faint sounds” in this instance, capable of moving anyone who hears them, much as Cythna’s “low voice makes [one] weep” (SPW, l. 3215) in The Revolt. “Ghosts”—as Shelley understands them, that is—possess the potential to tell one of the afterlife, just as infants possess the potential to tell one of preexistence. “Power,” made manifest as the life force, is also the death force, taking its rise before life and continuing beyond it. This is an article of his Neoplatonic faith that Shelley found confirmed by the argument of

244

O

Shelley among Others

Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode.42 In Adonais, Shelley expresses a belief in the realm of “the One,” a realm of ideal forms, the attainment of which requires that the desiring subject “Follow where all is fled”—that the object of his address ultimately “Die,/If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek” (ll. 460–65), in other words. Keats-Adonais is Shelley’s exemplary desiring subject who undergoes the Neoplatonic analogue of apotheosis, who retains articulate form in the heavens in his afterlife, now that, “like a star, [he] / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are” (ll. 494–95). Asia attains a glimpse of such apotheosis. She recalls the conclusion of her dream as follows: And then I said: “Panthea, look on me.” But in the depth of those beloved eyes Still I saw, follow, follow! (Poetry, II.i.160–62) These are the same eyes, it should be noted. that Asia described earlier as “like the deep blue, boundless Heaven / Contracted to two circles.” At this point, the Echoes take up the motif, one of them repeating Asia’s last two follows. Panthea is at first suspicious that “The crags, this spring morning, mock our voices, / As they were spirit-tongued” (II.i.163–64). To use the distinction between “mimicked and . . . mocked” (II.iv.80) that Asia subsequently makes in analyzing the impact of the Promethean donation of language: the Echoes mimic the speech of Asia rather than mocking it. 43 Moreover, it is Asia and, to a lesser extent, her sister Oceanides who are “spirit-tongued,” in the sense that what they say is an expression of the inner workings of mind, or spirit—witness the dream narratives that lead up to this moment in act II. The presence of enthralling and disturbing dreams in need of interpretation, the intervention of the Echoes at this point to help Asia and Panthea begin their dream work, the Echoes’ tendency to say very little beyond giving back to Asia the words she utters, and the fact that the Echoes are always heard and never seen, all suggest that the Echoes function very much as analyst(s) to Asia’s analysand.44 The journey to the Cave of Demorgorgon inaugurates the talking cure, which is completed in the cave with another virtually unseen speaking presence that gives back to Asia the words that she utters, a process of regression that ends by allowing Asia to know her mind and to speak it freely.45 At the start of the process, Asia represses knowledge of the fact that it is

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

245

she who speaks, much as Prometheus represses knowledge of the curse he has uttered. Hearing her own “follow, follow!” echoed, she remarks, “It is some being / Around the crags.—What fine clear sounds! O list!” (II.i.164– 65). Like Narcissus, Asia understands the echo of her speech as the speech of the Other, in other words. Unlike their counterpart in the myth of Narcissus, the Echoes not only reply, but do so in a manner that repeatedly emphasizes their own evanescence. For example, in response to Asia’s “O list!” the Echoes reply, Echoes we—listen! We cannot stay As dew-stars glisten Then fade away— Child of Ocean! (II.i.166–70) The refrain “Child of Ocean!” (II.i.170, 187, 194, 206) reminds Asia of her origins as one of the “Oceanides, daughters of Ocean, one of the first gods in all classical theogonies” (165n.), to be sure. Those origins are what lend authority to Asia’s account of the Promethean donation. But the reminder of those origins also highlights the absence of the father: Ocean only appears in act III, scene ii, and he never interacts with any of his three daughters throughout the drama. On her way to “the Cave of Demogorgon, the site of a return behind what Lacan calls the mirror stage, to a space where we uncover the original self, a vacant sign as yet untenanted by author or reader,” 46 Asia is repeatedly reminded not only of her estrangement from her father, but also of her alienation from her mother, Earth, the primal love object, whose absence initiates her use of language as the means of compensating for that loss by mobilizing a chain of signification founded on absence, not to mention her alienation from Prometheus. Although lacking autonomous voice, the purpose that the Echoes serve is to help Asia find her authentic, oracular voice. Until she does, the Echoes can only riddle their potential to her in the following terms: In the world unknown Sleeps a voice unspoken; By thy steps alone Can its rest be broken Child of Ocean! (II.i.190–94)

246

O

Shelley among Others

That voice is figured as Demogorgon, the demiurgic presence responsible for all deployed, articulate forms. The descent into the Cave of Demogorgon is, in fact, the moment of self-colloquy, of the journey to the interior of the self, of descent into the heart, the soul, the skull, figured as a trek through the forest to the pinnacle above the cave.47 The extent to which the outside is the inside in Shelley’s visionary drama may be glimpsed by comparing Asia’s take on the location of oracular power before and after her interview with Demogorgon. Atop the pinnacle with Panthea, Asia remarks, in terms that remind one of Alastor, the realm Of Demorgon, and the mighty portal, Like a volcano’s meteor-breathing chasm, Whence the oracular vapor is hurled up Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy. (II.ii.1–6) After she learns from Demogorgon that all is subject to “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change,” save for “eternal Love” (II.iv.119–20), Asia responds by locating oracular power in the heart. “Of such truths / Each to itself must be the oracle” (II.iv.121–22), she says. How can Demogorgon be the inside and the outside at the same time? The actions of the Demiurge in the Timaeus provide an answer, not to mention a very interesting anticipation of Shelley’s assertion, in A Defence, that poetry “is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge” (503). Of the Demiurge’s actions in the cosmogony, Timaeus observes, “Now when the Creator had framed the soul according to his will, he formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two together, and united them centre to centre. The soul, interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, of which she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself, began a divine beginning of never-ceasing rational life enduring throughout all time” (36d–e). Asia becomes that “soul,” an “enchanted Boat” interfusing center and circumference alike. Figured as light by her sister Panthea in her account, after “The Nereids,” Asia’s ascent from the center of heaven is described in the following terms:

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

247

love, like the atmosphere Of the sun’s fire filling the living world, Burst from thee, and Illumined Earth and Heaven, And the deep ocean and the sunless caves, And all that dwells within them. (II.v.26–30) Similarly figured as light by her father Ocean, Asia’s descent from the circumference of heaven is described in the following terms: from their glassy thrones Blue Proteus and his humid Nymphs shall mark The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see The floating bark of the light-laden moon With that white star, its sightless pilot’s crest, Borne down the rapid sunset’s ebbing sea. (III.ii.23–28) Prometheus speaks knowingly when he hails Asia as “thou light of life, /Shadow of beauty unbeheld” (III.iii.6–7). The reclamation of Promethean speech eventuates the recreation of “the corporeal universe,” inside out, and outside in, in love’s image, as it were. As Demogorgon observes, Love from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings. (IV.557–61) There is a good deal of “crag-like Agony” in The Cenci as well, but there are decidedly no miraculous rebirths, no “new world of man” (IV.157), as the chorus of Spirits terms it. Rome may be the evanescent entity that Shelley views it as being in Adonais, but to the characters in The Cenci, at the turn of the seventeenth century, it is a reified, oppressive, and constraining material reality that informs the ontology of all its occupants decisively. The Rome of this time was also the seat of a religion proclaiming itself the sole legitimate effect of a divine first cause, and metonymy was every bit as much an atmospheric given of the time as is malaria in Adonais.

248

O

Shelley among Others

Seduced by Metonymy As Barbara Groseclose observes, in one history of the Cenci family saga that Shelley consulted, volume 10 of Ludovico Muratori’s Annali d’Italia (1749), “Incest was not, in fact, an aspect of the original story.” Her conjecture as to why Shelley altered this original is that, “Dramaturgically, the decision was a necessity.” 48 Shelley did perceive a need to enhance the play’s dramaturgical values. As he says in the preface to The Cenci (1819), “The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring” (Poetry, 239–40).49 But arguing that Shelley’s alteration is intended to mitigate the gravity of Beatrice’s actions parts ways with Shelley himself who, while endeavoring to render faithfully the moral universe of late-sixteenth-century Rome, nevertheless makes it clear that nothing in that moral universe should be taken to excuse or justify the actions portrayed therein. He characterizes the actions of all the play’s principals, including Beatrice, as springing from “moral deformity” and declares, moreover, that “Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes” (240). Arguments such as Groseclose’s for mitigating circumstances (“Shelley needed to link serious provocation with the magnitude of the crime”)50 tend to wrench the tragedy out of its late-sixteenth-century Roman moral universe and thrust it into the respective moral universes of commentators who, in their turn, argue over the presence and significance of such circumstances.51 More importantly, arguments in mitigation of Beatrice’s violent vengeance fail to acknowledge an important caveat that follows from Groseclose’s observation. If Count Cenci was guilty of lewd misconduct and of attempted incestuous rape, but not of incestuous rape itself, perhaps there is some other motive, whether symbolic, thematic, or dramaturgical, underlying Shelley’s decision to alter the original historical account. Yet most commentators have failed to acknowledge the existence of such a caveat, let alone to heed it. Although he specifies Shelley’s goal as one “dictated by artistic purposes rather than a desire for historical accuracy,” Tetreault has no qualms about declaring, without qualification, that The Cenci is “a drama . . . based on actual histori-

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

249

cal circumstances.” Sperry takes Beatrice’s incestuous rape as a purely literal fact, arguing indeed “that Beatrice’s tragic flaw is her idealization of her own virginity.”52 Such conclusions quite simply ignore an important dimension of the social critique mounted in the play. My argument is that while Beatrice’s seduction can be read as a literal seduction perpetrated by her father out of the need to satisfy his appetitive will to power, a seduction marking “the potential horror in the openness of each human’s world to the intrusive and appropriative presence of another,” it can also be read as a symbolic one consummated by Beatrice’s adoption of the metonymic language of reification and self-authorization spoken by a patriarchal society in general and by her father Count Cenci in particular.53 The seduction illustrates how, in Shelley’s poetry, one may easily be led astray by language used habitually and unreflectively by a speaker not fully aware that language is as much the agent that constitutes the object as the referential apparatus that points to it.54 Metonymy plays an important role in such habitual and unreflective use of language. Such use results from metonymy’s chief effect: selfconcealment by means of repetition and naturalization. One case in point with relevance to the issue of patriarchal oppression in The Cenci is the Christian Creed: “I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” 55 Divinity that is patrilineal in descent—from Father to Son— and originally preached by an all-male discipleship, and ratified by a Lord’s Prayer now thought to have been attributed to Jesus by a disciple rather than uttered by him, is not to be shared with women—so one argument goes. Shelley execrated the lot of women in a patriarchal culture,56 and he may well have harbored sympathies with the Gnostic analysis of the cause of and cure for religious oppression.57 To be sure, his comments in the Essay on Christianity assume a heretical position on the orthodox Christian conception of God the Father. Shelley argues in the Essay that “the word God according to the acceptation of Jesus Christ unites all the attributes which these denominations contain and is the interfused and overruling Spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things. . . . The Universal Being can only be defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness end, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin” (Prose, 200–202). The insidious attractiveness of metonymy’s substitutive logic and its potential for reduction and reification make it so dangerous and, arguably, the

250

O

Shelley among Others

object of Shelley’s remarks in the preface to The Cenci about “the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek justification of Beatrice, yet feel that what she has done needs justification” (Poetry, 240).58 A strong latinist such as Shelley most likely knew that the root of casuistry is the Latin casus `case’ or `occurrence’, with a strong accessory sense of `falling’). Accordingly, “anatomizing casuistry” implies somewhat more than Reiman and Powers’ useful gloss defining casuistry as “that part of ethics which resolves cases of conscience, applying the general rules of religion and morality to particular instances in which circumstances alter cases, or in which there appears to be a conflict of duties (Poetry, 240n.). Shelley’s understanding implies a falling off, a killing-by-anatomy of a “living,” humanmade ethical precept, the metaphoric “spirit” of which is lost in the application of the metonymic (and, often as not, anthropomorphic) “letter” to a specific instance in need of justification. In A Treatise on Morals, Shelley demonstrates the way that “anatomizing casuistry” operates in “the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose. . . . Duty is an obligation. There can be no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law to which it is the will of the lawgiver that we should conform, which will we should in no manner be bound to obey, unless some dreadful punishment were attached to disobedience. This is the philosophy of slavery and superstition” (Prose, 188). Metaphor is, in Shelley’s terms, an enactment of “The great secret of morals,” which 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” (Poetry, 487). But just as a necessarily unreflective childhood gives way to a willfully unreflective adulthood, metaphor gives way to metonymy. Speaking of the poetic reverie characteristic of childhood (and of those who are reflective and courageous enough to persevere as true poets) in the Essay on Life, Shelley observes, “Those who are subject to . . . reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction” (Prose, 174). As the moist, subliminally sexual atmospherics of the metaphors “dissolved” and “absorbed” suggest, there is no reification in such a state of reverie because there are no discrete “things” or objects, only continuous, evanescent, and complete processes of transference. However, when it is too often repeated, a “living” metaphor announcing these processes “dies” into

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

251

metonymy, with its “mechanical and habitual agents” (174), and human beings begin to conceive of themselves not as one with the other, but as one among others—in this case as discrete, hard, corpuscular objects—alienated and devoid of immanence in a Newtonian universe of matter, force, and motion, and marked by distinctions such as those of gender, wealth, and class, much as the corpuscles of Newtonian matter—or, better yet, the atoms of Lucretian matter—are marked with the distinctions to be observed in the material universe.59 Sadly enough, the establishment of unequal power relations between the two genders has, for Shelley at least, the tacit consent of both.60 In The Cenci, dissolution into the universe or absorption of it—the options available under the influence of loving metaphor—give way under the influence of a patriarchal hegemony to metonymic occlusion and reification. The atmospherics of dissolution and absorption take on a palpability and a tainted, overtly sexual range of connotation. Although she at first denies responsibility for participating in such metonymic occlusion and reification, Beatrice, about to put it off and participate in the evanescent change of state signaled by death, ultimately admits her complicity in wrapping herself “in a strange cloud of crime and shame” (V.iv.148).61 In the first manifestation of the occlusion and reification, however, Beatrice denies any responsibility on her part for creating the “clinging, black, contaminating mist” that appears to reify her as a unitary object (“it glues/ My fingers and my limbs to one another”) in the very act of apparently poisoning her “inmost spirit of life!” (III.i.17–23). Sequentially if not causally, the “mist” follows from the metonymic blood that marks Beatrice as a woman subject to menarche and the rupture of the hymen that may accompany the loss of virginity if it does not occur prior to that loss, as well as one who, under the sway of metonymy, will adopt the ethos of retributive justice—blood for blood, in other words. The metonym works revealingly, interfering with the ability to see clearly and ultimately tainting any hope of transcendence, even as it prepares the way for the onset of the “mist” of which Beatrice complains. At first, Beatrice implores Lucretia, “My eyes are full of blood; just wipe them for me . . ./ I see but indistinctly” (III.i.2–3). Lucretia underscores the fictive status of the metonym, stating that the blood of which Beatrice speaks is “only a cold dew/That starts from your dear brow” (III.i.4– 5). 62 Ultimately, the metonym subverts such evanescent options as atmospheric dissolution and absorption, leading to a topsy-turvy vision of

252

O

Shelley among Others

contamination and death: “The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! /The sunshine on the floor is black!” (III.i.13–14). And metonyms do lead to one another. Beatrice does not idealize her virginity as much as Sperry argues; rather, she reifies it as a repository of universally acknowledged value—as, indeed, virginity was a component of the value that, along with a dowry, determined the exchange value of a woman of the upper classes upon entering into the marriage contract. The metonym or symbol of the exchange value of virginity, as Sperry correctly notes, is the wearing of one’s hair bound up.63 Shortly after noting the presence of the metonymic blood, Beatrice asks, How comes this hair undone? Its wandering strings must be what blind me so, And yet I tied it fast. (III.i.6–8) As with the mist, so with the metonym of hair: at the conclusion of the play, Beatrice realizes that virginity is a state of mind—that, as Shelley writes in the play’s preface, “no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another” (240). 64 Declaring that she has “Lived ever holy and unstained” (V.iv.149), despite her circumstances and the actions to which they gave rise, Beatrice follows by symbolically reclaiming her purity, if not the literal physical fact of her virginity, by asking Lucretia to “bind up this hair/In any simple knot” (V.iv.160), thus purging the metonym of bound hair of its power to reify and to create externally imposed standards of value. In fact, the metonym here reverts to a prior condition of figural polysemousness and mutuality. Moreover, to the extent that bound hair signifies innocence, Shelley’s implication would seem to be that it is a state reattained by a loving mutuality that causes two or more individuals to become one by being “disssolved” or “absorbed” into one another by mutuality of action. Allowed to proceed unchecked or uncorrected by “new poets” who “arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized” (482), the movement from metaphor to metonymy has the force of making the world seem much as it does for Blake’s prophetic avatars after the (temporary) failure of poetic vision: stony, petrific. Shelley’s best synopsis of the process is found in Prometheus Unbound where Asia, following her interview with Demogorgon, expresses her understanding of the Promethean donation of language and its consequences:

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

253

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the Universe; And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven Which shook but fell not; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song, And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o’er clear billows of sweet sound; And human hands first mimicked and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own The human form, till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. (II.iv.72–84) The Promethean donation “create[d],” in a pristine human environment, “the associations” that subsequently had to be “create[d] afresh.” These associations are what speak the universe into “measure[d]” coherence. Continued without let, such speech might have resulted in the full knowledge (“science”) necessary to eradicate the will to power in the gods and humanity alike. But “the thrones of Earth and Heaven/ . . . shook but fell not.” Thus when the “associations” are recreated as moistly atmospheric “billows of sweet sound,” that will to power metonymized and anthropomorphized “With moulded limbs more lovely than its own” the same divine essence that was responsible for “The human form” and had caused “the listening spirit” to walk “Godlike.” A state of petrifaction, the real emblematic of the imaginative, in which “marble grew divine,” set in. Not able to become what they behold, the humanity oppressed by this state (state in several senses) of petrifaction—significantly “mothers,” the passivized, ready recipients of the liquid “love” that the phallic statue of Jupiter or some other male god throws off—took in (“drank”) that sexualized infusion and, like “properly” sexually responsive women of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lost themselves in repturous yet submissive orgasm, that is, “perish[ed]” in “love.” As Blank has shown, the dynamic of struggle in Prometheus Unbound is informed by Oedipal issues, particularly “that of a son attempting to contend with a tyrannical father.”65 Sperry suggests that the difference between the two dramas is more nearly that of mode—”the esoteric” in Prometheus Unbound versus “the exoteric” in The Cenci66—than that of theme. It is not

254

O

Shelley among Others

surprising, then, that the description of Pope Clement’s response to pleas for clemency, as it were, recreates in historical time the heroic marble statuary of Asia’s description in visionary time, while implying that his metonymically underwritten position of authority renders him somewhat less than human. As Cardinal Camillo reports, The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent. He looked as calm and keen as is the engine Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself From aught that it inflicts; a marble form, A rite, a law, a custom: not a man. (V.iv.1–5) Seen, for example, from the perspective of eternity assumed by the speaker of Adonais (1821), who views the marble cityscape of the same Rome that so oppressed Beatrice Cenci, petrifaction is contingent and mutable rather than absolute and immutable: “And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time/Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand” (442–43). But from Beatrice’s perspective, the patriarchal culture she lives in is stony, constrictive, oppressive, and utterly impervious to transcendence or evanescence. It is at once patriarchal and petriarchal. Beatrice’s tragedy lies not in how she perceives this oppression but in how she reacts to it: she does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. It is with considerable and complex tragic irony that Beatrice does exactly what she enjoins Orsino not to do in the very first words she utters: “Pervert not truth” (I.ii.1).67 To pervert, from the Latin vertere ‘to turn’ plus the intensive per, suggests a pun on the antecedent Greek noun tropos ‘turn’ and verb trepein ‘to turn’. Ultimately, it is impossible to speak the truth in anything but tropes, especially if the object of discourse is that “Universal Being [who] can only be described or defined by negatives.” Thus Beatrice’s injunction is, on one level, impossible to heed. On another level, the injunction, as the intensive per suggests, has to do with a distinction between tropes that are willed and those that arise spontaneously, a distinction that is isomorphic, if not precisely synonymous, with the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Willed tropes, as Shelley makes clear in A Defence, are not poetry: “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will” (503). Lurking behind Beatrice’s injunction is the specter of “the adverting mind” (1. 100) of “Mont Blanc,” which would naturalize the text of “Poetry

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

255

[that] lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (487) and “read” it, much as the natural theologian (or the apostolic succession of the Catholic Church before him) claims “to read” books—the natural and the scriptural alike— for “God’s truth.”68 That “truth” is presumed to be an aggregate made up by the metonymic bits, just as the natural or scriptural text is, on the literal level, made up of little bits—rocks, stones, trees, and mountains in the former instance, letters, words, verses, and chapters in the latter. In the crucial fourth act of The Cenci, “God’s truth” and the little bits thereof are very much in evidence. When, for example, Lucretia attempts to protect Beatrice from the count by alleging that Beatrice has had a vision of divine retribution exacted against him for his deeds, then allows that “It was a feint” (IV.i.70) uttered “to awe” him, Cenci rebukes Lucretia with “Vile palterer with the sacred truth of God” (IV.i.72–73). Palterer means, among other things, “equivocator,” “shuffler,” or “haggler” (OED VII.ii.407). But, as the OED notes of the root verb form palter, “no suitable primitive palt is known” (VII.ii.407). It seems probable that Shelley construes this word, which is foregrounded in two crucial instances in act IV, as derived from something like one of the probable roots for paltry, the Early Frisian “palter, pulter a rough or broken piece (e. g. of wood or stone)” (VII.ii.408). Paltering with “God’s truth,” then—especially when it is an activity engaged in by a woman such as Lucretia—is, from Cenci’s perspective, playing fast and loose with the metonyms that may be interpreted authoritatively only by the patriarchy. One might even say that the wood-or stone-splitting activity of paltering makes lesser metonyms of metonyms, further problematizing the task of “reading” the “book” in question to a certain (and authoritative) end. As noted already, palterer is foregrounded in two instances in act IV: the one in scene i cited earlier, and another, in scene iii, when Beatrice calls the assassins Marzio and Olimpio “Base palterers!” (IV.iii.25) for their reluctance to kill the sleeping count. Lucretia’s alleged paltering is viewed by Cenci as an attempt to divert him from the goal of subjecting Beatrice’s mind and body to his will and thus completing his seduction. Identifying with the aggressor by speaking his metonymic language, Beatrice becomes the aggressor and seducer.69 Seeing Beatrice in this way means understanding that to seduce, dissevered from its sexual connotations, means simply to lead astray, something that Beatrice cannot help but do, “wrapped” as she is “in a strange cloud of crime and shame” that prevents her from seeing, let

256

O

Shelley among Others

alone following, the proper way of proceeding. Beatrice views Marzio and Olimpio’s equivocating failure to act as an indication that she has not succeeded in seducing their minds and bodies to perform the task of blood-forblood retribution, which in its own right a form of absolute and violent possession, albeit thanatic rather than erotic. As with name-calling in general, palterer suggests the strategy of projection and denial. If the object of address is a palterer, then the subject is saved from any imputation that she or he might be one as well, with the corollary inference that one who is demonstrably not a palterer has access to and command of “God’s truth.” It is no coincidence, then, that shortly after Beatrice successfully exhorts Marzio and Olimpio to return to the count’s bedroom and finish the job, she explains to the two of them, and to Marzio in particular, “Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God/To a just use” (IV.iii.54–55). The two imputations of paltering, and especially the effect of that notion on Beatrice, offer another instance of how Beatrice’s conviction that she is authorized to speak “God’s truth” serves to “contort[s] her into the patterns of patriarchal language,” ultimately making “her standard/rival the supreme incarnation of mimetic violence so that she can justifiably, as God’s true agent (miming the count’s similar claim), commit such violence against him herself under the cover of acting by the dictates of the highest authority.”70 Another effect of the denial signified by the use of the term palterer is to conceal under the guise of wood or stone splitting the living subjects that are the ultimate focus of this activity. One who is figured as a palterer of wooden or stony bodies might just as likely be figured as an anatomist of living bodies, whether fleshly or linguistic. Of Beatrice, Orsino confesses, I fear Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze, Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve And lay me bare. (I.ii.83–86) Orsino later comments that it is the “trick of this same family/To analyze their own and other minds,” adding that “Such self-anatomy shall teach the will/Dangerous secrets, for it tempts our powers” (II.ii.108–11). To return to the patriarchy-petriarchy dyad: Count Cenci himself sounds the note of stony obduracy when he responds to Cardinal Camillo’s question, “Art thou not/Most miserable?”

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

257

Why miserable?— No.—I am what your theologians call Hardened. (I.i.91–94) Cenci’s prolepsis notwithstanding, the exchange, with its foregrounding of the world miserable, recalls in part the reaction of Milton’s Satan when he first views Eden: Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. (MPP, IV, 73–75) That hell, it should be noted, is located in a petrific landscape, a “Region dolorous,” replete with “many a Frozen, many a Fiery Alp,/Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death” (II.619–21). After hearing Cenci minimize his murderous exploits by claiming in a manner at once horrific and relevant to the notion of stony enclosures, “I rarely kill the body which preserves,/Like a strong prison, the soul within my power” (Poetry, I.i.114–15), Camillo tellingly responds, Hell’s most abandoned fiend Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt, Speak to his heart as you now speak to me. (I.i.117–19) The petriarchy that vindicates a patriarchy that maintains itself in power by speaking in anthropomorphic metonyms about ultimate (and ultimately unknowable) truths is incrementally oppressive. Praising “the great father of all” (I.iii.23), who has ostensibly answered his prayers, Cenci reveals to his dinner guests that his glee stems from the news that two of his four sons are dead. The former of these, “Rocco” (rock-o?— one Italian word for rock is roccia), is of particular interest, as he Was kneeling at the Mass, with sixteen others, When the Church fell and crushed him to a mummy, The rest escaped unhurt. (I.iii.59–61) What better evidence could there be that the patriarchal God of Rome and its Church is with Cenci and against his worthless progeny? Whatever causes the stones of the church in which Rocco prays to fall apparently singles him out with an especial vengeance, not only killing him, but effac-

258

O

Shelley among Others

ing his merest resemblance to other human beings by reducing him to “a mummy,” which Reiman and Powers define as “a pulpy substance or mass” (250n.). Moreover, when Cenci himself is en route to Petrella—”that lonely rock, /Petrella, in the Apulian Apennines” (III.i.239–40)—the very name of which combines the Italian word pietra ‘stone’ with a diminutive (and feminine) suffix that ironizes the castle’s looming, luring prospect and aspect, he passes unscathed by that mighty rock, Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustained itself with terror and with toil Over a gulph, and with the agony With which it clings seems slowly coming down. (III.i.247–51) As Sperry explains, “The stone never descends, for Count Cenci passes by the intended spot an hour too soon. The lines describe Beatrice herself as a kind of failing Prometheus, slowly giving way to the insupportable weight of her miseries as they drag her down into despair.”71 What Sperry does not say is that Prometheus is able to rise from and transcend his own rocky situation—the “Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus” (136)—with the innumerable (if desexualized) agonies perpetrated by the ravishments of the Furies, 72 because he is able to unsay a curse that treats of God, fate, ultimate justice, and other matters of which human beings can have no knowledge, let alone control. Beatrice, on the other hand, continues to view the events of her life as governed by a God, fate, and ultimate justice of which she can have knowledge and, with that knowledge as a basis for her actions, a modicum of control. The description of the rock has a historical, symbolic, and prophetic dimension to it as well as the naturalistic—a dimension revealing the logic of the patriarchy/petriarchy dyad that makes it more than an opportunistic pun. As Webb observes, Shelley’s examination of “the mind of Italian Catholicism” reveals “a close connection between power, wealth and authority, a nexus of self-interest which binds together Count Cenci, the Pope, and God.”73 That each is a patriarch is beyond question: Cenci is the father of his children; the pope, Holy Father of the congregated faithful; God, the Heavenly Father whose will the pope and Cenci each, in his degree, presumes to interpret to those in his charge. But each is a petriarch as

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

259

well: Cenci is, by his own admission (and not without sexual innuendo), “hardened,” and Beatrice remarks both his obduracy and the futility of seeking “by patience love and tears/To soften him” (I.iii.115–16); the pope, the inheritor of the keys of Peter, the original rock upon which Jesus would build his church (Matt. 16:18), not to mention the “marble form” glimpsed at the beginning of V.iv; God himself, the “rock and . . . fortress” of Psalm 18:1, as well as “Rock of Ages” celebrated in Augustus Montague Toplady’s 1775 hymn of the same title. The “mighty rock,” then, is the petriarchal emblem of the patriarchal hegemony that has, “from unimaginable years,/Sustained itself with terror and with toil”—not its own terror and toil, but rather the terror and toil of those who are oppressed in the name of the patriarchal-petriarchal hegemony, yet who are nevertheless “supporters,” albeit without a choice, of that “rock.” (Similarly, the “agony/With which it clings” is that of the oppressed.) The rock becomes, in this description of it, a type of naturalized erection that symbolizes both the terror and illegitimacy of the patriarchal-petriarchal hegemony and of the threat of phallocentric violence that underwrites it. What makes the real rock of the description memorable is not merely its size and looming aspect, but also its lack of any solid grounding: it appears to loom “Over a gulph.” Implicit in the description is the question that Shelley sees as being begged by the patriarchy-petriarchy that he interrogates: what solid foundation or “grounding” justifies its eminence? The answer is that none does, and that the illusion that any does exist is itself an effect of metonymic projection. Yet the “mighty rock” does not fall—not on Cenci, not on anyone else— while the stones of a church in Salamanca do fall, crushing Cenci’s son Rocco beyond recognition. More perplexing and ironic still, shortly after Marzio and Olimpio have dispatched the count, the Papal Legate Savella arrives at Petrella, bearing, on Lucretia’s report of the whispered rumor, “a warrant for his [i.e., Count Cenci’s] instant death” (IV.iv.28). Without the intervention of Beatrice, her stepmother, and the assassins, that is, it appears as though the inheritor of the keys of Peter, the “rock” on which the Catholic Church is founded, had sent his legate and troops to fall on Count Cenci at last. What is one to make of the “heartbreaking, all but unthinkable possibility” that Beatrice’s “promised deliverance was immediately at hand,”74 had she only been able to forbear vengeance, secure in the knowledge that “no person

260

O

Shelley among Others

can be truly dishonoured by the act of another”? Is there, as D. HarringtonLueker argues, “an evil that is a persistent and pressing potentiality, made actual if man’s will is in some measure weak or misguided,” an “evil [that] can be willed away in the sense that it is not inherent in man as Judeo-Christian theology would have it”?75 The apparent answer to the dilemma at hand is that stones fall, not subject to our will or understanding, but subject to a causal chain that originates with a “Universal Being” who, as characterized in the passage from the Essay on Christianity quoted earlier, “can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences.” That is, the workings of divine justice, if they are what is behind the question of who is to live and who is to die, operate beyond the ability of human beings, whether they be popes or lesser mortals, to comprehend. In this sense, then, Michael Worton is correct in his assertion that Savella’s arrival is “a means of undermining all notions of justice and of the sanctity of the Pope.”76 Shelley would have had no difficulty with Newton’s invocation of the law of parsimony in the “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” that preface book III of the Principia. There, Newton offers as an example of “natural effects” bespeaking the presence of “the same cause[s]” that of stones affected by the force of gravity: “the descent of stones in Europe and in America.” But he did have a good deal of difficulty with Newton’s ascription, in the “General Scholium” of the Principia, of the final cause of gravity to a “Lord God Pantokrator, or Universal Ruler” in whom “all things [are] contained and moved.” 77 As Eusebes argues in A Refutation of Deism, imperfectly quoting the words of Newton last cited, “We are incapacitated only by our ignorance from referring every phenomenon, however unusual, minute or complex, to the laws of motion and the properties of matter; and it is an egregious offense against the first principles of reason to suppose an immaterial creator of the world, in quo omnia moventur sed sine mutua passione: which is equally a superfluous hypothesis in the mechanical philosophy of Newton and a useless excrescence in the inductive logic of Bacon” (Prose, 133–34).78 In killing her father, Beatrice becomes what she beholds—a vengeful, stony patriarchist (if not a patriarch) with a pantocratic will-to-power that is not hers to wield. As she says to Lucretia just prior to the return of Savella’s troops with Marzio in custody, in phrasing that evokes Newton’s characterization of God and her father’s of himself as “hardened,”

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

261

I am as universal as the light; Free as the earth-surrounding air; as firm As the world’s centre. Consequence, to me, Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock But shakes it not. (Poetry, IV.iv.48–52) Unlike her father, however, Beatrice is, before her death, able to free herself from the delusion that by her actions she carries out the will and work of God. She goes from the Gott mit uns ideology of oppression to a very different view of God as her own death approaches. After their conviction but prior to sentencing, Lucretia contemplates the consequences of murdering Cenci and laments the conspirators’ decision to do so. Beatrice rejoins in part, Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and made Our speedy act the angel of his wrath, Seems, and but seems to have abandoned us. Let us not think that we shall die for this. (V.iii.113–16) However, after Camillo brings the sentence and the warrant for the conspirators’ immediate execution, Beatrice’s views alter radically. At first, she doubts God’s existence, while at the same time expressing her worst fear: that the metonymic patriarchy that presumed to speak for God also holds sway in the afterlife, devoid of any delusions regarding its access to a divine source. Sweet Heaven, forgive such week thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world. . . . If all things there should be . . . my father’s spirit His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me; The atmosphere and breath of my dead life! If sometimes, as a shape more like himself, Even the form which tortured me on earth, Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down! For was he not alone omnipotent On Earth, and ever present. (V.iv.57–68)

262

O

Shelley among Others

The horrific specter of being condemned to unending incestuous rape in the afterlife shakes Beatrice’s ready identification of God as a powerful patriarchal figure. Although she tells Lucretia, “I hope I do trust in him. In whom else/Can any trust?” (V.iv.88–89), Beatrice no longer associates trusting in God with bearing witness to any special manifestation of his potency or efficacy. No difference has been made by God or man, Or any power moulding my wretched lot, ’Twixt good or evil, as regarded me. (V.iv.82–84) If “No difference has been made by God or man,” it follows that Beatrice has not been “truly dishonoured by the act of another”—has not suffered the “difference” of loss of honor to her father or before God. In this last scene, Beatrice arrives at the realization that her repeated protestations of innocence in the aftermath of the discovery of Cenci’s murder and her trial and conviction for that murder are true, although not in the sense she originally (and willfully) intended. Ultimately, Beatrice is truly innocent— not innocens, or unharming, since she is responsible for instigating her father’s murder, but innocendum, or unharmed, her honor unimpaired by the violence that has been done and is about to be done to her. With this understanding of her innocence as essentially inviolable and intact, Beatrice accepts her impending death and that of her mother as “the reward of innocent lives,/. . . the alleviation of worst wrongs” (V.iv.110–11), trusting that she is leaving behind both patriarchy and petriarchy for a softly maternal presence and ceaseless evanescence and transference. After characterizing man as “Cruel, cold, formal . . . righteous in words/In deeds a Cain” (V.iv.108–9), and lamenting in part that “hard, cold men,/Smiling and slow, walk through this world of tears” (V.iv.112–13), Beatrice moves beyond that stage in which “Speech and consciousness give the impression of being restricted by language.”79 She says no more of God or man, even though she has more than two long speeches and an appropriate forum and audience for doing so. Instead, she turns to Death and woman, for reasons very much like those underlying the song of the captive Greek women in Hellas (1822), in which the song is “an alternative to the repetition of sameness, a countersong that thoroughly recasts the roles of . . . women.”80 In this specific instance, Beatrice’s speech revises the earlier specter of her father’s shade winding her in his “hellish arms”:

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

263

Come, obscure Death, And wind me in thine all-embracing arms! Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom, And rock me to the sleep from which none wake. (V.iv.115–18) Not surprisingly, in turning from God and man to Death and woman— and restoring the balance and alleviating the confusion between the erotic and the thanatic in the process—Beatrice also turns from figuration that is primarily metonymic to figuration that is primarily metaphoric (“Death[‘s] . . . arms”) and similic (“Like a fond mother”). The speech also bears witness to the reemergence of authentic desire, manifested in the form of what Hogle, with a little help from Freud, characterizes as “every person’s longings . . . for the ‘original’ place, the body and embrace of the Mother, to which Freud claims we seek a return in death so as to reach a state prior to our differentiation from the womb.” 81 Unlike Prometheus Unbound, in which unsaying one’s high language suffices as the first step in setting the world right, Beatrice’s renunciation of the metonymic language of oppression does not change the world in which she lives. It is a world of obduracy and gravity, under the influence of which things fall, stones and the executioner’s sword alike. But then again, Beatrice is one who has been led astray by her own high language to the extent that she is unable “To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; / To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night” (IV.570– 71)—at least not to the extent of eschewing the opportunity for revenge. Nevertheless, at the very end of the play “the once hardened Beatrice . . . for the very first time since the earliest portions of the play . . . initiates acts of simple human kindness.” 82 That kindness suggests the transcendent value of Beatrice’s insights about the language of oppression and the acts that follow from it for other ages—Shelley’s, to be sure, but our own as well, and every age that follows, until or unless the world witnesses the renewal of the “great age,” and with it the return of “The golden years” (1060–61) glimpsed in Hellas. Whether or not that golden age comes to pass, however, there are certain implications at the conclusion of The Cenci that must be drawn out in order to set a context for the final chapter. While Lucretia and Beatrice wait with Giacomo to learn the pope’s decision on Bernardo’s appeal for a pardon, Lucretia, speaking to Beatrice with unintended irony, allows herself to fantasize.

264

O

Shelley among Others

Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years. (V.iv.92–94) Will they, nill they, Lucretia and Beatrice, who do not live to write their story, nevertheless become literary history, an oft-told “tale for distant years.” The two step onto the scaffold, are beheaded (simultaneously bereft of thought and language), and are made into historical narrative by others not similarly bereft, such as Muratori in his Annali, published some 150 years after the fact, and by other historians. Shelley’s dramatization, coming 70 years after Muratori’s account, extends the distance to 220 years after the fact, and this discussion brings the distance from the events to some four centuries. Lucretia and Beatrice, although no longer actually telling their tale of woe, are telling it virtually. But it is a fixed and complete tale that, although it may be mistranscribed or otherwise corrupted, may not be changed, because those who would change it no longer possess the thought or language to do so. The conclusion of The Cenci brings Shelley to the verge of confronting a profoundly disquieting question latent in the metaphor-metonymy passage in A Defence: what does it mean, at the turn of the third decade of the nineteenth century, to become literary history, to have spoken or written one’s last poem? Looking back over the history of poetry from ancient Greece to his present, Shelley can see that poets did arise “to create afresh the associations which have thus been disorganized,” thus insuring that language did not become “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (482). But can one be sure that such poets will continue to arise? Post-Napoleonic Europe labored once again under the sway of absolute monarchs, and Shelley |thought that the poetic language of one of his boyhood idols, Wordsworth, who had “submitted to a new control,” had become “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” within his own lifetime. Were these events to be taken as omens or as part of an ongoing historical cycle of decline and renovation? This question of what it meant at the turn of the third decade of the century to become literary history, no less than the anxieties motivating it, helps to explain why Shelley felt compelled in the first place to write A Defence to rebut Peacock’s Four Ages, in which Peacock proclaims that poetry is history—that it is in a state of terminal decline, sinking quickly in a bronze age beyond which lies the renovative golden language of science. More to

A Perpetual Orphic Song

O

265

the point, this question helps to explain why Shelley felt compelled to rebut Peacock’s position as quickly and strongly as possible after receiving and reading The Four Ages. A month’s worth of letters to Charles Ollier and to Peacock himself, from 22 February to 21 March 1821, speak of almost nothing else. Shelley proclaims himself determined to “unveil the inmost idol of the error,” and confesses to Ollier that “The subject to which the 4 ages of Poetry has provoked my attention requires more words than I had expected” (Letters, 2:269, 271). One of the driving motivations of Shelley’s last three years, especially the final one, was that of somehow overcoming the constraints of human time, of subverting his own inevitable reification, his own inevitable transformation into the metonym “Shelley,” as in “I have read all of Shelley.” While it certainly was not a fear of death that gave rise to this motivation, it was an anxiety about belatedness, coupled with a curiosity to see whether he or Peacock had the more nearly accurate analysis, that motivated a line of poetry that has its origins no later than Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci and rises to prominence in their aftermath. This line of poetry, which runs from no later than “Ode to the West Wind” to The Triumph of Life, at once enacts a romance of dematerialization and tries to imagine before the fact what it means to become literary history.

266

O

Shelley among Others

O

Chapter 7 Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

The Romance of Dematerialization and After Shelley lived and worked during his last months in the throes of serious depression concerning his career as a poet. In a letter of 10 April 1822, to John Gisborne, Shelley asks, “Tell me how you like Hellas & give me your opinion freely. It was written without much care, in one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, & which make me pay dear for their visits” (Letters, 2:406). In a letter of 18 June to the same correspondent, Shelley confides that he has ceased working on Charles the First, a drama for which he had formerly held great hopes. In a letter of 25 January to Leigh Hunt, Shelley had characterized Charles the First as “a play which if completed according to my present idea would hold a higher rank that [than] the Cenci as a work of art” (2:380). Less than five months later, Shelley questioned not only these works, but his entire poetic oeuvre. As he confides to Gisborne, “I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past, to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater, peril, and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment”(2:436). On the same day that Shelley penned this self-assessment, he also corresponded with Trelawny, then at Leghorn, where, Shelley speculated, Trelawny would “of course enter into society.” Shelley continues, should “you meet with any scientific person capable of preparing the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quantity. It requires the greatest caution in preparation

O

267 of Shelley Moving toward the Shade

O

267

& ought to be highly concentrated; I would give any price for this medicine.” Although he calls prussic acid and cyanide (“essential oil of bitter almonds”) “medicine,” Shelley goes on to specify their intended use. Prussic acid in weak dosage concentrations was the drug of choice for treating depression in Shelley’s day, but he does not intend to use it or the cyanide for that purpose. Although Shelley protests, “I have no intention of suicide at present,” he wants one or both of the poisons “to medicine all ills infallibly,” acting instantaneously, and “avoiding needless suffering” by inducing paralysis of the vital organs (2:432–33). A number of personal reasons may serve to account for Shelley’s depressive state of mind. These include the deaths of daughter Clara (24 September 1818) and son William (7 June 1819); his deteriorating relationship with Mary, herself not well; his entanglements with Teresa Viviani and Jane Williams; financial pressures; and his dealings with Ollier. But in the letter of 18 June to Gisborne, Shelley ties his state of mind directly to his writing. The “precipice” on which Shelley imagines himself standing, like much mountainous terrain, is stone. It is stone that Shelley has ascended by writing on it, and he cannot efface that writing without the loss of his identity, and his life. Nor does Shelley expect to emulate the poison drinkers he presents in Adonais, Chatterton and Keats,1 or Sidney, who died of infection. These three “Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,/Far in the Unapparent” (Poetry, 11. 398–99). Shelley for his part proclaims himself “content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.” His vision of the ineluctable materiality of his oeuvre written on stone calls into question Shelley’s romance of dematerialization, 2 the fantasy of losing one’s material identity but not her or his transcendent and immaterial meaning, of being “made one with Nature,” so that her or his “voice [is heard] in all her music, from the moan/ Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird” (11. 370–71). The realization also has sobering implications for how one is to understand the materiality of language and of signification. Not even moments of impassioned utterance, such as the final chorus of Hellas, which celebrates the advent of a new golden age of Athens with the envisioned victory of the Greeks over their Ottoman oppressors, are exempt from these concerns. The last stanza of the poem, which is also the seventh stanza of the final chorus—the stanza on which that chorus rests, as it were—casts doubt on the credibility of the basis of the celebration. Ultimately, the fact that “Another Athens shall arise” (1. 1085) also means that another

268

O

Shelley among Others

Athens shall fall. While the chorus would like this rise somehow to take place outside of the realm of material and temporal history, thus avoiding such an outcome, the chorus realizes that that is not a possibility, that the only state beyond that of materiality and temporality is the state of death. O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, O might it die or rest at last! (1096–1101) The vision of these lines is the Promethean vision applied to the material and the temporal world of historical contingency. Another Athens may arise, and another master poet, another Socrates, may speak it into coherence with the poetry of his dialogues. But that language will result in the same materiality, with the same historicized deification of stone that Asia recounts in Prometheus Unbound (II.iv.80–84). But while Prometheus, Asia, and the other opponents of Jupiter are able to transcend materiality in that visionary drama simply by retracting the reificatory language that gives rise to it, language in historical time—language that defines historical time—may not be similarly retracted. Nevertheless, Shelley remains engaged with the romance of dematerialization from the time of Prometheus Unbound to the end of his life. The romance is latent in key passages of that visionary drama, although not without problematic overtones having to do with the absence of the renovative poetry of successor generations. For example, the chorus characterizes Jesus as follows: One came forth of gentle worth, Smiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like swift poison Withering up truth, peace and pity. (1.546–49) As one of the Furies notes, however, the fault lies not with Jesus, the Living Word, who never wrote down any of his parabolic discourse, but with those apostles who promulgated it—literally—as gospel, and ultimately as a church, thereby allowing the letter to overwhelm the spirit. As that Fury observes of humanity, “Hypocrisy and custom make their minds/The fanes of many a

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

269

worship, now outworn” (I.621–22).3 But Demogorgon, whose language is never written down within the visionary frame of the drama, and whose language, like his being, underwrites materiality without itself being material, helps to redeem language from its fall into materiality—so much so, that when he prepares to give his final speech of the play, celebrating the triumph of “Love” over “Heaven’s Despotism,” the chorus encourages him by chanting (not writing), “Speak—thy strong words may never pass away” (IV.553–61). In The Cenci, Beatrice suggests that language, figured as “a strange cloud of crime and shame” (V.iv.148), may be unsaid, although not with the same visionary and renovative potential in this life that Prometheus Unbound may be taken to suggest. And in Hellas, the chorus makes mortality itself the be-setting problem. It presents the following capsulized life of Jesus, which resonates in its conclusion with The Mask of Anarchy: A Power from the unknown God, A Promethean Conqueror, came; Like a triumphal path he trod The thorns of death and shame. A mortal shape to him Was like the vapor dim. (11. 211–16) Despite what the common discourse of his dramatic works proclaims, however, Shelley’s lyrics still embrace the hope of a language that can somehow transcend the contingencies of the material and the temporal. In the “Ode to the West Wind,” for example, which looks back to The Revolt of Islam and forward toward A Defence, Shelley envisions himself becoming an ever renovative principle of music, identity, thought, and language, the passive medium through which the workings of Power can be apprehended, albeit indirectly and dimly. In the fifth and final of the ode’s fourteen-line stanzas, each of which displays an inspired fusion of terza rima and sonnet form, the speaker implores the wind, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is/What if my leaves are falling like its own!” (11.57–58). The “lyre”-liar pun is too obvious to pass by without commenting on the fact that the speaker’s very request also announces his limitations: in assuming the role of the nescient, perishing, mortal medium of Power operating in the world, the speaker must needs falsify and misrepresent its ultimately benevolent telos, no less than the late-autumnal forest does. The imperative mood, in play

270

O

Shelley among Others

here and elsewhere throughout the poem, only serves to underscore the limits of the speaker, nowhere more so than in the following request to be identified with Power: “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one” (11. 61–62). The imperative of the next tercet, “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe /Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! (11. 63–64), suggests a certain anxiety about whether “new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized” (Poetry, p. 482). Here again, the pun on “leaves”—both the kind that grow on trees and the kind on which the characters of language are set down—is too obvious to be ignored. The “withered leaves” of his poetry are the vehicle of the speaker’s “dead thoughts.” The metaphor evinces a marked change from The Revolt, where Cythna figures her words and those of other poets as “the wingèd seeds” that “The blasts of Autumn drive . . ./ Over the earth”(SPW, 11. 3649–50). The final tercet and concluding couplet continue the imperative mood, anticipating at least two passages from A Defence, but bringing another echo to bear as well. The first imperative, “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (Poetry, 11. 66–67), anticipates Shelley’s strictures against willing oneself to write a poem. As he argues, using imagery redolent of Platonic discourse, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (503–4). The speaker’s “Ashes and sparks” may sputter toward extinction, as well as toward dematerialization, but their origin is an “unextinguished hearth” that holds an additional reserve of the influence that makes for inspired utterance, which possesses, in its turn, a potential to dematerialize. The poem’s final imperative, “Be thou through my lips to unawakened Earth/The trumpet of a prophecy! (11. 68–69), may, as Reiman and Powers suggest (223n.), echo language in A Philosophical View and A Defence. But the passage also echoes the book of Revelation and, in so doing, continues the romance of dematerialization and ties it to at least one version of an overarching telos. Chapters 8–11 of Revelation report on the events that follow upon the sounding of the “seven trumpets” given to “the seven angels which stood before God” (8:2). The sounding of the seventh trumpet, much like any seventh reprise in Revelation, is particularly noteworthy, in this instance announcing no less than the dematerialization of the entire fallen world. In John of Patmos’s account, “there were great voices in heaven, say-

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

271

ing, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (11:15). Not surprisingly, the avatars of material and temporal power are not happy with this transformation. “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou should give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth” (11:18). The skylark, like the figure of the eagle in Adonais, and like the eaglelike Jesus and Socrates in The Triumph,4 represents an idealized liminality, under the terms of which language and the language-using poet return to a close proximity with the informing Power responsible for poetry’s music and emotional force, yet maintain the status of discrete utterance and retain that music and emotional force. This liminality is implied by the speaker’s first location of the skylark as a “blithe Spirit” whose “profuse strains of unpremeditated art” emanate “from Heaven, or near it” (ll. 1– 5). The equivocation about the skylark’s location suggests that the poem’s speaker locates and represents himself not only as a less gifted poet than the skylark, but as a poet who will fail in the attempt to capture his subject with some justice, let alone to emulate that subject. The refigurings of liminality that follow are not “strong” (metaphoric) refigurings, but “weak” (similic) ones. Thus liminality is refigured in the second stanza, in terms that recall the translation of Elijah, one of the Hebrew prophets who speaks but does not write, “by a whirlwind” caused by “a chariot of fire, and horses of fire” into heaven, leaving behind only a material remnant—”the mantle . . . that fell from him” (2 Kings 2:11, 13). The skylark is presented as springing from the earth toward the heavens “Like a cloud of fire,” singing and soaring without let (ll. 8–10; my emphasis). The “weak” refigurings of liminality continue. The third stanza presents the skylark’s song against the backdrop of “the sunken [i.e., setting] Sun” (l. 12), flying “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun” (l. 15; my emphasis). The fourth, anticipating the apotheosis of Adonais, presents the skylark’s song as being like Venus, the Evening Star, on the threshold of visibility, not visible “In the broad day-light” (l. 20), yet emergently so, as “The pale purple even/Melts around [its] flight” (ll. 16–17). The fifth stanza presents the skylark’s song once again as being like Venus, this time in the guise of the Morning Star,

272

O

Shelley among Others

Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there. (ll. 23–25) The sixth presents the skylark’s song as being like the moon emerging from behind a cloud at night, transforming “bare” (l. 28) night skies to “Heaven . . . overflowed” (l. 30). Celestial liminality gives way to the earthly variant, and the “weakness” of these refigurings is foregrounded by four stanzas, all of which begin with the word “Like” (ll. 36, 41, 46, 51). The first two present human liminality. In the former, a “Poet hidden/In the light of thought” sings “hymns unbidden” that rouse the world to sympathetic imagination, passion, and action “with hopes and fears it heeded not” (ll. 36– 40). In the latter, a “high-born maiden/In a palace tower” sings “music sweet as love—which overflows her bower” (ll. 41–45) and affects the surrounding world for the better. In the last two, the similes return the skylark to its element, figuring it in terms of natural liminality. The former of these two stanzas figures the skylark as being “Like a glow-worm golden,” the weak light of which is “unbeholden” by human observers, but visible to “the flowers and the grass which screen it from the view” (ll. 46–50). The latter figures the skylark as being Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves By warm winds deflowered Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet heavy-winged thieves. (ll. 51–55) The path of descent runs from the celestial, to the human; from the animal, to the vegetable; from the verge of heaven, to deflowering and over-indulgence; from the verge of immortality, to seasons, pollination, and perishing mortality. The speaker implores the skylark to point the way beyond a world of poetry in which “praise of love or wine” (l. 64)—the Anacreontic, as Reiman and Powers note (228n.), or the wedding song (“Chorus Hymeneal”), or the victory song (“triumphal chaunt” [ll. 66–67])—is the standard. 5 The speaker does so because he sees humanity, in contrast to the skylark, as existing in a distinctly less attractive threshold condition, between the future and the past, in the midst of the life that captures humanity in

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

273

triumph, in a situation where “We look before and after,/And pine for what is not” (ll. 86–87).6 The song of the skylark, like the song of Keats’s nightingale, defeats temporality by its own constancy. Individual skylarks (and nightingales) live and die, but the song remains the same, without condition, without premeditation, without reference to the very surroundings that it transfigures. The very sapience that languages human song consigns that song not only to temporality and materiality but also meaning and individuation. To “look before and after” is to realize one’s distance from future and past by reason not only of mortality but of personhood as well. In the speaker’s words, “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” (l. 90). When the speaker apostrophizes the skylark as “thou Scorner of the ground” (l. 100), he notes its distance not only from the place where “We look before and after,” but also from the determinate and material signification in which humanity reports on its condition. To sing like the skylark involves relinquishing human identity and the language in which it is expressed. To learn “half the gladness” reposing in the skylark’s “brain” (ll. 101–2) is to relinquish the order of the human brain, and thereby to create a poetry that is nothing other than “harmonious madness” (l. 103)—striking and compelling, perhaps, but ultimately indecipherable, even as it teases one out of thought and temporality. The next major enactment of the romance of dematerialization is Epipsychidion (1821). Both in the immediate aftermath of the poem’s composition and at some remove from that time, Shelley was, in his correspondence, uneasy about the poem, at least in part because he had became increasingly aware of the romance that he had been recreating, in varying guises, in poems such as “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Sky-Lark.” However, Shelley was at first defiant and unwilling to relinquish that romance. In the letter of 16 February 1821 that accompanies the fair copy of Epipsychidion and two lesser poems, Shelley prefaces his instructions to Ollier concerning publication with a disclaimer that the poem “is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction.” Like Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion is not for the general reading audience; it is intended “for the esoteric few,” rather than the many “who turn sweet food into poison; transforming all they touch into the corruption of their own natures” (Letters, 2:262–63). Some seventeen months later, however, in a letter to Gisborne written on the same day (18 June 1822) that he wrote to Trelawny requesting prussic

274

O

Shelley among Others

acid or cyanide, and three weeks before his death, Shelley, in what was, for him, the last word on the poem, expresses disgust for Epipsychidion, stating that he “cannot look at” the poem, in part because of its subject. “The person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace” (2:434). Shelley alludes to the mythological narrative of what Ixion did to earn his place of dishonor on the wheel in Hades. Ixion, king of the Lapiths, refused to pay his father-in-law Eioneus the previously agreedupon bride price for his daughter Dia, then murdered Eioneus by hurling him into a fiery pit. Jupiter, hoping to get Ixion to see the error of his ways, as well as to oppose the precedent of murdering one’s in-laws, brought Ixion to Olympus. There, he attempted to add adultery and miscegenation to the crime of murder by having sex with Juno. Juno is transformed into a cloud to avoid the unwanted intimacy, but Ixion, not to be deterred, procreates with the cloud, as the result of which a centaur is born, its very mixed form testimony to the consequences of mortals forcing their unwanted attentions upon the gods, as well as a commentary on a humanity that aspires to the gods in its mind and heart, but hews closer to the animals in its nether parts. 7 The point of Shelley’s allusion is to castigate himself for unwittingly repeating the same besetting category mistake that is at the center of Alastor. Epipsychidion, in Shelley’s words, “is an idealized history of my life and feelings.” In language that echoes the Augustinian epigraph of Alastor, he continues, “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.” Hogg understood well the confounding of the ideal with the carnal, and he accounted Emilia Viviani rather ordinary in the bargain. Shelley reports that he “is very wicked and droll about this poem,” praising in Latin with the accolade “Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris” (So much of honor adheres to things taken from the common stock). 8 Shelley’s last words on the matter are rather lame. “Now that, I contend, even in Latin, is not to be permitted” (2:434). Shelley struggles in writing Epipsychidion and in reaction to it, with the realization that the materiality of signification, and the part that the will must inevitably play in making choices about the language of poetry—if not in the fading glow of composition, then in the cold white light of revision and copying—must finally and irrevocably subvert even the loftiest attempt

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

275

to write the romance of dematerialization. The “Advertisement” begins with the assumption that dematerialization is possible. Shelley characterizes the poet as one who “died at Florence, as he was preparing to voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old building, and where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of life suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this.” This would-be journey to the East across the Aegean Sea is to the Sporades, islands the very collective name of which means scattered. As such, the journey reprises the motif of scattering as it is presented in the “Ode to the West Wind.” Like the “Ashes and sparks, my words,” the subject of the “Advertisement” is presented as dematerialized (dead) and yet somehow present, albeit in “that happier and better world” of ideal forms rather than this world of the eidola specus. According to the speaker of the “Advertisement,” the poet’s “life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings” (Poetry, 373). Here Shelley begins another line of argument, one that was planted in the statement that the young poet “died at Florence.” He attempts to sustain a faith in the romance of dematerialization and to defend Epipsychidion from charges of crass sensuality. The dead poet was a modern type of Dante. His “Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers,” although “incomprehensible” to others who manifest “a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats.”9 Any imputation of materiality, sensuality, or carnality to the Vita Nuova (ca. 1293) was countered by the appearance of The Divine Comedy (ca. 1307–21), which showed that the love of Dante for Beatrice was enduringly holy, pure, and transfigurative. And just as the Vita Nuova was a prelude or dedication to The Divine Comedy, “the present poem appears to have been intended by the Writer as the dedication to some longer one” (Poetry, 373). The two classes of readers that Shelley identifies differ with respect to how “a common organ of perception”—the languaged, imagining mind—processes the language of poetry. Shelley quotes a passage from the Vita Nuova XXV by way of praising both poets and “a certain class of readers” for their ability see beyond language’s materiality of signification. That passage, as translated by Reiman and Powers, observes, “Great would be his shame who should rhyme anything under the garb of metaphor or rhetorical figure;

276

O

Shelley among Others

and, being requested, could not strip his words of this dress so that they might have a true meaning” (373n.).10 Those with the “defect” in question cannot strip their words, thereby taking the “garb” for the “true meaning.” 11 But this act of laying bare is not so simple as Shelley would have it— not even for Dante as Shelley understands him. Writing of Dante and Milton, Shelley argues that “The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised” (498). At the conclusion of his discussion of the two poets, Shelley says of “all high poetry” that “Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed” (500). Statements such as these stand uneasily juxtaposed to others, such as the claim that poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.” In the very next paragraph, which is the last word on the matter in A Defence, Shelley would have it both ways. “And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being” (505). Shelley’s comments in the “Advertisement” to Epipsychidion notwithstanding, while the very materiality of language invites the poet and “a certain class of readers” to look toward the naked truth and beauty that supposedly lies beyond it, that materiality is always already there, a default condition to struggle with and to attempt to overcome. The very preoccupation with language that veils or unveils suggests that Shelley is back to struggling with the issues of fetishism and sexual possession that bedeviled the Poet in Alastor. Emily is figured in terms reminiscent of the transfigured Beatrice in Paradiso, but the veiling persists, virtually from the outset, where Emily is presented as a Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath the radiant form of Woman All that is insupportable in thee Of light, and love, and immortality! Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse! Veiled glory of this lampless Universe! (ll. 21–26) Nor does the veiling imagery end here. Emily’s immanent “divinest presence trembles through/Her limbs” in much the same manner that moonlight shines through “a cloud of dew” (ll. 79–83). She is “A shadow of some golden

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

277

dream” (l. 116), “the veiled Divinity” (l. 246); “she might have masked herself from me” (l. 255). Emily is “the Vision veiled from me/So many years” (ll. 343–44). As he imagines the love feast that will ensue when Emily and he arrive on the island, the speaker fantasizes, And from the sea there rise, and from the sky There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, Veil after veil, each hiding some delight. (ll. 470–72) Lastly, he and Emily will have “A veil for our seclusion, close as Night’s, /Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights” (ll. 556–57). At some level, Shelley is aware of his relapse—witness his echoing of the fatally transgressive moment in Alastor, when the Poet “overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!” (l. 207). The speaker of Epipsychidion praises “true love,” claiming, “it never yet/Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence” (ll. 397–98). Shelley’s attempt to convert transgression to triumph proceeds by his bringing to bear echoes from the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” echoes that figure Emily as a type of the “awful LOVELINESS” (l. 71) he encounters in the “Hymn.” In lines that recall Plato’s cave in the Symposium and a line from the “Hymn” (“Sudden, thy shadow fell on me” [l. 59]), the speaker of Epipsychidion presents Emily as “An image of some bright Eternity;/A shadow of some golden dream (ll. 115– 16). Emily is not wholly of the realm of the ideal, but she is a mediatrix, a transferential vehicle that points the way to it, “A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning;/A vision like incarnate April” (ll. 120–21).12 Such a vehicle is necessary to the transition from this perishing material world to the imperishable realm of ideal forms. Had he met her in that realm, the speaker claims, “My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,/A divine presence in a place divine” (ll. 134–35). Even the accident of mortal birth could not have extinguished a bond formed in that realm, although the mutable existence of this world, when compared with existence in that unchanging realm, would have made life on earth “A shadow of that substance, from its birth” (l. 137).13 “But not as now” (l. 138), he continues. The speaker met Emily here on this mutable earth, which is the realm of the many in contradistinction to the realm of the One. Shelley reprises the latter distinction near the end of Adonais, when the speaker exclaims, “The One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460). If one accepts the One-many distinction, then it follows that, in this world, knowledge of the One entails a prior knowledge of the

278

O

Shelley among Others

many, a knowledge that simultaneously facilitates and mediates knowledge of the One. In Epipsychidion, the speaker mobilizes a parallel argument, based on the One-many distinction, about the nature of earthly love: the way toward a sacred love for the One lies through a profane love for the many, which simultaneously facilitates and mediates that love. The speaker begins by confessing his lifelong distaste for monogamy. I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion. (ll. 149–53) In A Defence, commenting on the surfeit of modern “moral, political, and historical wisdom,” Shelley not only states that “The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes,” he strongly suggests, by quoting Macbeth I.vii.44– 45, that the desire that motivates the creation of this knowledge is concealed by the repression that such processes exert. In Shelley’s (and Shakespeare’s) words, “we let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in ‘the adage.’ We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act upon that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life” (502). Elsewhere in A Defence, in the passage dealing with “The great secret of morals,” Shelley makes a case for desire as the path to to agathon ‘the good’. “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (487–88). Repression, on the other hand, is the path to the opposite of to agathon, to kalon. Following “modern morals” and living monogamously, according to the speaker of Epipsychidion, means negotiating the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go. (154–59)

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

279

But not to practice monogamy, the speaker argues, does not cause one to realize that the way toward the One lies through the many. There is still a risk of confusing a single lover with the One, real with the ideal, the copy with the prototype. The result of doing so is idol-(or eidolon-) worship. When he gives Emily a history of the women in his life, the speaker admits, in terms reminiscent of the “Hymn,” to just such idol worship in the past. He prefaces a thinly disguised account of the women with a confession: “In many mortal forms I rashly sought/ The shadow of that idol of my thought” (ll. 267–68).14 Again, echoing the “Hymn” and “On Love,” the speaker makes it clear that he should have been able to discern the causative influence of the One from her many material effects but did not. “There was a Being whom my spirit oft/Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft” (ll. 190–91), he confesses. But despite such spiritual communion, the speaker never apprehends the One directly. He confesses, “She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,/That I beheld her not,” despite the all-but-universal presence of “Her voice” (ll. 199–201). Mistaking material effect for immaterial cause creates problems in discerning that influence. Murmuring “names and spells which have controul/ Over the sightless tyrants of our fate,”15 the speaker, like the Poet of Alastor, finds that “neither prayer nor verse” serves to bring him any nearer to his “veiled Divinity” (ll. 239–44). Materiality triumphs temporarily, and with it reification and idol worship, but in the very instant of that triumph, the speaker realizes his error. In Blakean terms, he becomes what he beholds. Mistaking the One’s transcendence for mere concealment, the speaker reasons, “If I could find but one form resembling hers,/In which she might have masked herself from me.” He finds what he takes to be just that “form,” but she is “One, whose voice was venomed melody,” whose very “breath” issues from a “false mouth” (ll. 254–59), not the One. The speaker understands his mistake on a gut level, as it were. Instead of experiencing love, which is a going out of oneself, he experiences a sickening sense of contamination. flame Out of her looks into my vitals came, And from her living cheeks and bosom flew A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew Into the core of my green heart. (ll. 259–63)

280

O

Shelley among Others

The speaker proposes love as a going out of oneself, a seeking of the One through the many, as a way of transcending mortality and overcoming materiality. In its fullest deployment, love, operating on the principles of understanding, imagination—and, above all, empathy—brings one to the verge of the oracular, as the allusion to Apollo slaying Python at Delphi suggests (378n.). True Love in this differs from gold or clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human phantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. (ll. 160–69) In its cumulative effects, the speaker argues, love purifies the desiring subject with something approaching an idealized alchemical efficacy, relieving that subject of a burden that Blake might call selfhood. Mind from its object differs most in this: Evil from good; misery from happiness; The baser from the nobler; the impure And frail, from what is clear and must endure. (ll. 174–77)16 Approaching an idealized alchemical efficacy, but neither attaining nor sustaining it: one can approach the boundary separating the material and the immaterial, but she or he cannot cross that boundary in this life, nor can she or he remain at that boundary for long. Although Emily may be “a mortal shape indued/With love and life and light and deity,” rather than “The shadow of that idol of [his] thought,” the speaker must express his love for her in language, and its materiality ultimately defeats him. The baser overcomes the nobler, and Apolloninian gold falls to leaden, material signification. “Woe is me!” the speaker exclaims. The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of love’s rare Universe,

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

281

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (11. 588–91) The soul’s attempted flight is here figured in bodily—explicitly, phallic—terms as a would-be piercing, and the force of the metaphor is to return the speaker to his perishing, mortal, and orgasmic body, which is figured as having “expire[d]”—reached the petit mort of sexual climax— and then begun sinking toward trististia post coitans. The speaker’s envoy contains the moral of the poem He confesses that he has been made a “slave” by the “Weak Verses” (11. 592–93) with which he thought to liberate himself. But he is careful not to deny the possibility that poetry may yet do otherwise. The speaker enjoins the “Weak Verses” to call [their] sisters from Oblivion’s cave, All singing loud: “Love’s very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.” (11. 595– 98;emphasis added) The mind is still its own place, with the potential to make a heaven of hell, as well as to make a hell of heaven. But the question is one of whether the mind can attain that place without committing some tragic, besetting transgression that leads to the failure of to poiein ‘the making’. The transgression that takes place in Epipsychidion, as the conclusion’s phallicism suggests, operates on the very level of metaphor itself. As he turns to Emily to propose their elopement to “one of the wildest of the Sporades,” the speaker suddenly waxes proleptic. Lady mine, Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth Which from its heart of hearts that plant puts forth Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes, Will be as of the trees of Paradise. (11. 383–87) The speech begs the question of why Emily would want to scorn the speaker ’s figures—his “flowers of thought”—especially because the speaker claims that her approving glance (“sunny eyes”) can reverse transgression and bring about a triumphal return to the Edenic state. Understanding the speaker’s proleptic move entails e x a m i n i n g a p a s s a g e i n A D e fence to which these lines

282

O

Shelley among Others

are closely related. In arguing that no one can will the composition of poetry, Shelley argues that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower, which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (503–4). “Flowers of thought” must fade, and one is powerless even to remark their advent and departure, let alone to sustain their presence. Shelley wishes the case were otherwise, for then the triumphal return of which he speaks might be possible. “Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force,” he continues in A Defence, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results: but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (504). Composition, then, reenacts the fall in the attempt to render pure and forceful inspiration, already on the decline when its presence is sensed, in fallen human language. 17 Seen in this context, the speaker’s invitation to depart is an attempt to “defeat[s] the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions” (505), not through poetic utterance, but through the symbolic attempt, like that of the Poet in Alastor, to return to “the youth of the world,” that state of innocence in which “men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order” (481). The ship selected to transport the pair is “as an albatross, whose nest/Is a far Eden of the purple East” (11. 416–17). The island itself is as “Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise” (1. 423). The “rhythm or order” of the place is palpable: “all the winds wandering along the shore/Undulate with the undulating tide” (11. 433– 34). The island’s dwelling place is said to have been erected by “Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime/Had been invented, in the world’s young prime” (11. 488–89). As this allusion and the subsequent conjecture that this “pleasure-house” is, “as it were, Titanic, in the heart/Of Earth having assumed its form “(11. 491–95) suggest, the castle’s engendering and coming into being are figured in terms that recall the origins of both the Oceanides and the Titans, the former being the children of Oceanus (Ocean) and Gaea (Earth); the latter, the children of Uranus (Sky) and Gaea. Emily’s role as the speaker ’s “vestal sister” (1. 390) is a reprise of Asia’s role as Prometheus’s

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

283

sister—the two have the same mother, but different fathers. 18 The scene that the speaker describes is the scene of Promethean language—the very verge of the Promethean donation, the boundary between thought-creating speech and silence, in fact. The speaker envisions himself and Emily on that verge. And we will talk, until thought’s melody Become too sweet for utterance, and it die In words, to live again in looks, which dart With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, Harmonizing silence without a sound. (11. 560–64) The speaker would have Emily be what Shelley, in A Defence, characterizes as that which “creates for us a being within our being” (505); what he, in “On Love,” characterizes as that “something within the soul” able to “awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes” (474). And the speaker would be these things for Emily as well. The transfiguration that he envisions is no less than the ensoulment that occurs when primal, loving, poetic speech creates thought, which then becomes the measure of the universe But the speaker is unable to carry off the transfiguration he proposes. As his comments on the world “ere crime/Had been invented” suggest, too many falls have occurred in the intervening ages to make the transfiguration a possibility. Such crime has in common the reaffirmation of perishing mortality, not only of humanity but of the Titans and the Gods as well. Death separates the speaker—indeed, all speakers—from transfiguration. The conditions under which two “spheres instinct with it [i.e., flame] become the same,/Touch, mingle, [and] are transfigured; ever still/Burning, yet ever inconsumable” (11. 577–79), then, are not attainable in this life. They are the conditions set out at the conclusion of Adonais, under which “The soul of Adonais, like a star,/Beacons from the abode where the eternal are” (11. 494–95). And the price of passage is to “Die,/If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek” (11. 464–65). The speaker does by his own account. His last words within the lyric frame of the poem, “I expire!” are, among other things, the last words of a dying man. But the death is symbolic; the corpse revives to write the envoy. Yet not without attaining an important insight: eros and thanatos are variants of the same basic human drive, to be sure, but so, too, then are language, the condition of love, and silence, the condition of

284

O

Shelley among Others

death. It seems fitting at this point to turn to Shelley’s exploration of the modalities of silence.

Imagining Silence and Transfiguration According to Reiman and Powers, Shelley learned of Keats’s death on 11 April 1821, “and almost immediately began his elegy” (388). Two letters of this period to Byron reveal something of Shelley’s frame of mind as he began composing Adonais. The letter of 17 April, in which Shelley gives Byron the news of Keats’s death, begins with a seemingly innocuous statement of circumstance. “On my return from a tour in this neighborhood, I find your letter, which has therefore remained unanswered” (Letters, 2:283). Shelley has been silent, he owns, but he hastens to break that silence in responding to Byron. This temporary silence sounds a powerful theme that will permeate much of the poetry of Shelley’s remaining year or so of life. Further on in the letter, Shelley exhorts Byron to strive for poetic greatness. “You have now arrived about at the age at which those eternal poets, of whom we have authentic accounts, have ever begun their supreme poems. . . . Oh, that you would subdue yourself to the great task of building up a poem containing within itself the germs of a permanent relation to the present, and to all succeeding ages!” (2:284). Byron was thirty-three years old at this writing, the age of Jesus,19 one of Shelley’s “eternal poets,” when he was crucified. “Eternal poets” defeat silence by forging “a permanent relation to the present, and to all succeeding ages.” Said slightly differently in A Defence: “Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions” (Poetry, 505). Shelley’s next letter of 4 May to Byron continues his discussion of the circumstances of Keats’s death, as Shelley had these from Hunt. Shelley contrasts Byron with Keats, who died, according to Hunt, “of a rapid consumption” rather than endure “a pledge of future sufferings, had he lived,” for writing and publishing, in Endymion (1818), “some good verses in bad taste.” Shelley echoes Adonais in his characterization of Byron as one who is proof against “contemptuous and wounding expressions. . . . Your instance hardly applies. You felt the strength to soar beyond the arrows; the eagle was soon lost in the light in which it was nourished, and the eyes of the aimers were blinded.”20 In contrast both to Keats and Byron, Shelley declares himsel

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

285

“morbidly indifferent to this sort of praise or blame; and this, perhaps, deprives me of an incitement to do what now I never shall do, i.e., write anything worth calling a poem” (Letters, 2:289). This failure means entering the state of silence. Shelley reports to Byron that “My `Cenci’ had, I believe, a complete failure—at least the silence of the bookseller would say so” (2:290). Silence, a hard fate, is preferable to the ignominy that Shelley fears as the alternative: being remembered with contempt as a failed poet, wholly of one’s own age, without any capacity to speak meaningfully to “succeeding ages.” In the letters of 11 June to Ollier and 16 June to Gisborne, the latter announcing the completion and placing into production of Adonais, Shelley complains about the decision of the radical bookseller William Clarke to publish a pirated edition of Queen Mab. In the letter to Ollier, Shelley terms the poem “villainous trash; & I dare say much better fitted to injure than to serve the cause which it advocates” (2:298). But it is in the letter to Gisborne that Shelley specifies what he views as being wrong with Queen Mab, namely, its “furious style, with long notes against Jesus Christ, & God the Father and the King & the Bishops & marriage & the Devil knows what” (2:300). The “long notes” in question are not only discursive, but disjunctive as well, and their topicality and particularity cause whatever of vision Queen Mab might otherwise convey to succumb to the contingency of time and place and the materiality of detail. The sole essential prerequisite for writing poetry that articulates “a permanent relation to the present, and to all succeeding ages” is to work from the immaterial to the material, from the whole to the part, not vice versa, to the end of capturing as much as possible of what Shelley, in A Defence, terms the “purity and force” of the “invisible influence” that gives rise to all great poetry. Shedding light on what he might mean, beyond a characterization of its affect, by “furious style,” Shelley compares Milton’s Paradise Lost to Tasso’s Orlando Furioso. “For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority for the Muse having `dictated’ to him in `unpremeditated song,’ and let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting” (Poetry, 504). The “Muse” is Urania, and she is chief among the mourners in Adonais, which also figures Keats as Milton’s son, chiefly on the basis of his accomplishments in the blank verse fragment Hyperion (1820).

286

O

Shelley among Others

The goal of Shelley’s pastoral elegy for Keats is to reclaim the latter from the condition of muteness manifested in the poem’s third stanza, where Adonais sleeps “a mute and uncomplaining sleep,” and where “Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair” (ll. 23, 27).21 To accomplish this reclamation, the speaker must persuade the reader that Keats-Adonais’s “fate and fame shall be / An echo and a light unto eternity!” (ll. 8–9). The reclamation therefore involves making Keats’s poetry live again in the elegy. In some instances, making Keats’s poetry live again takes the form of obvious literary allusion, such as those to “Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale” and “the song of night’s sweet bird” (ll. 145, 372 and nn.), which brings to mind the “Ode to a Nightingale” (1820).22 But in other instances, the allusions are less obvious and more complexly intertwined with the poem’s preoccupations. The evocation of “Lost Echo[, who] sits amid the voiceless mountains,/ And feeds her grief with his remembered lay” (ll. 127–28), is followed by a series of reminiscences of Endymion. Echo will no more reply to winds or fountains, Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, Or herdsman’s horn, or bell at closing day; Since she can mimic not his [i.e., Adonais’s] lips. (ll. 129–32) The first two lines seem to recall part of the Keats’s description of Mount Latmos in book I. It is a site where “A melancholy spirit might well win/ Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine/Into the winds” (I, 98– 100); a site where “cold springs had run/To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass” (I, 102–3); a site where “a dove/Would often beat its wings” (I, 86–87), and where “The lark was lost in” (I, 102) the sun. 23 The reference to the “herdsman’s horn” seems a direct reminiscence of the shepherd-king Endymion, who appears for the sacrifice to Apollo with “a silver bugle” hanging “beneath his breast, half bare” (I, 172–73). To find echoes of Endymion in Adonais is, at first glance, to catch Shelley in a moment of self-contradiction. In a letter of 6 September 1819 to Ollier, Shelley, perhaps thinking of the manner in which Keats’s dedicatee, Chatterton,24 published his Rowley poems, writes of Endymion, “I think if he had printed about 50 pages as fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger” (Letters, 2:117). But Shelley softened his initial strictures against Endymion, if only out of the desire to cheer its gravely ill author. In a letter of 27 July

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

287

1820 to Keats, Shelley confides, “I have lately read your Endymion again & ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion” (2:221). And in a letter of November 1820 to William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review, which printed a damning review of Endymion in its issue of April 1818, Shelley argues that “the poem with all its faults is a very remarkable production for a man of Keats’s age and the promise of ultimate excellence is such as has rarely been afforded even by such as have afterwards attained high literary eminence” (2:252). About Hyperion, Shelley was far more positive. Writing to Peacock on 15 February 1821, Shelley says of Keats’s Hyperion, “I think it very fine. His other poems are worth little; but if ‘Hyperion’ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries” (2:262). And writing to Byron on 4 May of that year, Shelley argues, “As to Keats’ merits as a poet, I principally repose them on the fragment of a poem entitled ‘Hyperion,’ which you may not, perhaps, have seen, and to which I think you would not deny high praise.” Shelley, however, does qualify his praise, deploring Keats’s “narrow and wretched taste in which . . . he has clothed his writings,” though at the same time nothing that “The energy and beauty of his powers” (2:290) overcome even this liability. Some of Shelley’s reservations about Keats’s taste no doubt spring from the class prejudices that caused the reviewers to remark his awkward “Cockney” rhymes and caused Byron to rate Keats as “a depreciator of Pope, a Cockney, and a Romantic,” and to decry Keats’s embarrassed and embarrassing eroticism.25 But even in Endymion, Shelley found passages that reaffirmed his belief in Keats’s poetic powers. In the letter to Gifford, Shelley remarks several passages that serve to confirm that belief, namely, “Book 2. line 833 &c. & Book 3. line 113. to 120 . . . & then again from line 193” (2:252). The passages cited by Shelley suggest that he understood Keats’s particular strength as a poet to be his ability to render moments of transfiguration, to capture as much as possible of what Shelley, in A Defence, terms the “purity and force” of the “invisible influence” that gives rise to all great poetry. In the first of the passages cited earlier, the narrator of Endymion, reflecting on Endymion’s failure to understand that the beloved who has revealed herself to him is none other than Cynthia herself, tells a tale concerning the transfigurative power of universal love, distinguishing it, as Milton’s Raphael does in Paradise Lost, from passion (MPP, VIII, 588–94).

288

O

Shelley among Others

Ye who have yearn’d With too much passion, will here stay and pity, For the mere sake of truth, as ’tis a ditty Not of these days, but long ago ’twas told By a cavern wind unto a forest old; And then the forest told it in a dream To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam A poet caught as he was journeying To Phoebus’ shrine; and in it he did fling His weary limbs, bathing an hour’s space, And after, straight in that inspired place He sang the story up into the air, Giving it universal freedom. There Has it been ever sounding for those ears Whose tips are glowing hot. The legend cheers Yon centinel stars; and he who listens to it Must surely be self-doomed or he will rue it: For quenchless burnings come upon the heart, Made fiercer by a fear lest any part Should be engulphed by the eddying wind. (KPW, II, 827–46) 26 The passage has strong resonances with the final third of Adonais, although those resonances are as corrective as they are allusive. The idea that the poet “sang the story up into the air,/Giving it universal freedom,” is picked up in Adonais by the speaker’s injunction to anyone Who mourns for Adonais[?] oh come forth Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright. Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; As from a centre, dart thy spirit’s light Beyond all world’s, until its spacious might Satiate the void circumference. (Poetry, ll. 415–20) The notion that the “legend cheers/The centinel stars” is echoed when “The splendours of the firmament of time,” who rose “Like stars to their appointed height” and stood watch, awaiting the arrival of Adonais, note his arrival—he sings himself into place—and installation as the ruler of the third sphere of Venus.

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

289

“Thou art become as one of us,” they cry, ”It was for thee you kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!” (ll. 410–14 and n.)27 The “quenchless burnings,” which for Keats afflict the fleshly “heart,” are for Shelley intimations of eternal, universal love. Echoing Demogorgon’s speech to Asia on the relationship of “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change” to “eternal Love” (II.iv.114–20), the speaker of Adonais argues, Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. (ll. 338–42) The speaker subsequently presents eternal, universal love as That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim. (ll. 478–84) Shelley did not single out any specific passages from Hyperion for praise in his letters, but it seems plausible that he found the conclusion of the fragment, in which Apollo dies into life, memorable. Dying into life and turning into a spirit presiding over a celestial body of light in recognition of the fact are, after all, operative conceits in Adonais as well as in Hyperion. The suspicion that “Our Adonais has drunk poison” (l. 316) is followed almost immediately by the beginning of his apotheosis, with yet another allusion to Keats’s nightingale ode, during the course of which He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan

290

O

Shelley among Others

Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own. (ll. 370–76) Apollo, by way of contrast, says he feels as if he had imbibed some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless . . . And so become immortal. (KPW, III, 118–20) Nevertheless, Apollo becomes a “presence” like that of “Power” itself. In uncanny anticipation of Shelley’s characterization of the West Wind as “Destroyer and Preserver” (Poetry. l. 14), Apollo comments on his own transfiguration in the presence of the prophetic Mnemosyne. Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me. (KPW, III, 113–18) It is easier to reclaim Keats than it would have been if he had enjoyed a longer and more successful career, such as Wordsworth’s.28 Keats, whose name was written on water, is transfigured much as his own Apollo was and is apotheosized along with the likes of Lucan, Sidney, Chatterton, and others “whose names on Earth are dark/But whose transmitted effluence cannot die” (Poetry, ll. 397–407). If the best poets, such as Socrates and Jesus, wrote nothing, perhaps those next in order of eminence are poets like these, whom circumstance constrained to write very little. Poets such as these bespeak liminality of a slightly different sort than that of the skylark. Their poetic utterance occupies a threshold between immaterial speech and material writing, and yet the most distant of these in time, Lucan, is still recognized by name and for his Pharsalia by Shelley seventeen and one-half centuries after his death. But an easier reclamation is by no means a sure one. In a letter covering the copy of Adonais that Shelley sent to the artist Joseph Severn, Keats’s

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

291

companion throughout his last voyage and illness, Shelley renders a verdict that time has happily proved wrong: “In spite of his transcendant genius Keats never was nor ever will be a popular poet.” Shelley claims to speak from firsthand experience: “the total neglect & obscurity in which the astonishing remnants of his mind still lie, was hardly to be dissipated by a writer who, however he may differ from Keats in more important qualities, at least resembles him in that accidental one, a want of popularity” (Letters, 2:366). Shelley’s figuring of Keats’s poetry as “remnants” is interesting. Further on in the letter, Shelley uses the term again, announcing that he intends “to have collected the remnants of his compositions & to have published them with a life & criticism” (ibid.). A variant on the more common remains—usually, literary remains29—Shelley’s language in the letter of 29 November 1821 to Severn helps to explain the foregrounding of the poet’s corpse in Adonais. For more than two-thirds of the poem—the first thirty-seven of its fifty-five stanzas—the corpse lying in state centers the poem. Only with the announcement “that our delight is fled/Far from these carrion kites” (ll. 334–35) in stanza 38 does the focus begin to shift from the timebound corpse and the mourners surrounding and filing past it to timeless celestial vistas. In addition to transfiguring muteness to echoic play, then, Shelley undertakes to argue Keats’s “remnants,” his literary corpus, thus transfigured, will live forever on a higher plane than one on which his mortal corpus lived so briefly.30 Stanza 39 continues the transfiguration and marks the beginning of a multistanzaic conversation with Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601). The conversation seems apt, given the tragedy’s preoccupation with the body— and, above all, given Hamlet’s loathing of his body and the bodies of others. The speaker declares that, just as the transfigured Adonais will live forever on that higher plane, those who live on the plane of bodily existence will continue to die. ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife Invulnerable nothings.—We decay Like corpses in a charnel. (ll. 345–49)

292

O

Shelley among Others

These lines evoke a number of scenes in the play: Hamlet’s interview with his father’s ghost (I.v.1–91); Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius, whom he thinks is Claudius, his incestuous uncle, as Polonius stands behind the arras to overhear Hamlet’s discussion with his mother (III.iv.24–39); and the first part of the graveyard scene (V.i.1–204). The purpose of sounding this note is to argue that Adonais “has outsoared the shadow of our night” (Poetry, l. 352), to enact in Adonais the transfiguration that is not available to Hamlet as the means to escaping a world that he views as “an unweeded garden/That grows to seed” (I.ii.135–36). Hamlet begins the last-quoted soliloquy on the unseemliness of his mother’s remarriage to his uncle less than two months after his father’s death by wishing aloud, “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (ll. 129–30). Adonais does escape a world “That grows to seed”—”From the contagion of the world’s slow stain” (Poetry, l. 356), as the speaker of Adonais figures it. And the speaker figures Adonais as having been thawed and resolved “into a dew.” Stanza 41 begins, He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais.—Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone. (ll. 361–64)31 The geographical site of Keats’s transfiguration is Rome, the Eternal City to be sure, and as such the city of the body—or better yet, the city of the body’s untransfigured repose. Of Rome, and “those who cannot die,” the speaker of Adonais observes, “ages, empires, and religions there/ Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought,” in stark contrast to those with whom Adonais now dwells—”the kings of thought/Who waged contention with their time’s decay/And of the past are all that cannot pass away” (ll. 426–32). Although Rome may be the site of the body’s untransfigured repose, there is at least one enclave that offers hope that the outcome may be otherwise: the locale of the Protestant Cemetery and tomb of Caius Cestius. In the letter to Peacock, Shelley ventures observations echoing in his conclusion the conclusion of “Mont Blanc.” The English bur[y]ing place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, & is, I think the most beautiful and solemn

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

293

cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass fresh when we visited it with the autumnal dews, & hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, & the coil which is stirring in the sunwarm earth & mark the tombs mostly of women & young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind & so it peoples with his wishes vacancy & oblivion. (Letters, 2:59–60)32 The site or another like it had an abiding fascination for Shelley. He returns to a discussion of such a site in the letter of 23 March 1819 to Peacock. Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey. Still further, winding half up one of those shattered pyramids by the path through the blooming copse wood you come to a little mossy lawn, surrounded by the wild shrubs; it is overgrown with anemones, wall flowers & violets whose stalks pierce the starry moss, & with radiant blue flowers whose names I know not, & which scatter thro the air the divinest odour which as you recline under the shade of the ruin produces a sensation of voluptuous faintness like the combinations of sweet music. (Letters, 2:84)33 The speaker of Adonais echoes these very words, describing a site where “flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress/The bones of Desolation’s nakedness,” a site “Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead,/A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread” (Poetry, ll. 436–41). This stanza and the site that it describes are adjacent to another stanza and the site that it describes, the tomb of Caius Cestius—”one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,” which “doth stand/Like flame transformed to marble” (ll. 444–47). Here, as in the second letter to Peacock, the scene is set at the boundary that divides the articulate from the ineffable. The speaker laments the fact that “Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak/ The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak” (ll. 467–68). In both the poetry and the prose—especially the latter of the two passages cited— the language marks the physical site described as one of metalepsis. Both verbs—convey in the prose passage and the verb transfuse in the poetry—meaning, respectively, “to carry or transport from one place to

294

O

Shelley among Others

another,” and “to pour from one container into another”—are metaphors for a process of metempsychosis or resurrection, and for the process of metaphor itself.34 Other details of the site, rendered both in the prose and in the poetry, also serve to mark it as a site of transfiguration. “Violets whose stalks pierce the starry moss,”35 when read against the starry skyscape that overarches the concluding scene of Adonais, suggest that it is by the medium of the flower itself—another metalepsis, in the sense that flowers of rhetoric are figures of speech—that the “starry moss” is transfigured and attains heavenly preeminence, either as “The soul of Adonais, like a star” (l. 494), or some other star.36 So, too, the “one keen pyramid with wedge sublime” functions as a metalepsis. As Wasserman observes, “in Shelley’s day it was generally assumed that the word ‘pyramid’ derives from pur (fire) because, according to Johnson’s Dictionary, fire always ascends in the figure of a cone.”37 The pyramid, in other words, is the figure by means of which earthly fire, at first sublimed to stone (changed from the gaseous state to the solid, with no intervening liquid state), is resublimed from the solid state to heavenly fire. 38 Statements such as “He has outsoared the shadow of our night,” and “He is made one with Nature,” the latter a transformation that causes Keats’s voice to become one with that of “the song of night’s sweet bird” (ll. 352, 370–72), make it clear that Shelley identifies Keats’s poetry as the agent of his transfiguration. Shelley reprises a crucial passage in the nightingale ode to underscore this point. The three stanzas that present Shelley as the “frail Form” (l. 272) of a less noteworthy mourner describe him in turn as “A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift” (l. 280), and as a figure garlanded with “pansies overblown,/And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue,” who bears “a light spear” that Reiman and Powers correctly identify as the Dionysian thyrsus (ll. 289–92 and n.). In other words, Shelley presents himself as a type of Dionysus, or Bacchus.39 The speaker of Adonais takes Keats at his word and reprises the speaker’s wished-for transfiguration in the nightingale ode, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Poesy” (KPW, ll. 32–33). In looking to poetry rather than “Bacchus and his pards” (and the wine that they both transport and represent) as the vehicle of his transfiguration, the speaker of the ode reverses his earlier wish “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee [i.e., the nightingale] fade away into the forest dim” (ll. 19–20). The speaker’s change of

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

295

heart comes from the understanding that to be of the party of Bacchus and to drink is to escape, but not to overcome, “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (l. 23) of human existence, and, above all, of human consciousness. The Bacchic figure is marked by just such symptoms of his all-toohuman existence. He is described in turn as a “frail Form,/A phantom among men” (Poetry, ll. 271–72), and as “A love in desolation masked;— a Power/Girt round with weakness” (ll. 281–82).40 For Shelley, no less than for Keats, Bacchus, the god of wine, represents the seasonality and brevity of bodily life without hope of transfiguration. Before Keats’s transfiguration in Adonais, the Bacchic figure, having no inkling that such transfiguration is about to occur, at least in part because he cannot imagine his own transfiguration,41 “in another’s fate now wept his own” (l. 300). The Bacchic figure sees that fate as a mute oblivion after an alltoo-brief, deluded, and alienated existence.42 The Bacchic figure is also figured as one who “Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,/ Actæon-like, and now he fled astray” (ll. 276–77). The allusion to Actaeon refers back to Shelley’s view of how poetry operates, revealing, as he characterizes it in A Defence, “the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of [the world’s] forms” (505). The Bacchic figure is, as it were, hounded by thoughts of unattainable beauty. Actaeon, who saw Diana naked, was condemned as a result of his transgression to be torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs (399n.). But there is more than one Diana myth at play in Adonais, and this first allusion sets up the complex allusive and intertextual negotiations that lead to the conclusion of Shelley’s pastoral elegy. As a result of these negotiations, the speaker displaces the romance of dematerialization onto Keats, making his life, like that of the other exemplars, an ideal that those who remain behind should not “fear . . . to become[?]” (l. 459). In the letter of 23 March 1819 to Peacock, Shelley describes an evening walk in the environs of Rome: “The elms are just budding, & the warm spring winds bring unknown odours, all sweet from the country. I see the radiant Orion through the mighty columns of the temple of Concord” (Letters, 2:86). 43 To identify this constellation is to know the underwriting myth —to know that Orion appears in the heavens as a mighty hunter, equipped with sword, club, lion’s skin, and girdle, and accompanied by his dog Sirius. The mythological Orion figures in another Diana myth that is pertinent to Adonais. A handsome son of Neptune, Orion was a favorite of Diana’s—the two shared a common interest in hunting. Duped by her brother Apollo

296

O

Shelley among Others

into proving her accuracy with a bow, Diana on one occasion aimed at what she took to be a dark object floating on the sea. At some distance from the object, Diana did not know that it was the head of Orion, all that was visible as he waded through the water. Diana proved her aim but at the cost of killing her favorite. By way of atonement, she transfigured him, giving him immortality as a constellation.44 Before his transfiguration, Orion fell in love with the Pleiads, who were Atlas’s daughters, as well as nymphs attending Diana. The seven sisters implored the gods to transfigure them, in order to protect them from Orion. Jupiter took pity on them, turning them into the six-star constellation known as the Pleiades.45 The numerical discrepancy is accounted for by another myth. Electra, one of the seven, is said to have left the constellation so as not to be forced to witness the fall of Troy, founded by her son with Zeus, Dardanus. 46 The remaining six are said to have grown pale at her departure, thereby accounting for their relative faintness in the night sky. Along with Chatterton, Sidney, Lucan, “And many more whose names on Earth are dark” (l. 406), Keats becomes part of a Pleiades, if not the Pleiades. This transfiguration may appear to pose the problem of gender switching, but the problem is only apparent. There is the historical precedent of La Pleiade, seven sixteenth-century male French poets (Jean Antoine de Baif, Joachim du Bellay, Remy Belleau, Etienne Jodelle, Peletier du Mans, Pierre de Ronsard, and Pontus de Thiard), who, like Chatterton, Sidney, and Keats in the latter-day constellation, sought to raise the estimation of their native tongue as a literary language. The speaker also proposes Keats as “thou Vesper of our throng” (l. 414). As Reiman and Powers note, Venus, named for the female Greek god of love, is also known as Lucifer (403n.), a name associated with the male (or androgynous) angle who fell as Satan. The Neoplatonic realm to which Keats’s transfiguration takes him is a realm beyond gender. That place, to which Adonais and Shelley’s dead children “have departed,” is a place where “man and woman; and what is still dear,” no longer “Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither” (ll. 471–74). With perhaps a nod to the hermaphrodites of Plato’s Symposium, it is a place where unitive beings, not gendered polarities, are the order of the day. Echoing the conclusion of the Anglican marriage service (“What God hath joined, let no man put asunder”), the speaker, proclaiming “No more let Life divide what Death can join together” (l. 477), adverts to a realm where

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

297

everyone is always, really, and consubstantially one spirit, rather than being sometimes, figuratively, and contingently one flesh. In the skies above Rome, and in their celestial position within the constellation Taurus, the Pleiades still appear to be fleeing from Orion, which appears south of Gemini and Taurus, and which will always pursue the Pleiades but will never catch them. On the ground in Rome, by way of contrast, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. (ll. 460–64) The only way to attain the transfigured condition of ekphrasis that the constellations find themselves in is to “Follow where all is fled!” (l. 466). Here as in the case of the Bacchic figure, the speaker apparently takes Keats at his word in reprising the wished-for transformation to an ekphrastic condition in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820).47 The Pleiades, with Orion in pursuit, serve as an astronomical echoing of the first stanza of that ode. “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” (KPW, ll. 8–9). As “The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the eternal are” (Poetry, ll. 494–95), it is at once a shining (beaconing) example of ecstasy, or out-of-body existence, and an inviting (beckoning) glimpse of a possibly transfigured and transfiguring future beyond the body, in a better realm.48 The transformation of Adonais into a condition of ekphrasis is adumbrated by the speaker’s statement that He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. (ll. 357–60) In addition to having the figure of the urn in common with Keats’s ode, these lines suggest that the transfigured Adonais, in his place in the constellated heavens, finds himself in a position much like the one inhabited by the figures on the sides of Keat’s urn, “All breathing human passion far above, / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d” (KPW, ll. 28–29).

298

O

Shelley among Others

The problem with “breathing human passion,” as Keats depicts it here and elsewhere—as, for example, in The Eve of St. Agnes (1820)—is that experiencing such passion is never as fulfilling as imagining it is. Passion only leads to phallocentrism and postcoital depression. But the transformation that Shelley envisions moves beyond the consummation of male poet and female nightingale heralded by the phallic Bacchic figure with his thyrsus in an important respect. The elision—and, ultimately, the elimination—of gender and gender distinctions in the realm that the transfigured Adonais inhabits signals Shelley’s awareness of the imperative, as he sees it identified in Keats’s ode, and as he sees it played out in his own elegy, to move beyond phallocentric notions of order and of the language that inscribes that order, notions that Shelley himself, even in Prometheus Unbound, was unable to move beyond.49 Adonais, “pierced by the shaft which flies / In darkness” (ll. 11–12), does not repay his detractors in kind; rather, he reappears, transfigured, in a universe of light to which no shafts can either reach or fly, a universe that the abandoned Bacchic figure, thyrsus in hand, can only approach through Keat’s language and conceits.

The Shade of Shelley One of the architectural monuments that Shelley describes in the second of his letters from Rome to Peacock, immediately prior to his evocation of “the radiant Orion,” is the triumphal arch of the “stupid and wicked monster Constantine.” There are three arches, whose roofs are pannelled with fretwork, & their sides adorned with similar reliefs. The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as it were borne from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate. Never were monuments so completely fitted to the purpose for which they were designed of expressing that mixture of energy and error which is called a Triumph. (Letters, 2:86) In contrast to this arch, Shelley commends to Peacock “the central arch of the Triumphal arch of Titus . . . more perfect in its proportions they say,

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

299

than any of later date.” However, it is not the arch’s proportions that strike Shelley, but rather, “The figures of Victory. . . . Their lips are parted, a delicate mode of indicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at their destined resting place, & to express the eager respiration of their speed. Indeed so essential to beauty were the forms expressive of the exercise of the imagination & the affections considered by the Greek artists, that no ideal figure of antiquity not destined to some representation directly exclusive of such a character, is to be found with closed lips” (2:89). The parted lips of these “figures”—and here as in the previous passage, these are figures in at least two senses, that of bodies realized as statuary, and that of metaphors “expressive of the exercise of the imagination & affections”—represents “imagination & affections” and the Greek culture that underwrites them as affirming human existence. The figures express what the Spirit of the Hour in Prometheus Unbound characterizes as “the yes” that the “heart . . . breathes” (Poetry, III.1i.149–50), the life-affirming resonation of “Power” that connects the many of humanity to the originary One. As Shelley observes in the preface to Hellas, “We are all Greeks—our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece, Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors would have spread no illumination with her arms” (409). The other three arches, the military victories and triumphs that they commemorate no longer memorable, are fitting evidence of how the imperishable immaterial ultimately underwrites the perishing material, of how “what was born in blood must die” (l. 811), as Ahasuerus tells Mahmud in Hellas. To illustrate the point, Ahasuerus summons the phantom of Mahomet the Second, who took Istanbul for the Ottoman Empire in 1453. From the perspective of the afterlife, Mahomet reinforces the lesson that Mahmud is in the process of learning, even though on the brink of his greatest military victory: that temporal power and those material trappings which signify its establishment and exercise are delusory, existing not as absolute, but rather as a contingent phase of a seemingly unending cycle of retribution, in which, in the words of Ahasuerus, “The Past” manifests itself “like an Incarnation / Of the To-come” (ll. 853–54). Ahasuerus, “an adept in the difficult lore / Of Greek and Frank philosophy” (ll. 741–42), according to Mahmud, is associated by name with the legend of the Wandering Jew—and thereby connected to both of Shelley’s two exemplary speakers, Socrates and Jesus. He has learned the distinction between the immaterial One and the material many that the speaker of Adon-

300

O

Shelley among Others

ais reiterates near that poem’s close. Ahasuerus attempts to lead Mahmud to an understanding of this distinction, an understanding that would render any considerations of temporal power ironic. The former bids that the latter “look on that which cannot change—the One, / The unborn and the undying” (ll. 768–69). Everything else “Is but a vision—all that it inherits / Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams” (ll. 780–81). Ahasuerus’s teachings have the effect of showing Mahmud that the exercise of power by means of the materiality of signification occurs by means of the metonymic logic that allows for and, in fact, fosters the reification of categories. Mahmud, in the process of experiencing a reversal, or dereification, responds, What means thou? Thy words stream like a tempest Of dazzling mist within my brain—they shake The earth on which I stand, and hang like night On Heaven above me. What can they avail? They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, Doubt, insecurity, astonishment. (ll. 786–91) And yet this dereification is the exception that proves the rule. In a dark reprising of the concept of the Goethean prototype, or urpflanze, Ahasuerus is perfectly clear in the matter of how language prefigures, figures, and reifies. Responding to Mahmud’s “astonishment,” Ahasuerus chastens him. Mistake me not! All is contained in each. Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup Is that which has been, or will be, to that Which is—the absent to the present. (ll. 792–95) What is responsible for the material world as we experience it, according to Ahasuerus, is Thought Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, [which] cannot die. (ll. 795–97) “Thought / Alone” is an imaginative universal. As Ahasuerus himself asks, “what has thought / To do with time or place or circumstance?” (ll. 801– 2).50 What he does not say—he leaves it to the phantom to drive home the point—is that, although thought originates as the earthly human resonation

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

301

of what Shelley elsewhere calls “Power,” Mahmud, in exercising temporal power as he does, furnishes a perfect example of “how,” as the Shelleyan speaker of The Triumph of Life observes, “power and will / In opposition rule our mortal day” (ll. 228–29). When the phantom drives home this point, Mahmud, perhaps for the first time, understands what Shelley means when, in A Treatise on Morals, he discusses “the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose” (Prose, 188). That is, Mahmud sees himself, no less than his subjects, as implicated in a web of metonymically authorized power relations. Responding to the phantom, Mahmud exclaims, Spirit, woe to all!— Woe to the wronged and the avenger! woe To the destroyer; woe to the destroyed! Woe to the dupe; and woe to the deceiver! Woe to the oppressed; and woe to the oppressor! (Poetry, ll. 893–97) His fate confirmed, Mahmud hears the victory cries from without as “Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile / Of dying Islam! (ll. 915– 16). But the chorus of captive Greek women, which, according to Shelley’s note, “anticipate[s] however darkly a period of regeneration and happiness,” finds itself engaged in “a more hazardous exercise” than it would be if it instead uttered “Prophecies of wars” (438n.). The chorus’s problem arises from attempting to imagine the origins of “Another Athens” (l. 1084) and another golden age that is more durable than and superior to the original. Near the origins of an originary civilization one finds, as Shelley terms it in A Defence, “the chaos of a cyclic poem” (482)—a Homeric epic recited in the kyklos, or market square, or some other foundational text, such as a tragedy, or a series of same. Every one of the foundational texts that the chorus refers to, including the myth of the golden fleece, the myth of Orpheus, the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the story of Oedipus (ll. 1072–83), imports into the culture that it underwrites the problem of evil and death. The problem, as the chorus comes to realize, may not be with human ambition manifested as the will to power, but rather with “Every original language near to its source.” Such language is used not only by poets as “the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting,” but also by poets as “the institutors of laws and the founders of

302

O

Shelley among Others

civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true the partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion” (482). 51 The chorus glimpses what is explicitly stated by the Shelleyan speaker of The Triumph: that “power and will / In opposition rule our mortal day,” and that “God made irreconcilable” to agathon and logos—”Good and the means of good” (ll. 228–31) 52—and that the irreconcilability proceeds precisely from the fact that virtually every human speaker operates under conditions of at least partial nescience. To attain a fleeting apprehension of the One, Power, Love—all of these synonyms for that distant, transferential first cause, the effects of which are all that is articulate, deployed, and apprehensible—is one thing; to make that apprehension the basis of attempting to impose order by dint of will, entirely another, giving rise to distortions, and to the ideologies that result from such distortions. Shelley’s position here, although somewhat darker than previous ones, is anticipated by a passage from “On Life.” “What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much” (475–76; emphasis added).53 Accordingly, the chorus breaks off its “more hazardous exercise,” commanding and observing, “Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn / Of bitter prophecy” (ll. 1098–99). But there is no option to “die or rest at last” (l. 1101). The only option remaining is a sure process of decay for virtually all who live, speak, and write, as the result of which they degenerate to become the effects of their sponsoring motives and the language in which those motives are expressed. Virtually all who live end up becoming mere reified metonyms of themselves, in other words. This is the bleak transfigurative vision of The Triumph, which offers an alternative vision to that of the radiant transfigurative vision of Adonais. The relationship of the Shelleyan speaker to the shade of Rousseau is prefigured by that of Mahomet to Mahmud, as well as that of Dante to Vergil.54 Both relationships are between someone who has “gotten it wrong,” metaphysically, and someone who may yet “get it right,” metaphysically. Both re-

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

303

lationships accordingly reflect on Shelley’s preoccupation with trying to develop a retrospective understanding from some higher plane of existence of how and why human beings continue to get and live their lives wrong. This preoccupation informs most of the major texts discussed here, most particularly Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, and Hellas. In these texts, the speakers reach, and look back from, the threshold separating impending death from past life to try to fathom the latter. In the case of The Revolt and Hellas, the retrospect is presented as being posthumous, as it is in The Triumph. As one who began with the intent of becoming a poet-reformer, and who feels increasingly that his best efforts have come up short, Shelley is increasingly preoccupied with the question of whether his metaphysics has “gotten it right,” as well as with what it means and is like to have had his last word and reached linguistic closure, if not canonical status—to have become the metonym “Shelley,” as in “I have read all of Shelley.” 55 The central figure of the poem—that of the Roman triumph, in which the victor parades his troops and the spoils of war before the emperor and the citizens—reflects in part Shelley’s reminiscences of Rome, Roman history, and above all “that mixture of energy and error which is called a Triumph.” Those figures in the procession whom the Shelleyan speaker describes as fleeing before it “as it were a ghost, / Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath” (ll. 60–61), look a good deal more like the figures from the arch of Constantine, “as it were borne from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate (Letters, 2:86),56 than the figures from the arch of Titus, whose “lips are parted, a delicate mode of indicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at their destined resting place, & to express the eager respiration of their speed” (2:89). But the central figure also harks back to Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode and the lasting impression that that poem made on Shelley, most specifically in its exposition of the Neoplatonic doctrines of plenitude and anamnesis.57 The Shelleyan speaker’s first description of the parade, All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he came, or whence he went, or why He made one of the multitude [Poetry, ll. 47–49], depends on Wordsworth’s argument that

304

O

Shelley among Others

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. (WPW, ll. 58–61) Both poems figure all that is knowable of human life in terms of spatiotemporal motion. But while Wordsworth’s at least proposes that the motion takes the form of progress toward a terminus ad quem, a place of “setting,” in the lines that express a belief “In the faith that looks through death, /In years that bring the philosophic mind” (ll. 185–86), Shelley’s does not.58 While the object of such faith probably exists, 59 it cannot be apprehended, visually or otherwise, in this life. Thus, when the would-be tutelary figure of the shade, roused from what Shelley elsewhere calls a “reverie,”60 asks the Beatrice-like “shape all light” what lies beyond “this valley of perpetual dream,” imploring her, “Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why—/Pass not away upon the passing stream” (Poetry, ll. 352, 398–99), he is asking her the wrong questions, if, indeed, there are others, that are not wrong. The shade asks at a terrible cost to himself. As Edward Duffy observes, “‘The Triumph of Life’ is a history of Rousseau’s energies and their Urizenic curtailment. That which is curtailed is love and the sympathetic imagination; that which curtails them is egotism of pride and intellect.”61 Like Asia’s questions in her interview with Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, the shade’s questions bespeak their own answers. The egotism apparent in the repetition of the first-person singular pronoun, and the resultant confounding of the I-Thou dyad with the I-It, 62 mark the shade’s failure to recognize two of the central tenets that Shelley proclaims in “On Life”: that “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”; and “The relations of things remain unchanged by whatever system” (Poetry, 477–78). Unlike Rousseau’s Pygmalion, also discussed by Duffy, who brings Galatea to life with a statement proclaiming his imaginative empathy (“il me suffira de vivre en elle” [it suffices for me to live in her]), 63 the shade operates on the premise elle se suffira de vivre en moi (it suffices for her to live in me), reducing the “shape all light” to the sum of

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

305

his needs, and extinguishing that light in the process. What the shade sees, then, is not the “shape all light”’s vision, but his own. Some crucial differences between two parallel passages present the distinction that Shelley wishes to draw between the two speakers of The Triumph. Not choosing to ask, or even to speculate, on whence he came, or where he is, and why, the Shelleyan speaker finds all traces of the triumph’s origins and ends effaced. Having observed “Maidens and youths” transformed to “foully disarrayed” old people, the Shelleyan speaker comments that he is presently unable to say where the chariot hath Past over them; nor other trace I find But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath Is spent upon the desert shore. (ll. 161–64) In contrast, the shade, after his “brain became as sand/Where the first wave had more than half erased/The track of deer on desert Labrador” (ll. 405–7), claims subsequent access to “a new Vision never seen before” (l. 411). In this vision, the lights of heaven are extinguished and the warm light of the sun turns cold. The difference between the total erasure that the Shelleyan speaker reports and the partial erasure that the shade reports is the latter’s ego-involvement in pursuing his vision. The significance of the shape’s imperative, “Arise and quench thy thirst,” followed by a draught of “bright Nepenthe” (ll. 359, 400), has been addressed by a number of commentators. 64 But none has tied this response to one of the shade’s foundational predications of the shape’s ultra-or prelinguistic origins with the One: “Thou comest from the realm without a name” (l. 396). Nor has anyone previously discussed the tension between this predication and the medial position that the user of language, even figurative language, finds herself or himself in repeatedly. The shade himself speaks from a liminal position, 65 between day and night, “as one between desire and shame/Suspended” (ll. 394–95). 66 The very use of figurative language to create thought and take the measure of the universe is what consigns the individual to a liminal or medial position.67 It is worth remembering that “A Janus-Visaged Shadow” (l. 94) drives the chariot—the figure either is the conqueror in whose honor the triumph is being held, or he is the conqueror’s driver. Janus is the Roman god of the threshold (L. limen).68

306

O

Shelley among Others

The two principal speakers of the poem recall coming to consciousness by means of language in precisely such positions. The Shelleyan narrator recalls, “the Deep/Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head” (11. 27–28). The shade finds himself “Under a mountain, which from unknown time/ Had yawned into a cavern high and deep” (11. 312–13). These originary moments suggest that in mediating ultra-or prelinguistic noumenal reality, figurative language risks reducing it to readily reifiable categories, the more so if the speaker operates from a position of egoinvolvement or ego-investment. And even the most astutely selfless speaker cannot totally avoid such involvement or investment. For instance, the Shelleyan narrator, situated at his medial site, figures the red light of the dawning sun, which symbolizes the originary site of the One, in the following terms: “The smokeless altars of the mountain snows/Flamed above crimson clouds” (11. 5–6). “All is contained in each” (1. 792), as Ahasuerus tells Mahmud. The figuring of mountaintops bathed in the red light of dawning day as “smokeless altars” implies the bloody, smoking alternative, and as such the figure anticipates biblical narratives such as those of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4), and of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22). 69 Narratives such as these provide justification and a basis for altar worship, burnt offerings, and even autos-da-fé, a preoccupation of Shelley’s from the time of Queen Mab and central to the plot of The Revolt of Islam. The irony of this figuration as formulated by the Shelleyan speaker is that burnt offerings are closely linked to the cooking and eating of flesh. 70 In the mouth of a committed vegetarian such as Shelley, the figure enacts in miniature one of the ways in which language, even poetic language, harbors the potential to betray its speaker. Analogously, the figuring of the calyces of the flowers as “censers” filled with “orient incense” that “Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent/Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air” (11. 11–14) anticipates the burning incense that accompanies the Catholic liturgy, and evokes the aura of that religion’s mystery and mystification, which filled Shelley with revulsion. Although not uttered by the shade, the figuring does create an interesting tension in “The Triumph.” Rousseau came to England in 1776 as the result of being driven from the European continent. (He had fled France in 1762 to avoid the execution of arrest warrants issued because of the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse [1762].) The Catholic Church played a leading role in seeing to it that the warrants were issued.71 Nor does the shade fare any better. His figuring of trees budding in April,

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

307

“When the forest tops began to burn/With kindling green” (11. 309–10), anticipates other kinds of burning, such as those just noted, as well as forest fires, both generally, and as a metaphor for the holocaust of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic era that followed. And the shade’s characterization of the originary site of his coming to language poses huge problems. It may be that those who visit the site “must needs forget/All pleasure and all pain, all hate and love” (11. 318–19). But the examples of a mother whose “only child. . . died upon her breast/At eventide,” and a deposed king, “The crown of which his brow was dispossest” (11. 321–24) prefigure the pain of losing a young child, with which the Shelleys were all too familiar, as well as tyranny and its overthrow, most likely by another tyrant. The shade’s failure, upon drinking the nepenthe, to obtain answers to his questions about the One in particular and about origins and ends more generally marks him as a thinker or poet whose “head . . . poisons the gifts of his heart,”72 albeit one of the best of that class.73 The nepenthe itself is proffered neither with the intent to deceive, as in the case of Milton’s Comus proffering it to the lady,74 nor with the intent to foster a redemptive vision, 75 but with the intent to palliate the pain and suffering of selfhood that afflicts the shade—and virtually every other language user—by dint of becoming ego-inscribed in a liminal or medial position by the very language that brings the speaker to consciousness in the first place. Nepenthe, in other words, palliates the pain of the human condition, of the parade, of the passage of a life about which one may speak, but a life that the subject is powerless to understand, let alone to alter. The effect of the nepenthe is described in the Odyssey as that of “an herb that banishes all care, sorrow, and ill humour. Whoever drinks wine thus drugged cannot shed a single tear all the rest of the day, not even though his father and mother both of them drop down dead, or he sees a brother or son hewn to pieces before his very eyes.”76 As it works in the Odyssey, so it works on the shade. The nepenthe allows him to encounter a most painful vision, to keep a steady eye on it, and to record it without succumbing to the pain. The shade has his valedictory vision of the “shape all light,” who disappears as The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep, A light from Heaven whose half-extinguished beam

308

O

Shelley among Others

Through the sick day in which we wake to weep Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost. (11. 352, 428–31) Here, the shade echoes darkly the Intimations Ode. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar: ................. . At length the Man perceives it [i.e., the vision] die away, And fade into the light of common day. (WPW, 11. 58–61, 75–76) The mention of weeping, the fact that the triumph is situated in a “mysterious dell” set between two “opposing steep[s],” and the presence of phantoms who serve as “A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained/In drops of sorrow” (Poetry, 11. 470, 515–16) combine to identify the site of the parade as a vale (veil?) of tears, as well as a “forest” (1. 436)—a descendant of the selva oscura, or “dark wood” that Dante finds himself in at the beginning of the Inferno.77 The shade describes the scene as a wonder worthy of the rhyme Of him who from the lowest depths of Hell Through every Paradise and through all glory Love led serene. (11. 471–74) While Dante is guided from the dark forest by Vergil, his precursor and a tutelary spirit sent by Beatrice to guide him to the brink of the Earthly Paradise, the shade has no such guide. This lack is fitting, since Rousseau in life repudiated the very system of religious belief that sponsored both Dante’s guide and his idealized progress to the paradise of living, eternal love. But the lack should not be read as a judgment against the shade, who speaks both his and Shelley’s mind concerning the distorting effect of Dante’s Catholicism on his poetry. Dante, according to the shade, returned to tell In words of hate and awe the wondrous story How all things are transfigured, except Love. (11. 474–76)78

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

309

“Transfigured” says it all. Love may give rise to metaphor, but it cannot itself be metaphorized in any truthfully totalizing way—not as godhead, not even as authoritative knowledge. The shade’s godless “grove” (1. 480), situated ironically under the rainbow’s “wind-wing’d pavilion” (1. 441),79 abounds with history’s figural detritus, all created upon mistaken premises, upon metaphors abused to foster the will to temporal authority, power, and control. In the shade’s words, “The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air/Was peopled with dim forms” (11. 480, 483)—Lucretian simulacra that represent outworn creeds and their underwriting metaphors, “ideas, superstitions, and passions given off by men” (468n.). Such “phantoms” hark back to the Phantasm of Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound, who is reified by the curse of Prometheus as these are by the will to temporal authority, power, and control, are what ultimately comes of the romance of dematerialization. Love, although it may have given rise to these mistaken figurations, abides elsewhere. In the absence of Love and the God equated by the likes of Dante and Milton with it, the dark forest takes on elements of the underworld of Lucian’s Menippus, as well as of Dante’s Inferno. Both are environments in which poetic justice—getting one’s just deserts for the abuses of this life illegitimately spoken into existence or sanctioned by means of such speech—is of paramount importance. As Reiman and Powers note, the “ideas, superstitions, and passions” are verbal artifacts “given off by men,” and as such they demean and reduce their speakers to their terms. To take just one account reminiscent of Shelley’s critique in The Mask—that of how the language of and in support of established church and monarchical state reduces the speaking subject: Some made a cradle of the ermined capes Of kingly mantles, some upon the tiar Of pontiffs sate like vultures, others played Within the crown which girt with empire A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made Their nests in it; the old anatomies Sate hatching their bare brood under the shade

310

O

Shelley among Others

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes To reassume the delegated power Arrayed in which these worms did monarchize Who make the earth their charnel. (11. 495–505) The dead have their own hell, and welcome to it. But what of the living? The shade notes the pernicious effect of the dead letter on Love manifesting as the beauty, strength, hope, and desire of the living. From every form the beauty slowly waned, From every firmest limb and fairest face The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left The action and the shape without the grace Of life, the marble brow of youth was cleft With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone Desire like a lioness bereft Of its last cub, glared ere it died. (11. 519–26) Soon, these, too, are reduced to “dead leaves” (1. 528). In the process that the shade narrates and describes, unity gives way to disunified misapprehension, imagination gives way to reification, inspired apprehension gives way to code law, anyone who participates earnestly in the triumphal procession becomes the metonym, the church and/or state of her/himself.80 Each, like himself and like each other were, At first, but soon distorted, seemed to be Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air; And of this stuff the car’s creative ray Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there As the sun shapes the clouds—thus, on the way Mask after mask fell from the countenance And form of all, and long before the day

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

311

Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven’s glance The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died. (ll. 530–39)81 The shade’s account reprises as an imaginative universal the coming to consciousness figured as a sunrise, just as in his own account and that of the Shelleyan speaker. But the car, which was formerly presented as “a cold bright car” (l. 434), has become something more nearly like the car of Apollo as well as the Merkabah. It now has a “creative ray,” and its action on the perishing mortals is likened to the way that “the sun shapes clouds.” And ultimately, it is this “creative ray” that is responsible for “all the busy phantoms that were there.” The “creative ray” is also responsible for the distortion that the shade observes. In A Defence, Shelley makes it seem as though distortion is the unfortunate outcome of subscribing to a belief system such as Christianity. “The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised” (Poetry, 498), he argues. But the shade himself, upon the report of the Shelleyan speaker, first appears to be “an old root which grew/To strange distortion out of the hill side” (ll. 182– 83). The speaker both acknowledges the fact of the speaker’s religious and political radicalism—the Latin for root is radix, which in its turn is the root of radical—and comments on the contribution made by this singular radicalism to the shade’s “strange distortion.”82 To distort is a verb formed from the past participle of the Latin distorquere, distortus, meaning most nearly to twist (torquere) apart (dis), to torture. Distortion is a symbolic function in The Triumph, Shelley’s dramatization of the outcome of “the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose” (Prose, 188), the twisting of a trope (from Gr. trepein ‘to turn’) in a direction other than the one it ought to go in. In the historical Rousseau’s case, one such metaphor is “natural man,” as discussed in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. By appropriating that metaphor from Aristotle’s Politics and proceeding to treat it as a metonymic term that describes an actual state of human existence, 83 Rousseau comes up with an account of origins that legislates his preferences for systems of government and other forms of social organization. But the account becomes an ideology which, in its turn, fosters hatred, among other sentiments. 84 One object of such hatred is the metonymic “ first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of say-

312

O

Shelley among Others

ing‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him[, who] was the real founder of civil society.”85 The shade’s apparent eyelessness (ll. 187–88) and putative sightlessness, the subject of some debate,86 should be understood as resulting from exactly the same kind of execration of tyranny and inequality that enfranchises them and makes the speaker-writer in question blind to his own role in the process. Rousseau, the foe of tyrants, like Prometheus, is “eyeless in hate” (I.9). The shade’s own summation of his life. “I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did, and died” (l. 200), corroborates both his Promethean enterprise of bringing light and the resultant hatred. Another way to look at the condition is to think about its development as the result of a failure, with the coming of the light of day, to keep the stars, which the shade figures as “heaven’s living eyes” (l. 392), in view. With the onset of the shade’s “new Vision” (l. 411), . . . the fair shape waned in the coming light As veil by veil the silent splendour drops From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite Of sunrise. (ll. 412–15) As “heaven’s living eyes” go out, so do the stars in the shade’s eyes. Rousseau’s symbolic life history is a cautionary tale for Shelley.87 Given such matters as his depressive state of mind, the deaths of his children, Mary’s increasing estrangement, and, above all, the questionable success of his writing career, he had every reason to embrace a cause, political, literary, or both, to focus on some object of hatred. And given the fact that only “the sacred few” (l. 128), such as “they of Athens and Jerusalem” (l. 134) have been able to flee “back like eagles to their native noon” (l. 131), Shelley sees slim hope of avoiding the fate of the shade. He is overcome By [his] own heart alone, which neither age Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb Could temper to its object. (ll. 240–43)88 Worse still is the fate of those

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

313

who wore Mitres and helms and crown. or wreaths of light, Signs of thought’s empire over thought; their lore Taught them not this—to know themselves; their might Could not repress the mutiny within. (ll. 209–13) Chief among these are “Voltaire/Fredric, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold /Chained hoary anarchs, demagogue, and sage” (ll. 235–37), who are conquered by life outright. 89 The “mutiny” in question is a decision not to abide by the rules—in this instance, the rules of intellectual engagement. To use the distinction proposed in A Defence, these avatars of the Enlightenment confused the “vitally metaphorical” with words that “become . . . signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts” (482). Theirs was a cold light glimpsed in “the new Vision and its cold bright car” (l. 434), not the “shape all light” (l. 352), and most definitely not sunlight. As a result, as Shelley argues in A Philosophical View of Reform, “they told the truth, but not the whole truth” (Prose, 233). 90 According to Duffy, the besetting sin of the shade is “the failure to recognize the ‘shape all light’ [l. 352] as another salutary and melodious fluidity. Instead, she strikes him only as a threatening ‘blot’ [l. 330]. This is why Rousseau has been forced into Life’s triumph. Not that he has never heard a different tune [sic]. Rather he has failed to temper himself to it, failed to recognize the lady’s dance as identical with the waters of life—’the fountains whose melodious dew/Out of their mossy cells forever burst’ [ll. 67–68].”91 Interestingly, Shelley, at the time of writing The Triumph, was embarked on a strategy calculated to reduce the risk of ending up as the shade does. 92 The poems dedicated to Jane Williams replay with something approaching obsession the figuring of Jane herself as some variant of “a shape all light,” to whom the Shelleyan speaker responds appropriately by not reducing her to the sum of his needs, and by expressing a faith in, but not adverting to, a higher realm where art, desire, and devotion are one in light. 93 In “One Word Is Too Often Profaned” (1822; 1824), for example, the Sheleyan speaker qualifies the desire that motivates the poem by insisting that it is more than the usual erotic itch.

314

O

Shelley among Others

I can not give what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star, Or the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow? (ll. 9–16) And in “To Jane” (1822; 1832), the Shelleyan speaker concludes, Though the sound overpowers Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one. (ll. 19–24) To go back to the moment of the shade’s entry: The Shelleyan speaker’s aside—”I would have added is here all amiss?”—no less than his other questions, would have been, and indeed are, greeted by the shade’s answer, “Life” (ll. 179–80). All is amiss, in the sense that the relationship between Love, and the life and death that Love gives rise to, are beyond human understanding. We die into life, as Keats’s Apollo does, and we live into death. From the perspective of this life eros and thanatos are ultimately one and the same drive. And to attempt to subvert this arrangement by saying “Abide, thou art so fair,” as the shade implicitly does in asking his questions,94 but as Goethe’s Faust never does, is to become the devil’s chattel. Love is ineluctably Other. 95 Even its name, like its primal nature, embraces its opposite. And humanity’s place beneath its pervading presence is, as in the case of Blake’s “Little Black Boy” (1794), is to “learn to bear the beams of love” (BPP, l. 14) and to memorialize that bearing in inspired forms, language preeminent among these. Paradoxically, it is this ineluctable otherness of Love that provides the basis for understanding its relationship to life, a question for which the Shelleyan speaker remains intent on seeking an answer, the answer, near the end of the fragment. The shade’s preliminary silence in response to the question, “Then, what is Life?” (Poetry, l. 544), is eloquent.

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

315

the cripple cast His eye upon the car which now had rolled Onward, as if that look must be his last. (ll. 544–46) Life is a metaphor for Love,96 or the earthly vehicle for an unearthly tenor, in the sense that it, too, is ineluctably other, as it becomes other for the shade in that eloquent final glance. The very first word of his reply, “Happy” (l. 546), suggests perhaps a shift to something resembling the Keatsian use of the word in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the word signifies both its usual acceptation and another that is a virtual opposite, meaning something closer to subject to happenstance than to joyful.97 Where would the fragment have gone? My guess is that Shelley intended to follow the seven-part structure of Petrarch’s Trionfi, introducing either a total of seven speakers, or the Shelleyan speaker and seven tutelary figures.98 The next, given Shelley’s comparison of Rousseau to him in the letter of 18 July 1816 to Hogg, would most likely have been Milton. Given the fragment’s laudatory mention of him (ll. 269–73), Bacon might well have been next. Dante would no doubt have appeared, and Petrarch, Jesus, Socrates, and Homer may well have. No doubt the “distorted notions of invisible things” would have colored the testimony of all of these earlier figures, save for Jesus and Socrates, and the stories of all except perhaps of those two would have been the same in their essentials. Why tell such a story repeatedly? What other story is there for Shelley to tell unless or until he can attain and sustain the vision glimpsed in the finale of “To Jane: The Invitation”? When the night is left behind In the deep east dun and blind And the blue noon over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal Sun. (ll. 62–69) It may be the case, as Paul de Man argues, that “The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists else-

316

O

Shelley among Others

where, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.”99 But the lines from “To Jane: The Invitation” quoted earlier profess a faith that randomness may yet yield conjunction rather than disparity, and that perfect unity, though it may be a singularity, may yet be realized, if only by means of the human mind’s imaginings.

Moving toward the Shade of Shelley

O

317

318

O

Shelley among Others

O Notes

Introduction 1. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), esp. 5, 115. I discuss Shelley’s idea of language in relation to the “New Philology” in “Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Language of Poetry,” Style 15:4 (1981), 382–400. 2. On Shelley and skepticism, see C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954); Lloyd Abbey, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979); and Terence Allan Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1988). On Shelley and Hume, see, e.g., Lisa M. Steinmann, “‘These Common Woes’: Shelley and Wordsworth,” in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 66; on Shelley and Drummond, see Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, and Jerrold E. Hogle, “Shelley as Revisionist: Power and Belief in Mont Blanc,” in Blank, The New Shelley, 108–9. 3. Parenthetical references to Poetry are to line; book and line; act, scene, and line; or page. 4. See John Sallis, Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1975), 401–12. 5. Here and throughout, I attempt to use the concept of transference as it used by Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4– 18, 43–44, esp. 15. Transference is the metaphor-powered (metaphor from Gk. metapherein ‘to bear across’) “transpositional drive” that “literally indicates any ‘bearing across’ between places, moments, thoughts, words, or persons—while adding the ‘conveyance’ of any perception without total inversion into a location, figure, or moment not its own.”

O

A Perpetual Orphic 319 Song

O

319

6. See Letters, 1:69, 77; 2:487. 7. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Fletcher Gyles, 1738–41), 2:81–83, 146. 8. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 3d ed. [1744], rev. tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), 154 (secs. 459–60). For an interesting gloss on Shelley’s comment that “Every language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem,” see also ibid., 319 (sec. 856). See also Cicero, De Oratore (The Making of an Orator), rev. ed., 2 vols., tr. Horace Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), 2:100–101, 136–39. (III.xxxii.19, xliv.173); Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, in On the Origin of Language, tr. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 132–33; and Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 11–12, 167. 9. See Susan Hawk Brisman, “‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound,” Studies in Romanticism 16:1 (1977), 57; Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 92; and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 204. See also my “Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Language of Poetry,” 398n. 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in Moran and Gode, On the Origin of Language, 12. See also Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 147–48, 151, and James O’Rourke, “Death and Error in ‘Shelley Disfigured,’” Criticism 34:1 (1992), 20–21. 11. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:160. See also Hans Aarsleff, “Wordsworth, Language, and Romanticism,” in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), 372–81, esp. 379. 12. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 135. See also Berlin, Vico and Herder, 167. 13. Warburton, Divine Legation, 2:83–84. It seems worth noting that Shelley sets his quasi-historical prophecies, such as The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Hellas (1821), either in the Middle East or at its threshold. See also Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, Translated from the Latin of the Right Rev. Robert Lowth, D. D., by G. Gregory, F.A.S., 2d ed. (1787; rpt. Boston: Buckingham, 1815), 50–51, 67. 14. To restate Shelley’s disagreement with Warburton (and all other orthodox theists) in a slightly different manner: “Poetry” is, for Shelley writing in A Defence,

320 320

O O

Notes Shelley to among Pages 4-7 Others

“the God . . . of the world” (Poetry, 503; emphasis added), not God outright, and not an aversion to a transcendent deity in some higher state or of some higher origin. 15. Vico, The New Science, 347 (sec. 948). 16. Ibid., 426 (sec. 1111). 17. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, text established by Robert Derathé, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964), 464; tr. and qtd., in de Man, Allegories of Reading, 221. See also Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 51, who states that “the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ are descended from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, ‘to breathe,’” and Stuart Curan, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975), 219–20n. 18. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 8, 14, 15–16, 36, 38. It seems probable to me that Shelley has the Cratylus, and perhaps the Phaedrus, in mind at least as much as the Republic when he says, at the conclusion of A Defence, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” (Poetry, 508). 19. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 116–17, 120–21. Contrastive distinction is a sine qua non of any discourse of descriptive linguistics. See also Berlin, Vico and Herder, 151 167. 20. See Vico, The New Science, 141–42 (sec. 434); Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 17, 19, 21–22; and Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755), in Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conway Bondanella, tr. Julia Conway Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 34. 21. See William Drummond, Academical Questions, vol. 1 [sic], introd. Terence Allan Hoagwood (1805; rpt. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1984), 28, 37. Shelley follows the lead of Drummond. In On Life (1819), Shelley declares, “Perhaps the most clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found in Sir W. Drummond’s Academical Questions” (Poetry, 476). 22. Parenthetical references to WPW are to line or book and line. 23. This idea of recapitulation is discussed by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Revolution and Tradition in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 201–17. 24. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 49, 72–73. 25. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 142–47. 26. Ibid., 147. 27. Ibid., 147–49. 28. Ibid., 149–52.

OO

A Perpetual Notes to Pages Orphic8-15 Song

321 321

29. Ibid., 154–55. Shelley might not see synonymy and parataxis as flaws of originary languages. For him, poetry operates on “the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself” (Poetry, 480). See also Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method: An Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), 267. 30. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 155. 31. See Jaynes, The Bicameral Mind, 49, 138. According to Jaynes, metaphor generates the new language that creates “previously unspeakable distinctions” that describe new experiences. Moreover, “Language allows the metaphors of things to increase perception and attention, and so to give new names to things of new importance.” 32. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 159. 33. Ibid., 160. 34. See Warburton, Divine Legation, 2: 86; Vico, The New Science, 3 (sec. 2); Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 68; and Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 147, 153. 35. Conceptually if not in its aesthetic implications (and applications), Shelleyan renovation has a good deal in common with the imagist doctrine of “make it new.” See Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber & Faber, 1934). 36. See Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 117–21. It is highly significant that Ahasuerus discusses rather than declaims; that he speaks in a dramatic, not in a pastoral or more generally lyric context; and that his speech arises out of dialectical (and dialogical) engagement with Mahmud. 37. If the lion were to lie down with the lamb, that occasion would mark both the end of predation and the end of a social economy that institutes and justifies social inequality. See Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 138. 38. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 36. See also Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 101; and David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 34. 39. John Thelwall, The Tribune: A Political Publication Consisting Chiefly of the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall, 3 vols., 2:220; cited in Smith, Politics of Language, 36. 40. Smith, Politics of Language, 9. 41. Ibid., 41. Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1987), 237, observes that “Thomas Paine’s

322 322

O O

Notes Shelley to among Pages 15-19 Others

revolutionary concept that the monarch governs by consent of the governed provided a valuable new model for social relations upon which Shelley built his theory of verbal interaction.” 42. Smith, Politics of Language, 2–4. 43. Ibid., 30. 44. See Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), 4. These apparently self-contradictory stances caused no difficulties for the Chartists. See Bouthaina Shaaban, “Shelley in the Chartist Press,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983), 42; and “The Romantics in the Chartist Press,” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1988). See also Michael Scrivener, “Shelley and Radical Artisan Poetry,” Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993), 22. 45. Smith, Politics of Language, 6. 46. Morton, Revolution in Taste, 183–84, points out that the reforms leading to equality of this sort depend in their turn on dietary reform. Duff, Romance, 136–37, points out that Godwin saw Shelley’s Address as betraying chivalric ideals, a charge that Shelley was at pains to argue down. 47. See Behrendt, Audiences, 62–74, esp. 63–67. Behrendt correctly notes that, in a series of letters to Godwin (see Letters, 1:243, 258–59, 267–68), Shelley both announces and repudiates his own decision “wilfully [to] vulgarize the language of this pamphlet in order to reduce the remarks it contains to the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry who have been too long brutalized by vice and ignorance” (Letters, 1:258). But as Behrendt also notes, Shelley discusses the imperative for any “prophet-orator” to undertake such “vulgarizing” in the preface to Julian and Maddalo (1818–19) and the Essay on Christianity (1817?), albeit “to a different class” (Letters, 1:259) than that of the peasantry, Irish or otherwise. 48. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 288–89. 49. See ibid., 271. 50. See my “Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Language of Poetry,” 387–88. 51. John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, or, the Diversions of Purley, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 1:398–99. 52. Smith, Politics of Language, 118–19. 53. Tooke, Diversions of Purley, 1:51. 54. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller, introd. Léon Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 25–26. Shelley’s “certain rhythm or order” has strong affinities with Kristeva’s notion of the chora, borrowed “from Plato’s Timaeus,” a text with which Shelley was most certainly familiar. 55. Smith, Politics of Language, 202–4. Smith notes that upon his return to England from America in 1800, Cobbett had the reputation of a spokesperson,

O O

A Notes Perpetual to Pages Orphic 19-23 Song

323 323

albeit a vulgar one, for the conservative cause. Frederick L. Jones’s characterization of Cobbett as “a life-long political radical who was a thorn in the side of the conservative government” (Letters, 1:318n.) is inaccurate and misleading. 56. See Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 6–19 and n. 57. Parenthetical references to SPW are to page, line, or canto and line. 58. For a general discussion of Lowth and Murray’s popularity, see Smith, Politics of Language, 4–5. John Entick (1703–73) was certainly one of the arbiters of language in the mold of Harris, Johnson, and Lowth. Entick’s Speling Dictionary (1764) was popular enough to be printed in editions of 20,000 copies (DNB 6:796). Lindley Murray (1745–1826) saw his English Grammar go through fifty editions between 1795 and 1816 (DNB 12:1294–95).

Chapter 1: Figures That Look Before and After 1. See John W. Wright, Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1970), 17–18. 2. Ibid., 19. 3. Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), 7, holds a similar view of eloquence. 4. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 59–60. 5. Ibid., 59, 61, 81. 6. Ibid., 62, 63, 81. 7. Wright, Myth of Metaphor, 20–21. See also Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976), 50–52. Ricoeur argues that the essence of metaphor is the “twist” that affects in our understanding of both terms. When metaphor no longer possesses such a twist, it is dead. Ricoeur borrows the notion of the “twist” from Monroe K. Beardsley, “The Metaphorical Twist” (1962), in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. Mark Johnson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1981), 105–22. 8. As I suggest in my “Shelley, Vico, Monboddo, and the Language of Poetry,” the affinities between Vico’s thought and Shelley’s concerning the problem of knowledge understood as the problem of language seem clear and compelling. 9. Vico, The New Science, 129–30. 10. Leslie Brisman, “‘The Mysterious Tongue’: Shelley and the Language of Christianity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23:3 (1981), 389, notes that “A metaphor, like the modern Greek word for truck to which it is related, is a vehicle of conveyance.”

324 324

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among23-27 Others

11. “The great secret of morals,” according to Shelley, “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. . . . The great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause” (Poetry, 487–88). Liselotte Gumpel, Metaphor Reexamined: A Non-Aristotelian Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 134, characterizes metaphor as “an expanded form of transference.” Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 230 characterizes “the distribution of transference” as a “continuous going-out to others beyond any present circle.” White, Kaironomia, 8, states that “Kaironomia will transpire as eroticized thought.” 12. Vico, The New Science, 130 (sec. 406). 13. Ibid., 130 (secs. 405, 406). 14. See Jacques Lacan, Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, tr. and comm. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), 187. In Lacanian terms, this is a classic encounter of the phallus with the fetish, of “(unconscious) desire and . . . (conscious) demand” with “a metonymic displacement.” Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 16, observes that “desire is carried on, generated, and revived perpetually, by a moving recollection seeking an image that looks elsewhere to yet another point. Hence, because . . . ‘primary repression’ . . . keeps the supposed ‘lost origin’ (the mother, usually) forever distant and forbidden, this doubleness or tripleness (‘veil after veil’) turns toward still other traces and images into and through which its energy can be extended (or ‘cathected’).” 15. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 64–65. See also Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 112– 17. 16. Vico, The New Science, 129–30 (secs. 404–6). 17. Compare the concluding stanza of Constancy, in CPW, 1: ll. 25–32. Coleridge queries the object-namesake of the title thusly: And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without a tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

O O

to Pages 27-29 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

325 325

See also G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 8–12; Lacan, Language of the Self, 179–85. The gesture of giving “A human heart to what ye cannot know” seems to echo wryly the panorama of charity depicted in Wordsworth’s The Old Cumberland Beggar, which concludes by justifying “needed kindness, for this single cause, /That we have all of us one human heart” (WPW, ll. 151–52). 18. Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 41. See also P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 107–8. 19. See Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, tr. John Henry Freese (1926; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), 365–67, III.iii.4 (1406a). The lack of a name may be the result of Shelley making use of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which metonymy and synecdoche are not named as such. However, Aristotle’s discussion of the fourth of the abuses of metaphor leading to “frigidity of style” presents instances that both verge on the logic of metonymy and are, in Shelley’s terms, “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.” Shelley was well versed in Cicero, having read in his collected works no later than 14 October (Letters, 2:471) and terming him on 26 November, 1813, “one of the most admirable characters the world ever produced” (Letters, 1:380). Shelley’s reading in Quintilian is rather difficult to document; however, it seems inconceivable that Quintilian’s Institutes would not have been part of the curriculum at Eton. Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetical Thoughts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 110–11, makes the connection, moreover, arguing that Julian and Maddalo (1819) is Shelley’s experiment with mixing, even confounding, the contrasting rhetorical strategies of ethos and pathos. 20. See Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 3. 21. Roman Jakobson, “Concluding Statement,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 375. 22. See Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 8. Hoagwood makes it clear that from the perspective of Shelley’s skeptical commitment, the concept of the real —or, to use Hoagwood’s term, “truth”—is at best problematic and at worst extremely vexed. In place of “truth,” the skeptic prefers to talk of “the relative property of probability.” 23. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 63; and Earl J. Schulze, Shelley’s Theory of Poetry: A Reappraisal (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 109–10. 24. John Freeman, “Shelley’s Early Letters,” in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Greynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983),

326 326

O O

Shelley among29-30 Others Notes to Pages

esp. 109, 111, cites this letter as an example of how Shelley used Hitchener’s “selfcritical trait . . . to become, as he later put it, ‘a strict anatomist’ of his own mind.” 25. See Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” tr. Jan Miel, Yale French Studies 36–37 (1966), 112–13, 122; Frederic Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis, the Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 353–56; and White, Kaironomia, 110–11. 26. Julia Kristeva, “Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents,” tr. Léon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 247. See also Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 106, who discusses Prometheus before the renunciation of his curse in terms of the Nietzschean categories set down in “Of Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense.” Although Hogle is correct in principle, he accepts too uncritically Nietzsche’s characterization of the “mobile army.” It contains metonymies and anthropomorphisms, to be sure, but it lacks metaphors, at least the sort of originary metaphors specified by Shelley in A Defence. 27. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969), 137, sees the amphisbaena as related to other serpents in the poem, including “the ouroboros, serpent swallowing its own tail, hermetic emblem of Blake’s Orc cycle and of the cycle which struggles against eternity in Shelley’s vision as well.” 28. For another reading of Promethean dualism, see White, Kaironomia, 112–13. 29. See Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), 68; Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 268; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 28. Looking for a way beyond “the perverse negation, the fetishism, necessary to maintain the Symbolic,” Oliver notes that “The mother negates the Symbolic order even while insuring its generation. Her differences with Kristeva duly noted, Gelpi’s account of what Shelley attempts in Prometheus Unbound seems to be precisely the sort of revision of the Oedipal account, the same sort of resolution of the double-bind, that Oliver ascribes to Kristeva. 30. Kristeva, “Freud and Love,” 243, argues that “Metaphor should be understood as movement toward the discernible, a journey towards the visible. Anaphora, gesture, indication would probably be more adequate terms for this sundered unity. . . . Aristotle refers to epiphora: a generic terms for metaphorical motility previous to any observation of a figurative meaning. . . . The object for love is a metaphor for the subject.”

O O

to Pages 30-31 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

327 327

31. Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1972), 125. White, Kaironomia, 61, makes much the same point. Both analyses owe a good deal to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which posits as the creative principle a “play impulse” (Spieltrieb) that mediates between “the spiritual principle of the subjective will” (Formtrieb) and “a bodily principle representing human rootedness in history” (Sinntrieb). 32. On the distinction between the skeptical account of reality and the dogmatic account, see Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 8. 33. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 226. 34. Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1977), 130–31, notes that “Shelley read the Bible regularly and critically throughout his life.” Shelley’s fascination with the Bible arose from his “quite exceptional hunger for certainty in these matters [i.e., Was there a God? Was there an existence after death? Were our lives truly meaningful?].” See also Chernaik, Lyrics of Shelley, 91–94. 35. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 28, 60. Shelley’s generally heterodox and particularly Gnostic sympathies are a matter of common knowledge, as is his antipatriarchalism. His reading surveyed the controversy surrounding Gnosticism and other heterodoxies, and included the letters of Athanasius, the letters of Justin of Samaria, and Maimbourg’s History of Arianism (Letters, 2:468, 477, 479). See also Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 76. In the fragmentary text “The Assassins” (1814), Shelley introduces “a little congregation of Christians” that evince “a character superior in singleness and sincere self-apprehension to the slavery of pagan customs and the gross delusions of antiquated superstition. Many of their opinions considerably resembled those of a sect afterwards known by the name of Gnostics” (Prose, 145). This fragment, recently discussed by Ya-Feng Wu, “The Assassins: Shelley’s Appropriation of History,” Keats-Shelley Review, n.s., 9 (1995), depends, according to Ya-Feng on four sources: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776–87), Delisle de Sales’s Le Vieux de la Montagne (1799), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Marco Polo’s Travels (ca. 1296). Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 122–23, discusses the role of Gnostic thought in Julian and Maddalo. 36. See Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, 48–69. 37. Trimorphic Protennoia, tr. John D. Turner, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977). All citations of the texts themselves are parenthetical, by codex number, binding order, chapter, and verse. 38. Allogenes, tr. John D. Turner and Orval S. Wintermute, in Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library.

328 328

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among31-34 Others

39. See, e.g., Max Black, “Metaphor” (1955), in Johnson, Philosophical Perspectives, 63–82, esp. 77–79; and Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 46–52. Black argues that metaphor operates on a principle of nonsubstitutive interaction. 40. One person’s metonymy is often another’s synecdoche. See M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), 66–67. Abrams defines metonymy as a figure in which “the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated. Thus ‘the crown’ or ‘the scepter’ can stand for a king.” Abrams defines synecdoche, on the other hand, as a figure in which “a part of something is used to signify the whole, or (more rarely) the whole is used to signify a part. . . . Milton refers to the corrupt clergy in Lycidas as ‘blind mouths.’” Abrams’s distinction between the two figures would seem to be that synecdoche operates on a logic of propinquity, whereas metonymy operates on a logic of participation. Both logics are substitutive rather than interactive. See also Gumpel, Metaphor Reexamined, 134. Following the lead of Quintilian, who says that metonymy and synecdoche are “not very different,” Gumpel characterizes the two interchangeably as operating on a part-for-whole logic, witness her description of the “‘metonymic’ relation of carefully spaced parts to the whole.” So, too, Roman Jakobson, in “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Selected Writings II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 255–56, defines metonymy as “a part for the whole,” in contradistinction to metaphor, which is “a whole for a whole.” Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), 281, disagrees with the move to conflate the two tropes. 41. On Shelley’s treatment of patriarchal ideology in Prometheus Unbound, see Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 180–81. See also Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 90. 42. Behrendt, Audiences, 198. 43. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 135–36, for a discussion of the “mimetic violence” of the poem, a violence that is enforced by the metonymically driven catechism in question. See Klancher, Reading Audiences, 132. 44. Masks and costumes do signify metonymically (or synecdochically). See Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), 346–47, who identifies the “Brazen Masks” editorial in the Examiner of 22 August as the source of Shelley’s conceit. Behrendt, Audiences, 198, sees appearances where I see metonyms. 45. “Ozymandias” is discussed at some length in chapter 2. 46. The point is made by Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 184–86, 238n. Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 200–205,

O O

to Pages 34-35 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

329 329

cites two other Hone-Cruikshank collaborations of December 1819 and January 1820, respectively: The Political House That Jack Built, The Man in the Moon, and The Political “A, Apple Pie.” 47. Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 185. 48. See Behrendt, Audiences, 200. 49. The interjection law! (or, in the non-Billingsgate variant form, lor!, from lord!) is a vulgarism, and as such it hints at the vulgarization of authority that Anarchy’s processional masque exemplifies. 50. See Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 35–82, esp. 70. Gelpi discusses the maternal role in the education of very young children, especially in the process of language acquisition. See also Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 206, who observes, “Earth, mother, liberty, seem to fuse into a libertarian spiritus mundi, a univocal symbol of both nurture and power.” 51. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 103–4, 109–10. His discussion of the relationship between language, gender, and reification in Prometheus Unbound has important affinities with my discussion of The Mask. 52. Plato, Symposium, 202e, tr. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1963). Shelley was at work translating the Symposium in July of 1818, if “only as an exercise to give Mary some idea of the manners & feelings of the Athenians–so different on many subjects from that of any other community that ever existed” (Letters, 2:20). Following James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1949), 390, and Webb, Violet in the Crucible, 7, I concur that “the Symposium was ‘one of the most important things in Shelley’s poetic life.’” 53. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Léon S. Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), 82. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); and my “Teaching Shelley’s Anatomy of Anarchy,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Poetry, ed. Spencer Hall (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 90–92. 54. See Behrendt, Audiences, 198. I disagree that Hope-Despair is a case in point of Shelley’s “ambivalent descriptions” in this poem. See also White, Kaironomia, 13–20. The identity of Hope-Despair, in addition to comporting with that of Love in Plato’s Symposium, comports with White’s characterization of kairos (“the right moment,” “the opportune”). Turning on “the doctrine of dissoi logoi [which] proposes that truth is self-contradictory, or riven by the strife of opposites,” the doctrine of “kairos entails a recognition of the antithetical nature of the truth, and consequently, of the provisional character of the logos of the moment.”

330 330

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among35-37 Others

55. Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 205–6, discusses “Ballad,” or “Young Parson Richards,” one of “a series of sociopolitical broadsides, including The Mask of Anarchy, fired off by Shelley in the years 1818–19. . . . The poem relates the pathetic, albeit scandalous, history of a hapless country girl, who is ruthlessly seduced then heartlessly abandoned by a sanctimonious Church of England Parson.” It seems clearly that Shelley drew no sharp distinctions between sexual politics and the national politics underwriting them. 56. See Cameron, The Golden Years, 125–27; Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 160–61. As a means of controlling unrest among the laboring classes during the national depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars, the government made a practice of infiltrating the ranks of militant labor with agents provocateur, whose task it was to incite the laborers to riot, then to testify against them in court. Speaking the language of the aggressor, if the aggressor were a secret agent such as the nefarious “Oliver,” could be fatal. 57. See Smith, Politics of Language, 30. That a visionary monologist enjoins the people of England to pursue the tactic of passive (and silent) resistance as the means to a heterological end is not a little ironic, even if the imagined speaker in this instance is “their Own indignant Earth” (Poetry, l. 139). Shelley obviously ventriloquizes that imagined speech. 58. And Shelley’s Jupiter is Jupiter Pluvius. See Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), 326–58, esp. 340–41. In the Essay on Christianity, Shelley observes, “According to Jesus Christ, God is neither the Jupiter who sends rain upon the earth [i.e., Jupiter Pluvius], nor the Venus through whom all living things are produced, nor the Vulcan who presides over the terrestrial element of fire, nor the Vesta that preserves the light which is enshrined in the sun and moon and stars” (Prose, 201). 59. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 183–85, discusses Asia as a type of the Venus Genetrix. 60. Greg Kucich, “The Spenserian Psychodrama of Prometheus Unbound,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12:2 (1988), argues persuasively for the influence of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1599) in general and the Despair episode in particular on Prometheus Unbound, the compositional dates of which bracket those of The Mask. 61. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 237–41, discusses these sources for the fourfaced “Charioteer” (l. 99) of The Triumph. 62. See Benedict de Spinoza, Ethic, 4th ed., tr. William Hale White, rev. Amelia Hutchinson Stirling (1923; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937), 13, 22 (props. XIV, XVIII). Shelley, who ordered the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Opera Posthuma of Spinoza no later than 2 January 1813 and translated the former of these (Letters, 1:347–48, 2:485), here seems very close to Spinoza’s propositions

O O

to Pages 37-40 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

331 331

concerning God as substance and cause, as these conceptions are expressed in the Ethic, one of the texts comprising the Opera Posthuma. Spinoza was inordinately aware, as was Shelley, of the human tendency to respond mistakenly to language as though it were the referential vehicle of a perfect correspondence between word and object. See Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 211, and Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley’s Thought (1936; rpt. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1965), 285. 63. See Eugenio Donato, “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécheut,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harrari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 230. 64. Parenthetical references to BPW are followed by plate and/or line or page numbers. In Blake’s poem, one effect of “the primeval Priests assum’d power”—the ascendancy of patriarchal religion, in other words—is “The petrific abominable chaos” of the world that Urizen speaks into existence. 65. Donald H. Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1969), 77, notes that the “oracular vapour” in question is the cause for which “men, like the misguided young idealist in Alastor, dissipate their energies in a vain frenzy that can be as dangerous to true inspiration as was the Maenads’ madness to Orpheus.” 66. See Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 152. Commenting on Asia’s insight, Cronin states, “She has realised that Demogorgon is not an oracle but an echo.” 67. See Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 79–138. 68. Ibid., 18. 69. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, tr. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 18. 70. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 271. 71. Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 5, proposes extending his treatment of Shelley’s philosophical prose to his poetry, especially Adonais, but states that this analysis “will form the matter of other books” not currently available. 72. See the poem prefatory to Milton (BPW, 1:13–16). 73. See William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York: Methuen, 1984), 9–10; Webb, Voice Not Understood, 184. Shelley’s view of Bacon is admittedly problematic. His own note to the assertion that “Lord Bacon was a poet” directs the reader not to The Advancement, but to “Filium Labyrinthi and the Essay on Death particularly” (Poetry, 484–85 and n.). Nevertheless, Shelley does cite The Advancement, III.i, with approval when he characterizes the “similtudes or relations” apprehended by the “vitally metaphorical” language of poetry as being “finely said by Lord

332 332

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among41-47 Others

Bacon to be ‘the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world,’” much as he subsequently does in his comments on “epitomes” as “the moths of just history, in which he cites The Advancement, II.ii.4, with approval (482, 485, and nn.). As Keach notes, the former of the two appropriations of Bacon writing in The Advancement has the effect of “Shelley’s quoting him as a celebrator of ‘vitally metaphorical’ language in an uncertain light.” Webb, in his discussion of stanza 16 of Adonais, points to Shelley’s discussion of the idola specus, as he has that concept from the Novum Organum and The Advancement in the Essay on Christianity, as a possible source for “the basic idea” of the stanza. What Webb does not say, but what Keach suggests, is that in instances such as these, Shelley at least in part reads Bacon against himself. In the Essay on Christianity, for example, Shelley rescues the notion of idola specus, or false idols, as Bacon calls them, by characterizing them, with a nod to Plato’s Symposium, as “peculiar images which reside in the inner cave of thought,” then going on to assert that such images “constitute the essential and distinctive character of every human being, to which every action and every word bears intimate relation” (Prose, 199). 74. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 169. Shelley for his part sought to separate Bacon as poet from Bacon as ideologue. As he observes in A Defence, “Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect” (Poetry, 484–85).

Chapter 2: Nothing Beside Remains 1. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 184. 2. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 19. 3. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), esp. 303–37. 4. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 26–27, 27–28. Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 28, provides the synthesizing insight with the observation that the Poet’s encounter with the Indian-Maiden-cum-muse constitutes “primordial incest, his romance with his muse.” See also Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 302. 5. Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 25. 6. See MPP, I, 254–55 (parenthetical references to MPP are to book, line, or page numbers). As Hughes edits them, the lines read, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

O O

to Pages 48-50 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

333 333

7. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 22. 8. Compare Byron’s characterization of the Archangel Michael, in The Vision of Judgment (1821), as “a mushroom rich civilian.” See ByPW, IV, stanza 36 (parenthetical references to BYPW are to stanza and / or line or page numbers). I discuss the characterization in “The Politics of ‘Neutral Space’ in Byron’s Vision of Judgment,” MLQ 40:3 (1979), 281. 9. See Drummond, Academical Questions, 39. 10. Ibid., 37. 11. See Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of P. B. Shelley, as Comprised in the Life of Shelley by T. J. Hogg, The Recollections of Shelley and Byron by Edward J. Trelawney, Memoirs of Shelley by Thomas Love Peacock, 2 vols., ed. Humbert J. Wolfe (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933), 1:147–48. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 36–37, 48–50, notes the strong influence of the Intimations Ode on such early poems as “The Retrospect” (from the Esdaile Notebook) and several poems from the Alastor volume. 12. See Behrendt, Audiences, 99; Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 48–50; Yvonne M. Carothers, “Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth,” MLQ 42:1 (1981), 22; and my “Between Desire and Nostalgia: Intertextuality in Shelley’s Alastor and Two Shorter Poems from the Alastor Volume,” Romanticism Past and Present 9:1 (1985). 13. Mary Shelley’s Journals, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1947), 15 (entry for 14 September, 1814). 14. See Carothers, “Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth.” 15. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style,” PMLA 93:2 (1978), 200. Hartman notes that these features are characteristic of “Wordsworth’s style, early or late.” 16. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 25–26. 17. So also Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 15. 18. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 18. 19. See Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, tr. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), 145; Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 29, 34. 20. See Peter Finch, “Shelley’s Laon and Cythna: The Bride Stripped Bare,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 3, n.s., (1988), 31. 21. See William A. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 27. 22. See Clark, Embodying Revolution, 114, 117. Clark misreads the poem when he states that, “Although Shelley describes the difficulty of the project, its very conception is evidence of his extraordinary faith in the power of the will at this period.”

334 334

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among51-61 Others

23. See The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 37. Book III of The Confessions, near its outset, reads thusly: “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought for what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.” 24. Ibid., 37. See also Forrest Pyle, The Ideology of the Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Standford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 96. Pyle, after Paul de Man, observes that “The imagination is a force that, like magnetism and the wind and, perhaps, like history, remains always ‘immanent in its effects.’” 25. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 98, argues, “just as Shelley felt Wordsworth’s perception in The Excursion to be solipsistically inclined, he makes the Poet a prisoner of his own perception, his own created vision.” Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 46, observes of Alastor, “the piece begins with Shelley’s Narrator calling to Mother Natura / Necessity / Venus / Eros as to a Wordsworthian muse in order that he may passively take in the ‘breath’ of the primordial poetic lifeforce, thereby grasping it, and at the same time penetrate (sexually and otherwise) into ‘thy deep mysteries.’” 26. Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 223–24, concedes that “Shelley’s lovepsychology has frequently been viewed in a less than sympathetic light, not as high-minded idealism, but . . . a sort of sexual solipsism or autosexuality that denies the reality of others.” Brown faults “the epistemology of the day” as “inherently solipsistic,” locating Shelley within “the sympathetic love tradition,” and arguing that “No one . . . defined the tradition’s psychodynamics more closely than Shelley nor attached it more firmly to its philosophical base.” 27. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 23–24. For Sperry, Shelley’s remarks in the preface to Alastor address “the problem of human desire—the drive we would today describe as libido—and the idealization to which it naturally leads.” 28. Behrendt, Audiences, 103, notes that “Alastor documents the need for community among humanity and the terrible consequences for all parties of the failure to achieve such community.” 29. Tilottama Rajan, “‘The Web of Human Things’: Narrative and Authority in Alastor,” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and David C. Goellnicht (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994), 45, suggests that “the Narrator’s failure can be seen as a failure of narrative as well as lyric. Unable to make the Poet credible as a character, the Narrator is also unable to give his life the status of fact, of something that has happened.” See also Christopher Heppner, “Alastor: The Poet and the Narrator Reconsidered,” Keats-Shelley Journal 37 (1988), 99, 106. Heppner offers a more charitable reading of the narrator in

O O

to Pages 61-63 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

335 335

relation to the poet than I do, but a reading that nevertheless does not diverge too far in its essentials from mine. 30. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 98–112, discusses in great detail the influence of The Excursion on Alastor. Frederick Kirchoff, “Shelley’s Alastor: The Poet Who Refuses to Write Language,” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 115– 17, discusses the failure of a similar kind of relational apperception. 31. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 99–101, 150–55. He distinguishes the positive from the negative with reference to the treatment of the motif in Laon and Cythna and The Cenci, respectively. Speaking of these same two texts, Finch, “Shelley’s Laon and Cythna,” 44, cites Shelley’s own comment that “Incest is like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance” (Letters, 2:154) to back up his own argument that incest is one of “those ambiguously ‘poetic’ circumstances” which oscillates, “with desire either transcending or merely transgressing the boundaries of dominant discourse, enacting a sexuality either of selflessness or selfishness.” William D. Brewer, The Shelley-Byron Conversation (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994), 66, observes that “the brotherand-sister incest portrayed in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and Byron’s Manfred is the ‘excess of love’; the father-daughter incestuous rape which is at the center of The Cenci is the ‘excess’ of hate.” To Hogle’s, Finch’s, and Brewer’s distinctions may be added the additional distinction between sibling incest and parent-child incest. Incest of the former sort is figured forth in Shelley as an act between peers proceeding out of free choice, and not subject to coercions arising from gender or power relations. Incest of the latter sort is subject to these coercions. The point of Shelley’s “correction” in the invocation of Alastor, then, is that while Wordsworth thought that the marriage of the mind to nature was “positive incest” of the former sort, it was in fact “negative incest” of the latter sort. 32. For a discussion of Goethe’s concept of the archetype, see, e.g., Ronald H. Brady, “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology,” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 97 (Boston: D. Reidel, 1987), 257–300. It may be the case that Shelley’s Poet seeks a prototype when he should be seeking an archetype. 33. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 259–60, for a discussion of this passage in the context of Shelley’s view of history. 34. See Paradise Lost I, 254–55, IV, 73–77, in MPP. 35. See Kristeva, Desire in Language, 286. 36. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 48–49. For discussions of Wordsworth’s troubled search for origins, early and late, see Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 276–361; and Hartman, “Blessing the Torrent.”

336 336

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among64-68 Others

37. See Kirchoff, “The Poet Who Refuses,” 109; Heppner, “Poet and Narrator,” 93; and my own “Between Desire and Nostalgia,” 48. 38. The concluding question is a secondary echo, recalling the conclusion of the questions on which the fourth stanza of the Intimations Ode concludes: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (WPW, ll. 56–57). 39. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 47, sees the journey as comprising two segments: “First, the now-dead Poet is remembered as pursuing his own quest for nature’s and mythology’s origins to the temple of Dendera on the upper Nile, the cradle of [science’s] first elements for many in Shelley’s era. Later, the same Poet turns eastward to seek his feminine Other in the Vale of Kashmir at the heart of the Indian Caucasus, the region from which all races, streams, and faiths supposedly descended after the Ark was left on Mount Ararat by the Deluge.” Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 171, points to the important role played by Shelley’s “impassioned reading and rereading of The Missionary: An Indian Tale [1811] by Sydney Owenson.” See also Letters, 1:107, 112. 40. Heppner, “Poet and Narrator,” 96–97. 41. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 26–28. Ulmer shrewdly points out that “Shelley’s Poet by no means avoids error or guilt in his solitude; the poem surely makes that clear enough by conducting him to a narcissus-bordered ‘cove’” (l. 405). It should be noted that “Alas! alas!” (Ai! Ai!) is precisely what Narcissus says while pining over his reflection, and is also what Echo repeats to him. See Ovid: Metamorphoses with an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1916), 1:148–49, 150–53 (Metamorphoses III, 358, 370–99). Ulmer remarks that the Poet’s history is not reducible to a type of the Narcisus myth, however. His “more complex, more typically Romantic ending” has satanic overtones. Ulmer locates the source of the overtones, synopsized in “He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!” in book IV of Paradise Lost, although the language in the book’s “Argument,” where Satan “confirms himself in evil, journeys on to Paradise, [and] . . . overleaps the bounds” (MPP, 277) seems more directly implicated than Ulmer’s choice of “At one slight bound overleap’d all bound” (IV, 181). Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 53, cites both sources discussed here. 42. Alexander Beljame, in his translation of Alastor (Paris, 1895), as cited in Joseph Raben, “Shelley the Dionysian,” in Everest, Shelley Revalued, 27. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 33, reads the Indian Caucasus, in which the Vale of Cashmir is located, as “the birthplace of humankind,” and the western Caucasus, where the Poetsubject ends his life, as “the legendary site of the garden of Eden”—the appropriate place for he who “overleaps the bounds” to end up. See also Reiman, Shelley, 37–38. 43. Pulos, The Deep Truth, 10. Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 13, distin-

O O

to Pages 68-70 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

337 337

guishes usefully between Pyrrhonian skepticism and the Academic alternative that succeeded it. 44. Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 59. 45. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 302. It is probably worth noting that the word metaphor is itself a metaphor, likening the sort of comparison it tenders to bearing an entity across space and time, to transfer, to transport. See also Karen A. Weisman, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 19. 46. See Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 36. 47. William Jones, “Third Anniversary Discourse,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols. (London: J. Stockdale and J. Walker, 1807), 3:33, 64. See also Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 64, 72, 76. 48. See Jeffrey N. Cox, “The French Revolution in the English Theatre,” in History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literture, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990), 45–47. 49. See Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990), 57; Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 58. 50. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 52, sees the problem of language as separable from the issue of what love is. 51. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and tr. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–72), 14:87– 88; Grosz, Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. 126–31. The Arab maiden represents the option of what Freud calls an “anaclitic” attachment, love of “persons who are concerned with the child’s feeding, care, and production . . . in the first instance, his mother or a substitute for her.” The Poet’s failure to respond to her overdetermines his identity as a narcissist, one of those “plainly seeking themselves as a love object.” No wonder, then, that “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception” (Poetry, 69). 52. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 17. Shelley’s characterization seems to follow Rousseau’s conception of natural writing. Of that conception, Derrida observes, “Natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological. It is hieratic, very close to the interior voice of the Profession of Faith, to the voice one hears upon retreating into oneself: full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense.” 53. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 39–40. The conflict between the Indian Maid-

338 338

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among 72-75 Others

en’s “wild numbers” and stifling, “tremulous sobs” leads to “metaphor’s revelation of its basic paradoxes. Neil Fraistat, “Poetic Quests and Questioning in Shelley’s Alastor Collection,” Keats-Shelley Journal 33 (1984), 168, has divided this formal revelation into two successively synecdochic (or metaphoric, given Shelleyan metaphor’s holistic imperative) and metonymic phases. The final phase becomes metonymic as the poet’s search for an antitype . . . dissolves among the contiguous images of his journey. The journey disfigures metaphor, accommodating it to metonymy but increasingly toward allegory as well.” 54. Compare these lines from “Tintern Abbey”: “Until, the breath of this corporeal frame/And even the motion of our human blood/Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul” (WPW, ll. 43–46). 55. OED (2:940) dates the first use of the word cashmere to denote the woven wool fabric of that part of India as 1822—specifically, the journal entry for 11 January in John Wilson Croker’s Diary, which notes the appearance of women wearing clothes made of this fabric. Obviously, this usage comes well after Shelley’s poem, which was written in 1815. But the OED is generally suggestive rather than exhaustive in such datings. On Schopenhauer, see Michael G. Cooke, “Romanticism: Pleasure and Play,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), 82–83, 350. 56. Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 307, makes precisely this observation in reference to Shelley. 57. See Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 207, 209. “The veiled woman stands . . . as the ultimate embodiment of woman as fetishistic commodity.” Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 58, citing Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 15, notes that “the veiling of a woman’s body has been associated in both the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian traditions with a male ‘owner’s’ exclusive sexual rights.” 58. Abrams, Glossary, 5th ed., 66. 59. In A Refutation of Deism (1814), the Deist Theosophus, whose name suggests both a God-wise individual and God’s sophist, sums up this logic in the following statement: “All is order, design, and harmony, so far as we can descry the tendency of things, and every new enlargement of our views, every new display of the material world affords a new illustration of the power, the wisdom, and the benevolence of God” (Prose, 130). See also Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 191, and Wasserman, A Critical Reading, 12. 60. See also Vico, The New Science, 116–26, chap. 1 (“Poetic Metaphysics”).

O O

to Pages 76-77 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

339 339

Here Vico traces the progression of tropaic logic from the metaphoric to the metonymic, as the result of which the name Jove (Jupiter), originating as a metaphor for a lightning bolt, became the chief god of an entire pantheon of deities, variously endowed both with names and with supernatural powers originating in those names. 61. Shelley’s discussion of defamiliarization anticipates the Russian formalist definition of “defamiliarization” (ostraneniye). See Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 13–22. 62. See “Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley,” in The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 10 vols., ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (London: Constable, 1924–34), 8:100. “He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude. . . . The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil.” 63. Solomon expresses incomprehension and an inability to account for certain kinds of motion and, in one instance, emotion. “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.” In A Defence, Shelley refers to “the astonishing poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah” (Poetry, 495). Another possible source is the Iliad XII, 199–202. See Homer’s Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951). The passage was, moreover, memorable in classical antiquity and beyond. See James Harris, Philological Inquiries, 1 vol. in 2 (London: J. Nourse, 1781), 302–3. Among the statues with which the Emperor Constantine adorned his capital of Constantinople was one of “an EAGLE destroying a SERPENT, set up by Apollonius Tyaneus.” 64. Shelley later in the poem makes its connection to The Rime clearer still. Walking alongside the woodland stream on the way to the “one silent nook” (Poetry, l. 572) that is to be his final resting place, the Poet encounters the following sight: Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants’ eyes, With gentle meanings, an most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs. (ll. 438–44) Compare Shelley’s description of these “parasites” with Coleridge’s description of the water-snakes.

340 340

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among79-80 Others

Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. (CPW, 1: ll. 277–81) 65. Wordsworth writes of how The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day. (WPW, ll. 72–77) 66. Blank, Wordworth’s Influence, 99. See also William Keach, “Obstinate Questionings: The Immortality Ode and Alastor,” Wordsworth Circle 12:1 (Winter 1981), 42. 67. Keach, “Obstinate Questionings.” 68. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 252–53, notes that the namesake of The Witch of Atlas (1820) and Prometheus Unbounds Asia also live in caverns, the former “in order to gain the wisdom necessary for her redemptive activities.” 69. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 34 and n. 70. The desire for such conformability was with Shelley long after he wrote Alastor. Compare the petitions on which the Ode to the West Wind (1820) closes. Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (ll. 63–67) 71. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 35. 72. The reference to “falling spear-grass” may be an echo, with a difference, of the close of Book I of The Excursion. There, the Wanderer, having told Margaret’s sad story, recalls having encountered shortly after her death, the type of a natural benediction—”the high spear-grass on that wall,/By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o’er” (WPW, I.943–44). 73. The Shelleyan narrator of The Triumph finds himself in the following situation:

O O

to Pages 82-85 A Notes Perpetual Orphic Song

341 341

beneath the hoary stem Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine: before me fled The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head. (ll. 24–28) The Rousseauvian speaker recounts a very similar site of awakening, “Under a mountain, which from unknown time/Had yawned into a cavern high and deep” (ll. 312–13). Rajan, Supplement of Reading, 301, observes, “As elegy, Alastor stands at the opposite pole from The Triumph of Life, where it is not the living who must turn to the dead, but the past that must encounter the present.” The two poems may stand at opposite poles, but their stances depend upon a common type of originary site, if not in fact a common site. 74. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 84, 196. 75. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 42. 76. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 249, quotes this passage to validate the claim that “the Shelleyan hero has been criticized . . . for loving projections of himself rather than ‘real’ women.” 77. See Rajan, “‘The Web of Human Things,’” 43. 78. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 49. In Marcuse’s view, “the images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos. . . . They are committed to the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise—the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.” 79. Paul Michael Privateer, Romantic Voices: Identity and Ideology in British Poetry, 1789–1850 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991), 117, 118, 188– 91. 80. Clark, Embodying Revolution, 107–88, links Dejection to another of the poems in the Alastor volume, “To——” (“Oh! there are spirits in the air”). 81. Compare BPW, 454. In one of the satiric songs in An Island in the Moon (1785), Blake figures forth “old corruption” as “Adorned in yellow vest” (ll. 1– 2). 82. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 61. Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 225–26, discusses Shelley’s endorsement of “the androgynous ideal.” 83. See Drummond, Academical Questions, 175. “When men first assumed the existence of power, in order to account for events, they seem to have ascribed it to some being possessing will and intelligence.” 84. Rajan, Supplement of Reading, 301. 85. Ovid: The Metamorphoses, new ed., tr. Horace Gregory (New York: New American Library, 1960), 195, VII.n.l. See also Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 62.

342 342

O O

Notes Shelley to Pages among85-98 Others

Chapter 3: “Mont Blanc,” the Recuperation of Voice, the Way of “Power,” and the Fate of Love 1. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 68. 2. See Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 171–76, esp. 171. Cameron, The Golden Years, 250; Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 69–70; O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 32–33; and Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 46, make a case for Shelley’s indebtedness to Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802). The surface resemblances are indeed striking. But Shelley is not so much engaged in debate with Coleridge as he is using him as a straw man. Ultimately, Shelley turns Coleridge’s worshipful celebration of the Judeo-Christian God into his own celebration of “Power.” 3. See the “Advertisement” to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), and the “Commentary” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyseer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:117, 166. 4. Shelley’s “dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,/A city of death,” (ll. 104–5), recall one of Milton’s description of hell containing “many a Frozen, many a Fierie Alpe,” and being “A Universe of death” (MPP, II, 620–26). Cameron, The Golden Years, 250, notes that “the ‘adverting mind’ is apparently an echo from Godwin’s chapter ‘Of the Mechanism of the Human Mind’ in Political Justice.” 5. See Drummond, Academical Questions, 5. The difference between what “William” has to say and what Shelley’s speaker has to say involves the former’s reference to “Powers,” versus Shelley’s earnest philosophical engagement with the principle of “Power.” 6. See Beardsley, “The Metaphoric Twist,” 121. See also Peter Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 149. 7. See Hogle, “Shelley as Revisionist,” 115, 127. 8. See Carl Grabo, A Newton among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1930), 97– 98. 9. See, e.g., Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918), 11. 10. Ibid., 34. See also Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation, 14–15. According to Murphy, originality is at least as much a matter of self-presentation as of substance. 11. The Poetical Works of John Milton, from the Text of the Rev. Henry John Todd, M.A., with a Critical Essay by J. Aikin, M.D., 4 vols. (London: Joseph Johnson, 1808), 1:8. See also, e.g., William Duff An Essay on Original Genius (1767), and Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759). 12. In the “Ode to Duty,” Wordsworth quotes the passage rather than merely

to Pages 101-107 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

O

343 343

echoing it, when the speaker implores Duty, “Give unto me, made lowly wise, / The spirit of self-sacrifice” (WPW, ll. 53–54). 13. That such a theology operates in Wordsworth’s poetry should be evident to the reader of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1804;1807), no less than to the reader of the two earlier poems. 14. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare by act, scene, and line are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 15. Shelley uses the reign/rain pun elsewhere. See Prometheus Unbound, I.266; II.iv.19–31; and III.i.80–83. Wasserman, A Critical Reading, 326–58, discusses the atmospherics of Prometheus Unbound in great detail. 16. A number of commentators focus on Lear’s captivity speech, quoted earlier and echoed in Prometheus’s cave speech in Prometheus Unbound (III.iii. 4–63), as an important reference point in Shelley’s development of the concept of unmediated Promethean voice. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 113; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 202–3; and Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 247. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 61, sees one of Lear’s earlier speeches during the harrowing on the heath (III.ii.I–9) as having an important part to play in imaging the operations of the human mind in Prometheus Unbound. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 177, apparently concurs. Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2d ed. (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1971), 127–29, 341, finds “twenty possible verbal echoes of Shakespeare,” some of them from King Lear, in The Cenci, and he traces the character of Archy in Shelley’s fragmentary Charles the First (1819– 22) to that of the Fool in King Lear. 17. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 135–36, also discusses the Dedication in relation to King Lear. 18. Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 76–77, notes that while “The view that the universe is a vast semiotic system open to interpretation and reinterpretation makes the act of reading nature central to our experience of it,” there is also a portion of nature not susceptible to “reading” and/or totalization. “Unobserved nature may well contain order, but if so it is a complex organization evident only to itself.” 19. In a passage from the “Hymn” that both anticipates the description of an enlarged humanity found at the end of act III of Prometheus Unbound and serves well as a gloss on how “Large codes of fraud and woe” take their rise, the speaker remarks the effect of asking questions as to why the Spirit of BEAUTY” is “inconstant” in its influence on human emotion an conduct. No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given—

OO

344 344

Notes Shelley to Pages among 107-114 Others

Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see Doubt, chance, and mutability. (Poetry, ll. 25–31) See also Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 70. 20. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 195. 21. In making my arguments along the lines of Keach, I have chosen not to discuss the prosody of “Mont Blanc,” which exploits all the legitimate variants on iambic pentameter, such as the inverted first foot and the extra unstressed final syllable, then rings changes on these variants. Such a discussion might, in another context, prove both extremely interesting and worthwhile. 22. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 197. Although anaphora signifies repetition only in successive lines, there is some evidence that Shelley is doing with it what he does with identical rhyme. For example, “Where” (ll. 16 and 43) and “Now” (ll. 38 and 42) echo earlier anaphoras. 23. Ibid., 195. 24. Noted in ibid., 197. Keach includes “Ravine” in the anagram. 25. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, et al., tr. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). The text established formed the basis of a course of lectures that Saussure delivered no later that 1900, the year of his death. The Cours générale was published in the original French no later than 1916. 26. See The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed., ed. Francis N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). In The Parlement of Foules (1377?), birds of prey are referred to as “foules of ravyne” (ll. 323, 527). 27. See Keach, Shelley’s Style, 198–99. 28. One might recall at this juncture that in Adonais, “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity,” and that “Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak/The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak” (ll. 462–63, 467–68). 29. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 195. 30. Poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Poetry, 505). 31. See Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 9. 32. Ibid, 2–3, 9. Hoagwood cites the Loeb Library edition of Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Pyrrhonistic Hypotyposes), 2 vols., tr. R. G. Bury (1933; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939), 1:8, 26. 33. See Wasserman, A Critical Reading, 222, 223. “Shelley formulated a syntax

O O

to Pages 115-121 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

345 345

which, by fusing the externalizing subject (universe of things) and the internalizing predicate (flows through the mind), denies both that ‘things’ are mental fictions and that there is any real distinction between thing and thought.” 34. See my “The Two Languages and the Ineffable in Shelley’s Major Poetry,” in Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 123–29. 35. See Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 230; Weisman, Imageless Truths, 49. 36. Chernaik, Lyrics of Shelley, 43. See also O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 42. 37. See Hogle, “Shelley as Revisionist,” 125. 38. Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 44–45. 39. Francis Wilford, “On the Geographical Systems of the Hindus,” Asiatic Researches 8 (1805), 273, as cited in Curran, Annus Mirabilis, 67. See also 35, 65. 40. See Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 196; and O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 44. 41. See Vico, The New Science, 118, 127–28 (secs. 379, 401). 42. Shelley was certainly conversant with both myths. In Adonais, he characterizes himself, figured as “one frail Form,” as one who “Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,/Actæon-like, and now he fled astray” (Poetry, ll. 271–76). In his translation of Homer’s “Hymn to the Sun” (1818), Shelley notes the tortuous course of Apollo’s team—”His rapid steeds soon bear him to the West;/Where their steep flight his hands divine arrest” (SPW, ll. 21–22)—a course that requires godlike skill to negotiate. Such godlike skill is precisely what Apollo’s mortal offspring Phaeton lacks, and this lack is the very circumstance that causes Phaeton to lost control of the team and plummet earthward. 43. Vico, The New Science, 184 (secs. 528–29). 44. Ibid., 288 (sec. 752). 45. See ibid., 269–70 (secs. 712–13). 46. “These glaciers flow perpetually into the valley ravaging in their slow but inevitable progress the pastures & forests which surround them . . . for where the ice has once been the hardiest plant refuses to grow—if even, as in some extraordinary instances, it should recede after its progression has once commenced” (Letters, 1:498). 47. In A Defence, Shelley notes that “It is probable that the astonishing poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples” (Poetry, 495). 48. See Brewer, Conversation, 31, for a discussion of Horace Benedict de Saussure’s theory of glaciation and Buffon’s catastrophism. 49. See Abrams, Glossary, 66. Among the examples of metonymy that Abrams

OO

346 346

Notes Shelley to Pages among 124-131 Others

offers is one drawn from As You Like It (1601): “doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat” (II.iv.5–6). 50. Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 61, notes that “Shelley . . . distrusts the habit of substituting a word for a thing and thus creating a presence from devices of rhetoric.” 51. See Art Young, Shelley and Nonviolence (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). 52. In stanza 53 of Adonais, the Shelleyan speaker asks, Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? Thy hopes are gone before; from all things here They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! (Poetry, ll. 469–71) That this is a universal rather than a personal history is suggested by the use that Shelley makes of the myth of the fall in “The Serpent,” which allegorizes a disruption, if not the end, of Shelley’s sexual involvement with Jane Williams. The serpent is shut out from Paradise— The wounded deer must seek the herb no more In which its heart’s cure lies. (ll. 1–3)

Chapter 4: Toward a Vision of the Nineteenth Century 1. “Composed in the neighbourhood of Bisham Wood, near Great Marlow, Bucks, 1817 (April-Sept. 23); printed, with title (dated 1818), Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, Oct., Nov., 1817, but suppressed, pending revision, by the publishers, C. & J. Ollier” (SPW, 31). 2. “Probably Longman & Co., who had recently published Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh” (Letters, 1:564 and n.). 3. Shelley begins the first stanza of the poem’s “Dedication” to Mary by suggesting that his own life, no less than the lives of his characters, is allegory. So now my summer task is ended, Mary, And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home; As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome. (ll. 1–4) Even here, the Janus-like allusion linking this account with other stories is irrepressible. With the phrase “victor Knight,” Shelley evokes not only Red-Crosse,

O O

to Pages 132-136 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

347 347

but also looks backward to his early Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. The reference to “her enchanted dome” looks forward to the description of the Temple of the Spirit in canto I of The Revolt. See also Curran, Poetic Form, 147, 181; and Duff, Romance and Revolution, 157–58, 161, 169. 4. Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 47–49, performs a similar etymological analysis of the names of Prometheus Unbounds Panthea and Ione. 5. See Weisman, Imageless Truths, 74, who comments that “Shelley’s impulse for allegory is underscored by the Greek origin of the names of his heroes: ‘people’ for Laon and ‘seed’ or ‘germ’ for Cythna.” Although it has another etymology that is discussed earlier, Shelley’s naming of Cythna also suggests an etymological pun on chiton—in ancient Greece, a light garment worn interchangeably by both sexes, usually next to the skin. That Shelley knew what a chiton is seems tolerably certain, witness the following satirical attack on Wordsworth in Peter Bell the Third (1819) for his inability to come to terms with the immaterial basis of material nature, But from the first ’twas Peter’s drift To be a kind of moral eunuch He touched the hem of Nature’s shift, Felt faint—and never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic. (ll. 313–17) 6. See Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 123. 7. See Webb, A Voice Not Understood, 99–125, esp. 101, 106–8, and Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 128–29. 8. As discussed in Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 133–39. 9. As noted in Poetry, 221n. See also Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, 97, who argues that “the passage from Laon and Cythna indicates the general meaning of the parallel terms in the ‘Ode to the West Wind.’” 10. See MPP, XII, 581–87; Duff, Romance and Revolution, 208. 11. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 2d ed., ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 19, 28–29, 34. One possible source for the poem’s atmospheric orientalism and Cythna’s incarceration in the Tyrant Othman’s harem, albeit “without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners” (Letters, 1:563), may be Wollstonecraft’s own struggle, throughout A Vindication, with Islam marginalized and repressed as the other. 12. Shelley’s own note on this passage observes, “I have followed the classification adopted by the author of the Four Ages of Poetry [i.e., Peacock]. But Rousseau was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners” (Poetry, 502n.). 13. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 51, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse

OO

348 348

Notes Shelley to Pages among 136-140 Others

on the Origin of Inequality among Men, in Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conway Bondanella, tr. Julia Conway Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 38–39. 14. See Rousseau, On the Origin of Inequality, 35–36; and Lacan, Language of the Self, 290–91. Rousseau makes an argument strikingly similar to Cythna’s above and to Shelley’s below. Speaking of “the character of the belle âme, which Rousseau, for one, knew only too well,” Wilden notes, after Hegel, that “the Spirit will eventually reconcile the split, revealed by the understanding, between the subjective and the objective . . . or between what the Romantic would call the official self and the unconscious or supernatural immediate unity of soul and nature.” 15. By “identification” here, Shelley means something closely akin to Lacanian “Secondary—i.e., mirror-stage—identification,” which follows upon the attempt “to block the apprehension (splitting sensation) which comes from the difficulty of situating the infant body in the world” by bringing “an intimation of unity and continuity via the human Gestalt.” See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 37–38. 16. See Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 107. Weaving in England after the Frame Work Bill (1812), especially during the time of the Castlereagh administration, also has decided social and political symbolism. 17. As Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 67, observes of Cythna, “The education in language that she undergoes in the cave stresses the materiality of signification.” Laurence Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 295, speaking of The Revolt, notes that in the preface Shelley “objects to overvaluation of the signifier.” 18. See Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 59. Tellingly enough, in The Revolt, when Laon and Cythna make love among the ruins, “a passion whose consummation is the poem’s centerpiece,” according to Brown, their presumptive nakedness is occluded by a sensory overload or failure—”over all / A mist was spread” (SPW, ll. 2636–37), Laon reports. And afterwards, Cythna’s “dark tresses were all loosely strewn / O’er her pale bosom” (ll. 2670–71). 19. See Owen and Smyser, Prose Works of Wordsworth, 2:84–85, 114n. See also my “Dying into Newtonian Time: Wordsworth and the Elegiac Task,” Genre 23:4 (1990), 179–96. 20. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 67. See also Keach, Shelley’s Style, 39; and Abbey Destroyer and Preserver, 38. 21. See King-Hele, Thought and Work, 69. 22. Plato, Republic, 515a–b (Jowett translation). 23. Ibid., 546a–b and n. (Jowett translation). 24. Commenting on these lines among others, Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 68, ob-

O O

to Pages 142-147 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

349 349

serves, “These lost truths are Pythagorean (as the Crotona reference indicates). They probably found their way into The Revolt of Islam through Thomas Moore’s ‘The Grecian Girl’s Dream of the Blessed Islands.’” Weisman, Imageless Truths, 80, observes that “The subtler language within language is of course metaphor. . . . This subtler language is not quite truth itself, but rather the ‘key of truths’ which were only ‘dimly’ taught in old Crotona.” 25. So characterized by Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 81. 26. See John Newton, An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton, 6th ed. (London: Joseph Johnson, 1786), 63, as cited in Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, 79–80. 27. After Cordelia’s death, Lear recalls, “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman” (V.iii.272–73). 28. See Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 19, 20–21; and Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 62. 29. Although the overt motive of the “Whence came ye” questions is to find out the mariners’ home port, business, and cargo, it echoes Cythna’s much earlier teleological question to Laon: “Whence came I what I am? Thou, Laon, knowest / How a young child should thus undaunted be” (SPW, ll. 1018–19). 30. Cythna pointedly does not attack the notion of a common humanity, only the notion that such humanity is caused by a power that it resembles in some essential way. Several stanzas later, in fact, she says, “Disguise it not—we have one human heart— / All mortal thoughts confess a common home” (ll. 3361– 62). Here, Cythna echoes the speaker of Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (1798). However, as Lockridge, Ethics, 307, notes, Cythna’s comments form part of Shelley’s ongoing “critique of the heart and its passions,” which, while they offer respite from the solipsistic confinement of selfhood, are as liable to misprision and abuse in the service of base temporal motives as selfhood is. 31. Shelley’s God is apersonal and immanent. In the Essay on Christianity, Shelley says that Jesus’ use of the name God, “prompted by the energy of genius . . . was the overflowing enthusiasm of a poet, but it is less literally true, clearly repugnant to the mistaken conceptions of the multitude. God, it has been asserted, was contemplated by Jesus Christ as every poet and every philosopher must have contemplated that mysterious principle. He considered that venerable word to express the overruling Spirit of the collective energy of the moral and material world” (Prose, 201–2). 32. See Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1–10; Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 7–8. The distinction here proposed is isomorphic to the distinction Buber proposes between

OO

350 350

Notes Shelley to Pages among 147-150 Others

the two “primary words,” I-Thou (morality in the name of oneself) and I-It (morality in the name of the other). 33. The original of Shelley’s extract is found in George Sale, The Koran . . . to Which Is Prefixed a Preliminary Discourse (London: C. Ackers for J. Wilcox, 1734), 164. See also Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 45–46, 83, for a discussion of the use Shelley made of Sale’s “Preliminary Discourse” in conceiving the characters of Asia and Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound. 34. Demogorgon celebrates Prometheus’s triumph thusly: 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; Neither to change nor falter nor repent: This, like thy glory, titan! is to be Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. (Poetry, IV.570–78) 35. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 40, and O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 46. 36. The oscillating symbolism of snake and eagle has a likely source in the book of Proverbs. Along with “Agur the son of Jakeh,” who told his “prophecy . . . even unto Ithiel and Ucal,” Shelley would seem to hold that “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid” (Proverbs 30:1, 18–19). Similarly inscrutable snake-and-eagle symbolism is found in the Iliad XII, 199–202. 37. See Tetreault, The Poetry of Life, 113; Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 65; and Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 139. 38. Here and elsewhere throughout The Revolt, Cythna is represented in such a way as to recall the Indian Maiden in Alastor, Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, Her dark locks floating in the breath of night. (Poetry, ll. 176–78) 39. See Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny, 207, and Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 218. 40. After listening to the Hermit’s news of the unnamed Cythna’s inspired doings in Argolis, Laon chances to glance at his reflection in the lake alongside

O O

to Pages 151-157 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

351 351

which the two sit during the Hermit’s report. Laon describes himself as one characterized by “hollow looks and withered mien,” albeit one in which “The likeness of a shape for which was braided / The brightest woof of genius, still was seen” (SPW, ll. 1676–78). 41. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 51, and Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 60. Of Laon’s “small knife” (SPW, l. 1166), Sperry states that the “purpose” or intent for which that patently phallic “small knife” is put to use changes as a function of Laon’s “initiation into a proper ideal of adulthood,” which causes Laon to renounce phallic violence while “reordering . . . the pattern of psychological instability that underlies it.” Ulmer observes that “For Laon, transcendence of erotic violence will require a transcendence of patriarchy.” 42. Lines 3522–76 of Cythna’s narrative, reporting on her speaking, her binding, the weeping of her captors at her eloquence, her release, and her subsequent rallying of “millions” in the cause of equality, recapitulates ll. 1570–1611 of the Hermit’s narrative, which reports on essentially the same events. Duff, Romance and Revolution, 198, says of these lines, “It is as though Shelley had finally purified the language of revolutionary politics by transforming the notion of ‘unmasking’ (a key term in the Jacobin rhetoric of denunciation) to that of Platonic unveiling.” 43. See Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 8–9; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 99. I must beg to differ with Bloom’s assessment of The Revolt as “abortive allegorical epic,” evincing “dualism” and “spiritual retrogression from the myth,” not to mention “dubious allegorizing” and “technical decline from the mythmaking of the 1816 Hymns.” 44. Buber, I and Thou, 4. 45. The Lord (Jehovah) commands Moses and the Israelites to “hang the vail [sic] up under the taches [of the four pillars], that thou mayest bring in thither within the ark within the vail the ark of the testimony: and the vail shall divide unto you between the holy place and the most holy” (Exod. 26:33). The Lord further commands that “In the tabernacle of the congregation without the vail, which is before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the Lord” (27:21). Aaron and his sons, in other words, are designated as custodians of “the holy place” and “vail”—or gatekeepers of “the most holy” (Num. 8:19). 46. In Shelley’s Notes on Queen Mab (1813), he states that “The vulgar, ever in extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event. Testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine” (SPW, 820). 47. See Grabo, The Magic Plant, 210. 48. Laon confronts a mob from which is heard “‘He who judged let him be

OO

352 352

Notes Shelley to Pages among 157-162 Others

brought/To judgement! blood for blood cries” (SPW, ll. 1999–2000). The first statement is an almost exact inversion of the beginning of the third of the three chapters of Matthew comprising the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1). The second is a variant of “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” to which Jesus responds, “That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:38– 39). In doing so, Laon echoes Jesus’ challenge to the scribes and Pharisees who would punish the woman by stoning her to death in accordance with Mosaic law: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). 49. As is evident from his letter of 2 January 1812 to Elizabeth Hitchener, Shelley has some difficulty accepting the veracity of the Mosaic account. In Shelley’s words, “Moses writes the history of his own death whic{h} is almost as extraordinary a thing to do as to describe the creation of the World” (Letters, 1:216).

Chapter 5: The Poet Situated— between the Failed Past and a Hopeful Future 1. See Letters, 2:95–96 and nn. 2. Wasserman, A Critical Reading. 74. 3. “Beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” figured as “seeds cast upon the highway of life looks back to Cythna’s extended analogy in canto IX, figuring the exemplary lives of her and Laon, and the revolution that those lives give rise to as “the wingèd seeds” that “The blasts of Autumn drive” over the face of the earth to engender the next “Spring, of hope, and love, and youth, and gladness” (SPW, ll. 3649–93). Slightly but tellingly transmogrified, these “seeds” reappear as “dead thoughts” figured as “withered leaves” (Poetry, ll. 63–64) in “Ode to the West Wind.” 4. See Shelley and His Circle: 1733–1822, 8 vols. to date, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (vols. 1–4) and Donald H. Reiman (vols. 5–8) (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961–), 6:1100–1103; Clark, Embodying Revolution, 167. Remain argues for a date of 1819; Clark concurs and adds that such a date “would confirm the relationship to the dialogue with Byron embodied in Julian and Maddalo.” 5. See Donald H. Reiman, “Structure, Symbol, and Theme in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’” (1962), rpt. Poetry, 582–83; and Curran, Poetic Form, 117, 121. Curran sees Rosalind and Helen, Lines, and Julian and Maddalo as “a trio of poems, written with increasing sophistication, in which Shelley tests the efficacy, especially in psychological terms, of pastoral.” 6. Mary Shelley’s summary recalls the epigraph to Alastor, drawn from Augustine’s Confessions and translated as “Not yet did I love, yet I was in love with loving; . . . I sought what I might love, loving to love” (Poetry, 70n.). The epi-

O O

to Pages 162-169 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

353 353

graph and its Augustininan context are discussed in chapter 2; see the discussion in nn. 23–24. 7. Shelley was reading the Symposium at this time. In the letter to Peacock of 16 August, 1818, written just after he completed Rosalind and Helen, Shelley reports, “I have translated, and Mary has transcribed, the Symposium as well as my poem; and I am preceding to employ myself on a discourse [‘Essay on the Literature, the Arts, and the Manners of the Athenians’], upon the subject of which the Symposium treats, considering the subject with reference to the difference of sentiments respecting it, existing between the Greeks and modern nations” (Letters, 2:29). 8. In a passage from the Phaedrus that Shelley read approvingly at approximately the time that he was completing Rosalind and Helen (see Letters, 2:29n.), Socrates engages in some richly suggestive word-play. In arguing for understanding prophecy as divine madness, Socrates says of “the ancient inventors of names,” “they must have thought that there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two words, mantike and manike, are really the same, and the letter [tau] is only a modern and tasteless insertion” (244b). 9. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 179–80. 10. Urania also does not look much like Cythna, who is described as being “a shape of brightness” possessed of fair skin (“white arms”) and, presumably, blue eyes that are “lodestars of delight” (ll. 848, 865, 919). Nor does she look much like Mary Shelley. See Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1940), 1:336. 11. See Curran, Poetic Form, 147. The Revolt, while it is polyvocal, is not heterological. This defect is partly owing to the limitations of the Spenserian stanza as a vehicle for rapid verbal interchange, notwithstanding Curran’s just assessment of Shelley’s “adeptness with the technical difficulties of the stanza.” 12. Charles J. Rzepka, “Julian and Maddalo as Revisionary Conversation Poem,” in Blank, The New Shelley, 128. Rzepka cites Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 121. 13. The “mariner, worn and wan,” who “ever drifted on / O’er the unreposing wave / To the haven of the grave” (Poetry, ll. 24–26), is the person who lands on the islands in question. Of them, the speaker of Lines asks, What if there no friends will greet; What if there no heart will meet Him with love’s impatient beat Wander wheresoe’er he may, Can he dream before that day To find refuge from distress In friendship’s smile, in love’s caress? (ll. 27–33)

OO

354 354

Notes Shelley to Pages among 170-173 Others

Ultimately, this mariner “Lies a solitary heap, / One white skull and seven dry bones” (ll. 48–49), his death unmourned, save for the ironic wailing of the seamews and the howling of the gale (ll. 53–57). 14. Reiman, “Structure, Symbol, and Theme,” 581. 15. The rendering seems too close to Wordsworth’s rendering of London in the sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (1802;1807), to be mere coincidence. “Column, tower, dome, and spire, / Shine like obelisks of fire” seems a virtual echo of “Ships, towers, domes, and temples lie / Open to the fields, and to the sky” (WPW, ll. 6–7). But the sun in Wordsworth’s sonnet lights the scene from behind the speaker’s vantage point—he and Dorothy, traveling east to Dover, whence they will take ship to Calais, turn back to look at London as they cross the bridge of the sonnet’s title. With the opposing lighting schemes comes the opposition of points of view. Far from appearing in the guise of a burned offering, the London of Wordsworth’s sonnet, “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air” (1.8), appears in the guise of an abiding presence not unlike the presence of nature itself. The speaker concludes by expostulating, “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!” (ll. 13–14). 16. Shelley’s arguments here would seem to owe some of their point and imagery to Wordsworth’s sonnet, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” (1802?;1807). 17. “The literary analogues underlying Shelley’s thought in lines 352–70 are Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Dante’s sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti beginning, ‘Guido, I would that Lappo, thou, and I, / Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend / A magic ship . . .’ of which Shelley published a translation with Alastor” (Poetry, 112n.). 18. See Rzepka, “Revisionary Conversation Poem,” 142. For Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 245, the line of development under discussion is of questionable value. Cronin characterizes Rosalind and Helen as “Shelley’s dreadful ‘modern eclogue,’” exhibiting “exactly the kind of limp, discursive poeticising into which octosyllabic couplets tempt so many English poets.” Its “irregularity” does not redeem Rosalind and Helen from this defect, “and Lines Written among the Euganean Hills is not free from it.” 19. Curran, Poetic Form, 117. The poem is A Modern Eclogue because the speakers are modern women rather than pastoral swains. Rosalind and Helen’s misfortunes would be completely out of place in the pastoral world of Theocritus. Shelley himself characterizes Rosalind and Helen as “a mere extempore thing, and worth little” (Letters, 2:198–99). 20. Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 245, has an especially low opinion of Rosalind and Helen. But Shelley was not uniformly self-deprecating about this poem.

O O

to Pages 174-182 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

355 355

Taken as a group, his comments suggest that he may have held the poem in higher esteem than he would readily allow. He was pleased to have Leigh Hunt’s “kind expressions about [his] Eclogue” (Letters, 2:109). He asked his publisher, Charles Ollier, to send him a copy of the poem “for a particular purpose” (2:106), as well as to send a “copy of [his] Poem . . . to Mr. Keats” (2:111). He asked Hunt to send a copy of Rosalind and Helen, among other texts, in great haste “for some friends of [his]” (2:113). 21. Not defiance but simple prudence prevents Lionel from marrying Helen. The author, within the fictional framework of the poem, of the Lucianic and blasphemous “Banquet in Hell” (SPW, l. 687), Lionel fears the reprisals of the “priests [who] hated him” (l. 689), much as the priests in The Revolt hate Laon, whose name, no less than his role, resembles that of Lionel. Seeking consecration from the priests would only cause them to “kill him [Lionel] in their glee” (l. 849). 22. This symbolism appears, with slight differences, at the end of The Cenci. There, Beatrice, resigned to her end, leaves off with speaking the language of the aggressor and addresses her stepmother Lucretia as follows: Here, Mother, tie My girdle for me, and bind up this hair In any simple knot; aye, that does well. And yours I see is coming down. How often Have we done this for one another. (Poetry, V.iv.159–63) 23. Rosalind’s name links her to the Rosalind of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599 [see esp. V.iii.214–22]) and, as such, suggests the need to come to terms with the sexual politics of the English scene. 24. The scene as described bears a striking resemblance to the “valley of Bethzatanai” in Shelley’s prose fragment The Assassins (1814). See Prose, 146. 25. See Troilus and Criseyde, in Robinson, The Works of Chaucer, 3:1233– 39; and The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble (1951; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 173. 26. See Letters, 2:154; Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 213; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 99–101, 150–55. It would seem that “good” (noncoercive) incest in Shelley’s poetry always takes place between siblings, while “bad” (coercive) incest, as it is represented in The Cenci, takes place between a male parent and female child. Sibling incest is the more nearly metaphoric variant. Parent-child incest, in which the “cause” (father) forces itself upon and seduces the “effect” (daughter), is the more nearly metonymic. 27. See Brown, Sexuality and Feminism, 226–27; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 286.

OO

356 356

Notes Shelley to Pages among 183-188 Others

The fact is that neither Rosalind nor Helen ever again seeks adult male companionship (SPW, ll. 1275–78). 28. In A Philosophical View of Reform (1819), Shelley discusses “the result of the labors of the political philosophers” as being “the establishment of the principle of utility as the substance and liberty and equality as the forms, according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered.” Shelley applauds “The system of government in the United States of America” as being “the first practical illustration of the new philosophy” (Prose, 234). 29. Speaking, in A Philosophical View, of the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution as cases in point illustrative of “how distinct from the opinions of any of those professing themselves establishers were the doctrines and actions of Jesus Christ,” Shelley defends the right to challenge coercive political unions, especially when such unions rest on religious dogmas establishing the monarch as God’s vice-gerent (Prose, 232). Pyle, Ideology, 52, suggests, with reference to Coleridge’s writings on the English Constitution, the extent to which Shelley’s is a cogent critique of the arguments and practices of cultural representation in his time. 30. Helen, however, makes no pretense to knowledge of an afterlife. It may be that “death be not division,” but if death causes the division and dissolution of being, insentience is its own reward: “the dead feel no contrition” (SPW, l. 579). 31. Cameron, Golden Years, 128. 32. The first seven lines of Helen’s speech anticipate the final chorus of Hellas. There, the earth renews itself not through parturition, but through molting: “The earth doth like a snake renew / Her winter weeds outworn.” This transformation witnesses the return not of a “happy age,” but of a “great age.” In that age “Saturn and Love their long repose / Shall burst” (Poetry, ll. 1060–91), serving as the bearers of, in Shelley’s words, a “state of innocence and happiness” (439n.) to the earth, in place of what Helen terms “truth and love.” 33. Shelley characterizes Wordsworth’s pre-Excursion position thusly: 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. (Poetry, ll. 7–10) Both descriptions in their turn allude back to the tableau of Peele Castle depicted by Sir George Beaumont and in part the subject of the older poet’s “Elegiac Stanzas.” O ’tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here;

O O

to Pages 188-193 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

357 357

That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. (WPW, ll. 45–52) 34. See Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (Baltimore: Penguin, 1977), 264, 283. 35. On the Convito and Lucian’s Menippus, see Webb, Violet in the Crucible, 297; and my “Teaching Shelley’s Anatomy.” 36. In Wordsworth’s sonnet, the speaker, lamenting the contemporary creed of “Getting and spending” (WPW, l. 2), which causes those involved in these practices to turn away from nature, expostulates, Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. (WPW, ll. 9–14) Helen’s analysis of the effect of “outworn creeds” suggests that, far from putting the romance back into nature, they would more likely put the hierarchy, cruelty, and oppression back into human interactions. 37. See Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (1974; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 35. Victor recounts the effect of a thunderstorm that he observed at age fifteen on “an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from the house,” which was reduced to “nothing . . . but a blasted stump” by the storm. 38. That Helen’s speech takes on the authority of church doctrine, albeit in an intimate rather than a more nearly catholic sphere, is subtly suggested by her use of modal auxiliaries. The use of will with the first-person pronoun (“We will have rites”) or shall with the second-or third-person pronoun (“our church shall be”) takes on imperative overtones suggestive of biblical commandments. Compare Genesis 2:17–18. 39. “There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:6–7). 40. See On Love (Poetry, 474).

OO

358 358

Notes Shelley to Pages among 194-197 Others

41. Ineffability is a trait that Shelley also associates with language on the boundary in other writers, such as Dante. See my “The Two Languages.” 42. In A Defence, Shelley characterizes the ontology of poetic composition as being spontaneous and unwilled, “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (Poetry, 503–4). But poetry is identical with neither those moments nor those minds. 43. See Augustine, The Confessions, 162. Helen’s account of “strange tongues” also has interesting affinities with Augustine’s discussion of what he calls “memory” in book X of The Confessions, suggesting that her descent into madness is also a descent into the collective unconscious. 44. Behredt, Audiences, 177, correctly observes that “The convergence of Julian and Maddalo in their response to the Maniac underscores an important affinity that the two men share from the outset. Both are deeply interested in the relation of the individual to society and to the world generally. Both have thought long and hard on this problem, and though their conclusions differ greatly, they are anxious to convince others of their correctness.” 45. See G. M. Matthews, “`Julian and Maddalo’: The Draft and the Meaning,” Studia Neophilologia 35 (1963), 83; Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 137; Curran, Poetic Form, 119; and Rzepka, “Revisionary Conversation Poem,” 140. Shelley views the proposed collection containing Julian and Maddalo as somehow being out of character with his self-image as an optimistic poet of revolution and reform. As he characterizes the contents of this proposed pamphlet, “The Julian & Maddalo & the accompan[y]ing poems are all my saddest verses raked up into one heap—I mean to mingle more smiles with my tears in the future” (Letters, 2:246). Rzepka identifies the conversation poem generally and Julian and Maddalo in particular as “a gesture towards dialogical self-redemption.” 46. See White, Shelley, 2:42–50. One of the reasons not to publish the poem was Claire Clairmont’s objection to two passages about Allegra (ll. 143–58, 588– 96), her daughter by Byron. Although somewhat disingenuous, given his initial intention to publish Julian and Maddalo anonymously, and given his protracted consideration of how to publish the poem thereafter, Shelley’s assurances that all of Claire’s “wishes have been attended to respecting ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ which never was intended for publication” (Letters, 2:254) does show another aspect of Shelley’s ambivalence about publishing the poem during his life. 47. In the letter of 14 May 1820 to Ollier, Shelley equivocates about his intent to publish Julian and Maddalo. “If I had even intended to publish ‘Julian and Maddalo’ with my name, yet I would not print it with ‘Prometheus.’ It would not harmonize. It is an attempt in a different style, in which I am not yet sure of myself” (Letters, 2:196). Some seven months later, in the letter of 22 February

O O

to Pages 197-201 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

359 359

1821, having sent Ollier additional manuscript materials, Shelley muses, “I suppose ‘Julian and Maddalo’ is published. If not, do not add the ‘Witch of Atlas’ to that particular piece of writing; you may put my name to the ‘Witch of Atlas,’ as usual” (2:269). 48. Vergil, The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues), tr. E. V. Rieu (1954; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), ll. 29–30, 70. See also Curran, Poetic Form, 119. The Latin original of Shelley’s translation/epigraph reads, “nec lacrimis crudelis Amor nec gramina rivis/nec cytiso saturantur apes nec fronde capallae.” Rieu translates the pertinent section of Pan’s speech as follows: “You will no more satisfy the cruel god with tears than goats with leaves, or bees with clover, or the grass by watering it.” Curran sees the epigraph as ironic. 49. Vergil, The Pastoral Poems, ll. 22–23. The Latin original reads, “‘Gallae, quid insanis?’ inquit. ‘tua cura Lycoris/perque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est.”’ Rieu renders the speech as “‘Gallus,’ he [Pan] said, ‘what madness is this? Lycoris, your darling, has run off with another man, over the snows, to share the rigors of a soldier’s life.”’ 50. See Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 109. The letter of 15 August 1819 to Hunt makes it clear that Shelley consciously opts for what might be called a high colloquial style. In Shelley’s own words, “I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms.” 51. See Kelvin Everest, “Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo,” in Everest, Shelley Revalued, 75, 76. 52. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 124–25, sees a connection between the figure of the Maniac and the observation of the narrator of “Resolution and Independence” (1802) that “We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness” (WPW, ll. 48–49). 53. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 53, observes that “Julian and Maddalo is a text that prompts the reader to supply explanations and moralizing glosses, even as it refuses to give final assent to any single account.” 54. See Everest, “Shelley’s Doubles,” 69. 55. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 71, analyzes the lines thusly: “The use, once again, of ‘such’ alerts the reader to the inescapable human drive to interpret; the detail does not ask us to be sceptical about the ‘transcendent worth’ of Maddalo’s daughter, but merely requires us to acknowledge the inevitable and never-ending quest to find some accord between ideals and experience.” The simile that likens Maddalo’s daughter to “one of Shakespeare’s women” suggests that she resembles Cordelia, an exemplary woman for Shelley. 56. Reiman and Powers (Poetry, 114n.) correctly note that the echo in these

OO

360 360

Notes Shelley to Pages among 201-204 Others

lines is of Paradise Lost, II, 555–61, particularly of those lines in which the elite few apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. (II, 557–61) Julian and Maddalo agree on the difficulty of attaining self-knowledge in the hellish world of the poem. Of the Maniac, Maddalo says, those are his sweet strains which charm the weight From madmen’s chains and make this Hell appear A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear. (Poetry, ll. 259–61) Maddalo here echoes perhaps Shelley’s favorite speech in Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (I, 254–55). While William Christie, “‘Despondency and Madness’: Shelley in Conversation with Byron in Julian and Maddalo,” Byron Journal 21 (1993), 57, notes the pertinence of the last-quoted lines from Milton to “the metapoetic exchange with Byron,” in which Maddalo makes a hell of heaven, and Julian makes a heaven of hell, Christie does not identify this echo. 57. There may also be something of Hamlet to Maddalo. See Wasserman, Critical Reading, 75–76; Clark, Embodying Revolution, 197. Cameron, Golden Years, 614–15n., reports that “John Lavelle of Monmouth College suggested. . . that the name Maddalo perhaps came from Count Maddaloni, whose family was noted in J. C. L. Sismondi de Sismondi, Histoire des republics italiennes du Moyen Age.. . . Shelley was acquainted with Sismondi’s history. Shelley also used the name Maddalo for a courtier in Scene from Tasso (1818).” 58. Byron was also known to keep a menagerie of animals in his lodgings in Venice, thereby recalling, albeit with a humorous difference, Adam’s naming of the animals (Gen. 2:19–20). 59. See Cameron, Golden Years, 257. 60. Christie, “‘Despondency and Madness,”’ 47, 49, correctly views the site as symbolizing “the lack of firm ground on which the argument [between Julian and Maddalo] takes place.” 61. In the topos of the four ages of poetry, picked up by Thomas Love Peacock in his 1820 essay of that title, the age of iron is the last and least inspired, following upon the ages of god, silver, and bronze, respectively. 62. In Lines, Venice serves a similar microcosmic function. There, however, the Shelleyan speaker sees the “Sun-girt city” returning to the sea, figured as

O O

to Pages 204-207 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

361 361

“watery bier” (Poetry, ll. 115–20), or tomb that had formerly been the womb of “Ocean’s child, in terms more nearly like those of Maddalo than those of Julian. 63. See Byron’s “Prometheus” (1816), in ByPW, ll. 18–23, 47–52. Shelley’s Julian has Maddalo/Byron dead to rights. Demogorgon’s concluding speech in Prometheus Unbound, in which he exhorts humanity “To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (IV.573–74), both echoes and revises the analysis of Byron’s speaker. And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refused thee even the boon to die. (ByPW, ll. 18–23) For the Byronic speaker as for Maddalo, the individual is isolated, reified, trapped and alienated forever within the body. Prometheus, for the former, is a symbol and a sign To mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence. (ByPW, ll. 45–52) 64. See Cameron, Golden Years, 255–66; Clark, Embodying Revolution, 178. 65. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. and tr. Josué V. Harrari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 67. Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 149, observes that “Shelley’s poem is manifestly a dialogue in which the monologue of yet a third speaker becomes the subject of debate.” 66. See Gerry O’Sullivan, “Strategies of Power in Aristotle’s Poetics,” in Culture/Criticism/Ideology, ed. Stuart Peterfreund, Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, vol. 4 (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press for the Department of English, Northeastern Univ., 1986), 1–14, esp. 3. 67. Sallis, Being and Logos, 401–12. 68. Brewer, Conversation, 49, usefully observes that, “Rather than giving us the means to interpret the Maniac’s soliloquy, Julian and Maddalo depicts the impossibility of explaining the human condition with words.” 69. See Serres, Hermes, ed. and tr. Harrari and Bell, 67. See also Christie,

OO

362 362

Notes Shelley to Pages among 209-211 Others

“‘Despondency and Madness,’” 43; Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 131–32; O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 65, 67, 71; and Rzepka, “Revisionary Conversation Poem,” 132, 136. 70. Rzepka, “Revisionary Conversation Poem,” 147–48, sees Julian and Maddalo as exhibiting a “discursive scepticism” that “reflects one half of Shelley’s profoundly divided view of language as a means of liberation.” 71. Ibid., 136. 72. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 128. 73. See Clark, Embodying Revolution, 177–78, 195. 74. On the importance of Byron’s poem for understanding the Maniac, see Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), 135; Clark, Embodying Revolution, 172, 179, 189; O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 70. On the dating of the events in Tasso’s life, see Clark, Embodying Revolution, 181–82. Maddalo’s contention that wrongful suffering is the besetting cause of poetry bears very close affinities with Byron’s own position and that of his protagonist in The Lament of Tasso (1817). Shelley also paid a visit to the literary sites of Ferrara. See Letters, 2:45–48, esp. 47–48. 75. The affinities of this section of A Defence with Julian and Maddalo would repay closer study. Shortly after invoking the trope of veiling, Shelley cites Satan’s “The mind is its own place” speech from Paradise Lost (MPP, I, 254–55) to support his own contention that “All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient” (Poetry, 505). Maddalo also echoes Satan’s speech in his characterization of the Maniac’s poetic speech: his sweet strains which charm the weight From madmen’s chains, and make this Hell appear A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear. (ll. 259–61) 76. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). Apophades is one of Bloom’s seven revisionary ratios.

Chapter 6: A Perpetual Orphic Song; or, The Name of the Father? 1. Chernaik, Lyrics, 142. Wasserman, A Critical Reading, 42, is harsher, calling the first “the cowering earthbound spirit.” 2. Chernaik, Lyrics, 142. Wasserman, A Critical Reading, 42, characterizes the Second Spirit as one “whose wings are ‘strong desire’ for more than the world can provide.” 3. In “On Love,” Shelley notes that one effect of the “eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing of brooks and the rustling of reeds beside

O O

to Pages 212-220 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

363 363

them” that “bring[s] tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like . . . the voice of one beloved singing to you alone” (Poetry, 474). 4. See Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 9–11. 5. The trope can be traced back to “Mont Blanc.” Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly In circles? (Poetry, ll. 53–57) 6. See Wasserman, Critical Reading, 44–45. Wasserman discusses the sonnet, building on what he sees as “the psychomachy of the two Spirits.” 7. The epigraph, as translated by Reiman and Powers, is “Not yet did I love, yet I was in love with loving; . . . I sought what I might love, loving to love” (Poetry, 70n.). 8. See David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., Greek Tragedies, vol. I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), 62. 9. Grene, introduction to Prometheus Bound, in ibid., 62. For a recent discussion of the changes that Aeschylus rings on the originating Greek myth as it is found in Hesiod’s Theogony, see Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 137–43. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 83, observes that Shelley’s play shares with “its Aeschylean model . . . certain fundamental premises. . . . Although tyranny and hatred must at length yield to freedom and enlightenment, it is only from suffering over time that the necessary wisdom springs.” 10. Reiman and Powers suggest that “Shelley omits the killing of the bird because, as III.ii had made clear, bloodshed was banished after Jupiter’s fall” (Poetry, 184n.). In fact, the metonymic eagle that wreaks Jupiter’s vengeance is banished along with Jupiter in III.ii. Describing Jupiter’s fall to Ocean (and converting metonymy back to metaphor), Apollo figures Jupiter as his metonymic avatar, An eagle so, caught in some bursting cloud On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length Prone, and the aerial ice clings over it. (III.ii.11–17) 11. Marlon B. Ross, “The Apprehending Reader in Prometheus Unbound, Keats-Shelley Journal 36 (1987), 118.

OO

364 364

Notes Shelley to Pages among 220-225 Others

12. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 92–93. 13. As discussed in Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 137–38. 14. See Bryan Shelley, Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 105. 15. See ibid. 16. See Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Oresteian Trilogy, tr. Philip Vellacott (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956), ll. 881–98; O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 95. 17. The sense of “Neither to change nor falter nor repent” may, at first glance, seem problematic in light of the fact that Prometheus does indeed repent for his cursing of Jupiter. However, I take Demogorgon’s sense to be that Prometheus is the being who takes unrepentantly the positions that Demogorgon describes — that Prometheus loves, bears, and hopes unrepentantly, that is—not that Prometheus is (or ought to be) unrepentant on general principle. 18. Cicero: Tusculan Disputations, tr. J. E. King (1927; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), 170–73. 19. Ibid., 164–65, 170–73. 20. In these lines and the two preceding echo the story of the death of Hercules at the hands of Deianira. This story is discussed by Cicero immediately prior to his discussion of Aeschylus. See ibid., 168–69. See also Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 150. 21. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 84–85. Others are not so comfortable as Ulmer is with the dynamics of metaphor in Prometheus Unbound. Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 156, comments on “The folly of Shelley’s language. . . . Prometheus Unbound is a play of signs and sign-making, a play of ‘sense’ independent of ‘reference’, to borrow Frege’s distinction. . . . None of the events in Shelley’s elaborate fiction refers to historical time, nor do his characters stand for specific concepts.” And Ross G. Woodman, “Metaphor and Allegory in Prometheus Unbound,” in Blank, The New Shelley, 177, complains, “Shelley’s metaphor-making arises from an anarchistic desire to live unhistorically in the moment by severing the bonds of connection which narrative provides.” 22. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 340–41, comments on the Freudian analog of such talk in discussing “the famous ‘ego ideal,’ the censorious voice of the world made one’s own.” It would seem that in cursing Jupiter, Prometheus helps him to make “the censorious voice of the world” his own. 23. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 163–65, discusses what he calls “self-extension by self-repression.” 24. The passage from Plato adds an ironic dimension to “Here lies one whose name was writ on water. In the matter of hydrostatics and meteorology, see Wasserman, Critical Reading, esp. 328–32.

O O

to Pages 225-233 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

365 365

25. This parting of the ways is noted by Clark as well. See Prose, 287n. 26. See my introduction, note 12. 27. There is a probably a punning self-reference at work here, in the Greek root iso ‘the same as’; if Isocrates “has the element of philosophy in his nature,” he is iso-Socratic, as it were. 28. Wasserman, Critical Reading, 260. 29. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 109; Rajan, Supplement, 304; Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 94. In Ulmer’s words, “Demogorgon allows Shelley to idealize history —that ‘record of crimes & miseries’ (Letters, 1:340)—by rooting temporal contingency in immutable truth, in ‘the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ (Defence of Poetry, 483).” 30. KPW, I, 181. 31. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 143, notes that this setting represents a shift from “the Caucasus Mountains that lie between the Black and Caspian seas” in Aeschylus’s play. 32. “The creator of the universe” instructs the gods as to how to create one category of these animals in a manner that is quite pertinent to the metaphysical and social dimensions of Shelley’s idealism. “In order that they, [i.e., the ‘animals’] may be mortal, and this universe may be truly universal, do ye, according to your natures, betake yourselves to the formation of animals, imitating the power which was shown by me in creating you. The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you—of the divine part I will sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you” (41a—b). 33. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 130. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 145, notes that Prometheus “and Jove share power,” in spite of the former’s “degrading and tormented position.” 34. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 103–6 for a discussion of projection in Prometheus Unbound, and 91–101, for a discussion of the narcissistic motivations of projection, chiefly in relation to The Revolt. 35. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 93–94. 36. Ovid: Metamorphoses, tr. Miller, II, 78–79 (Metamorphoses X, 214– 19). Reiman and Powers (Poetry, 164n.) also pick up the allusion. 37. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 14:77. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 16, discusses this essay. Gay, Freud, 340, notes that “the narcissistic type, under the sway of the ego-libido, loves what he is, what he once was, what he would like to be, or the person who had been part of his own self.” 38. See Clark, Embodying Revolution, 234; David Quint, “Representation and Ideology in The Triumph of Life,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18 (Spring 1978). Clark notes that Prometheus Unbound anticipates, in its dynamics,

OO

366 366

Notes Shelley to Pages among 234-243 Others

“the recurrent pattern of revolutionary, imaginative energy degenerating into ideological dogma.” Brewer, Conversation, 90, observes, “As post-Waterloo liberals, both Byron and Shelley were disgusted at the restoration of the ancien régime, the renewed embrace of the old order, and to an extent Sardanapalus and The Cenci reflect this political frustration.” 39. See Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 170–235, esp. 197. 40. See Christine Berthin, “Prometheus Unbound, or Discourse and Its Other,” Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993), 133–34. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 197, observes a similar dynamic at work in the “Arve,” “rave[s]” “ravine” play at the outset of “Mont Blanc.” 41. There may be an echo of Matthew 4:18–19 here. Coming upon the fishermen Simon-called-Peter and Andrew, his brother, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus says to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 42. See Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 168–71. 43. The Echoes subsequently say to Asia that their “music, wild and sweet, / Mocks thy gently falling feet” (II.i.185–86). “Feet,” not “voices”: in so doing, the Echoes comment on the ability of art to idealize, then both deify and reify, an object such as animate nature, much in the same sense that Asia does when she talks of how human hands first mimicked and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own The human form, till marble grew divine. (II.iv.80–82) Voice has nearly the opposite effect. 44. The Phantasm of Jupiter does very much the same thing for Prometheus. Gay, Freud, 296, in discussing Freud’s 1913 essay “On Beginning the Treatment,” notes that “the patient lies on a couch with the analyst behind him, out of sight, listening intently.” Especially uncanny is the way that Freud’s strictures against taking notes—Freud “cautioned analysts against taking notes during the session, since doing so would only distract their attention. Besides, they could trust their memories to retain what they needed”—intersects with Shelley’s concern with the written versus the oral, as these bear on the problem of language’s reification. 45. See Gay, Freud, 296. “As for himself, he [i.e., Freud] had no doubt: the psychoanalytic situation invites the patient to regress, to free himself of the constraints that normal social intercourse imposes.” 46. Rajan, Supplement, 313. 47. Blake does something similar, albeit darker, in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). 48. Barbara Groseclose, “The Incest Motif in Shelley’s The Cenci,” Comparative Drama 19 (1985), 222, 225, 226.

O O

to Pages 243-249 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

367 367

49. See Michael Worton, “Speech and Silence in The Cenci,” in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 107; Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 127; and O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 79. 50. Groseclose, “The Incest Motif,” 226. 51. See Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), 140. Curran, although urging the reader of The Cenci to refrain from imposing upon Beatrice’s “world an ethic foreign to its exigencies, denying the repeated symbolism of the imagery and the carefully balanced structure of characterizations,” ends up seeing Beatrice as the sort of character more usually found in existential fiction than in tragedy. Baker, Major Poetry, 142, judges Beatrice’s actions more harshly: “under indignities of the most horrible kind, a gentle and innocent girl was turned into an efficient machine of vengeance, coolly planning, imperiously executing, denying her part in, and at last calmly dying for the murder of her father.” Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 141, adopting Fredric Jameson’s thesis that a culture’s common language subverts heteroglossic alternatives and enforces the horizons of the dominant ideology, has pleaded for mitigation. Beatrice, “Having no access to an alternative discourse . . . locks herself into tragedy by embracing the ideology of vengeance embedded in the prison-house of her father’s language.” Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 130, has taken a harder line, turning to Shelley’s preface to note “the inflexible moral imperative that Beatrice violates in carrying out the murder of her father.” If Sperry’s Shelley seems to be saying, “peace,” Tetreault says, “hate the sin but love the sinner.” Sperry holds that Shelley “regarded the moral recognition of his play truer to the underlying spirit of Christianity than the sacrilegious politics of false piety and self-interest he exposes in all his work.” 52. Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 129–30; Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 135. 53. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 156, observes, “It is as though, invaded by him, she must act as he would were he inside her, all the while forgetting that such a drive is really a constructed excuse for answering (and imitating) his phallic power play.” Anne C. McWhir, “The Light and the Knife: Ab/Using Language in The Cenci,” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989), 145, states that “The Cenci is clearly a play about the effect of patriarchy on thought and language, an effect going well beyond the transformations of meaning that such words as ‘father’ and ‘child’ undergo in the course of the play. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 115–16, connects that adoption to a variant of the mirror stage. “Shelley offers specularity as the model of emotional and intellectual realization throughout The Cenci. 54. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 271. See also Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 154; Ronald L. Lemoncelli, “Cenci as Corrupt Dramatic Poet,” English Language Notes 16 (1978), 104–6.

OO

368 368

Notes Shelley to Pages among 249-250 Others

55. Eugene R. Hammond, “Beatrice’s Three Fathers: Successive Betrayal in Shelley’s The Cenci,” Essays in Literature, 8 (1981), reads the play as one of Beatrice’s successive betrayal by three hierarchically ordered fathers: Count Cenci, her biological father; Pope Clement VIII, her Holy Father; and God, her Heavenly Father. 56. See Brown, Shelley and Feminism, 200–201. 57. In The Assassins, Shelley sympathetically describes a small band of early Christians who hold “opinions [that] considerably resembled those of the sect afterwards known by the name of Gnostics” (Prose, 145). See also James Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: G. Braziller, 1967), 133. 58. Orsino, in a wonderful moment of projection, exhibits just such “restless and anatomizing casuistry” within the play itself. He proclaims the goal of engaging Beatrice in a clandestine relationship, then confesses, Yet I fear Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze, Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts.—Ah, no! A friendless girl Who clings to me, as to her only hope:— I were a fool, not less than if a panther Were panic-stricken by the Antelope’s eye, If she escape me. (I.ii.83–91) Subsequently (II.ii.108–11), Orsino projects the anatomizing tendency upon the entire Cenci clan. See also Donna Richardson, “Hamartia of Imagination in Shelley’s Cenci,” Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995), 229; Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 131. 59. See Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, based on the 4th ed., 1730, ed. Duane H. D. Roller (New York: Dover, 1952), 401. See also Grabo, A Newton among the Poets, 15. See Lucretius, De rerum natura, tr. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 70. In book II of De rerum natura (ca. 55 B.C.), Lucretius states that “the characteristics of atoms of all substances . . . differ in shape and the rich multiplicity of their forms.” Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 32, discusses the influence of Lucretius among others in the development of Shelley’s materialism. 60. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 91. 61. See McWhir, “The Light and the Knife,” 157. 62. See ibid., 150; Morton, Revolution in Taste, 191. 63. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 135.

O O

to Pages 250-253 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

369 369

64. See Lockridge, Ethics of Romanticism, 322; Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 135. 65. Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence, 141. 66. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 127. 67. See Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 134. 68. See Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 232. 69. Weisman, Imageless Truths, 107, sees the speaking of this language as the dark double of the self-oracularity celebrated in Prometheus Unbound. “In the world of The Cenci, self-revelation results in oracles of, and then actualization of, further evil.” 70. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 154, 158. 71. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 136. 72. Ibid., 135, compares Fuseli’s pictorial rendering of the torments of Prometheus with Shelley’s rendering of those torments. 73. Webb, A Voice Not Understood, 135. 74. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 134. 75. D. Harrington-Lueker, “Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth,” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 179. 76. Worton, “Speech and Silence,” 117. 77. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, tr. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori (1934; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 398, 544–45. 78. Clark, who translates the Latin as “In whom all things move, without affecting each other,” mistakenly notes Holbach’s Système de la Nature (1775) as the source (Shelley 134n.:1966). 79. O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 89. O’Neill cites V.iv.97–101 as his case in point. 80. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 293. 81. Ibid., 310. 82. Harrington-Lueker, “Imagination versus Introspection,” 188.

Chapter 7: Moving toward the Shade of Shelley 1. In proclaiming “Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!” (Poetry, l. 316), Shelley figures Keats’s imagined death from hostile reviews in line with his own fantasies, at the same time suggesting his own reaction to hostile reviews. 2. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), 136; and

OO

370 370

Notes Shelley to Pages among 253-268 Others

Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (1971; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 5–6. 3. See David G. Riede, Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 50. The Fury’s speech glances back at Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1802), suggesting one of the liabilities of being “suckled in a creed outworn” (WPW, l. 10). 4. The speaker of Adonais likens the poem’s namesake to the eagle, who like thee could scale Heaven, and nourish in the sun’s domain Her mighty youth with morning. (ll. 147–49) And in The Triumph, the speaker-observer reports that “they of Athens and Jerusalem,” to be numbered among the sacred few who could not tame Their spirits to the Conqueror [Life] . . . as soon As they had touched the world with living flame Fled back like eagles to their native noon. (ll. 128–31) In both passages, as well as in “To a Sky-Lark,” Shelley invokes the myth that eagles restore their keenness of vision by flying directly up toward the sun, thus burning away the accumulated film that has dulled that vision. Compare “The Eagles,” in The Poetry of Humphry Davy, ed. A. Pritchard (Penzance: Penwith D. C., 1978), 37. 5. Curran, Poetic Form, 70 synopsizes the “hierarchy of lyric modes” found in Charles Batteux’s Course of Belles Lettres (1761) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). “Both . . . place the sacred ode first . . . followed by the heroic ode, derived from Pindar, the moral or philosophical ode, mainly associated with Horace . . . and the festive, amorous, or joyful ode, this latter deriving from Anacreon and barely distinguishable from a song.” 6. The lines appear to anticipate that moment in The Triumph when “A Janus-visaged shadow did assume/The guidance of that wonder winged team” (ll. 94–95) that pulls the chariot of the conqueror Life and leads his parade of captured slaves. 7. See Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 718–21. 8. Hogg quotes Cicero, Pro Domo, 138. I am grateful to my colleague, Frank Blessington, for his aid in rendering the line and identifying the source. 9. Dante wrote La Vita Nuova while a citizen of Florence, finishing that work

O O

to Pages 270-276 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

371 371

nine years before his exile on charges of corruption in 1302. He died not in Florence but in Ravenna, having previously refused the opportunity to return to Florence. Of Dante, Shelley observes in A Defence, “His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language. . . . His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradation of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry” (497). 10. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 27, notes this source. 11. Shelley’s case against eighteenth-century thinkers turns on his understanding that they take the “garb” for the “true meaning.” Dryden, in his Essays, Pope, in Essay on Criticism, and Johnson, in Lives of the Poets, all take the position that language is the dress of thought. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 25–26, disagrees. 12. There is a parallel passage in “On Love” (474). Reiman and Powers cite this essay fragment in relation to ll. 235–38 of Epipsychidion. 13. Substance, in the philosophical sense intended by Aristotle and others, means that which persists through change. 14. Compare the first part of stanza 5 of the “Hymn” (ll. 49–54). What follows —in the spring, naturally—is the manifestation of Intellectual Beauty’s “shadow,” which causes an epiphany not unlike that which Emily, figured as “A shadow of some golden dream,” causes. 15. Compare the following line from the “Hymn”: “I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed” (l. 53). 16. “What . . . must endure” is substance. See note 13. 17. Shelley seconds Milton’s position on the difficulties with rendering the paradisal state in a twice-fallen language. See Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 107–29. 18. In Prometheus Unbound, the protagonist addresses Asia, thou light of life, Shadow of beauty unbeheld; and ye Fair sister nymphs. (III.iii.6–8) The word sister refers both to the kinship of Asia and the other Oceanides, and to the kinship of the other Oceanides—and, by extension, of Asia herself—to Prometheus. 19. Shelley takes up the Byron-Jesus association again in the preface to Adonais, this time by means of literary allusion. Commenting on the questionable taste and morals of those who review for the Quarterly, above all, the Reverend Henry Hart Milman, Shelley asks, “Are these the men who presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron? What gnat did they

OO

372 372

Notes Shelley to Pages among 277-285 Others

strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? Against what woman taken in adultery, dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone?” As Reiman and Powers note, the second question echoes Jesus’ condemnation, in Matthew 23 (esp. 23:24), of the literalness of the scribes and Pharisees; the third, Jesus’ charitable verdict, in John 8:3–11 (esp. 8:7), in opposition to the insistence of the scribes and Pharisees that the woman taken in adultery be sentenced to the prescribed penalty of death by stoning (Poetry, 391 and n.). Shelley looks at the reviewers as a type of the scribes and Pharisees. 20. The speaker of Adonais accords this prowess to the poem’s namesake, himself resembling the eagle, who like thee could scale Heaven, and nourish in the sun’s domain Her mighty youth with morning. (ll. 147–49) Byron had taken on and defied the critics and the literary establishment more generally in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and Don Juan (1818–21?). 21. This initial condition is not unlike that of Blake’s Milton. The poem’s namesake is introduced as “Unhappy tho in heav’n, he obey’d, he mumur’d not. he was silent” (BPW, 2:18). Curran, Poetic Form, 123, concurs. 22. See KPW, l. 52. A previously unnoted allusion to Keats’s ode comes in the preface, where Shelley observes of the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, “It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place” (390). The remark echoes the speaker of the ode’s confession to the nightingale: “I have been half in love with easeful Death.” 23. Shelley, by his own admission in the letter of 27 July 1820 to Keats (Letters, 2:221), was rereading Endymion at approximately the same time that he was composing “To a Sky-Lark,” one central image of which is that of the bird disappearing into the sun “Like a cloud of fire” (Poetry, l.8). There may also be echoes of poems earlier than Endymion, such as Sleep and Poetry (1817) and I Stood Tiptoe (1817), here. See Letters of John Keats, 2 vols., ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 1:33. In establishing a chronology of Keats’s life and works, Rollins notes that, on 16 February 1817, “At a dinner party Hunt shows some of Keats’s verse to the Shelleys, Godwin, Basil Montagu, and Hazlitt.” 24. The preface reads, “INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS CHATTERTION” (KPW, 64). 25. See George Cheatham, “Byron’s Dislike of Keats’s Poetry,” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 20. See also Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). 26. The passages from book III of Endymion focus on a transfiguration having to do with universal love.

O O

to Pages 285-289 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

373 373

27. See note 14. Another possible intertext here is “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), which, as a poem that first appeared in the 1 December 1816 number of The Examiner, which Hunt edited, was almost certainly among those poems he showed to the Shelleys and the others present at the dinner party of 13 February 1817. The sonnet’s speaker states that reading Chapman’s translation made him feel “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (KPW, ll. 9–10). 28. In a letter of 29 October 1820 to Marianne Hunt, Shelley praises Hyperion as evidence that Keats “is destined to become one of the first writers of the age,” then observes that his other poems are “written in a bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy they are imitating Hunt & Wordsworth” (Letters, 2:239). 29. The title Literary Remains was often used in Shelley’s time for collections by those who met untimely ends. Some examples include The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey, with a Memoir of Her Life by Nicholas Harris Nicholas (London: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1825); The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard, with a Sketch of His Life. By J. G. Whittier (Hartford: P. B. Goodsell, 1832); The Literary Remains of Martha Day. With Rev. Dr. Fitch’s Address at Her Funeral, and Sketches of Her Character (New Haven: H. Howe & Co., 1834); and Literary Remains. Of Joseph Appleton Barrett and Emily Maria Barrett (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1837). Grey’s dates were 1537–54; Brainard’s, 1796–1828; Day’s, 1813–33; the Barretts’, 1813–33 and 1815(?)– 33, respectively. Shelley associated the Protestant Cemetery, the site where Keats’s physical remains were interred, with “mostly . . . women & young people who were buried there” (Letters, 2:60). 30. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 301. 31. See ibid., 302. 32. And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (Poetry, ll. 142–44) 33. The sentiment, if not the precise words, echoes “On Love (Poetry, 474). 34. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 303. Shelley’s fragment, “The Colosseum (1819?), which introduces a mysterious stranger who possesses “something in his manner unintelligible but impressive,” is set in Rome on “the feast of the Passover,” which just happens also to be “the great feast of the Resurrection.” Given the fact that the stranger “spoke Latin, and especially Greek, with fluency and with a peculiar but sweet accent,” it seems plausible that this figure is one of the participants in the Passion and the Resurrection—the Wandering Jew, Joseph of Arimathea, or one of the disciples, most likely Peter or Paul. 35. Violets may serve as metalepses for the process of transfiguration by means

OO

374 374

Notes Shelley to Pages among 290-295 Others

of metaphor, but they are themselves vulnerable to destructive forces, such as that of translation. See also Keach, Shelley’s Style, 20; Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 9. 36. See Wasserman, Critical Reading, 492: “flower and star, two symbols of Adonais, have been recurrently related in the poem as earthly life is to postmortal life.” 37. Ibid., 493; emphasis added. 38. Grabo, A Newton among Poets, 97, notes that Shelley was likely familiar with Newton’s theory that “ascribes to ether the origin of matter itself.” In his study of meteorology, Shelley may have encountered the observation that water is a compound capable of sublimation, especially from ice to vapor in the presence of radiant light. The subliming of iodine also dates from Shelley’s time. See David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 99, 197. 39. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 312, finds that “The composition of this poetfigure is not only a disruption, even a parody, of conventional lamentation; it also resurrects the ancient Dionysian rituals designed to bring about renewal after death, ones that fashioned reincarnations . . . in a highly physical and metamorphic fashion different from any that the tradition of Urania would recognize.” 40. Shelley may be remembering more of the third stanza of the nightingale ode, which represents the locus of human existence as a site Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full or sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs. (KPW, ll. 25–28) 41. Unlike the Bacchic figure, speaker of Adonais has some slight inkling that such transfiguration is possible. The figure “Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, / Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s” (ll. 305–6), the speaker reports. In Genesis, God sets a mark on Cain’s forehead to prevent anyone from avenging Abel’s murder by killing him (4:15). The effect is not to transfigure Cain but rather to prolong his miserable life as “a fugitive and a vagabond . . . in the earth” (4:13). Jesus’ bloody crown of thorns (Matt. 27:29) does hint at his impending transfiguration, and to the possibility that the Bacchic figure’s brow resembles that of Christ rather than that of Cain, the speaker exclaims, using the conditional tense (or the subjunctive mood), “Oh! that it should be so!” (l. 306). 42. In Prometheus Unbound, Panthea speaks of how “lonely men” imbibe That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain To deep intoxication, and uplift Like Mænads who cry aloud, Evoe! Evoe! The voice which is contagion to the world. (II.iii.7–10

O O

to Pages 295-296 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

375 375

Reiman and Powers explain the lines thusly: “Maenads were fanatic female worshipers of Dionysus, Greek god of wine (Roman Bacchus); when in an intoxicated frenzy, they would surge through the wilderness crying ‘Evoe!’ and killing every living thing in their path” (169n.). 43. Shelley was an amateur astronomer of some standing, with an abiding interest in the theories and observations of astronomers such as William Herschel, whose sighting of Uranus underwrites Keats’s Chapman’s Homer sonnet. See Grabo A Newton among Poets, 84–86, and The Magic Plant, 163–65. 44. See Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 273. 45. Ibid., 213–17. 46. Ibid., 557–59. 47. See Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1994), 20. 48. See Grabo, A Newton among Poets, 84–85. Citing The Collected Scientific Papers of William Herschel, Grabo notes Shelley’s essential agreement with Herschel’s pre-1818 position that “The stars . . . [are] essentially like our sun and planets, as habitable planetary globes.” 49. See Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 144; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 103–5. 50. In his argument, Ahasuerus echoes Shelley’s position in “On Life.” “The words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind” (478). 51. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, tr. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 294–304, 390–91, esp. 299. Shelley here at once anticipates and extends the insights of Lévi-Strauss’s chapter 28 (“A Writing Lesson”), to include not only writing but any “official” language that participates, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, in “the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. . . . My hypothesis . . . would oblige us to recognize that the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.” 52. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 114. 53. See Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: A Critical Study, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 55 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), 111; Keach, Shelley’s Style, 11. 54. Ibid., 39–40. Cronin, Poetic Thoughts, 214, adds usefully that Rousseau’s narrative is “a partial parallel to the visionary’s own experience, a distorted reflection of the kind that dominates the poem.” 55. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 339, has a similar insight, speculating as to whether

OO

376 376

Notes Shelley to Pages among 296-304 Others

“the success of Shelley’s critique may result in its failure, in an erasure of its revelations by any reading of its signs.” 56. Shelley’s detestation of Constantine is clear. At one point in The Triumph, the shade points to a group in the procession whom the Shelley speaker recognized amid the heirs Of Caesar’s crime from him to Constantine. The Anarchs old whose force and murderous snares Had founded many a sceptre bearing line And Spread the plague of blood and gold abroad.” (Poetry, ll. 283–87) 57. Brewer, Shelley-Byron Conversation, 109–30, argues for the presence of Byronic and Goethean Influences on The Triumph. Duffy Rousseau in England, 127, 134–35, also discerns the influence of Goethe’s Faust, as do Reiman, “Triumph,” 19n., 59, 86, and Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 333–34, 336. 58. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 320, 338, also notes the informing presence of the Intimations Ode. See also Reiman, “Triumph,” 110–11. 59. See Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology, 7–17, for a discussion of to pithanon, or probability. See also Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 50, 64. Without invoking skepticism by name, de Man practices it in his discussion of the function of Neoplatonic forgetting, or anamnesis, in The Triumph. Keach, Shelley’s Style, 192, counters usefully, granting the power of “Forgetting, obliteration, and erasure,” but going on to note that “the articulation of these forces depends upon the counterforces of remembering, literation, and repetition.” 60. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 109–14; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 323– 24. See also Rousseau, The Confessions, 592–93. 61. Duffy, Rousseau in England. 133. 62. See Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1–4. 63. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 133; Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 1228–29. 64. See, e.g., Reiman, “Triumph,” 67; Duffy, Rousseau in England, 122; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 329. 65. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 329. 66. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 167–68, argues for Purgatorio, XXX, 85–99, as a source for the passage. Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 334, 336, characterizes the mediatory position as “Faustlike” and discusses the way in which the poem’s structure works “to situate both the narrator and the reader at the Goethean fulcrum.” 67. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 169, sees the shape as responsible for the errors resulting from the assumption of the mediatory position.

O O

to Pages 304-306 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

377 377

68. Janus is also a figure associated with language acquisition in modern Europe, in texts such as Jan Amos Comenius’s Janua Linguarum (The Gate of Languages Unlocked [1631; tr. 1659]). 69. See Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910), in Strachey et al., Standard Edition, 11:153–61. Drawing on the work of the philologist Karl Abel, Freud concludes that such words harbor two meanings deployed antithetically. 70. In Leviticus 6:8–16, for example. God issues certain commands regarding the way that Aaron and his sons prepare and dispose of burned offerings, including what is called the “meat offering. . . . And the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat” (6:15–16). 71. See Rousseau, Confessions, 545; Duffy, Rousseau in England, 18. 72. Duffy, Rousseau in England, 137. 73. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 334. I disagree with Hogle’s position that “Shelley has taken the terza rima dream-visions of Dante and Petrarch and reworked their deigns to give his narrator and reader the option of choosing between repressed and accepted transference, between the all-centering One of Dante, Petrarch, Calderón, and Rousseau himself or the revisionary, decentering One of Goethe and Shelley.” 74. See Reiman, “The Triumph,” 64–65. 75. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 322–23. 76. Odyssey, IV, 219–34 (Butler translation). 77. Inferno, I.1–2 (Norton translation). See Reiman, “The Triumph, 39–40; Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 335. 78. In A Defence, Shelley says, “The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised” (Poetry, 498). Rousseau’s words also recall Demogorgon’s statement, Prometheus Unbound, that “All things are subject” to “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change” except “eternal Love” (II.iv.119–20). 79. In Genesis 8:9–13, God’s “bow in the cloud is his “token of the covenant” made between him and all the other living creatures that survived the flood: “neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.” 80. See note 3; O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 180. 81. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 189, observes usefully that “Several related metaphors control the development of the poem. One is burning and irradiation and, as an inevitable result, waning and dissolution. The other is encrustating, blurring, and adulteration—a process of distortion that reflects light ultimately to its opposite, deceiving shadow.”

OO

378 378

Notes Shelley to Pages among 306-312 Others

82. See Brewer, Shelley-Byron Conversation, 124. 83. See Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, 3–7, esp. 7; Duffy, Rousseau in England, 91, 119. 84. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 128. 85. Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, 34. 86. See, e.g., Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 255; Reiman, “The Triumph,” 39. 87. See Brewer, Shelley-Byron Conversation, 124; Duffy, Rousseau in England, 121–22, 128. 88. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 117. 89. See Brewer, Shelley-Byron Conversation, 120, and de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” 43. 90. See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 109. 91. Ibid., 121–22. 92. Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 248–49, takes the extreme position that The Triumph is “ultimately a dead end, poetically speaking . . . a poem in the private voice, a personal meditation on the complexities of existence in a far from perfect world that recalls Alastor.” 93. Weisman, Imageless Truths, 160, reads the relationship of The Triumph to the poems to Jane the other way around. 94. Tetreault, Poetry of Life, 251, argues that “the chief speakers of The Triumph of Life have embarked” on what he terms “a quest for unconditional meaning” akin to that of the Poet in Alastor. The argument elides the important differences between the Shelleyan speaker and the shade. 95. See Hogle, Shelley’s Process, 333–34. 96. See Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros, 173. 97. See my “The Truth about ‘Beauty’ and ‘Truth’: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ Milton, Shakespeare, and the Uses of Paradox,” Keats-Shelley Journal 35 (1986), 69–70. Reiman, “The Triumph,” 83, speculates, “Thus Rousseau’s declaration beginning ‘Happy those for whom the fold’ might have continued with an affirmative use of ‘fold’ as the sheepfold into which were gathered followers of the folding star of Love.” See also Duffy, Rousseau in England, 148–49. 98. See Reiman, “The Triumph,” 40, for the Dantesque alternative. “We must suppose that, had ‘The Triumph’ been extended into a vision of the ideal to balance the vision of sublunary experience in the existing fragment, Rousseau would certainly have given place to another guide, as Beatrice replaced Virgil in Canto XXX of Purgatorio.” 99. De Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” 69.

O O

to Pages 312-317 ANotes Perpetual Orphic Song

379 379

380

O

Shelley among Others

O

Bibliography

Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays in the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982. ———. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967. Abbey, Lloyd. Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Scepticism. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 5th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1988. ———. Natural Supernaturalism: Revolution and Tradition in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Aeschylus. The Oresteian Trilogy. Tr. Philip Vellacott. Baltimore: Penguin, 1956. ———. Prometheus Bound. Tr. David Greene. In Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene and Lattimore, 1:99–245. Alighieri, Dante. “The Divine Comedy” of Dante Alighieri, tr. Charles Eliot Norton, 3 vols. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1892. Allott, Miriam, ed. Essays on Shelley. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982. Amrine, Frederick, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, eds. Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 97. Boston: D. Reidel, 1987. Aristotle. The “Art” of Rhetoric. Tr. John Henry Freese. 1926; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Tr. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Tr. Edward B. Pusey. New York: Collier Books, 1961. Baker, Carlos. Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogical Imagination. Tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.

OO

381 Bibliography

381

———. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Beardsley, Monroe K. “The Metaphorical Twist.” 1962; rpt. in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. Johnson, 105–22. Behrendt, Stephen C. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989. ———, ed. History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990. Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Berthin, Christine. “Prometheus Unbound, or Discourse and Its Other.” KeatsShelley Journa, 42 (1993), 128–41. Black, Max. “Metaphor.” 1955; rpt. in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. Johnson, 63–82. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982. Blank, G. Kim. Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. ———, ed. The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971. ———. Shelley’s Mythmaking. 1959; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969. Bloom, Harold, et al., eds. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. Brady, Ronald H. “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology.” In Goethe and the Sciences, ed. Amrine, Zucker, and Wheeler, 257–300. Brewer, William D. The Shelley-Byron Conversation. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994. Brisman, Leslie. “The Mysterious Tongue’: Shelley and the Language of Christianity.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23:3 (1981), 389– 417. ———. Romantic Origins. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978. Brisman, Susan Hawk. “‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound.” Studies in Romanticism 16:1 (1977), 51–68. Brown, Nathaniel. Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Tr. Tonsld Gregot Smiyh. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

382

O

Bibliography

Byron, George Gordon. Byron: Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page, corr. John Jump. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970. Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974. Carothers, Yvonne M. “Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth.” MLQ 42:1 (1981), 21–47. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 2d ed. Ed. Francis N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Cheatham, George. “Byron’s Dislike of Keats’s Poetry.” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 20–25. Chernaik, Judith. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1972. Christie, William. “‘Despondency and Madness’: Shelley in Conversation with Byron in Julian and Maddalo.” Byron Jounal 21 (1993), 43–60. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Cicero: Tusculan Disputations. Tr. J. E. King. 1927; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950. ———. De Oratore (The Making of an Orator). 2 vols. Rev. ed. Tr. Horace Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948. Clare, John. The Prose of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble. 1951; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970. Clark, David L., and David C. Goellnicht, eds. New Romanticism: Theory and Critical Practice. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994. Clark, Timothy. Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912. Cooke, Michael G. “Romanticism: Pleasure and Play.” In The Age of William Wordsworth, ed. Johnston and Ruoff, 62–83, 348–50. Cox, Jeffrey N. “The French Revolution in English Theatre.” In History and Myth, ed. Behrendt, 33–52. Cronin, Richard. Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. ———. Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975. ———. Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970. Davy, Humphry. The Poetry of Humphry Davy. Ed. A. Pritchard. Penzance: Penwith D. C., 1978.

Bibliography

O

383

Dawson, P. M. S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figurative Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979. ———. “Shelley Disfigured.” In Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Bloom et al., 39–73. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, et al. Tr. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966. Donato, Eugenio. “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Péchuet.” In Textual Strategies, ed. Harrari, 213–38. Drummond, William. Academical Questions. Vol. 1 [sic]. Introd. Terence Allan Hoagwood. 1805; rpt. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1984. Duff, David. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994. Duffy, Edward. Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976. Everest, Kelvin. “Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo.” In Shelley Revalued, ed. Everest, 63–88. ———, ed. Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Greynog Conference. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983. Felman, Shoshana, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis, the Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982. Feyerabend, Paul K. Against Method: An Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975. Finch, Peter. “Shelley’s Laon and Cythna: The Bride Stripped Bare.” KeatsShelley Memorial Bulletin, n.s., 3 (1988), 23–46. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980. ———. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971. ———. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 1967; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971. Foss, Chris. “Shelley’s Revolution in Poetic Language: A Kristevan Reading of Act IV to Prometheus Unbound.” European Romantic Review 9:4 (1998), 501–18.

384

O

Bibliography

Fraistat, Neil. “Poetic Quests and Questioning in Shelley’s Alastor Collection.” Keats-Shelley Journal 33 (1984), 161–81. Freeman, John. “Shelley’s Early Letters.” In Shelley Revalued, ed. Everest, 109–28. Freud, Sigmund. “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910). In The Standard Edition, ed. and tr. Strachey et al., 11:153–61. ———. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914). In The Standard Edition, ed. and tr. Strachey et al., 14:73–102. ———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Ed. and tr. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992. Grabo, Carl. The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley’s Poetic Thought. 1936; rpt. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1965. ———. A Newton among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1930. Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds. Greek Tragedy. Vol. 1. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960. Groseclose, Barbara. “The Incest Motif in Shelley’s The Cenci.” Comparative Drama 19 (1985), 222–39. Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1990. Gumpel, Liselotte. Metaphor Reexamined: A Non-Aristotelian Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984. Hall, Spencer. “The Ideal, the Rhetorical, and the Erotic: A Poststructural P. B. Shelley.” College English 54:6 (October 1992), 721–28. ———, ed. Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Poetry. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, eds. The Collected Dialogues. New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1963. Hammond, Eugene R. “Beatrice’s Three Fathers: Successive Betrayal in Shelley’s The Cenci.” Essays in English Literature 8 (1981), 25–32. Harrari, Josué V., ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979. Harrington-Lueker, D. “Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macheth.” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 172–89.

Bibliography

O

385

Harris, James. Philological Inquiries. 1 vol. in 2. London: J. Nourse, 1781. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style.” PMLA 93:2 (1978), 196–204. Hawkins, Peter S., and Anne Howland Schotter, eds. Ineffability: Naming the Unnameable from Dante to Beckett. New York: AMS Press, 1984. Heppner, Christopher. “Alastor: The Poet and the Narrator Reconsidered.” Keats-Shelley Journal 37 (1988), 91–109. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Essay on the Origin of Language. In On the Origin of Language, tr. Moran and Gode, 87–166. Hoagwood, Terence Allan. Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1988. Hoeveler, Diana Long. Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. The Life of P. B. Shelley, as Comprised in the Life of Shelley by T. J. Hogg, The Recollections of Shelley and Byron by Edward J. Trelawney, Memoirs of Shelley by Thomas Love Peacock. 2 vols. Ed. Humbert J. Wolfe. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933. Hogle, Jerrold E. “Shelley as Revisionist: Power and Belief in Mont Blanc.” In The New Shelley, ed. Blank, 108–27. ———. Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. Homer. Homer’s Iliad. Tr. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951. ———. “The Odyssey,” Rendered into English Prose . . . by Samuel Butler. London: Longmans, Green, 1900. Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Jakobson, Roman. “Concluding Statement.” In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. ———. Selected Writings II. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. ———. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Selected Writings II, 255–56. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Felman, 338–95. ———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. 1976; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

386

O

Bibliography

Johnson, Mark, ed. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1981. Johnston, Kenneth R., and Gene W. Ruoff, eds. The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987. Jones, William. The Works of Sir William Jones. 13 vols. London: J. Stockdale and J. Walker, 1807. Keach, William. “Obstinate Questionings: The Immortality Ode and Alastor.” Wordsworth Circle 12:1 (1981), 36–44. ———. Shelley’s Style. New York: Methuen, 1984. Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. 2 vols. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958. ———. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978. King-Hele, Desmond. Shelley: His Thought and Work. 2d ed. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1971. Kirchoff, Frederick. “Shelley’s Alastor: The Poet Who Refuses to Write Language.” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 108–22. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Knight, David. Humphry Davy: Science and Power. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Léon S. Roudiez. Tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Léon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980. ———. “Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents.” Tr. Léon S. Roudiez. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, 238–71. ———. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Tr. Margaret Waller. Introd. Léon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984. Kucich, Greg. “The Spenserian Psychodrama of Prometheus Unbound.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12:2 (1988), 61–84. Lacan, Jacques. “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” In Écrits, tr. Sheridan, 226–80. Originally published as “La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir.” ———. Écrits: A Selection. Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. ———. Feminine Sexuality. Tr. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 1982. ———. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” Tr. Jan Miel. Yale French Studies 36–37 (1966), 112–47.

Bibliography

O

387

———. “L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou La Raison depuis Freud.” Psychoanalyse 3 (1957), 47–81. ———. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Tr. and comm. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. 1959; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970. Leighton, Angela. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984. Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis, eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965. Lemoncelli, Ronald L. “Cenci as Corrupt Dramatic Poet.” English Language Notes 16 (1978), 103–17. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Tr. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Lockridge, Laurence. The Ethics of Romanticism. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989. Lowth, Robert. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, Translated from the Latin of the Right Rev. Robert Lowth, D. D., by G. Gregory, F.A.S. 2d ed. 1787; rpt. Boston: Buckingham, 1815. Lucretius. De rerum natura. Tr. R. E. Latham. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Matthews, G. M. “‘Julian and Maddalo’: The Draft and the Meaning.” Studia Neophilologia 35 (1963), 57–84. McWhir, Anne C. “The Light and the Knife: Ab/Using Language in The Cenci.” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989), 145–61. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. ———. The Poetical Works of John Milton, from the Text of the Rev. Henry Todd, M.A., with a Critical Essay by John Aikin, M.D., 4 vols. London: Joseph Johnson, 1808. Moran, John H., and Alexander Gode, trs. On the Origin of Language. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966. Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994. Murphy, Peter. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, vol. 3. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.

388

O

Bibliography

Newton, Isaac. Opticks, or a Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light. Based on the 4th ed., 1730. Ed. Duane H. D. Roller. New York: Dover, 1952. ———. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Tr. Andrew Motte. Rev. Florian Cajori. 1934; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966. Newton, John. An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton. 6th ed. London: Joseph Johnson, 1786. Notopoulos, James A. The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1949. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993. O’Neill, Michael. The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. O’Rourke, James. “Death and Error in ‘Shelley Disfigured.’” Criticism 34:2 (1992), 1–25. O’Sullivan, Gerry. “Strategies of Power in Aristotle’s Poetics.” In Culture/ Criticism/Ideology, ed. Peterfreund, 1–14. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Peacock, Thomas Love. The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 10 vols. Ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones. London: Constable, 1924–34. Peterfreund, Stuart. “Between Desire and Nostalgia: Intertextuality in Shelley’s Alastor and Two Shorter Poems from the Alastor Volume.” Romanticism Past and Present 9:1 (1985), 47–66. ———. “Criticism and Metahistory.” Journal of Thought 17:4 (1982): 68–84. ———. “Dying into Newtonian Time: Wordsworth and the Elegiac Task.” Genre 23:4 (1990), 179–96. ———. “The Politics of ‘Neutral Space’ in Byron’s Vision of Judgment.” MLQ 40:3 (1979), 275–91. ———. “Seduced by Metonymy: Figuration and Authority in The Cenci.” In The New Shelley, ed. Blank, 184–203, 256–59. ———. “Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Language of Poetry.” Style 15:4 (1981), 382–400. ———. “Teaching Shelley’s Anatomy of Anarchy.” In Approaches, ed. Hall, 90–92. ———. “The Truth about ‘Beauty’ and ‘Truth’: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ Milton, Shakespeare, and the Uses of Paradox.” Keats-Shelley Journal 35 (1986), 62–82.

Bibliography

O

389

———. “The Two Languages and the Ineffable in Shelley’s Major Poetry.” In Ineffability, ed. Hawkins and Schotter, 123–29. ———, ed. Culture/Criticism/Ideology. Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, vol. 4. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press for the Department of English, Northeastern Univ., 1986. Pound, Ezra. Make It New. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. Privateer, Paul Michael. Romantic Voices: Identity and Ideology in British Poetry, 1789–1850. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991. Publius Ovidius Naso. Ovid: The Metamorphoses. New ed. Tr. Horace Gregory. New York: New American Library, 1960. ———. Ovid: Metamorphoses with an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1916. Pulos, C. E. The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954. Pyle, Forrest. The Ideology of the Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995. Quint, David. “Representation and Ideology in The Triumph of Life.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18 (1978), 639–57. Raben, Joseph. “Shelley the Dionysian.” In Shelley Revalued, ed. Everest, 31–36. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986. Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980. ———. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990. ———. “‘The Web of Human Things’: Narrative and Authority in Alastor.” In New Romanticisms, ed. Clark and Goellnicht, 27–51. Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1969. ———. Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life.”: A Critical Study. Illinois Studies in Language and Literature. vol. 55. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965. ———. “Structure, Symbol, and Theme in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills.’” In Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 579–96. Richardson, Donna. “Hamartia of Imagination in Shelley’s Cenci.” KeatsShelley Journal 44 (1995), 216–39. Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976. Ricks, Christopher. Keats and Embarrassment. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. Riede, David G. Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.

390

O

Bibliography

Rieger, James. The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: G. Braziller, 1967. Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. Ross, Marlon B. “The Apprehending Reader in Prometheus Unbound.” KeatsShelley Journal 36 (1987), 110–33. Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Tr. J. M. Cohen. 1953; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1985. ———. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conway Bondanella, tr. Julia Conway Bondanella, 3–57. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. ———. Essay on the Origin of Languages. In On the Origin of Language, tr. Moran and Gode, 5–74. ———. Oeuvres Complètes. Ed Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964. Ryan, Michael. “The Marxism-Deconstruction Debate in Literary Theory.” New Orleans Review 11:1 (1984), 29–35. Rzepka, Charles J. “Julian and Maddalo as Revisionary Conversation Poem.” In The New Shelley, ed. Blank, 128–49. Sale, George. The Koran . . . to Which Is Affixed a Preliminary Discourse. London: C. Ackers for J. Wilcox, 1734. Sallis, John. Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1975. Schulze, Earl J. Shelley’s Theory of Poetry: A Reappraisal. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1994. Scrivener, Michael. Radical Shelley: The Philosopical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982. ———. “Shelley and Radical Artisan Poetry.” Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993), 22–36. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. and tr. Josué V. Harrari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Pyrrhonistic Hypotyposes). 2 vols. Tr. R. G. Bury. 1933; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939. Shaaban, Bouthaina. “The Romantics in the Chartist Press.” Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1988), 25–46.

Bibliography

O

391

———. “Shelley in the Chartist Press.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983), 41–60. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shelley, Bryan. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Ed. James Rieger. 1974; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. Mary Shelley’s Journals. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1947. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Corr. G. M. Matthews. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970. ———. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. Ed. Frederick L. Jones Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. ———. Shelley and His Circle. 8 vols. to date. Ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (1–4) and Donald H. Reiman (5–8). Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961–. ———. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. ———. Shelley’s Prose; or the Trumpet of a Prophecy. Corr. ed. Ed. David Lee Clark, pref. Harold Bloom. London: Fourth Estate, 1988. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism, ed. Lemon and Reis, 3–24. Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Sperry, Stuart. Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethic. 4th ed. Tr. William Hale White, rev. Amelia Hutchinson Stirling. 1923; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937. Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985. Steinman, Lisa. “‘These Common Woes’: Shelley and Wordsworth.” In The New Shelley, ed. Blank, 65–81. Tetreault, Ronald. The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1987. Tooke, John Horne. Epea Pteroenta, or, the Diversions of Purley. 2 vols. 2d ed. London: J. Johnson, 1798. Toulmin, Stephen. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982. Turner, John D., tr. Trimorphic Protennoia. In Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Robinson, 461–70.

392

O

Bibliography

Turner, John D., and Orval S Wintermute, trs. Allogenes. In Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Robinson, 443–52. Ulmer, William A. Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. 3d ed. [1744]. Rev. tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968. Vinaver, Eugene. The Rise of Romance. 1971; rpt. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Vergil. The Pastoral Poems (The Eclogues). Tr. E. V. Rieu. 1954; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1961. Warburton, William. The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Fletcher Gyles, 1738–41. Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971. Webb, Timothy. Shelley: A Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1977. ———. The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Weisman, Karen A. Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. White, Eric Charles. Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987. White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. Ed. Richard Mabey. Baltimore: Penguin, 1977. White, Newman Ivey. Shelley. 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1940. Wilkie, Brian. Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Wolfson, Susan. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in English Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 2d ed. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Woodman, Ross G. “Metaphor and Allegory in Prometheus Unbound. In The New Shelley, ed. Blank, 166–83. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Ed. A. J. George, rev. Paul D. Sheats. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. ———. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Worton, Michael. “Speech and Silence in The Cenci.” In Essays on Shelley, ed. Allott, 105–24.

Bibliography

O

393

Wright, John W. Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1970. Ya-Feng, Wu. “The Assassins: Shelley’s Appropriation of History.” KeatsShelley Review, n.s., 9 (1995), 51–62. Young, Art. Shelley and Nonviolence. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Young, Edward. Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition. Ed. Edith J. Morley. London: Longmans, Green, 1918.

394

O

Bibliography

O Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 1 Abrams, M. H., 57, 76 Academical Questions (Drummond), 140 “Address to Journeymen and Labourers” (Cobbett), 23 An Address to the Irish People (Shelley), 20–21, 323n46 Adonais (Shelley), 268, 291–94, 296, 297–99, 347n53; compared with other works, 223, 234, 245, 248, 255; conclusion of, 198, 278, 284, 286, 289–90, 295, 300– 301, 303; eagle metaphor in, 272, 285, 371n4, 373n20; figurative language in, 46, 50, 72, 144, 294–95, 345n28, 375n41; and Greek myth, 346n42; on knowledge and death, 87, 304; language of, 169; preface to, 372n19; star metaphor in, 295, 375n36; underlying theme of, 286–87; and universal history of heartbreak, 134 The Advancement of Learning (Bacon), 47–48 Aeschylus, 42, 178, 224–28 Aikin, John, 107 Alastor (Shelley), 46, 50, 53, 173, 220, 332n65, 379n92; compared with other works, 61, 220, 234, 239, 242–43, 247; epigraph to, 132, 353n6; Indian Maiden in, 81, 147, 171, 351n38; narrator in, 64–70, 83, 97, 98, 99, 100, 335nn25, 29; and nature’s ebb and flow, 81, 100, 110; need for com-

munity in, 335n28; the Poet in, 60– 64, 68–69, 73, 80, 87–90, 94, 96– 97, 100, 118, 277–78, 280, 283, 335n29, 337nn39, 41, 42, 379n94; preface to, 335n27; spirit of solitude in, 79, 340n62; and veil metaphor, 113; and Wordsworth, 56, 63, 68–70, 83, 91–92, 99, 335n25 Alexander the Great, 70 alienation, 13, 77, 152, 153, 246 allegory, 52, 125, 129, 136, 138, 339n53, 347n3, 348n5; and religion, 10, 31, 124 Allogenes, 33 amphisbaena snake, 31, 327n27 Anaxarchus, 70 Annali d’Italia (Muratori), 249, 265 anthropomorphism, 27, 28, 36, 62, 127; and gods, 60, 149, 150, 250; and Power, 96, 153, 168, 254, 258 Arcesilaus, 72 Ariosto, Ludovico, 215 Aristotle, 22, 209, 312, 326n19, 327n30, 372n13 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 76, 356n23 atheists, 33, 54–55, 193 Augustine, Saint, 61–62, 169, 222, 335n23, 353n6, 359n43 Bacon, Francis, 115, 140, 217, 261, 316; and Shelley, 47–48, 332n73, 333n74 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37, 45

O O

Index 381 395

beauty: intellectual, 61; Shelley’s identification with, 142, 151, 349n15; and truth, 2–3, 10, 22, 30, 208 Behrendt, Stephen C., 35–36, 323n47 Bentham, Jeremy, 47 Blake, William, 243, 253, 280, 281, 315, 332n64, 373n21; and Shelley, 42, 47, 133 Blank, G. Kim, 83, 101, 254 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 47, 140 books-vs.-nature dispute, 101, 106 “Boy of Winander” (Wordsworth), 69 Buber, Martin, 158 Burke, Edmund, 18, 19 Burnett, James, 21 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 24, 176, 372n19, 373n20; and Julian and Maddalo, 204, 361nn56, 58, 362n63, and Shelley, 285–86, 288, 367n38 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 47, 140, 215, 378n73 Carlyle, Thomas, 44 Carothers, Yvonne M., 56 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord, 192 casuistry, defined, 251 The Cenci (Shelley), 115, 217, 248– 54, 256–66, 267, 286, 304; Beatrice in, 46, 249–53, 255, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 368n51, 369nn55, 58; compared with other works, 192, 224, 248, 254, 270; dedication of, 168; echoes of Shakespeare in, 344n16; incest in, 249–50, 356n26; and move to dialogism, 181, 218; patriarchy in, 42, 46, 250, 252; political frustration in, 367n38; preface to, 249; symbolisim in, 356n22 Chariot of Judgment, 38 Charles the First (Shelley), 267, 344n16 Chatterton, Thomas, 268, 291, 297, 373n24; Rowley poems of, 287 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 47, 140

396

O

Chernaik, Judith, 31, 126, 218, 328n31 Christianity, 95, 186, 206, 250; and Shelley, 32, 33, 160, 312, 328n34, 368n51. See also Jesus Cicero, Marcus Tulius, 226–28, 326n19, 365n20 Clark, Timothy, 20 Clarke, William, 286 Clarkson, Thomas, 53 Cobbett, William, 21, 22–23, 323n55 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 91–93, 106, 325n17, 357n29; and Shelley, 24, 28, 85, 87, 93, 95, 96, 101, 149, 340n64, 343n2 Collins, Wilkie, 65 “The Colosseum” (Shelley), 374n34 Confessions (Augustine), 61–62, 353n6, 359n43 Conrad, Joseph, 203 “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (Coleridge), 28–29, 149 Convito (Dante), 194 Cowper, William, 147 Cratylus (Plato), 8, 210 Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx), 44 Cronin, Richard, 202 Curran, Stuart, 35, 126 Dante Alighieri, 194, 303, 309–10, 355n17; and Christianity, 32; and Milton, 3, 107–8, 110–11, 140, 378n78; and Shelley, 24, 47, 107, 140, 277, 372n9, 378n73; Shelley’s view of, 312, 316, 372n9 A Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 64–65, 90, 124, 247, 302; and Christianity, 219, 312, 346n47; Dante and Milton in, 3, 107–8, 110–11, 140, 378n78; definition of love in, 60, 151; and dominion of love, 215, 284; on empathy, 184, 279; on equality, 142; and intellectual dichotomy, 25–26, 282–83, 314; material metaphor of weaving in, 143, 349n16; metaphor in, 30, 327n26; and moral

Index

quality of life, 140, 151, 217; and nature of language, 2, 5, 9–10, 16– 17, 22, 30, 71, 211, 214, 255; and Paradise Lost, 78; and perception, 3, 12; and poetic inspiration, 57, 113–14, 119, 121–22, 143–44, 265, 285–86, 288, 296; poets described in, 102, 105, 176; preface to, 60– 61 deification, 41; of error, 31–32, 42, 57; of temporal authority, 38 Dejection: An Ode (Coleridge), 91– 92 de Man, Paul, 316 dematerialization, 266, 268, 269, 271– 74, 276, 280, 296, 310. See also materiality desire: problem of human, 335n27; repression of, 28, 30, 325n14 dialectic, 187, 210–11, 212, 230, 235 dialogism, 136, 201, 218–24; in Hellas, 322n36; in Julian and Maddalo, 210–11, 217, 353n4; move to, 181, 218 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), 19, 295 discourse: as-if, 39; Menippean, 37; mythic, 124, 126; prophetic, 6–7; public, 13; of rhetoric, 1, 2; of words and actions, 4. See also language; speech Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Rousseau), 312–13 Diversions of Purley (Tooke), 21 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 32, 38, 277, 309–10 Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (Warburton), 4 Drummond, William, 1, 55, 59, 72, 140, 219, 321n21 Dryden, John, 144, 372n11 Duffy, Edward, 305, 314 eclogue, 181–200, 201 Eclogues (Vergil), 201 “Elegaic Stanzas” (Wordsworth), 56, 57, 63, 91, 92

Index

“The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment” (Shelley), 35 empathy, 148, 152, 185–86, 279, 281; imaginative, 184, 305; loving, 224– 26 Endymion (Keats), 168, 171, 285, 287– 88, 373nn23, 26 Enlightenment, 47, 314 Entick, John, 23 “The Eolian Harp” (Coleridge), 95– 96 Epipsychidion (Shelley), 61, 180, 277–82, 284 equality, 139, 144–45, 151–52, 161; divine, 140–41, 142, 163; gender, 33, 140, 153, 154, 156, 157 Essay on Christianity (Shelley), 32– 33, 36, 160, 250, 261, 331n58 333n73, 350n31 Essay on Life (Shelley), 251 Essay on Man (Pope), 216 Essay on the Devil and Devils (Shelley), 234 Essay on the Origin of Language (Herder), 5 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 4–5 Essays upon Epitaphs (Wordsworth), 144 Eusebes, 261 The Eve of St. Agnes (Keats), 299 The Excursion (Wordsworth), 56–58, 66–67, 91, 97–98, 99 101, 335n25, 341n72 “An Exhortation” (Shelley), 222 “Expostulation and Reply” (Wordsworth), 101, 106–7, 111 The Faery Queene (Spenser), 52, 161 “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte” (Shelley), 53 “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” (Thomas), 237 “The Four Ages of Poetry” (Peacock), 12, 265–66

O

397

“Fragment: Rome and Nature” (Shelley), 223 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 194, 358n37 freedom, 70, 138, 139, 141, 151, 158, 357n28 French Revolution, 18–19, 40, 136, 141, 181, 308; failure of, 135, 139, 194 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 264, 365n22, 367nn44, 45, 378n69 “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge), 85 Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 50 Genesis, 151, 164, 196 George III (England), 35, 52–53 George IV (England), 35 Gibbon, Edward, 47, 50, 140 Gifford, William, 288 Gisborne, John: letters to, 88, 267– 68, 286 Gnosticism, 33, 36, 217, 237, 250, 328n35, 369n57 God, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 160, 161, 163; and atheists, 54–55; of Gnostic gospels, 33–34; and kings, 51, 52; and language, 2, 6–7, 8; and love, 40, 310; mind of, 58; and Moses, 151; as patriarch, 262–63, 286; and Power, 7–8, 108; of St. Augustine, 61–62; Shelley’s view of, 250, 331n58, 350n31; and spirits, 37; transcendent, 149 Godwin, William, 20, 22, 323nn46, 47, 343n4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 301, 377nn57, 66, 378n73 Golden Rule, 150 grammar, 15, 16, 20, 23, 225 Greek Revolution, 178 Grene, David, 224 Groseclose, Barbara, 249 Grosz, Elizabeth, 28 Hall, Donald, 237 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 292–93 Handel, George Frederic, 51–52

398

O

Harris, James, 19 Hazlitt, William, 101 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 203 Hebrew language, 15 Hellas (Shelley), 12, 17–18, 46, 98, 264, 267, 300, 304; compared with Rosalind and Helen, 192; dialogism in, 322n36; final chorus of, 268, 270; setting of, 320n13 Heppner, Christopher, 69–70 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 5, 9, 12, 14– 16, 17 Hermes (Harris), 19 Herodotus, 13 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 30 Hitler, Adolf, 164 Hoagwood, Terence Allan, 44, 71–72, 120 Hoeveler, Diana Long, 94 Hogg, James, 316 Hogle, Jerrold E., 51, 59, 68, 72, 264 Homer, 107, 176, 217, 230, 316 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 97, 242 Horace, 202, 217 Hughes, D. J., 243 “The Human Abstract” (Blake), 243 Hume, David, 1, 47, 50, 72, 140 Hunt, Leigh, 168, 201, 267, 285, 356n20, 374nn27, 28 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (Shelley), 86, 95, 101, 124–25, 132– 34, 145, 154, 236–37, 344n19; compared with Julian and Maddalo, 206; compared with other works, 278, 280, 372nn14, 15; as lyric work, 173 Hyperion (Keats), 238, 286, 315; Shelley on, 288, 290 Icaromenippus (Lucian), 194 Iliad (Homer), 302 incest, 64, 249–50, 336n31, 356n26 Inferno (Dante), 309–10 “Intimations of Immortality from Rec-

Index

ollections of Early Childhood” (Wordsworth), 54, 66, 68, 82–83, 87, 97–98, 245; epigraph to, 59, 64; impression on Shelley of, 56, 304–5, 309, 334n11, 337n38, 341n65, 377n58; and reverie, 11– 12 Jakobson, Roman, 26, 29 “To Jane” (Shelley), 315 “To Jane: The Invitation” (Shelley), 316, 317 Jefferson, Thomas, 65, 229 Jesus, 7, 270, 316, 353n48, 367n41, 372n19; as poet, 291, 350n31; Sermon on the Mount, 159, 160; Shelley’s view of, 161, 219, 352n46, 357n29; speech of, 40, 160, 232– 33, 250 Johnson, Samuel, 19, 20, 144, 295, 372n11 Jones, William, 73, 226 Julian and Maddalo (Shelley), 46, 200– 217, 359nn44–47, 360n53, 362n68, 363n75; absence of closure in, 202– 4, 218, 223; Adamic connection in, 204–5; apostasy in, 98–99, 205– 6, 209; classical rhetoric in, 326n19; compared with The Cenci, 201; compared with Prometheus Unbound, 201–2, 207–9, 214; dialectic in, 24, 169, 173, 181, 210–11, 212; dialogism in, 210–11, 217, 353n4; echoes of Shakespeare in, 360n55, 361n57; hill-island trope in, 174; pastoral in, 353n5 Keach, William, 83, 85, 115–16, 118 Keats, John, 233, 238, 315; death of, 268, 285; and Endymion, 168, 287– 88; and Shelley, 24, 287–93, 295– 99, 356n20, 370n1, 373n23, 374nn27, 28. See also Adonais King Lear (Shakespeare), 108–11, 131, 148, 344n16, 350n27 knowledge: and death, 87, 304; and

Index

language, 1, 324n8; and poetry, 247; as Power, 61; and truth, 222 Kristeva, Julia, 26–27, 30, 37 Kruszewski, Mikolaj, 26 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 87 language: abstract, 15; articulations of, 114; awareness of figurative, 45; in behalf of Self, 75; and class, 19– 20, 23, 38; common, 21, 24, 38, 45, 46, 163, 164, 323n47, 331n56; and divine instruction, 9; dyadic dynamic of, 30–34; and epistomology, 1; European vs. Oriental, 14; and feelings, 15–16; figurative, 5, 46; French, 15; givers of, 9; of God, 15; and good, 210, 211, 279; Greek, 73; harmony of, 6, 7, 116, 119; hegemony of, 19–20, 23; high, 209, 224, 264; and imagination, 142, 154; Indo-European, 73; and knowledge, 1, 324n8; Latin, 20, 73; and liberty, 13; of love, 75, 81, 83, 173, 181, 183, 191, 197, 198, 199, 215–16; materiality of, 142–67, 232, 233, 240, 268– 69, 270, 277, 281, 349n17; metonymic, 71; and mind, 22, 211– 12; musical origins of, 21; official, 231, 376n51; of oppression, 264; originary, 2–3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14–16; as Orphic song, 6, 229–30, 239; of patriarchy, 257, 368n53; perpetual flow of, 239; poetic, 1–17, 25–27, 43, 44, 46, 56, 59, 60, 73, 75, 115, 211, 212, 217, 231, 265, 275, 276; politics of, 44; and Power, 1, 119, 139, 160, 211, 270, 271; of prophecy, 6–9; and prose vs. poetry, 25; as representational, 211; Sanskrit, 73; in service of poetry and love, 155; Shelley’s idea of, 1–2, 17–30, 322n35; synthetic vs. metaphoric, 25; and transcendence, 144; and truth, 6, 210, 211; vernacular, 1, 19, 21

O

399

“Lift Not the Painted Veil” (Shelley), 220 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (Shelley), 175–81, 223–24, 353n5, 354n13, 361n62; criticism of, 355n18; and Greek influence, 178; as personal lyric, 173, 234; recurring motif in, 169 “Little Black Boy” (Blake), 315 Locke, John, 22, 47, 50, 140 love, 37–38, 101, 182, 194, 208, 213; definition of, 60, 61, 281; and egotism, 305; and God, 40, 310; healing effect of, 151, 248; as intermediate spirit, 170–71; language of, 75, 81, 83, 173, 181, 183, 191, 197, 198, 199, 215–16; and life, 193, 316; and metaphor, 48, 72, 73–76, 181; otherness of, 315, 325n11; and Plato, 169; and Power, 133, 180, 240; and Rousseau, 215, 378n78, 379n97; as secret of morals, 142, 151; and Shakespeare, 215; Shelley on, 27, 60–61, 73, 88, 172, 335n26, 342n76; universal, 288, 290; and women, 42–43 Lowth, Robert, 19 Lucan, 291, 297 Lueker, D. Harrington, 261 Lycidas (Milton), 118 Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth), 106 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 279 Magna Carta, 35 Mahomet, 303 Malthus, Thomas, 140 Marcion, 33 Marxism, 44 The Mask of Anarchy (Shelley), 34– 41, 92, 137, 229, 270, 310–12, 330n54 materiality, 142–67, 232, 233, 240, 268– 69, 270, 277, 281, 349nn16,17. See also dematerialization Menippus (Lucian), 194, 310

400

O

Messiah (Handel), 51 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 98 metaphor, 10, 322n31, 324nn7,10, 327n30, 338n45, 350n24; abuses of, 326n19; definition of, 329n40; and language of poets, 25, 26, 27, 31; and love, 48, 72, 73–76, 181; and metonymy, 11, 24, 30, 34, 42, 47, 59, 60, 61, 71, 157, 168, 221, 251–53, 255, 264, 265, 339n53, 340n60; originary, 15, 327n26; Shelley’s use of, 174, 294–95, 300. See also under particular works “The Metaphysic of the Love of the Sexes” (Schopenhauer), 76 metaphysics, 22; and logic, 212 metonymy, 15, 26, 29, 69, 304, 311, 312; of agent for act, 27, 28, 34, 35, 48; of cause for effect, 28, 34, 47–48; chief effect of, 250; definition of, 329n40; of effect for cause, 74, 77, 339n59; and metalepsis, 72; and metaphor, 11, 24, 30, 34, 42, 47, 59, 60, 61, 71, 157, 168, 221, 251–53, 255, 264, 265, 339n53, 340n60; and “natural order,” 34– 41; of part for whole, 34, 74, 250, 329n40; and reification, 41–48, 301; in Shakespeare, 346n49; vs. synecdoche, 329n40; and veiled woman, 76, 85, 339n57 Metternich, 192, 194 Mill, James, 47 Milton, John, 12, 106–8, 180, 308; and Christianity, 32, 50, 57; and Dante, 3, 107–8, 110–11, 140, 378n78; description of Hell, 343n4; and Paradise Lost, 32, 61, 67, 71, 77– 78, 107, 110, 128–29, 130, 139, 204, 237, 286, 288–89, 361n56; and perception, 3; Satan of, 258; and Shelley, 50, 77–78, 110–11, 128, 140, 312, 316, 372n17; as Shelley’s model, 118, 170, 243 mind, 121–22, 282–83, 333n6; active, 22; individual, 29, 46; and language, 22,

Index

as metonym for the divine, 57–58; and natural world, 58–59, 64, 67; and perception, 3, 11, 50; perfectness of, 32 Monboddo, Lord, 21 “Mont Blanc” (Shelley), 100–134, 255, 293–94; and Greek mythology, 127– 28; identical rhyme in, 116; language in, 23–24, 85, 116, 345n21; lyricism in, 85, 173, 191; mythic refabulation in, 125–29; Power in, 7, 120–21, 195; “some say” formula in, 219, 220; and the speaker, 87, 89, 95, 96, 125, 130–31; storm imagery of, 131, 132; and veil metaphor, 160, 221 Muratori, Ludovico, 249, 265 Murray, Lindley, 23 “My Heart Leaps Up” (Wordsworth), 59, 64 “My Son, My Executioner” (Hall), 237 Napoleon, 53, 135, 177, 194, 242, 308 narcissism, 62, 70, 74, 90, 338n51, 342n78, 366n37 Natural History (Pliny), 242 nature, 64, 67, 91, 344n18, 367n43; oneness with, 93, 133, 223, 268, 290, 295; rhythms of, 68, 100, 114 The Necessity of Atheism (Shelley), 130 New Philology, 1, 2 New Science (Vico), 4, 27–28 Newton, Isaac, 252, 261, 375n38 Newton, John, 147 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, 33 Notes on Queen Mab (Shelley), 161, 352n46 La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 307 “Nutting” (Wordsworth), 59, 90, 91 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 298, 316 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 287, 295, 373n22, 375n40

Index

“Ode to Duty” (Wordsworth), 56, 57, 92, 93, 343n12 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 139, 169, 220, 266, 270, 274; metaphor in, 216, 217, 276, 341n70, 353n3 Odyssey (Homer), 302, 308 Ollier, Charles, 202, 268; letters to, 201, 266, 286, 287, 356n20, 360n47 “One Word Is Too Often Profaned” (Shelley), 314–15 “On Life” (Shelley), 11, 119, 126, 303, 305, 321n21, 376n50 On Love (Shelley), 61, 73, 132, 172, 280, 284, 374n33 On the Origin and Process of Language (Monboddo), 21 Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (Shelley), 23 Orlando Furioso (Tasso), 286 Ovid, 98 “Ozymandias” (Shelley), 35, 51, 53, 71 Pagels, Elaine, 33 Paine, Thomas, 18, 19, 322n41 Paradise Lost (Milton): Chariot of Judgment in, 38; Death described in, 237; Eden of, 71; Judeo-Christian mythology in, 128–29; and Julian and Maddalo, 204; originality of imitation in, 107; poetry of, 32; Satan in, 61, 67, 77–78, 363n75; Shelley on, 110, 286; Shelley’s favorite speech in, 361n56; and “The Revolt of Islam,” 139; universal love in, 288 Paradiso (Dante), 277 patriarchy: in The Cenci, 42, 46, 250, 252; of church, 33; and common language, 46; culture of, 255; effect of, 368n53, 369n55; and God, 34, 186, 262, 263; and gods, 42; language of, 257, 368n53; and petriarchy, 42, 43, 255, 257– 58, 259–60, 263; reification of, 60, 252; Shelley’s view of, 250, 328n35;

O

401

patriarchy (cont.) transcendence of, 352n41 Peacock, Thomas Love, 12, 47, 114, 265–66, 361n61; letters to, 22–23, 117, 226, 230, 288, 293–94, 296, 299–300 perception: and existence, 2–5, 10–12, 50; and expression, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11, 15; and mind, 3, 11, 50 “Peter Bell” (Wordsworth), 111 “Peter Bell the Third” (Shelley), 348n5 Petrarch, 47, 140, 176, 316, 378n73 Phaedrus (Plato), 230, 235, 244, 354n8 Pharsalia (Lucan), 291 A Philosophical View of Reform (Shelley), 65, 229, 314 Pitt, William, the Younger, 92 Plato, 1, 8–9, 24, 39, 77, 271, 297, 365n24; allegory of the cave, 83, 145–46, 194, 278; conception of object world, 95; principles of, 178; quest for love, 169; Shelley’s knowledge of, 229–30, 323n54, 330n52, 333n73; and unmediated speech, 40 Pliny, 242 poetry: of Bible, 80, 129, 162, 340n63, 346n47, 358n39, 378n79; decline of, 2, 10; and defamiliarization, 44– 45, 78, 340n61, 345n30; definition by Socrates, 230; Hebrew, 47; and imagination, 45, 143; of Jesus’ doctrines, 219; and knowledge, 247; language of, 1–17, 25–26, 44, 73, 75, 212, 217, 231, 275, 276; and liminality, 272–74, 291; as linguistic master text, 12–14; lyric, 173; and measure, 41; mode of being of, 10; narrative vs. lyric, 173; as originary language, 2–3, 4, 5, 7, 8; political, 35; and Power, 62, 89, 120, 195, 272, 291, 300; primal intuition in, 142; vs. prose, 4–5, 12– 14, 25; and repression, 11–12; Shelley’s thought on, 2, 5, 9–10, 320n14, 321n18, 322n29; and silence, 102; timelessness of, 102; and

402

O

tropes, 255; true nature of, 2, 3; visionary, 141; and wrongful suffering, 363n74. See also A Defence of Poetry poets: eternal, 285; as founders of civil society, 10, 22, 102, 176, 302–3; new, 49–50, 253; and Power, 62, 89; and relationship of true and beautiful, 2–3, 10; Shelley’s remarks on, 9–10, 102, 105, 120 Politics (Aristotle), 312 Pope, Alexander, 144, 216, 288, 372n11 Posthumous Poems (Shelley), 201 Power, 103, 106, 193; and anthropomorphism, 96, 153, 168, 254, 258; defiance of, 227; Drummond’s principle of, 219–20; and God, 7– 8, 108; and humanity, 149, 350n30; and knowledge, 61; and language, 119, 139, 160, 211, 270, 271; as life force, 244; and love, 133, 180, 240; manifestations of, 96, 342n83; and poetry, 62, 89, 120, 195, 272, 291, 300; and poets, 62, 89; principle of, 168, 343n5; probable voices of, 111–34; refiguring of, 120, 132; and rhythm, 114; and Shelley, 7; and thought, 301–2; as voice, 130; and will, 147, 148, 153, 236, 244, 301, 303, 334n22 Powers, Sharon B., 218, 220, 231, 235, 251, 259, 285, 297, 310; comparisons with Wordsworth by, 64, 66; and “Mont Blanc,” 118, 129; sources compared by, 89, 91, 98–99, 174, 222, 237, 242, 295 Prince Athanase (Shelley), 169–73, 354n10 Principia (Newton), 261 Privateer, Paul Michael, 91 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 42, 224, 226 Prometheus the Firebearer (Aeschylus), 224 Prometheus Unbound (Aeschylus), 224, 364n9

Index

Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 6–7, 92–93, 220–23, 226–27, 266, 299, 304, 305; act III of, 36, 75, 105; act IV of, 48, 90–91, 181; and classical literature, 228–48, 252–53, 264, 269–70, 300, 310, 327n29, 364n10, 365n17, 375n41; compared with Aeschylus’ version, 42, 224– 28, 235; compared with Julian and Maddalo, 201–2, 207–9, 214; compared with The Cenci, 254–55; concluding speech in, 152, 351n34, 362n63; Demogorgon in, 6, 7; dyadic dynamics in, 30–31; dynamics of metaphor in, 365n21; Earth in, 86; empathy in, 224–25; influence of Shakespeare on, 344n16; language of poetry in, 217; and move to dialogism, 218; pain in, 228, 232; preface to, 169, 178; and redeemed humanity, 40; reification in, 41; setting of, 115; and temporary errors, 46; veil metaphor in, 113, 220–21; visionary culmination in, 100–101 prose: philosophical, 45; vs. poetry, 4–5, 12–14, 25; realistic, 29 Pulos, C. E., 70 Pyrrho of Elis, 70, 72 Quarterly Review, 288 Queen Mab (Shelley), 53, 98, 151, 286, 307; Notes on Queen Mab, 161, 352n46 Raben, Joseph, 70 Rajan, Tilottama, 50 Rameses II, 51–53 Raphael, 217 reason, 7–8, 9 “The Recluse” (Wordsworth), 57, 66 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 18, 19 A Refutation of Deism (Eusebes), 261 reification, 49, 77; and God, 33, 55, 60; and metonymy, 28, 37, 41–48, 215,

Index

301; of natural universe, 62; of Prometheus, 225 Reiman, Donald H., 218, 220, 231, 235, 251, 259, 285, 297, 310; and comparisons with Wordsworth, 64, 66; and “Mont Blanc,” 118, 129; sources compared by, 89, 91, 98–99, 174, 222, 237, 242, 295 religion, 22, 196, 248, 303; and allegory, 10, 31, 124; ancient, 32; and atheists, 33, 54–55, 193; and mythic discourses, 124, 126; oppression by established, 42, 188, 250; original, 10, 12, 31; Shelley on, 10– 12. See also Christianity;God; Jesus Republic (Plato), 145–46 reverie, 11–12, 83, 251, 305 The Revolt of Islam (Shelley), 135– 67, 244, 304, 349n18, 350n24, 354n11; compared with Alastor, 351n38; compared with other works, 234, 242, 270–71; figurative language in, 168–69, 307, 353n3; framing motifs of, 80; Power in, 28– 29; as quest romance, 173; and Rosalind and Helen, 182, 192, 200, 356n21; setting of, 320n13; symbolism of cavern in, 83; as vision of times, 135–67 rhyme, 115, 116, 345n22 rhythm, 6, 7, 8, 39; of nature, 68, 100, 114; and Power, 114 Rickman, Clio, 21, 73 The Rights of Man (Paine), 18 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 106, 340n64 “Rock of Ages” (Toplady), 260 Rosalind and Helen (Shelley), 24, 169, 353n5, 354nn7,8, 356nn20,21, 357nn30,32, 358n38; coercive political unions in, 188, 357n29; criticism of, 355nn18,19,20; dialectic in, 187; empathy in, 185– 86; fidelity in, 190–91; as transitional genre, 181–200

O

403

Ross, Marlon B., 225 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 133–34, 316, 349n14, 376n54, 379n98; on figurative language, 4–5; ideology of, 312–13; and love, 215, 378n78, 379n97; and natural writing, 338n52; as poet, 348n12; and poetry’s efficacy, 12–14; on primitive vs. instituted society, 10; and providence, 17; Pygmalion of, 305; Shelley’s view of, 47, 50, 140; and The Triumph of Life, 303, 305–7, 309, 312, 342n73; unorthodoxy of, 8–9 Rzepka, Charles J., 173, 181, 212 Sale, George, 151 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 44 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 117 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 76 science, 41, 141, 254; language of, 265 self-referentiality, 44, 45 The Sensitive-Plant (Shelley), 46 “The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise” (Shelley), 134 Serres, Michel, 209–11, 212 Severn, Joseph, 291–92 Sextus Empiricus, 72 Shakespeare, William, 47, 76, 140, 279, 292; and Avon, 176; and dominion of love, 215; intertextual conversations with, 24; language of, 106, 107, 108; and Shelley, 360n55 Shaw, George Bernard, 19 “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” (Wordsworth), 92 Shelley, Clara (daughter), 268 Shelley, Mary (wife), 56, 169, 194, 201, 268; estrangement from, 313; on Rosalind and Helen, 182–83; and work of Shelley, 111, 222, 347n3, 353n6, 354n7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: as amateur astronomer, 296, 376nn43, 48; birth of,

404

O

18; classical influence on, 29, 226,326n19, 340n63, 346n42; colloquial style of, 360n50; contemporaneity of, 136; on historical present, 12, 17, 23–24; intertextual convers ations of, 24, 26; on monogamy, 279–80; originality of, 2; and restoration of ancien régime, 367n38; on reviewers, 373n19; on revolution and modern philosophy, 135– 36, 140; on social and economic reform, 20–21, 65, 229, 314, 323n46; on U.S. government, 357n28 Shelley, William (son), 268 Shklovsky, Victor, 45 A Short Introduction to English Grammar (Lowth), 19, 20 Sidney, Sir Philip, 268, 291, 297 signs, 6, 7–8, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31 silence: modalities of, 285; and poetry, 102; and solitude, 105, 106, 112–13, 131; and transfiguration, 285–99 “Simon Lee” (Wordsworth), 202 skepticism, 363n70, 377n59; vs. dogmatism, 72; vs. ideology, 70 “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal” (Wordsworth), 94 Smith, Olivia, 18, 20, 23 Socrates, 9, 40, 145, 146, 170–71, 210, 316; as character in Phaedrus, 230– 31, 233–35, 354n8; as poet, 269, 291 Solon, 230 “Song to the Men of England” (Shelley), 137 speech: alienation of, 13; female, 37, 39, 42, 43, 330n50; inspired, 40– 41; of Jesus, 40, 160, 232–33, 250; materiality of, 240; poetic, 43, 79; and thought, 41, 43, 254, 284; and writing, 230, 233– 35. See also language; words Spenser, Edmund, 38, 136, 215, 217 Sperry, Stuart, 83–84, 101, 250, 253– 54, 259 Spinoza, 331n62

Index

story, written vs. unwritten, 39–41 “Strange Fits of Passion” (Wordsworth), 94 Süssmilch, Johann Peter, 9 symbolism, 94; of caverns, 83, 341n68, 342n73; of snake and eagle, 153– 54, 156, 351n36; of sun, 207–8; of woven hair, 185, 356n22 Symposium (Plato), 83, 96, 170, 194, 278, 297, 354n7 “The Tables Turned” (Wordsworth), 101, 106–7 Tacitus, 36 Tasso, Torquato, 215, 217, 286 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 355n17 Tetreault, Ronald, 249–50 Thelwall, John, 18–19 “Third Anniversary Discourse” (Jones), 73 Thomas, Dylan, 237 The Thorn (Wordsworth), 37–38, 90, 91 Thucydides, 52 Timaeus (Plato), 96, 146, 237–39, 247, 366n32 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 65, 101, 339n54 “To a Sky-Lark” (Shelley), 31, 272– 74, 371n4, 373n23 Tooke, John Horne, 21–22 Toplady, Augustus Montague, 260 transference, 90, 157, 251, 278, 325n11, 378n73; definition of, 3, 319n5; and God, 7; and language, 154, 155; and love, 198; and metaphor, 11, 27, 62, 96. See also metaphor; metonymy A Treatise on Morals (Shelley), 11, 21, 44, 150, 157, 251; and nature of language, 211–12, 302 Trelawny, Edward John, 267 Trionfi (Petrarch), 316 The Triumph of Life (Shelley), 31, 38, 128, 314, 377nn56, 57, 59, 379nn92, 93, 94, 97, 98;

Index

compared with other works, 85, 91, 92, 169, 192, 204, 234–35, 266, 316–17, 371n6; eagle metaphor in, 271, 371n4; on language, 3, 46; opening of, 85, 341n73; power and will in, 133, 302; and Rousseau, 303, 305–7, 312 truth, 6, 7, 44, 326n22; and beauty, 2–3, 10, 22, 30, 208; God’s, 32, 256, 257; and knowledge, 222; and language, 6, 210, 211; and tropes, 255 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 226– 27 “The Two Spirits—An Allegory” (Shelley), 218–20 Ulmer, William A., 70, 86, 145 Urpflanze (archetype), 65, 301 Utilitarians, 47 veiling, trope of, 144, 154–57, 277, 351n45, 352n42, 363n75, 364n5; and metonymy, 76, 85, 160, 339n57; in Prometheus Unbound, 113, 220– 21 Venus Genetrix, 38 Vergil, 18, 24, 201, 217, 303, 309, 360nn48, 49 Vico, Giambattista, 4, 7–8, 10, 17, 324n8, 339n60; and myth vs. moral, 127–28; on poetic logic, 27–28; and poetry vs. prose, 12–14 Viviani, Emilia, 88 Viviani, Teresa, 268 voice, 100, 148; killing of poetic, 169; and Power, 111–34 Voltaire, 47, 50, 133, 140, 348n12 Warburton, William, 4, 6–7, 12–14, 17, 320n13 Wasserman, Earl R., 169, 236, 242, 295 Webb, Timothy, 259 We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird (Shelley), 137 Wilberforce, William, 53, 147 Wilford, Francis, 126

O

405

Williams, Jane, 268, 314–17, 347n53 The Witch of Atlas (Shelley), 111, 201, 360n47 “With a Guitar. To Jane” (Shelley), 180 Wolfson, Susan J., 149 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 348n11 The Woman in White (Collins), 65 women: emancipation of, 138, 161; and love, 42–43; roles of, 33, 34; and speech, 37, 39, 42, 43, 330n50; veiled, 76, 85, 339n57 words: and actions, 4; and emotions, 14, 200, 215–16; of Jesus, 40, 160, 219, 232–33, 250; and mysteries of being, 119; and opinion, 211; of poets, 139, 271; science of, 212; as signs of ideas, 30; and things, 347n50. See also language; speech Wordsworth, William, 34, 37, 107, 186, 193, 202, 291; and conversation by al-

406

O

lusion, 101, 106; enslavement of, 56–70, 93; imitators of, 374n28; and intertextual conversation, 24; and Intimations Ode, 11, 54, 245; on language, 5, 144; Poems (1807), 56; poetic language of, 265; and Powers, 107, 344n13; and Shelley, 54, 56, 60, 63–69, 75–76, 82, 83, 90–94, 97–99, 101, 102, 304–5, 309, 326n17, 336n31, 355nn15, 16, 357n33, 360n52; sonnets of, 358n36. See also particular works “To Wordsworth” (Shelley), 56, 82– 83, 90–94, 97–99, 193 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer), 76 Worton, Michael, 261 Wright, John W., 25, 27 Young, Edward, 106–7 “Young Parson Richards” (“Ballad”), 331n55

Index