Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ is one of the best known English poems, about which, one imagines, there is nothing new to be said. Long a staple of anthologies and school textbooks, the poem remains in many memories as a pretty bagatelle without deep meaning. To comment on it would seem as futile as to analyze over-familiar musical pieces such as Eine kleine Nachtmusik or Für Elise. Yet literary criticism cannot abandon classical texts as if they were exhausted sites. One function of this discipline is to shed new light on familiar texts, and thus breathe new life into them. It can do so in this case by revisiting the poem with fuller knowledge of its complex context, as one moment in Shelley’s intense and abundantly documented reflection on the two great questions of his time: the nature and role of poetry and imagination, and the political fortunes of the revolutionary ideal of liberty. ‘To a Sky-Lark’ might seem far from such philosophical concerns, but even Shelley’s simplest, lightest verses can never be divorced from his complex thought, for which he was always seeking the most powerful poetic expression. The full meaning of the poem becomes accessible only when we stop treating it as a flight of fancy and see it instead as a poem of imagination, in the full Romantic sense of that term. The lark is not a pretext for a string of pleasant and poignant conceits, but a symbol.
Imagination, as opposed to Fancy, is the faculty that Coleridge called the ‘esemplastic power.’ The word could be taken as a literal translation of Einbildungskraft (German ein = Greek eis, en, ‘into, in,’ with overtones of ‘one’; Ger. bilden = Gr. plattein, ‘to shape’; Kraft, ‘force’), which in German Idealism, particularly Schelling, is not merely a subjective faculty (whether ‘mirror’ or ‘lamp,’ in M. H. Abrams’s scheme), but a power of cosmic unity. (Or the word may come from Schelling's Ineinsbildung – the interweaving of opposites.) Imagination generates symbols, which also have an esemplastic character, in that they shape and unify, or bring out the fundamental pattern in, a whole tract of experience, and correspondingly shape and unify the poems in which they occur.
‘To a Sky-lark’ is not a casual piece of ‘nature writing,’ nor does its personification of the lark, heavily investing in the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ lead to the sentimentalism which D. H. Lawrence scorned in Wordsworth’s practice of ‘making flowers talk.’ It lies between ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Adonais on the trajectory of Shelley’s interrogation of freedom, creativity, the essence of poetry, and his own role and identity. Like the cloud in a neighbouring poem, the lark ‘may be interpreted as a natural Platonic symbol of the upward, ethereal, and incorporeal transcendence of the soul away from mortality to the heavens of Platonic purity’ (Notopoulos, 271-2), but there is much more to be said than that. The poem was published in Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems in 1820, among other shorter pieces such as the odes to the West Wind, to Heaven, and to Liberty: ‘it certainly makes a difference to one’s grasp of poems like “The Cloud” to see the company they kept.’ This cluster of works is sustained by the desire to ‘write poems that would both solve and escape the contradictions of the human condition: the expression is “complex” because the desire for simplification implicitly admits its impossibility’ (O’Neill, 121).
Symbols are central to poetry because of that ‘impossibility.’ They are used to point beyond what can be said straightforwardly or in transparent images as in allegory. They harbour a reserve of meaning that can never be fully spelt out, and they often have a charge of ambivalence as well. Yeats, who wrote an essay on ‘The Symbolism of Shelley’s Poetry,’ created several such symbols, such as the stone in ‘Easter, 1916’ or the cluster of emblems marshalled in his imagination of Byzantium and the Tower. However the obscurity and ambivalence that attach to powerful symbols should not be taken to mean that they are radically indeterminate. They stand for an excess of meaning rather than a lack of it. Postmodern criticism in the wake of Paul de Man emphasized a self-erasing quality in Shelley’s writing, and underestimated his desire to say, and his success in saying, exactly what he intended to say, especially in such lucid and classically structured utterances as ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ ‘To the Sky-Lark,’ and Adonais. The metaphorical cascades in these poems never undermine the coherence and authority of their central symbols, but neither can the symbols be reduced to the message they convey; they have a vibrant autonomous presence, which can ‘tease us out of thought’ like Keats’s Grecian Urn.
Shelley mustered every resource to build up his symbolic structures and enhance their communicative power. He is one of the most intertextual poets in English, allowing resonances from the great English poets and from the Greek and Roman classics to enrich the semantic charge of his verse. His diction has the choice quality that comes from awareness of the history of the language and of Latin roots. His early writing in blank verse (‘Alastor’) tended to be infiltrated by the rhythm and diction of Wordsworth. To find his own voice he experimented with a variety of verse forms, flourishing on the challenge of difficult tasks, the constraints of an elaborate formal mould, such as terza rima in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘The Triumph of Life.’ The original stanza form of ‘To a Sky-Lark’—four short lines with three accents, normally alternating between six and five syllables, followed by a hexameter, with the rhyme scheme ababb—conveys an impression of immediacy, as if the poem sprang into existence in a few moments, an inspiration caught on the wing. The short lines can mirror the speed of the skylark’s daring ascent and flight, while the hexameter fits the infinite leisurely expansion of its movement and song through the sky. The rhythm is so infectious that ‘one gets the stanzas by heart unawares and repeats them like “snatches of old verse”’ (Leigh Hunt, in Barcus, 327).
Shelley also took care to give his works an effective overall structure. Thus ‘To a Sky-Lark’ falls into four sections, three groups of six stanzas and a coda of three stanzas. Stanzas 1-6 describe the lark’s presence; stanzas 7-12 seek similes for it; stanzas 13-18 turn to contrasts, increasingly highlighting the pain of human existence; stanzas 19-21 form an affirmative conclusion, as the poet draws the lesson of the lark. The beginning of the second and third sections are marked by a direct address to the bird (‘What thou art we know not’; ‘Teach us, Sprite or Bird,’ which recapitulates the opening lines of the poem). It seems that one resource he did not consistently exploit is that of punctuation. The punctuation of ‘To a Sky-Lark,’ as well as details of spelling, varies considerably, indeed alarmingly, from edition to edition. Textual study of Shelley is almost as complex as if he were an ancient classic (see Crook 2011). I have taken the text of Donovan et al. as my base text, but altered the spelling of ‘bright’ning’ and ‘chrystal’ and the punctuation at some points (replacing the irritating dashes with commas and eliminating one colon). This is for copyright reasons, and draws on older editions.
The Invisible Voice (st. 1-6)
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
The identification of the bird as a spirit is not a casual fancy but is central to the metaphorical structure of the poem. In the previous year Shelley had called the West wind a spirit, and the word carries something of the same power here. The idealizing or derealizing character of Shelley’s imagination, on display here, led generations of critics to imagine that he was a vague poet, unable to focus his images precisely. Dogged and indeed dogmatic empiricism lay like a blight over mid-twentieth century poetry and criticism, obliging poets to clog their verse with pylons, gas pumps, and other emblems of realistic observation. Shelley’s powers of observation were extremely keen, but were brought to bear on the subtle and evanescent world of light and clouds. But observation remains subject to a higher poetic faculty, imagination.
Wordsworth rather sourly commented that Shelley’s poem ‘was full of imagination, but that it did not show the same observation of nature as his poem on the same bird did’ (Barcus, 2). In fact, from the journal entries of Mary Shelley and John Gisborne we know that Shelley would have observed the aspects of the bird noted by Wordsworth. Gisborne writes: ‘We here beheld the speckled songsters, burst forth from their bed of rich herbiage and soar fluttering… to a height at which the straining eye could scarcely ken the stationary and diminutive specks into which their soft, still receding forms had at length vanished’ (quoted, White, II, 594).
Ironically, Shelley’s poem echoes Wordsworth’s ‘To the Cuckoo’ (1804):
O blithe new-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering Voice?...
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery…
and ‘To the Skylark’ (1805):
Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine…
Like Keats’s nightingale, the skylark is a symbol that lights up both the nature of ultimate reality, imagined as freedom and joy, and, by contrast, the painful aspects of finite, mortal, human existence. Keats wrote in May 1819, Shelley in June 1820, but in his letter to Keats of July 27, 1820, Shelley refers only to Endymion (1818) and he probably did not read the nightingale ode until receiving the volume in which it was published, sent by Keats in August 1820, and of which Shelley wrote, in a letter to the editor of the Quarterly Review, ‘I have just seen a second volume, published by him evidently in careless despair’; praising ‘Hyperion,’ he adds: ‘the canons of taste to which Keats has conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own’ (Ellershaw, 2). His reaction to the nightingale ode is reflected in Adonais in 1821:
Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale,
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain… (st. 17)
The chief difficulty of the stanza form is that the short lines threaten to cramp the diction and make it unnatural. One can sense that danger in the second and fourth lines here. But Shelley keeps it at bay, and in most lines achieves a felicity of diction that can be seen as a bestowal of the stanza form, the danger of artificiality not arising at all. The cramped space here gives plosive violence to the crush of consonants in ‘blithe Spirit! Bird.’ The concentration of force and speed in the first four lines is followed by the joyful release of the fifth. Part of the freedom conveyed by the hexameter is the way it allows the long word ‘unpremeditated’ to breathe, unfolding its syllables at a leisurely pace. This line has a pedigree in English poetry going back to Paradise Lost IX—‘and inspire/ Easy my unpremeditated verse’—and always associated with the theme of spontaneous inspiration. Inserting it in a hexameter Shelley allows it to breathe with a new loveliness. Shorten the hexameter to a pentameter—e. g. ‘In strains of unpremeditated mirth’—and the long word is a dull nod to convention. Hexameters tend to become shapeless, and Shelley uses alliteration (the ‘pr’s) as a shaping principle.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
‘Like a cloud of fire’ is the first simile in the poem, which will attain its freest flight in a long train of similes that allow Shelley to course through the images that most delighted his imagination. The similes unfold the imaginative power of the skylark-symbol, and point to one central paradox: the skylark is unseen yet fills the world with its voice, emblematizing the power of the poet-prophet’s word. The similes are marked by an unlikeness that gives them spice, like dissonances enriching harmony. The metaphor does not refer to any visible form of the skylark but to the speed of its movement, its revolutionary break with earthly heaviness. The lark is like a cloud of fire only in its motion of springing up from the earth, the associations of ‘cloud’ and ‘fire’ move away from the bird but point to the figure for whom the bird is a metaphor, namely the poet, touched by the fire of inspiration. Compare Adonais: ‘Back to the burning fountain whence it came.’ Again the hexameter is shaped by alliteration. G. M. Matthews ‘the nuée ardente of an active volcano, a mass of superheated steam and incandescent dust which, as an observer had seen it over Vesuvius, “appeared in the night tinged like clouds with the setting sun”’ (164); there is a note of ‘mutiny and protest’ in this ‘propaganda broadcast with tempestuous energy’ (166), which echoes Milton’s line on Satan: ‘Springs upward like a Pyramid of fire.’ In the contemporaneous ‘Ode to Liberty’ Shelley had used the image of fire with revolutionary purpose: Liberty… /Scattering contagious fire into the sky,’ echoing a line of Southey, ‘The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran’ (quoted, Donovan et al., 387).
Reciting the poem, one tends to read, somewhat nonsensically: ‘Like a cloud of fire, the blue deep thou wingest,’ but ‘Like a cloud of fire’ goes with the first two lines and is divided from ‘the blue deep’ by a semi-colon. Rossetti’s edition of 1874 tried to bend the punctuation to the verse as he heard it, replacing the semi-colon with a comma (Donovan et al., 471). This is the only place in the poem where the first three lines of a stanza are grouped together. It is also rather awkward that the second sentence that begins with the heavy inversion, ‘The blue deep thou wingest’ (in contrast to the natural ‘From the earth thou springest’). Such awkwardness is hardly noticed when the poem is read aloud. Does all poetry skate on thin ice in this way?
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken Sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
‘Lightning’ seems an incorrect choice of word here, but poetic licence can dictate that the word stands for something that has no other word to express it, namely the light shed from the sun after it has gone down. The second simile is maximally abstract, but Shelley has the gift of making abstractions leap into life. The ‘unbodied joy’ is of a piece with the elaborate fresco of shimmering forms in Adonais. (Computer spell-checkers will alter the word to ‘embodied,’ and indeed one eager scholar suggested this emendation of Shelley’s text!) Like all the metaphors in the poem it is paradoxical. Poetic joy is the greater for being unbodied; the poet disappears in his words. Note that the poem is set at a particular time, after sundown, though we tend to associate it with the brightness of the midday sky, a confusion encouraged by the similes in the following stanzas, which refer to broad daylight, dawn, and night.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
These stanzas develop a single simile, the lark being compared with Venus, the morning star disappearing into the light of day. Again it is not the visible star but its invisibility that is stressed. Though unseen, the lark is heard and its presence is felt. This is not a poem of flat observation but sketches what Heidegger would call a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent.’ The supreme reality for Shelley always lies out of sight, ‘Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,’ like the One of Plotinus.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when Night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.
In this simile, the moon, like the sun earlier, sheds light while remaining itself unseen. Again the potency of the hidden, the invisible, is stressed.
Similes for the Undescribable (st. 7-12)
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
The quest for similes is made explicit or reflective. Stanzas 7 and 12 introduce the similes negatively, stressing how they cannot match the bird’s wonder, but the four stanzas they enclose develop positively the most beautiful images in the poem. Stanza 7 introduces the poem’s third cloud, referring to ‘the illuminated drops of rain which continue to fall after the sun has appeared and created a rainbow among the clouds’ (Donovan et al., 473). The cloud is linked with ‘thy presence,’ the hidden, numinous source of the sparkling notes. If the intertangled metaphors of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ were marshalled with sovereign hand, consistent as the sinews in a Renaissance marble statue, the inventive course of the riot of similes here might seem looser, each image existing on its own, like a separate bead on a string. The colons at the end of each stanza suggest such a linking string, and add to the propulsive movement of the verse.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
This simile expounds the underlying metaphor of the whole poem, emphasized by the capitalization. The mode of existence of the lark expresses that of the poet, ‘hidden in the light of thought.’ The paradoxical structure of private hiddenness and universal manifestation holds the similes together, fuses them in a symbolic grasp of the poet’s entire existence and role.
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour,
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
Here we are in the realm of fancy (Sir Walter Scott) rather than imagination, fancy that flies away from the grave symbolic import of the poem to play with pleasing images. The hyphenated words ‘high-born’ and ‘love-laden’ enhancing the rhyming tightness of the short lines, which then overflow unbroken in the leisurely expanse of the hexameter.
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:
The ‘g’ and ‘d’ alliterations tighten the short lines this time. The glow-worm may be connected with the fireflies mentioned in Mary Shelley’s note: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark, which inspired one of his most beautiful poems’ (Donovan et al., 468). The simile brings a shift from music to light, and the next one modulates to scent:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
Despite this synaesthetic plenitude, the sequence of four similes might seem loosely associative, like the set of dreamy scenes Keats’s nightingale evoked:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
But a closer look shows a tight logic in Shelley’s sequence. In each case there is an expansive effect, affecting many, whose cause remains hidden and self-absorbed. The short lines reflect the intense self-concentration of the hidden cause, the hexameter the miraculous overflow of the effect. Where the nightingale casts Keats afloat on a dream voyage into legendary pasts ending up in a never-never land, Shelley’s similes are intent on their purpose of analyzing the essence of the lark, or of the poet, in four exercises of imagination, four inspired soundings. Imagination is at its esemplastic work even if the immediate impression is one of freely dispersed fancy. Keats is rudely awoken from his dream: ‘Forlorn! the very word is as a bell/ Tolling me back to my sole self.’ But Shelley’s thought grows to an ever more intense wakefulness. In the final words of the poem, ‘I am listening now,’ all the thoughts and images the lark has evoked are fully present, whereas at the end of Keats’s poem the nightingale has fled and the deceptive illusions of fancy are banished.
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Two more similes here, expressed as negative contrast. The poem continues to accumulate images of joyous, clear freshness, as yet unshadowed by any hint of pain (whereas in Keats the pain is present from the start, coterminous with the delight of the bird’s song: ‘My heart aches…’).
Saddest Thought (st. 13-18)
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:
The bird becomes a teacher to the poet, first in a light, playful way, but then inspiring more sombre thoughts, until in the last stanzas it becomes a positive model of poetic existence.
Chorus Hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine, would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
In the mournful sound of ‘chaunt, vaunt, want’ do we not hear a subliminal echo of a word that rhymes more naturally with ‘Hymeneal’ than ‘be all,’ namely the word ‘funereal’? The ‘hidden want’ in the chorus and chant is not just a poetic deficiency, but suggests a deficiency in existence itself, as becomes increasingly explicit in the following stanzas.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
Here again the pure ecstasy of the lark’s song is subtly shadowed by the pain of mortality. The last four words retrospectively undermine the cloudless joy of the preceding lines, reminding us that such joy is not accessible in human life.
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.
The opposition of ‘joyance’ and ‘languor’ is another triumph of diction, and the word ‘annoyance’ is elevated by the rhyme and poignant contrast with ‘joyance.’ ‘Joyance’ might seem an artificial word, stretching a line that goes from ‘joy’ to ‘joyful’ to ‘joyous’ to the point of preciosity. Or rather the line stretches from ‘joy’ through ‘enjoyment,’ with help from the French jouissance. ‘Joyance’ is not simply joyfulness, but ecstatic enjoyment, close to ‘rejoicing’ or ‘delight,’ a favourite word of Shelley’s: ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou/ Spirit of Delight!’ It is active not passive joy, in accord with the active verb ‘lovest.’ ‘Languor’ and ‘annoyance’ are everyday, mundane words, but Shelley elevates them, giving them a keener sense. ‘Annoyance’ is made to sound like French ennui or Italian noia, a word of nihilistic intensity on the lips of Leopardi, the nearest Italian equivalent to Shelley. Shelley may have exclaimed ‘che noia!’ when dealing with ‘importunate creditors’ (White, II, 211). ‘Languor,’ too, takes on the strong sense of ‘languishing’ and taedium vitae. ‘Far more clearly than is apparent from the poem it is an instinctive reaction from an immediate definite environment,’ with its ‘shadows and miseries’ (ib.). But what biographical circumstance contributed to intensity of mood is sublated into clarity of symbol, feeding into the great over-arching project of the poet-legislator. Elevation of speech goes hand in hand with density of symbolic connotation, with a felicity that puts Shelley in the company of Milton and Wordsworth, and with a light aristocratic grace that comes from the confidence of lucidity.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream?
After ‘hidden want,’ ‘pain,’ ‘languor,’ ‘annoyance,’ ‘sad satiety,’ it is inevitably that ‘death’ makes its appearance. The lark’s song has banished languor and annoyance and now overcomes death, but all of this breeds an intenser awareness of how these shadows cling to human existence. Instead of dwelling on death directly, the poem instead broods on the metaphysical condition of transience:
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
No self-pity here, but a grave insight into the human condition. His classical formation, as well as the example of Wordsworth, stands Shelley in good stead in these famous lines, which bring to a climax the set of stanzas that have brought consciousness of pain and mortality to the surface. The lines are bereft of simile or image, in contrast to the rest of the poem. Their diction is simple, though the words ‘pine’ (half-rhyming with ‘pain’) ‘sincerest’ (continued by ‘sweetest’ and ‘saddest’), and ‘fraught’ are beautifully used: ‘sincere’ carries a Latin overtone of innocent and untroubled, like a clear sky; ‘fraught’ has the physical sense of ‘freighted’ but also the psychological sense, currently prevalent, of ‘tense.’ Above all the lines are distinguished by a directness of statement, repeating three times the thesis that human beings are never completely happy, in parallel with the threefold statement two stanzas back that the lark is perfectly happy. The ‘languor,’ ‘annoyance,’ and ‘satiety’ of the previous verse become pining, pain, and sadness here, and are sounded in their inner, inescapable essence. ‘Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,’ wrote Alfred de Musset (‘La Nuit de mai’), echoing Shelley, but without the extra charm of Shelley’s alliterations.
Poetic Faith (st. 19-21)
Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Even if human life were without pain, it would still not come near the sheer joy of the skylark. The lines carry an Empsonian ambiguity, for they could be read to mean: ‘if we knew not sorrow, we could never come near thy joy.’ Without the agony of existence, the ecstasy induced by lark (or nightingale) would lack its full metaphysical impact. The stanza, thus read, would not be a mere continuation of the preceding contrasts but begins the last movement of the poem, its affirmation of poetic faith.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!
Here the ‘poet’ is introduced in a general and impersonal way, in a stanza that is perhaps the most conventional in the poem. The ‘skill’ here is, paradoxically, an inspired spontaneity that has no need of the book-learning that played so great a role in Shelley’s own laborious and often laboured art. The poetic skills he deployed were at the service of a spontaneity, an abandonment, when the true lyrical afflatus took over. This has been touched on at various points: ‘unpremeditated mirth’ (st. 1), ‘singing hymns unbidden’ (st. 7), ‘a flood of rapture’ (st. 13), and now the final stanza brings it to its climax in defining the lark’s skill in terms of the classical notion of inspiration as madness, the furor poeticus:
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Ion: ‘they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own’ (Donovan et al., 477). Shelley, when inspiration strikes, is a man possessed. The poem is no longer at the services of his views, but commandeers them and goes beyond them.
The general reference to the poet is here concretized as Shelley thrusts his own persona as poet to the fore, as also happens in the last stanza of Adonais and the fourth and fifth stanzas of ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ Keats’s nightingale ode ends on a defeatist or irresolute note, but Shelley, in these three poems ends with a declaration of poetic faith. Shelley’s line, ‘Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale,’ touches on this melancholy, or paralysis and despair, in Keats; the images that embody Shelley’s spirit (wind, lark, fire, stars) are invincibly upbeat, bearing the force of his Promethean belief in progress, reform, and rejuvenation of the world. Keats cherished the dream of being numbered among the English poets, and developed a deep sympathy with human suffering, but rarely showed concern or confidence that the world would listen and be ‘wrought to sympathy.’ He did not assume his role as poet as self-consciously, as ‘officially’ as Shelley did, though in his elegy Shelley thrusts that role upon him in the most grandiose fashion, raising his stature with all the techniques of apotheosis learned from the Greeks and Milton. Keats had a less secure understanding of his vocation as poet, and used quite vague language: ‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth’ (Ellershaw, 164), ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ Shelley gives concrete value to these abstractions, bringing out a cosmic and metaphysical significance in his verse. Rarely has one poet done so good a turn for another. This defining moment in the reception of Keats is ignored by critics who prefer to whittle Keats back down to size, focussing on the empirical conditions of his poetry, and praising him as a model ‘for every man who wishes to discipline his sensibility and refine his sensual vision’ (Walsh, 98). It is understandable that they resist Shelley’s sublation of his dead friend into a Neoplatonic vision. Yet rather than re-imagine Keats arbitrarily, Shelley is recognizing and warmly affirming the conjunction of their destinies as the two supreme Romantics. This is a marriage made in poetic heaven.
Shelley wished to become an oracle, a medium for Orphic utterance. It is ironic that his most ambitious effort in that direction, Prometheus Unbound, carries less conviction than these three intensely personal poems in which the grand messianic gesture remains only a posture of longing. Shelley’s historical and political vision of liberation can be pieced together from his works, but it is not given substantial embodiment in a great masterpiece. Prometheus Unbound has not taken its place alongside The Prelude as a rich and rewarding poetic utterance. Instead, Shelley’s most successful poems are his least political. In them poetic speaking or saying imposes itself as an end in itself, and the liberating desire the three poems evoke in the reader is a general resolution to speak freely, transformingly. But to speak poetically is to be transformed in a radical way which political ideology cannot encompass. The spirit of poetry blows where it wills, as the hearer like the poet is ‘borne darkly, fearfully afar.’
To say that Shelley’s ‘self-knowledge’ was ‘distorted by an excessive preoccupation with the public or messianic role of the poet’ (Walsh, 89), as opposed to the down-to-earth realism of Keats, is to consign Shelley’s three most perfect poems to the realm of illusion. Keats himself wrote in August 1820, on receiving Shelley’s The Cenci: ‘A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have “self-concentration”—selfishness perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore’ (Ellershaw, 183). Shelley, in his best poems, achieved this artistic ideal without abandoning his magnanimous role as a prophet with a message, going beyond Keats with a courage that the critics have failed to appreciate. As they plumb the fragility of human existence and celebrate the imagination, the three poems carry a persuasive enlightenment that has philosophical depth. That Shelley in addition stood forth as a prophet, like Blake, and hoped that his ‘dead thoughts’ would ‘quicken a new birth,’ adds to the grandeur of these prophetic performances. He did not seek self-knowledge but self-transformation into the vehicle of a Spirit, and the three poems show the transition from the empirical ‘I’ who speaks of his weakness to a transcendental ‘I,’ the Poet, whose voice triumphs over death. This is close to Mallarmé’s ‘disparition élocutoire du poète,’ and to Rilke’s self-transformation. Rilke was disturbed by Paula Becker-Modersohn’s uncanny portrait of him, painted long before the sovereign breakthrough of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in 1922, for she caught his essential identity, the poet latent in the man, a somewhat frightening figure, dehumanized, an oracular mask (see Petzet; O’Leary 2010). T. S. Eliot sees the poet as haunted by ‘a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing.’ The poem is a kind of exorcism, followed by ‘a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable’ (98). Shelley lacked ‘self-knowledge’ no more than Rilke; both knew themselves as Poets, creatures of a rare stamp, sacrificing the everyday self to this preternatural identity. Shelley, with his hallucinations of auto-scopie, ‘was, when alive, a revenant and in that sense partook of the strange temporal logic of spirits and spectres discussed by Derrida’ (Allen, 228), ‘an elemental spirit… an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine’ (Mary Shelley, quoted, ib., 229).
Romanticism was dismissed as ‘spilt religion’ by T. E. Hulme. The nature mysticism of Wordsworth and Hölderlin could be seen as a regression from Christian mysticism. Their relationship to Nature, by whom they were ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,’ can sound like an echo of the biblical relationship to God. Shelley’s prophetism and messianism is a dechristianized version of Blake’s. Or should we see Wordsworth and Shelley as autonomous natural mystics, tuning in to a depth of soul, or an enlightenment, that the language of Christianity had cluttered up? Both, in their most inspired moments, become seers:
…we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (‘Tintern Abbey’)
Fancy becomes imagination, and imagination is a vision of the depth of things. Poetry as a contemplative naming of Being. Heidegger has pursued this dimension of the poetic in his ample commentaries on Hölderlin. Many see Shelley as turning in a circle of idle, narcissistic subjectivity, and so unworthy of comparison with Wordsworth and Hölderlin as poets of Being. Indeed, with Plotinus, he goes ‘beyond being’ at the end of Adonais, back to the pure simplicity of the One, the hidden source of all the splendours of the world of creative mind and the world of Nature. But this cannot be dismissed as nihilism, a death wish, cheap escapism; it is better to see it as a supreme act of imagination, with its own inner necessity and logic, its own truth.
References
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——. (2010). ‘Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney.’ In: Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo ed. Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception. New York: Continuum, 167-84.
O’Neill, Michael (1989). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Petzet, H.-W. (1977). Bildnis des Dichters. Frankfurt: Insel.
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White, Newman Ivey (1947). Shelley. London: Secker and Warburg.
From English Literature and Language 49 (2012):1-18.
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