DREAMS AND THE REDEMPTWE VLSWN
EN SHELLEY’S MAJOR POETRY

Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHiGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
NORMAN A. RASULLS
1970

   
   
   

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ABSTRACT

DREAMS AND THE REDEMPTIVE VISION
IN SHELLEY'S MAJOR POETRY

BY
.0-0
Norman A} Rasulis
When critics have taken account of the dream con-

tent in Shelley's poems they have either commented very
generally upon the dream-like quality of Shelley's poetry,
or they have searched amid the symbolism and allegory of
his most conspicuous dream-Visions for idealised truths.
Rarely have they interpreted the dream-visions in relation
to the larger contexts of his poetry. Yet dream-visions
figure significantly in every one of Shelley's narrative

poems from Queen Mab to "The Triumph of Life." Shelley was

 

doubtless fond of this long accepted metaphor for suspend-
ing the limitations of the objective, waking world of
reality and ensuring subjective autonomy.

Besides the advantage in perspective, however,
Shelley shaped the dream conventions in every poem to fit
the larger thematic and narrative demands of his redemptive
vision. This vision informs all of Shelley's narrative
poetry. It expresses a desire to reintegrate his existence

with Nature, and it therefore exemplifies the Romantic myth

Norman A. Rasulis

of redemption. Corresponding to the ancient myth of the
lost paradise of Eden, the Romantic mythos involves what
Northrop Frye describes as "a sense of an original identity
between the individual man and nature which has been lost."1

While correctly identifying the Shelleyan poetic
vision as starting from a human grog, Frye's mythos never-
theless falls short of explaining Shelley's expanded con-
sciousness. Like most interpretations of Shelley, it grap-
ples with the relationship between the subjective conscious-
ness and the objective world in Shelley's poetry princi-
pally from within a Platonic frame of reference. But at
the center of Shelley's "sense of dispossession" lies a
more complex motivation than merely the desire to tran-
scend this finite and temporal reality through his vision-
ary eggs. For within Shelley's imaginative vision the death
instinct is interlocked with the life instinct (Eros) in a
continual struggle which Freud postulated in his final
theory as the ruling principle of all life, including that
of the human psyche and its created civilizations. Life
versus Death in a polarity so general and so fundamental
as to seem banal. Yet its dynamics and its tOpography are
as subtly varied as life and art, both in Freudian theory
and in Shelley's poetry.

No single work of Shelley's maturity so essential-
izes this theme of the Life-Death struggle as his virtually

ignored Una Favola, which he wrote in Italian in 1820. Had

 

Norman A. Rasulis

Shelley been a Freudian he could not have contrived a more

uncanny allegory than Una Favola to exemplify Freud's

 

theory of the Life-Death struggle. The story is full of
subtle dynamics, but basically, here are Life and Death,
'twin sisters' and therefore sprung from a common source,
Love (Eros), in constant strife with each other. Both are
equally and alternately appealing and repelling. And both,
apparently, originate in his dreams. This study will trace
the paradigm of Life and Death in its thematic and narra-
tive develOpment and its pivotal relationship to the dream-

visions in each of Shelley's narrative poems from Queen Mab

 

to "The Triumph of Life."

The exploratory device of the dream-vision reveals
how Shelley's poetic vision is redemptive and, more im-
portantly, how the Life-Death struggle informs this vision
and deepens its complexity and meaning. Through use of
the dream—vision the familiar dichotomy between desire and
reality gives way to a vision of the competing desires of
Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, within
the context of a shifting reality. Beyond this fundamental
polarity in Shelley's poetry, however, it is possible to
discern the subtle dynamics of renunciation and repression
as components of the death impulse and the imperative of
an emerging Narcissism that detours Death into the service
of Eros in human society and in the individual psyche.

From the early framing function of Ianthe's dream, with its

Norman A. Rasulis

sharply drawn polarity between a redemptive Bros and a
history throttled by its own destructive institutions,
through "The Triumph of Life," which begins to explore
Death more subtly as a psychic and social phenomenon,
Shelley penetrated not only more intricately into the de-
structive forces of the death instinct and the precarious-
ness of Life but also into the obstinacy of Life and its

power over Death.

 

lNorthrOp Frye, A Study of English Romanticism
(New York: Random House, 1968), p. 17.

DREAMS AND THE REDEMPTIVE VISION

IN SHELLEY'S MAJOR POETRY

BY

(\
0.

Norman Al Rasulis

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish first to thank Professor James Hill, my
chairman, for his guidance and kindness throughout the
writing of this dissertation. He always rendered his ad-
vice with the concern and insight which enabled me to pur-
sue the implications of my own premises more fruitfully.

I have therefore come to regard him as a friend as well as
a counselor. Whatever deficiencies the study has, I hasten
to add however, are my own. To Professors Victor Paananen
and David Mead my thanks for their reading and numerous
helpful suggestions. Let me also add a special note of
thanks to Professor Mead who gave me my first job as a
graduate assistant and thereby enabled me to continue my
graduate studies. For my wife, finally, who endured so
much, nothing I might say here can encompass the debt of

thanks I owe her.

ii

INTRODUCTION.
QUEEN MAB. .

ALASTOR . .

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

EPIPSYCHIDION

HELLAS. . .

TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

CONCLUSION .

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

iii

Page

18
39
57
87
101
116
134
155

166

INTRODUCTION

Scholars have scrutinized the dream-visions of most
romantic poets, notably Coleridge and Keats, but Shelley's
penchant for this literary device has scarcely evoked their
interest. Shelley's characteristically visionary designs
may account for this oversight. Given his restless idealism,
which usually obliterates the boundaries between the sub-
jective and the objective worlds, one can easily overlook
how often the thrust of his vision is born by dreams. When
critics have taken account of the dream content in Shelley's
poems they have either commented very generally upon the
dream-like quality of Shelley's poetry, or they have
searched amid the symbolism and allegory of his most con-
spicuous dream-visions for idealized truths.1 Rarely, if
ever, have they interpreted the dream-visions in relation

to the larger contexts of his poetry. Yet dream-visions

 

1G. Wilson Knight in The Starlit Dome (New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1960), Newman Ivey White in Shelle (New
York: Knopf, 1940), and Graham Hough in The Romantic Poets
(New York: Norton, 1964), mention Shelley's dream-visions
but scarcely go beyond a general assertion of their signi-
ficance. See William H. Hildebrand's An Anagogic Inter-
pretation of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (Western Reserve
University, 1967). This sometimes illuminating disserta-
tion contains the most extended statement on Shelley's use
of the dream-vision, but the author relies almost exclu-
sively on Queen Mab, Alastor, and the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty" to support his basically Jungian interpretation.

 

 

 

 

figure significantly in every one of Shelley's narrative

poems from Queen Mab to "The Triumph of Life."2

 

Shelley was doubtless fond of this long accepted
metaphor for suspending the limitations of the objective,
waking world of reality and ensuring subjective autonomy.
His fondness is mirrored in a notable passage from "Mont
Blanc":

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep--that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.--I look on High:

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

Its circles?3

(49-57)

The speaker in the poem is postulating a supersensible
perSpective in the dream, or even in death, which might
give him access to those "gleams of a remoter world" that
are otherwise utterly inaccessible. Each of Shelley's
dream-visions relies upon this assumption. Dreams seem to
point the dreamer, and perhaps the reader, toward some
ultimate truth beyond mortal reality.

Besides the advantage in perspective, however,

Shelley shaped the dream conventions in every poem to fit

 

2The Revolt of Islam is an exception. Although
there are four brief dream—visions in the poem, they are
not central to its thematic development in terms of the
present study.

3From The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford Uni-
versrty Press, 1961). Subsequent quotations from Shelley's
poetry will be from this edition.

 

 

the larger thematic and narrative demands of his redemptive
vision. This vision informs all of Shelley's narrative
poetry. It expresses a desire to reintegrate his existence
with Nature, and it therefore exemplifies the Romantic myth
of redemption. Corresponding to the ancient myth of the
lost paradise of Eden, the Romantic mythos involves what
Northrop Frye describes as "a sense of an original identity
between the individual man and nature which has been lost."4
Whether conservative and reaching backward to resurrect ear-
lier traditional values, as in some Romantics such as Scott,
or reaching forward, like Shelley, to create a vision that
would overthrow the repressive values which dominate the
present, all the Romantics shared this common impulse to
reattain their lost sense of identity with Nature. Hence,
they varied widely in their attempts:

Romantic redemption myths, especially the revolution-

ary ones like those of Shelley, throw the emphasis

on an eros, or love rooted in the human sexual in-

stinct. Such an eros deveIOps a distinctively human

idealism, and for such idealism the redeeming agent

is also human centered. The agape or love of God

for man creates grace, but what man's love and ideal-

ism create is essentially a gnosis, an expanded know-

ledge or consciousness, and one that is more inclu-

sive and profound than the conscious knowledge of

the detached subject.5
Borrowing a phrase from the hip vernacular, Frye asserts
that "the central theme of Romanticism is that of attaining

. 6
an expanded conSCiousness."

 

4NorthrOp Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New
York: Random House, 1968), p. 17.

 

5Frye, p. 20. 6Frye, p. 42.

While correctly identifying the Shelleyan poetic
vision as starting from a human eros, Frye's mythos never-
theless falls short of explaining Shelley's "expanded con-

sciousness."

Like most interpretations of Shelley, it grap-
ples with the relationship between the subjective conscious-
ness and the objective world in Shelley's poetry from within
a predominantly Platonic frame of reference. But at the
center of Shelley's "sense of dispossession" lies a more
complex motivation than merely the desire to transcend this
finite and temporal reality through his visionary eggs.

For within Shelley's imaginative vision the death instinct
is interlocked with the life instinct (Eros) in the never-
ending struggle which Freud postulated in his final theory
as the ruling principle of all life, including that of the
human psyche and its created civilizations. Life versus
Death: it is a polarity so general and so fundamental as

to seem banal. Yet its dynamics and its topography are as
subtly varied as life and art, both in Freudian theory and
in Shelley's poetry.

Shelley's preoccupation with death has not gone un-
noticed by the critics. As the title of his book suggests,
B. P. Kurtz considered death the primary motivation in
Shelley's poetry.7 His study is not Freudian however, but

Platonic. Life in this world of time and space is a dream,

 

7B. P. Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death (London: Oxford
University Press, 1933).

 

an insubstantial shadow, a "painted veil" beyond which lies
death and its ideal and eternal world. Interpretations of
death in Shelley's poetry invariably share this Platonizing
tendency. Neither Shelley's nor Freud's metapsycholoqy
limits death in these terms, however, as we shall see.

Love and death, especially the former, have been
explored extensively by scholars of Shelley's thought. No
one, however, has explored the deeply interwoven dialectic
of these contradictory impulses in his poetry. The Eros-
Death struggle permeates Shelley's narrative poems. Nowhere
does it reveal itself more sharply than in his dream-Visions.
Because they simulate the desires and wish fulfillments of
real dreams, they are invariably leading toward the redemp-
tive vision through Eros. Just as often, however, they are
tinged with the much less conspicuous presence of Thanatos.8

But it cannot be emphasized too strongly that
Shelley's dream-visions are not real dreams and should not
and will not be analyzed as such in this study. Nor is
Shelley transcribing his own dreams. Like the rest of his
poetry, they are literary products of conscious effort,
rather than the emissions of a dreaming mind. They are, in
short, literary devices attaining to heightened conscious-

ness, not ending it. Literary history is filled with

 

81n his Bros and Civilization (New York: Vintage,
1955), Herbert Marcuse adOpts the Greek 'Thanatos.‘ Death,
designating the death instinct, to balance Freud's use of
'Eros' meaning "Love,' or the life instinct. I will use
all these terms in this study to denote the same meanings.

 

dream—visions, which writers have used as conscious artis-
tic structures. Macrobius probably influenced British
Literature in this respect more than anyone else.9 As
Walter De La Mare writes:

But it was the "authour that hight Macrobes" who,
with his prose commentary on the Dream of Scipio
which he borrowed from Cicero, set a literary
fashion in the fourth century which has never since
ceased to flower-~that of ascribing a story to a
dream. From the limpid simplicity and beauty of
Pearl; from the workday directness of Piers Plowman,
by way of The King's Quair and The Golden Targe,

to Spenser, and on to Byron, Burns and’Tennyson,

the tale in verse or allegory or lyric declaring
itself to be a dream is so usual a device in English
poetry that we question neither its motive nor its
justification.l

 

 

 

 

Like most critics, however, De La Mare overlooks Shelley's
dream-visions. As we will demonstrate, Shelley's depen-
dence on this psychic-literary device, both as a story-
frame and as a revelation of imaginative truth, is profound.
Most literary criticism drawing upon Freud's prin-
ciples limits itself to interpretations which rely exclu-
sively upon his early theories of psychoanalytical and

clinical psychology to design roadmaps to some hapless

 

9See William H. Stahl, ed., Macrobius' Commentary
on the Dream of Scipio (New York: Columbia UniversIty
Press, 1952). Macrobius differentiates the five main dream
categories in Chapter III as follows: "All dreams may be
classified under five main types: there is the enigmatic
dream, in Greek oneiros, in Latin somnium; second, there is
the prOphetic ViSlOn, in Greek horama, in Latin visio; third,
there is the oracular dream, in Greek chrematismos, in
Latin oraculum; there is the nightmare, in Greek enyphion,
in Latin insomnium; and last, the apparition, in Greek
phantasma, which Cicero, when he has occasion to use the
word, calls visum."

10Walter De La Mare, Behold, This Dreamer! (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), pp. 101-102.

 

 

 

 

 

 

author's psyche. Occasionally subjected to psychoanalytical
scrutiny, Shelley has been left comparatively unnoticed by
the Freudians. But although not numerous, Shelley's
Freudian critics have been extravagant. They have concen-
trated, by and large, upon his psyche and have used his
poetry to substantiate their claims about his personality.

An early biographical study by Carpenter and
Barnefield maintained that Shelley was at least bisexual,
and quite possibly a latent homosexual.ll They rested
their evidence on Shelley's somewhat feminine appearance,
his male friendships with Hogg and Trelawney, his paranoia
(a defence against homosexuality), the bisexual nature of
some of his literary characters, his penchant for the

Symposium, and his idealization of women. Because Shelley

 

could never identify his love-ideal and therefore never
realize it, this failure, it would seem, constituted a
repressed homosexual tendency. This entire thesis of
sexual deviance relies almost exclusively on very selective
biOgraphical information. It draws very little upon the
poetry and, of course, attempts no literary evaluation.

In his lengthy apologia for Shelley, Herbert Read,
several years later, reached the similar conclusion that the

poet was latently homosexual with narcissistic tendencies.12

 

11Edward Carpenter and George Barnefield, The Ps -
chology of the Poet Shelley (London: Folcroft, 1925).

12Herbert Read, "In Defence of Shelley," in The True
Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry
(London: Faber and Faber, 1953), pp. 212-287.

 

He interprets Shelley's lack of objectivity toward the ex-
ternal world as a regressive stage of auto-eroticism, which
accounts for his unconscious homosexuality and his narcis-
sism. The Eagle-Serpent passage near the opening of The

Revolt of Islam illustrates "most probably some form of
"13

 

castration complex. And just as cavalierly the dream-
maiden in Alastor is cited as evidence of his narcissism.
Aside from these and a few other tenuous illustrations,
Read relies on Speculation to develOp his contentions
which move toward the conclusion that Shelley's neurosis
proves to work to his artistic advantage: "he [Shelley]
allowed his feelings and ideas to develop integrally with
his neurotic personality; and the plan of that evoluation
inevitably led to the formulation of a clearer, more con-
scious social order."14
A very early study by Eugene C. Taylor did not find
Shelley neurotic but measured his poetic growth as the

15

psychic evolution of his libido. The longer poems before

Prometheus Unbound trace a quest motif in which the libidi-

 

nal forces strive unsuccessfully to reunite with the mother
but are blocked by the incest barrier. These quests all

failed when they resolved themselves in death. The incest

 

l3Read, p. 251.

14Read, p. 263.

15Eugene C. Taylor, "Shelley as Mythmaker," The
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, XIV (April-June, 1919),
64-90.

barrier is finally overcome, symbolically, in Jupiter's
downfall. The reunion with Asia, the mother surrogate, in
turn, resolves the quest successfully. She embodies the
"forward-striving libido of Prometheus" which reunites
with and overcomes the "pent up, incestuous, and retro-
gressive libido" of the unconscious.16 Asia triumphs and
Jupiter falls because, as the author contends, rather ob-
scurely, "unless the subconsciousness has been revealed
and the retrogressive libido given progressive expression,
the incest barrier must necessarily cease to exist."17
The most audacious psychoanalytical assault on

Shelley's poetry is perhaps, Wormhoudt's analysis of

Prometheus Unbound.l8 One of Shelley's idiosyncracies,

 

according to this author, was his breast complex and the
poem is replete with evidence: Prometheus is "an infant
masochistically attached to the denying mother's breast."19
Beyond the problems of breast feeding and numerous other
complexes, the underlying assumptions can best be summa-
rized as a conflict between negative and positive oedipal

demands.20

 

16Taylor, pp. 86-87.

l7Taylor, p. 88.

18Arthur Wormhoudt, The Demon Lover (New York:
Books for Libraries, 1949).

19

 

Wormhoudt, pp. 88-89.

20"Prometheus, as the oedipal son, usurps the privi-
leges of the father, is punished, repents and is forgiven.
But the normal course of oedipal justice did not appeal to

10

Freud himself was much more restrained than his
followers in his own occasional analyses of art or litera-
ture. Notably, in his study of Leonardo da Vinci, he ad-
mitted that because artistic talent relies so intimately
upon sublimation, "the nature of artistic attainment is
psychoanalytically inaccessible to us."21 He drew this
conclusion in the face of his own investigations which led
him to infer that Leonardo suffered from a strong latent
homosexuality. He based his findings in large part upon
an analysis of one of Leonardo's childhood fantasies in-
volving a vulture. This evidence, coupled with the re-
curring smile in several of his paintings, derived, ac-
cording to Freud, from Leonardo's memories of his mother.

There are two principle tendencies in current

Freudian literary theory. One explores "inner meanings"

 

Shelley. His hatred of the father was seemingly much
stronger than that of Aeschylus. It demanded the complete
overthrow of Jupiter and the concomitant exoneration of
Prometheus for this crime against the father. This exon-
eration is accomplished by overlaying the positive oedipus
with a negative oedipus complex whereby the son represses
his hatred for the father and puts himself in the mother's
place in order to demonstrate his love in the passive man-
ner. But both the positive and negative oedipus complexes
are themselves only defenses against the deeper conflict
between the son and the mother." (Wormhoudt, p. 88)
Wormhoudt concludes: "The final result of the complicated
action of this great poem is to permit the Promethean
Shelley to accept the guilt for the lesser crime of the
negative oedipus relation and escape that of two greater
crimes--masochistic attachment to the pregenital mother
and rebellion against the positive oedipal father." (p. 108)

21Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in His
Psychosexuality (New York: Random House, 1926).

 

11

(aside from the form, to which Freud was largely indiffer-
ent); the other seeks to eXplain the artist's temperament
as a person through his literature. Most Freudian criti-
cism of Shelley, as we have shown, is preoccupied with the
latter. None of these interpretations deals with Shelley's
poetry in light of Freud's mature theory, doubtless re—
flecting the hostility of Freudian theorists toward what
they consider an unmitigated fatalism in Freud's eventual
position. With very few exceptions, the literary critics
have preferred the idealistic modifications involving the
"collective unconscious" and "primordial images" of the
Jungian theory. Frye is among this group. His gags-
centered redemptive vision does not even include the com-
pelling possibility of the countervailing and subverting
force of the death instinct. In his closing remarks to

his interpretation of Prometheus Unbound he suggests that

 

Shelley's Eros "anticipates the Eros of Freud," but he
adds, "Shelley has nothing of Freud's despondent resigna-
tion to the tyranny of anxiety."22 Frye probably does not
equate this anxiety with the death instinct, and implicitly
he seems to be rejecting the full significance of how re-

pression creates anxiety and thereby intensifies the death

instinct in Freudian theory. His Romantic mythos chooses

the route of philOSOphical idealism and ignores the deepen-

ing shadows of the death instinct in Shelley's poetry.

 

22Frye, pp. 123-124.

12

During the early stages of its develOpment, Freud's
theory concentrated on the conflict between the sex (libid-
inous) instinct and the ego (self-preservation) instinct.

With the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in

 

1920, in which he introduced the death instinct as the real
antagonist of Eros, the life instinct, Freud had turned the
corner into the latest and final stage of his theoretical
development. In place of his earlier instinctual theories
grounded in the origin of the mind as an antagonism between
sex and ego stood a new metapsychology which explained the
life processes in terms of a definite direction. This
direction reveals a conservative dynamic, which strives

for release from tension, through life and death, a prin-
ciple somewhat akin to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in
Physics. While each instinct strives to attain its goal in
a different mode-~either sustaining or destroying life--
they both exhibit a drive to return to a state of equilib-
rium, the Nirvana principle, where excitation is kept as
low as possible. This principle informs civilization as
well as the human psyche. Though it is unclear whether
Eros or Death is to be construed as the dominant force,
they share a common, perhaps the same source, prior to
differentiation. Marcuse poses the central question of

the final stage of Freud's theory of his significant study,

Bros and Civilization:

 

13

Does Eros, in spite of all the evidence, in the last
analysis work in the service of the death instinct,
and is life really only one long "detour to death?"
But the evidence is strong enough, and the detour
is long enough to warrant the Opposite assumption.
Eros is defined as the great unifying force that
preserves all life. The ultimate relation between
Bros and Thanatos remains obscure.23
This study will explore the suSpense of this relationship
in Shelley's narrative pietry.

The basic direction of Bros and of Thanatos always
remains the same, but their objective and.their manifestations
shift with each turn in the thematic and narrative develop-
ment of the poetry (just as they do in life in relation to
the external influences of reality). Thus, the interwoven
complexity of the death instinct, which informs the Nirvana
principle, with Eros, which informs the pleasure principle,
expresses an intricate dynamic that can never be precisely
defined or schematized. Freud says of the relationship
between the Nirvana principle and pleasure principle:

. . . the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to
remove internal tension due to stimuli (the "Nirvana
Principle" . . .) . . . finds expression in the
pleasure principle; and our recognition of this fact

is one of our strongest reasons, for believing in
the existence of the death instinct.

 

3Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 25. More than
Freud's own work itself, principally his Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (New York: Liveright, 1924) and Civilization and
Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), I have relied on
Marcuse's philosophical extrapolation of Freudian thought
in Bros and Civilization. One of the very few theorists to
take Freud's final formulation seriously, he extends Freud's
thoughts to the aesthetic dimension with penetrative in-
sight because he retains the theory with its insistence
upon the death instinct intact and therefore does not fall
into idealizing compromises.

24

 

 

 

 

 

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 76.

 

14

Marcuse describes the primacy of the Nirvana principle as
"the terrifying convergence of pleasure and death [which]
is dissolved as soon as it is established."25 Sometimes
the pleasure principle, sometimes the Nirvana principle

is in the ascendency. Often it is impossible to tell which
predominates.

Marcuse eXplains that Freud's original contribution
with respect to literature lies in having shown how imagi-
nation is governed by its own laws. These laws are con-
nected essentially with the pleasure principle, which, in
the phantasy-making process, remain relatively free of the
reality principle. Theoretically, therefore, the pleasure
principle aligns itself with the redemptive vision that
Frye assigns to the romantic mythos; but the pleasure prin-
ciple in Freudian theory necessarily entails the other side
of its coin, the Nirvana principle. The sublimated nature
of literary expression does not preclude the thematic and
narrative dimensions of death. We have already noted that
there is no place in the redemptive mythos for death, as
Frye defines it. In light of the Shelleyan mythos, which
incorporates death as well as life, Frye's conception re-
quires theoretical revision.

In terms of the Life-Death struggle no single work
of Shelley's maturity so essentializes this theme as his

virtually ignored Una Favola, which he wrote in Italian in

 

 

25Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 24.

 

15

1820.26 This parable depicts a youth who is in love simul-

taneously with two mistresses-Life and Death. In his fif-
teenth year he is awakened by Love who promises to lead him
to "that one whom he had oft-times beheld in his dream's
abode awaiting him." The youth joins Love who is accom-
panied by a troop of very sensually appealing but veiled
female forms on their way through a "gloomy valley" and
into a labyrinth of "delight and sadness." The veiled
figures lavish the youth with attention and respond to his
every whim, except one--they will not unveil themselves.
One of them, however, complies. Life reveals herself to
him. She is "tall of person and beautiful"; but when he
loves her, she proves to be "more false than any Siren."
Thus led astray, he is abandoned by Love who returns "to
her third heaven." Scarcely has Love departed when the
forms unveil themselves and haunt the woeful youth with
their loathsome presence. Eventually, the tormented youth
finds his way "to the grot of the Sister of Life, herself
an enchantress." This sister is Death, who comforts him.
He in turn falls in love with her and forgets the tor-
menting forms and even Life herself. But Death spurns him
when she realizes he loves her: "'If thou lovedst me not,
perchance might I love thee--beloved by thee, I hate thee

and I fly thee.'" Although rebuffed, the youth goes off

 

26David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley's Prose (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1954), pp. 359-361.

 

16

in quest of Death. During his vain pursuit he encounters
another lady who pities him. So he falls in love with her
and begins to hate Death. Hated, Death returns to reproach
and reclaim him. There is a confrontation between Death
and this new paramour, who, as it transpires, is Life her-
self, the "twin sister" of Death. The fable breaks off,
appropriately, at this high point, with the poor youth torn
between the two sisters.
Critics have scarcely noticed this fable. When

they have, they, like White, have seen its allegory as a
polarity of "false and true loves."27 White goes on to
equate Life with imperfection and Death with perfection.
Yet, clearly Shelley gave equal weight to the two figures
and left the outcome of their contention in suspense.
Even in traditional Platonic terms, White's equations may
be wrong. For as Marcuse says in placing Freud in the main-
stream of Western philosophy:

His metapsychology, attempting to define the essence

of being, defines it as Eros--in contrast to its tra-

ditional definition as Logos. The death instinct

affirms the principle of nonbeing (the negation of

being) against Eros (the principle of being). The

ubiquitous fusion of the two principles in Freud's

conception correSponds to the traditional meta-

physical fusion of being and non—being. To be sure,

Freud's conception of Eros refers only to organic

life. However, inorganic matter is, as the "end"

of the death instinct, so inherently linked to or-

ganic matter that (as suggested above) it seems per-

missible to give his conception a general ontological
meaning.

 

27Newman I. White, Shelley, Vol. II (New York:
KnOpf, 1940), p. 262.

28Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 113-114.

17

Had Shelley been a Freudian he could not have con-

trived a more uncanny allegory than Una Favola to exemplify

 

Freud's theory of the Life-Death struggle. The story is
full of subtle dynamics, but basically, here are Life and
Death, "twin sisters" and therefore sprung from a common
source, Love (Eros), in constant strife with each other.
Both are equally and alternately appealing and repelling.
And both apparently, originate in his dreams. This study
will trace the paradigm of Bros and Death in its thematic
and narrative deve10pment and its pivotal relationship to
the dream-visions in each of Shelley's narrative poems

from Queen Mab to "The Triumph of Life."29

 

 

29See note 2 above.

QUEEN MAB

At the time he wrote Queen Mab, Shelley avoided the

 

objective limitations of reality by embodying his entire,
youthful vision of redemption in a dream. Perhaps he felt
he could live uncompromisingly by the truth of his imagina-
tion within a dream framework while not confusing his vision
with the principles that govern reality. Furthermore, the

redemptive vision in Queen Mab projects itself futuristi-

 

cally--beyond the limitations that might constrain its uto-
pian hypotheses in any other form than a dream-vision.

In this schema Ianthe is little more than a reces-
sive Spectator to Mab's revelations and prophecies. Pre-
sumably any other mortal as lovely and as virtuous would
have served Mab's purpose as well. Ianthe's relationship
to her dream is therefore unlike that of Shelley's later
dreamers whose symbolic and psychological identities are
integral to their dream-visions. It is not even clear
whether the dream centers in Ianthe's mind. For at the
Opening of the poem the narrator comments from both inside
and outside her mind. As he admires her sleeping beauty
he begins to remark upon the approach of Mab's chariot.
And from this point on, although the dreamer's traditional
loss of personal consciousness and entry to the dream are
absent, the dream-vision unfolds.

18

19

With its perspective outside space and time the
vision fits Shelley's suprahistorical design for reviewing
the past, present, and future. Although Shelley was prob-

ably unaware of it, Queen Mab conforms closely to what

 

Macrobius terms the "oracular dream." This pattern relies
upon a revered guide, often supernatural, who "clearly re-
veals what will or will not transpire, and what action to
take or avoid."1 From her vantage point outside time and
space Mab espouses the principle of Necessity that will in-
evitably liberate all mankind and nature from Oppression,
cruelty, and pain. Necessity, or the 'Spirit of Nature,’
Mab predicts, will overthrow the repressive system of
aristocratic, religious, and commercial interests which
dominate men's existence. In their stead, Mab predicts
an order that affirms the ideal of man's redemption through
reintegration with nature.

Redemption, as we have already observed, entails
man's reintegration with nature. Frye describes it as "a
sense of an original identity between the individual man
and nature which has been lost. . . . The Romantic redemp-
2

tion myth then becomes a recovery of the original identity."

As it finally evolves in section VIII and IX of Queen Mab,

 

this myth imaginatively projects a non—repressive, objective

world that liberates sensuousness (Eros) from reason,

 

lStahl, p. 90.

20

transforms toil into play, and conquers the destructive
effects of time. Frye is never very specific about how

the redemptive vision is fulfilled in terms of its eventual
realization. Marcuse's conception of the future of the
aesthetic dimension, however, fills out this Eros along
lines of the three criteria just mentioned. It is the
vision of Narcissus expressed in the Nirvana principle,

not as death but as life. But in Queen Mab this vision

 

only begins to assume the outlines of Narcissism; not until

the poems coming after Queen Mab does the Nirvana principle

 

underlying Narcissism emerge sharply with its struggle be-
tween Eros and the death instinct. Nevertheless, the flat,
sweeping contrasts between the future Mab promises and the
earthly realities of dead and dying civilizations in the
past and in the present are broadly suggestive of this
eventual direction.

Mab's presence is symbolically pervasive from the
agitated moment of her approach in Ianthe's dream. Shelley
signals her arrival in a rush of wind and refracted light,
suggestive of the inspirational desires and divine powers
often associated with his poetry:

'Tis softer than the west winds' sigh;

'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes

Of that strange lyre breezes sweep:

Those lines of rainbow light

Are like the moonbeams when they fall
Through some cathedral window, but the tints
Are such as may not find

Comparison on earth.
(I! 50-58)

21

Mab's supernatural origin and power in this opening section
are strongly marked by her accompanying celestial imagery,
while Ianthe, for all her earthly loveliness, is clearly of
terrestrial origin. This contrast of associations between
celestial and terrestrial elements holds for most of

Shelley's poetry. In Queen Mab it reinforces symbolically

 

the entire development of Mab's redemptive Eros throughout
the poem.3 For set against the deathly past and the de—
structive present of the terrestrial world are the limit-
less possibilities of the future, and the celestial imagery
associated with Mab underscores this promise. Mab descends
into center stage, and the narrative vieWpoint shifts to
her commanding perSpective. As Mab's chariot appears,
pulled by her "celestial coursers," the scene is suffused
with light imagery. Her celestial power, it is clear,
outshines all elemental perceptions:

Those who had looked upon the sight,

Passing all human glory,

Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene,

 

3According to Donald Reiman, Shelley's imagery

functions along precopernican lines. His general observa-
tions of Shelley's imagery in his introduction to Shelley's
"Triumph of Life" sketch out some of the broader implica-
tions and connotations in Shelley's imagery and concludes:
"The celestial symbols remain relatively consistent in their
associations throughout Shelley's poetry, as do many of the
terrestrial symbols. Each individual poem, however, devel-
ops its particular symbolic universe, drawing nuances and

 

associations from specific traditions." Shelley's "The
Triumph of Life": A Critical Study (Urbana, Ill.: UEiVer-

 

sity of Illinois Press, 1965), p. I7.

22

Heard not the night wind's rush,
Heard not an earthly sound,
Saw but the heavenly strains'
That filled the lovely dwelling.
Preparatory to releasing Ianthe's soul, Mab arrests the
elemental forces of terrestrial nature by summoning her
heavenly powers, "Stars! your balmiest influence shed /
Elements! your wrath suspend (I, 114-115). The powers of
earth, ocean, and air are cast asleep (I, 116 passim);
whereupon, Ianthe's soul is commanded to stand forth,
"all beautiful in naked purity" (I, 132). Stripped of her
earthliness, Ianthe's soul does more than merely betray a
lapse from materialism into incipient Platonism. There
lingers about her naked form the narrator's preoccupation
with her sensual beauty expressed in the opening lines of
the poem. This early sensuality evolves, of course, into
a complex Eros that is central to Shelley's aesthetic in
his later poetry, as we shall see.
Ianthe's dream accumulates all of the young dreame
er's earlier anticipations and now seems reality:
Each day dream of her mortal life,
Each frenzied vision of the slumbers
That closed each well spent day,
Seemed now to meet reality.
(I, 195-198)
Then in another profusion of light imagery Mab and her
charge ascend through the magnified reaches of the uni—

verse, ever enlarging the contrast with that diminutive

"smallest light" of earth. Their journey culminates in

23

their arrival at the 'Hall of Spells' that enshrines the
'Spirit of Nature.’ From this ultimate precipice the nar-
rator symbolically underscores the gap between man's con-
ceptions and the earthly limitations of his perceptions:

Yet not the golden islands

Gleaming in yon flood of light,

Nor the feathery curtains

Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch

Nor the burnished Ocean waves

Paving that gorgeous dome,

So fair, so wonderful a sight

As Mab's aethereal palace could afford

(II, 22—28)

The celestial influence as Ianthe and all other
mortals had viewed it is necessarily refracted and diffused
in its transmission to earth.4 Aside from the scientific
accuracy of its astonomical description, this ascent to a
supra-universal perspective is in the mainstream of dream-
vision tradition. Like Chaucer's guides in "The House of
Fame" and "The Parliament of Foules" and other earlier and
later hierOphants of dream-visions, Mab exercises her
oracular powers from a limitless promontory.

Although their vantage outside time-space permits
Mab and her pupil to survey the entire range of human exis-

tence, Mab's "celestial palace" is not a Cloister to evade

the will of Necessity:

 

4Explaining this phenomenon in his first note to
Queen Mab Shelley wrote: "Beyond our atmOSphere the sun
would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black
concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is
owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and
their reflection from other bodies." Poems, p. 800.

 

24

But were it virtue's only meed, to dwell

In a celestial palace, all resigned

To pleasurable impulses, immured

Within the prison of itself, the will

Of changeless nature would be unfulfilled

(II, 54-63)

Mab's instruction discourages escapist self-indulgence,
for as she expounds,

How Wonderful! that even

The passions, prejudices, interests

That sway the meanest being, the weak touch

That moves the finest nerve,

And in one human brain

Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link

In the great chain of Nature.
Man's existence and eventual liberation, we are reminded,
is rooted in the terrestrial world. And as Mab will even-
tually demonstrate, man will redeem himself through an ex-
panded psychic response to nature, under the governance of
Necessity.

Having prepared her listener with the promise to
review the lessons of the past, the present, and the
secrets of the future, Mab begins her discourse on the past.
Whatever physical grandeur past civilizations could boast,
traceable principally in their crumbling architecture,
Mab's eye is always on the price paid in human suffering
for the benefit of a powerful few. The glories of Palmyra,
the Pyramids, and old Salem were merely the vanities of
monarchs, warriors, and priests in league against mankind

and therefore obstacles to his redemption. However glo-

rious, civilizations eventually destroy themselves. Hence,

25

the pOpular sic transit theme of the Romantics is here sub-

 

ordinated to the spirit of freedom breathed by such great
thinkers as Socrates, whose memory reminds us of man's
alienation from his lost ideal for humanity:

The long and lonely colonnades

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,

Seem like a well known tune,

Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear.

Remembered now in sadness.

But, oh! how much more changed,

How gloomier is the contrast

Of human nature there!

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,

A coward and a fool, spreads death around--

Then, shuddering, meets his own.

Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,

A cowled and hypocritical monk

Prays, curses and deceives.

(II, 168-181)

For Shelley this sense of dispossession belongs to an order
of feeling that Frye refers to as the "lost paradise [which]
becomes an unborn world, a pre-existent ideal" in romantic
poetry.5 It is in this spirit that Mab recalls "MetrOpolis
of the western continent" (II, 188) which "wealth, that
curse of man / Blighted (II, 204-205), destroying "virtue
and wisdom, truth and liberty" (II, 206). In resurrecting
these lost ideals, as Frye would observe, the myth of re-
demption involves recovery of an original identity. But
it is an identity heavy with the memory of men's destruc—

tive exploitation of each other. It is only a momentary

exhumation at this point, for Mab has more to reveal before

 

5Frye, p. 18.

26

she discloses her ultimate vision of the future. Precisely
what form this new world must take, however, Mab is not
ready to disclose. As the second section reaches a close,
she stresses the pervasive continuity of nature's law in a
series of contrasting microcosmic and macrocosmic images
that express what Blake meant by seeing a world in a grain
of sand (II, 211, passim).

Following her revelation of the corrupt past and
an incipient, future redemption, Mab turns her attention
to the present in section III and explains why aristocratic
power engenders and corrupts itself and its subjects.
Basically, men will their own abjectness and subservience,
although later Mab will eXplicitly deny that human nature
is latently evil and insist on its determination through
custom and precedent. Critics have rehearsed the contra-
dictions between free will and necessity often enough with

reference to Queen Mab to the exclusion of the poetry.

 

Let it therefore suffice to say that Mab explains the
contradiction when she Optimistically affirms that when
Reason coincides with Nature's law, liberation must follow.
But neither in this section nor any other place in the poem
does she reveal how men will win their liberation, or will
compel tyrants to relinquish power. In one of her frequent
out-of-character outbursts Mab makes an infrequent appeal
to violence, but at no time does she eSpouse its general
application. Normally she is the dispassionate declaimer.

Here she proclaims:

27

. . . Not one wretch

Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bed

In earth's unpitying bosom rears an arm

To dash him from his throne!

(III, 103-106)

This statement is more rhetorical passion, however, than
dispassionate reason. Shelley was not a revolutionary.
Except for occasional lapses, such as that just mentioned,
he did not espouse violent struggle or sacrifice as pre-

requisites to liberation.

Queen Mab is a series of contrasts between repres-

 

sion and redemption. Such a contrast is represented be-
tween the "Gorgeous palace" of the monarch surrounded by
its "gloomy trOOps / Of sentinels," (III, 24-25) and its
opposite, "the virtuous heart" (III, 74). Monarchy's
seemingly impregnable authority not only preserves its
domination over men, but it also isolates the sovereign
in days of self-surfeit and nights of guilt-ridden dreams.
Both sovereign and subject negate freedom because "prece-
dent and custom interpose between a king and virtue" (III,
98-99). Thus, locked into this mutual, destructive hege-
mony, men glut the grandeur of the king with that very same
exploited labor that reduces themselves to privation.

The few critics who have bothered at any length

with Queen Mab always note how Shelley condemns authori-

 

tarian power; but they never account for the slavish obedi-
ence to this power that Shelley equally condemns. Why, he
implies, did men not forcibly overthrow Nero? (III, 180,

passim) Why, in failing to emulate the peace, harmony and

28

love of uncorrupted, terrestrial nature does man willingly
enslave himself against Nature's design? Why does "out-
cast, man" fabricate "the sword which stabs his peace"
and cherish "the snakes that gnaw his heart" (III, 200-
201)? Shelley himself supplies no clear-cut answer. This
perverse ambivalence expresses perhaps the kind of guilt
and anxiety associated with rebellion against the primal
father ( in this case, the king) that Marcuse summarizes
as follows:
The consequences are two-fold: they threaten to
destroy the life of the group by the removal of
the authority which (although in terror) had pre—
served the group: and, at the time, this removal
promises a society without the father-—that is,
without suppression and domination.6
To put it another way, the ruler--whether king, priest, or
God,--is a projection of man's alienation from Nature. This
interpretation clearly goes beyond Shelley's conscious in-
tent in the present context. The outlines of this alienation
are apparent, however, in Jupiter and other figures of
tyranny in Shelley's poetry. The section closes character-
istically on another high but contradictory note in which
Mab predicts that man, in tune with the celestially or-
dained 'Spirit of Nature' attains his "age of endless
peace" (III, 235).

Section IV opens with Mab's softly lyrical paeon

to night, lulling earth for the moment with her celestial

 

6Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 60.

 

29

influence. Then "The stars are quenched / In darkness"
(IV, 35-36), before the impending savagery of war. For
the remainder of the section Mab analyzes war's institu-
tionalized function. Its causes do not, as aristocratic
and cowardly apologists rationalize, originate in "mans
evil nature." No,"From kings and priests and statesmen,
war arose" (IV, 80). State and church constitute a ruling
class to reinforce each other's power and to further their
own mutual privileges. Mab then slips into another meta-
phor that suggests not only the common interests of these
powers but also the necessity of their violent overthrow:
"Let the axe / Strike at the root the poison tree will
fall" (IV, 82-83). Typically, the arid wasteland of this
scene then gives way to a garden of loveliness and plenty,
another of those several brief, futuristic visions through-
out the poem that foreshadow the fully realized Vision of
sections VIII and Ix.

Mab returns to her argument that it is not nature
but the institutionalized repression of "Kings, priests,
and statesmen," who control the individual's consciousness,
even from childhood, and enslave his mind. Reason itself
"sanctifies the sword" through state domination. Because
war is sanctioned and glorified by the state, it gains early
respectability in the hero-worshipping eyes of a child.

His natural instincts toward goodness are further poisoned

"by words, law and custom" (IV, 130). "Cursed from its

3O

birth, even from its cradle doomed / To abjectness and
bondage" (IV, 137-138), the individual, who is potentially
good, is constrained in his high resolve through the re-
pressive domination of the ruling class of the state.

Mab proclaims, in what are probably the poem's
most well known lines, "War is the stateman's game, the
priests delight / The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's
trade," (IV, 168-169). If the pOpulace's rage Opposes
this royally sanctioned murder, hired force is its sole
response and the sole basis of its revealed legitimacy.
And in order to preserve this legitimacy it decks its
hired enforcers with "wealth / Honor and power," (IV, 186-
187). Law too, "skilled to snare / The feet of Justice"
(IV, 196-197) sells the truth out while all self-serving,
honorable men "support the system," (IV, 207) and "God,
Hell and Heaven" are invoked to preserve the system's moral
suasion. Meanwhile, men, by and large, compromise their
will to liberate themselves in return for short-term grati-
fication, thereby reinforcing their own repression:

Youth springs, age moulders, Manhood tamely does
His bidding, bribed by short—lived joys to lend
Force to the weakness of his trembling arm.
(IV, 224-226)
Men are therefore responsible for their own suffering, al-
though, as we have also been informed, they are victims of
the system.

Mab does not fully delineate the causal relation-

ship, but the dehumanizing effects of "commerce" are central

31

to her argument in section V. Basically, the maldistribu-
tion of labor and therefore wealth corrupts and cripples
human relationships. If, as Mab asserts, "wealth should
purchase not but want demand / And natural kindness hasten
to supply / From the full fountain of its boundless love,"
(V, 39-40) any commercial advantage of exploitation will
poison the possibilities of love and therefore subvert all
chance of total liberation. Shelley's notes clarify this
point. He condemns the rationalization that defends surplus
wealth as a means of giving employment to the poor. In-
stead of exploiting labor, he advocates the equal re-
distribution of labor, and hence wealth, as an absolute
reform. Only free from excess toil can men, in turn, escape
their intellectual and emotional domination and realize
their highest potentialities.7 Throughout the section this
argument, along with faith in man's all-abiding will to
liberate himself, is pitted against venality, and the cor-
rupting effect of commercial selfishness. And as always,
the outcome is Optimistically forecast.

The gloomy pageant of past and present evil pro-
foundly troubles Ianthe's spirit. To reassure her that the
passing scenes are only transitory and a prelude to inevi-
table redemption, Mab spends most of section VI vindicating
the cycle of Necessity. However, "wild and miserable the

world" is or has been, the eternal world itself contains

 

7Poems, p. 813.

32

the cure as well as the evil. Although unwittingly close

to his own contradictory conception of Necessity, the ortho-
dox, competing explanation of a "Merciful and avenging God"
is repudiated as a "prototype of human misrule" (IV, 105).
This projection of human fallibility exhibits all the vices
of its creator: cruelty, hate, violence. In contrast,

of course, Necessity penetrates our grim, sublunary world
with its diSpassionate promise of redemption.

That Shelley owed his necessarianism to Holbach and
Godwin is an assumption generally agreed upon, although
critics have diSputed the extent of influence in each case.
Neither of his predecessors, however, could have embraced
Shelley's Optimistic faith in a utOpian future. Close
reading of sections VIII and IX will show that Shelley's
millenium is a materialistic one despite the device of a
dream-vision to conceptualize it. We will return to this
point following consideration of section VII, easily the
most provocative in the poem.

"There is no God! (le, l3) . . . "Is there a God!--
ay, an almighty God" (VII, 84). Between these poles of
Mab's denial on the one hand and Ahasuerus' bitter affirma-
tion lies the distinction between Shelley's belief in a
"pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe"8 (Necessity)
and mankind's repressive god who demands resignation but

inspires rebellion.

 

8Poems, p. 812.

33

Mab reviles all institutionalized religions as
illusory sanctions man erects to evade responsibility for
his own ignorance and for crimes against his fellows. But
Ahasuerus' narration recalls a personal dimension that lies
deeper than the overt facts of institutionalized domination
through religion. He does not miss the chance, of course,
to inveigh against the repression on earth of the rebel-
lious but virtuous and the enslavement of the obedient but
complacent. In his defiance he is a prototype of Prometheus,
to whom he is invariably compared. Like Prometheus his
existence is predicated on suffering, out of which he de-
fines himself. But unlike the Titan, his rebellion is not
tempered with love toward his persecutor. Moreover, like
the Alastor Poet, he is committed to the underworld and
to death; although again, like Prometheus, he does not die.
He also detests the capricious doctrine of the elect as
much as Mab (Shelley) detests the analogous authoritarian
privileges of the aristocracy.

In assailing Christ, Ahasuerus most significantly
resents Christ's transubstantiation following His cruci-
fixion because this act renounces His mission to liberate
men on earth and in the flesh:

I stood beside him: on the torturing cross

No pain assailed His unterrestrial sense;

And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed

The massacres and miseries which His name

Had sanctioned in my country . . .
(VII, 174-178)

34

Instead of overthrowing repressive institutions, including
religion, and establishing the rule of brotherhood and
peace (agape) while taking man's guilt on himself, Christ
renounces this expectation. In receiving Christ's curse of
permanent life, Ahasuerus, in turn, takes up the rebellion
that Christ laid down and with it, man's guilt. This curse
keeps Ahasuerus in permanent rebellion, and though it
frustrates his precious right to death, it is redemptive;
for it enables him to express rather obliquely the life
principle of a potentially expansive vision of love:

Yet peaceful, and serene, and self enshrined,

Mocking my powerless Tyrant's horrible curse

With stubborn and unalterable wish,

Even as a giant oak, which Heaven's fierce flame

Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand

Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves

The midnight conflict of the wintery storm,

As in the sunlight's calm it spreads

Its worn and withered arms on high

To meet the guilt of a summer's noon.

(VII, 256-266)

Moving from the desolate past and present to the
secrets of the future in sections VIII and IX we enter,
with Mab and Ianthe, the full vision of earthly redemption
that had been only glimpsed earlier. Man's eXpanded con-
sciousness, freed of internal as well as external constraints,
can reintegrate itself into nature. This transformation en—
tails reformation of both man and nature. Symbolically,
earth's environment, "No longer Hell," is permeated with

celestial influence, indicating its regeneration, as "all

its pulses beat / Symphonious to the planetary spheres"

35

(VII, 17-18). This fusion of the terrestrial with the
celestial is a marked feature of Shelley's imagery in the
final two sections: Mab opens section IX by exclaiming,
"0 Happy Earth! reality of Heaven."

Imperative in Shelley's thinking throughout the
narrative and in the notes is the prerequisite to liberate
men from material want and the surplus toil to secure their
barest physical essentials of life. No longer must man's
wants be "but scantily fulfilled" while he suffers "famine,
cold, and toil" (VIII, 157-160). Therefore, the wastelands
and deserts of earth bloom into abundance and "teem with
countless rills and shady woods / Cornfields and pastures"
(VIII, 74-75). This garden of fertility includes all the
e1ements-—air, earth, and water, plus fire which corre—
sponds to man's reciprocating power of "consentaneous love."
Shelley thus preserves the classical elements in their
traditional associations to support his vision of the
celestial-terrestrial union of man, heaven, and earth
(VIII, 101 passim).

This vision eventually incorporates the fundamental
transformations Marcuse describes as prerequisite to an
aesthetic culture of beauty and freedom. For in his extra-
polation from Freudian principles he derives a redemptive
Eros contingent upon freedom from the repressive need to
labor, and an order of abundance compatible with this free-

dom; the reconciliation of sensuousness and reason, which

35

(VII, 17-18). This fusion of the terrestrial with the
celestial is a marked feature of Shelley's imagery in the
final two sections: Mab Opens section IX by exclaiming,
"0 Happy Earth! reality of Heaven."

Imperative in Shelley's thinking throughout the
narrative and in the notes is the prerequisite to liberate
men from material want and the surplus toil to secure their
barest physical essentials of life. No longer must man's
wants be "but scantily fulfilled" while he suffers "famine,
cold, and toil" (VIII, 157-160). Therefore, the wastelands
and deserts of earth bloom into abundance and "teem with
countless rills and shady woods / Cornfields and pastures"
(VIII, 74-75). This garden of fertility includes all the
elements-—air, earth, and water, plus fire which corre—
sponds to man's reciprocating power of "consentaneous love."
Shelley thus preserves the classical elements in their
traditional associations to support his vision of the
celestial-terrestrial union of man, heaven, and earth
(VIII, lOl passim).

This vision eventually incorporates the fundamental
transformations Marcuse describes as prerequisite to an
aesthetic culture of beauty and freedom. For in his extra-
polation from Freudian principles he derives a redemptive
Eros contingent upon freedom from the repressive need to
labor, and an order of abundance compatible with this free-

dom; the reconciliation of sensuousness and reason, which

36

entails the sensualization of reason; and the conquest of
time in so far as it undermines lasting gratification. As
we have begun to see, all of these conditions prevail in
Mab's redemptive vision. It need not be seen as a tran—
scendentalized exposition but as a realizable objective

in the material world. It presupposes, therefore, a total
revolution in the way men perceive and feel.

Those old obstacles to man's liberation, the monar-
chy and its chief support in power, the church, are briefly
recalled. Their ruin is rendered in settings of lovely
desolation, remembered only for the corruption that sus-
tained them: famine and penury; faith and slavery (IX,
92-113). And just as it has throughout the earlier sec-

tions of the poem, the sic transit theme is used to drive

 

home the immorality of those past glories.

The "pure stream of feeling" (VII, 27) released
through this future vision not only harmonizes man with his
natural environment, as we observed; but it sharpens and
purifies his emotions (VIII, 136 passim), purging them of
evil passions. Furthermore, "Reason and passion cease to
combat there" (VIII, 231). Shelley must have equated
reason with the forms of institutionalized Oppression in
these final sections because he repeats the same sentiments
reconciling reason and passion several times. The reconci-
liation of the liberated life of the emotions with their

traditional Oppressor issues in a new "morn of love."

37

Reason in its repressive forms, such as religion, is en-
dowed instead with passion (IX, 38 passim). Even "virtue"
(morality), "love" (Eros) and "pleasure" (gratification)
are linked in "that sweet bondage which is Freedom's self"
(IX, 76). Mab apparently regards love as limitless in its
sensual possibilities. It is therefore not confined to
sexuality but is closer to Freud's Eros, the life instinct,
that, if unrestricted to sexuality through the imposition
of institutionalized morality, would embrace "with sensa-
tion's softest tie / The kindred sympathies of human souls"
(IX, 77—78). Sexuality, however, is central to the life
instinct and when "unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,"
(IX, 84) it liberates the total person. Eventually, per-
fectly uninhibited love establishes sexual equality between
man and woman (an ideal still in advance of its time). Free
of alienating toil in a nature of plenty; free Of repres-
sive reason in a world of liberated sensuality; only one
prerequisite to fulfilling Marcuse's outline for a redemp-
tive aesthetic vision remains to be mentioned: the conquest
of time and its corollary, the amelioration of death. Time
as Mab discloses, flees before man's liberated will (IX,
23), and death becomes a mild necessity (IX, 57, passim).
Death even implies a competing impulse with life, as we
shall discuss momentarily.

The future fades, and Mab refocuses on the present

and informs Ianthe, "my task is done" (IX, 140). She then

38

closes her oracular mission by briefly instructing Ianthe
on "what action to take or avoid," fulfilling the final
criterion of the oracular dream in Macrobius' definition.
Her advice to "pursue / The gradual paths of an aspiring
change" (IX, 148) is basically the Optimistic gradualism
inherent in her message of eventual redemption, aside from
those occasional, apparent calls to violent liberation.
Now, back in time, her message of forbearance reconciles
Ianthe to the cycle of birth, life, and death, all of which
"tend to perfect happiness" (IX, 151). Given the vision of
eventual redemption, even death loses its fearful and for-
bidding aspect. It promises an entry to "happy regions of
eternal hOpe. . . . The transient gulf dream of a starling
sleep" and "no foe to Virtue" (IX, 162, 175, 176). We
have now come full circle to the poem's opening lines:
"How wonderful is death / Death and his brother sleep!"

(I, 1-2) Death shares with Eros an expansive prospect
that hints at release from pain and want and therefore a
competing impulse of Eros, aside from its overtones of
Platonic transcendence. Its presence foreshadows the
Nirvana principle, mentioned earlier, that emerges more
strongly in Shelley's later poetry. These competing im—
pulses Of Eros and death become more sharply defined in

Shelley's next narrative poem, Alastor.

ALASTOR

From his first poem of major pretensions, Queen
Mab, to his next sustained narrative, Alastor, Shelley had
traversed the distance between a mechanical need to avoid
the objective limitations of time and space by framing his
entire vision in a dream to a dream-vision which is thema-
tically and psycholOgically integrated into the narrative
of the poem. The dream—vision of the Alastor Poet is a
personal revelation that is both illuminating and Obscure.
The visionary maidcn's "voice . . . like the voice of his
own soul" Opens for him the possibility, however illusory,
of erotic love with a maiden who embodies symbolically all
of his own poetic and philoSOphical aspirations. This
creature does not conduct the Poet-dreamer to a larger
ideological perspective, as Mab does Ianthe; she veils her
ultimate meaning in ambiguity.

That the dream-vision in Alastor is pivotal to the
poem's significance is not disputed by scholars; the import
of the veiled maiden, however, remains enigmatic. She
eludes definition because she is both 'destroyer' and 'pre-
server.' As the vision that the poet strives to repossess,
she preserves him; as the vision that impels him to deny

the world, she destroys him. She has been sent by "the

39

40

Spirit of sweet human love" (203), we are informed, to
punish and destroy the poet for having Spurned the choicest
gifts of the natural world. She arises, on the other hand,
out of his own felt sense of incompleteness, according to
the Preface: she therefore issues forth as an object of
desire (Eros) in his dream. These contradictory conceptions
do not, however, necessitate a resolution in favor of one
alternative or the other, for they are not inconsistent in
terms of the Life-Death ethos. Indeed, they are precisely
consistent with the Freudian View of Eros and the death
instinct as the two fundamental impulses of human nature,
rooted, quite possibly in a common source: "Eros and the
death instinct are now the two basic instincts. But it is
of the greatest importance to notice that, in introducing
the new conception, Freud is driven to emphasize time and
again the common nature of the instincts prior to their
differentiation."1 Redemption in Alastor relies on the
dynamics of conflict between the life and death instincts
in the Poet's response to his dream-vision. His Eros pre—
serves him only to define his death. For in affirming his
imaginative vision (Eros), he also affirms the flaw in
himself (Thanatos) and exacts the world's retribution in
acting upon his vision. This contradiction informs the

balance of the poem following the Poet's awakening.

 

lMarcuse, Bros and Civilization, p. 22.

 

41

To understand the order of feelings and events that
motivate the dream-vision, it is helpful to review their
movement up to the Poet's descent into his dream. For
although the dream itself and the Poet's response to it
determine the subsequent thematic and narrative development
of the poem, the dream is also the culminating experience
toward which the preceding segment builds. This segment of
the poem begins with Shelley's invocation, followed by his
account of the poet's youth: his communion with nature,
his study of philOSOphy, and his pilgrimage to the cities
of the ancient world. In his invocation Shelley recalls
how he had longed to fathom the secrets of Nature's "ob-
stinate questionings / Of thee and thine" (26-27). He
concludes that "though ne'er yet / Thou hast unveiled they
inmost sanctuary / Enough from incommunicable dream" (37-
39), he feels assured of the inspiration that will reinte-
grate his spirit into the ongoing processes of Nature. Un-
like the Poet of his narrative, Shelley is confident of his
eventual redemption. Shelley's expressed need for communi-
cation and revelation which seems veiled in a realm of
dream beyond his reception thematically foreshadows the
poet's own dream-vision. A seeker himself, Shelley casts
himself in the role of a lyre: solitary, responsive, wait-
ing for the impulses of nature from the air, the forests,
and the sea.

Following his sixteen line flashback summary of the

young poet's entire progress (50-66) Shelley Opens the

42

narrative proper at line 67 when he describes his protago-
nist as a visionary and a dreamer: "By solem vision and
bright silver dream / His infancy was nurtured" (67-68).
As a consequence of these early influences, the Poet, like
Shelley, harbors a pagan desire to identify with the inner-
most forces of nature. And in both cases, the elemental
imagery of earth, air and water mark the extent of their
temporal rapport with nature. Shelley, the narrator, ad-
dresses this tripartite association in the poem's opening
line: "Earth ocean, air, beloved brotherhood." But al-
though it is an "unfathomable world" for Shelley, he feels
confident of its future penetrability.

Prior to his dream-vision the Poet attempts to
bridge the schism between self and nature in order to re—
establish the identity between them. He pursues "nature's
most secret steps" (81) but only "like her shadow" (82)
over the landscape of this earthly world. However far "his
wandering step / Obedient to high thoughts" (107-108) leads,
he chafes against the restraints of his earthly reality.

He pores over "memories / Of the world's youth . . . (121-
122) till meaning on his vacant mind / Flashed like strong
inspiration and he saw / The thrilling secrets of the birth
of time" (126-128). But it is a temporally limited meaning.
In the Preface Shelley explains the psychology of his Poet.
His perceptions encompass only the "external world" and

merely point toward "its infinite and unmeasured capacities."

43

But these "objects cease to suffice. "His mind is at length
suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an in-

telligence similar to itself."2

But even the possibility
of love is circumscribed within the temporal world. The
Arab maiden who waits on and dotes on him remains inside
this world and outside his world of "innocent dreams." She
inhabits the sublunary world of cold, pale moonlight that
fades before the celestial promise in the "red morn" that
precedes his dream.

As he makes his way to the secluded setting with
its cavern and rivulet (characteristic of traditional dream
openings as well as Shelley's dream imagery), there hovers
about him an anticipation of some profound and impending
revelation--something undisclosed, yet known, nevertheless.
The vision that emerges is a "dream of hope that never yet /
Had flushed his cheek" (150-151) but also of "thoughts most
dear to him" (160). These contradictory tendencies
heighten the maiden's enigmatic appeal.3 In the dream-
vision her "voice of his own soul" (153) harmonizes with
his inmost senses and infuses his high thoughts of know-

ledge, truth, virtue, and liberty with her sensual presence.

 

2Poems, p. 14.

3In Stahl's Macrobius' Commentary the "enigmatic
dream" is defined asifione that conceals with strange shape
and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the informa-
tion being Offered, p. 90. This definition is highly sug-
gestive when read against the poet's dream in Alastor, par-
ticularly Macrobius' use of the verb, "veils."

 

44

But however profound a revelation it is, her appearance
remains a mystery. She plays a "strange symphony" and
tells an "ineffable tale." Her brightly lit form itself
is veiled as he discovers upon turning to view her.
Shelley's imagery then becomes provocatively involved at
line 187, the penultimate moment of his vision, when both
the maiden and the poet seem to dissolve in a union sym-
bolic of sexual and spiritual gratification and release.
At the same moment the black veil of night replaces the
veil of light and woven wind, and the poet is propelled
back into the waking world.

Critics have traditionally displaced the erotic
impulse of the dream-maiden in transcendently spiritual
and intellectual directions. More recently, however, a
few have gone to considerable lengths to desanctify this
Platonistic purism in favor of a truer recognition of the
erotic content in Shelley's women and in his poetry.4
But aside from arguing for the reality of this erotic dimen-
sion as Shelley's clear intention, they have scarcely
probed beneath the human physical basis to its subliminal
possibilities. Indeed, in their zeal'UO puncture Shelley's
beautiful idealisms, they tend to overemphasize the maiden's
physicality. Not only does the Poet's psychical counter-

part in Alastor "unite[s] all of wonderful or wise or

 

4Edward E. Bostetter's Romantic Ventriloguists
(Seattle: University of Washington, 1963), and Gerald
Enscoe's Eros and the Romantics (The Hague: Mouton, 1967)
are two notable efforts.

 

 

45

beautiful which the poet, the philOSOpher, or the lover
could depicture,"5 but her sensuous presence weaves itself
through the imaginative and ideological content of the
dream in a promise of liberation through eXpanded Eros.
This Eros goes beyond sexuality and embraces all levels of
the aesthetic response--senses, intellect, and imagination.
As the driving force that originates in Eros, the

dream maiden, we observed earlier, expresses the life in-
stinct which preserves the poet. She is also his flaw,
however; for in conflict with the objective world she is
his death instinct. As Marcuse explains,

The death instinct, is destructiveness not for its

own sake, but for the relief of tension. The de-

scent toward death is an unconscious flight from

pain and want. It is expression of the eternal

struggle against suffering and repression.
The poet's 'descent toward death' begins at the point that
the maiden and the poet's dream dissolve together. Marcuse's
discussion of the Nirvana principle is suggestive of the
Alastor poet's attempt to redeem the dream:

The primacy of the Nirvana principle, the terri-

fying convergence of pleasure and death, is dis-

solved as soon as it is established. No matter how

universal the regressive inertia of organic life,

the instincts strive to attain their objective in

fundamentally different modes. The difference is

tantamount to that of sustaining and destroying
life. Out of the common nature of instinctual life

 

5Poems, p. 14.

6Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 27.

 

46

develOp two antagonistic instincts. The life in-

stincts (Eros) gain ascendence over the death in-

stincts. They continuously counteract and delay

the 'descent toward death.‘7

"Roused by the shock" of being dispossessed of the

dream-maiden the Poet awakens to despair. Around him the
scene reflects his frame of mind. Instead of the harmo-
nizing imagery of woven breezes and streams and the per-
meating fire of the maiden's brilliantly illuminated pre-
sence, the scene is desolate in the pale, blue light of
the moon. The bleak, sublunary world, so different from
"The lines of heaven that canOpied his bower / Of yester-
night" (197-198), evokes the central question of how he can
regain this memory of lost gratification: "Does the dark
gate of death conduct to thy mysterious paradise / 0 sleep?"
(211-213). That is, can Thanatos reunite him with Eros?
But this question cannot be answered this side of the grave.
The Poet therefore hesitates in his precarious anxiety
between "doubt" and "love" as he undertakes his quest to
recover his vision.

Under the impact of his dream, the poet traces his

redemption in a liebestod that preserves as it destroys

 

him. The life and the death instincts derive from a common
source and the remainder of the poem symbolizes the tension
between and convergence of these rival components. The
natural imagery so expressive of the poet's struggle with

reality therefore also reflects his frame of mind in its

 

7Marcuse, Bros and Civilization, p. 24.

47

trajectory toward the repose of love in death. Within the
aesthetic dimension, as Marcuse has shown, the elusive
dichotomy of Eros and Thanatos is reconciled by the myth
of Narcissus. It is however, a Narcissus whose Eros is
eXpansive and who promises "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."8 This conception of Narcissus diverges signifi-
cantly from the traditional view of Narcissus as the ego-
centric and auto-erotic figure who withdraws into death.
In Marcuse's words:

The love of Narcissus is answered by the echo of

nature. To be sure, Narcissus appears as the anta-

gonist of Eros: he spurns love that unites with

other human beings, and for that he is punished by

Eros. . . . But it is not coldness, asceticism, and

self-love that color the images of Narcissus that

are preserved in art and literature. His silence

is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is con-

temptuous of the love of hunters and nymphs he

rejects one Bros for another. He lives by an Eros

of his own, and he does not love himself. (He

does not know that the image he admires is his

own.) If his erotic attitude is akin to death and

brings death,.then rest and sleep and death are not

painfully separated and distinguished: the Nirvana

principle rules throughout all these stages.9
This conception is also that of Shelley's poem and his
Preface, in Spite of Shelley's own reference to the "Poet's
self-centered seclusion." The remainder of Shelley's

Preface contradicts the assumption that the Poet's seclu-

sion is ultimately self-centered in design, for Shelley's

 

8Marcuse, Bros and Civilization, p. 149.

 

9Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 151-152.

 

48

Poet really 'rejects on Bros for another.‘ Marcuse's
definition of the Nirvana principle matches the culmina-
tive description of the Poet's psychology in the Preface:
"Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy,
the pure and tender hearted perish, through the intensity

and passion of their search after its communities [my

 

emphasis], when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes

itself felt."lo

Hoffman, who has applied the Narcissus

myth to the Poet in Alastor, does not interpret "the love

of self and the desire for death" as the antipodes of a
single principle. "His [Shelley's] immediate concern has
two objectives: the poet's determination to die, as the
remaining means of recapturing his vision, and his inability
to find any longer, lasting satisfaction in nature."11
This is true enough, as far as it goes. But the expansive
thrust of Eros conflicts, of course, with the demand of

the death instinct which pervades the remainder of the
poem. The segment beginning at line 223 expresses this
tension in its provocative and equivocal imagery. The day-
light and Open sky that allow the poet pause to "keep mute,
conference / With his still soul" (224—225), call into
association feelings of limitless aspiration and repose.

By contrast, the erotic impulse that seems to issue forth

at night "like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream"

 

10Poems, p. 15.

11Harold LeroyHoffman, An Odyssey of the Soul
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1933): pp. 44-45.

49

(225) shakes him out of his rest; for to allbw him to sur-
render to this darkened scene with its restful promise of
death is antithetical to Eros. Paradoxically, however,
the same impulse leads "him forth / Into the darkness"
(226-227).

Shelley then elaborates on this ambiguity with the
simile of the eagle and serpent locked in combat. All the
constrictive and poisonous powers of the serpent are wrapped
around the eagle, striving to subdue its otherwise limitless
possibilities Of flight, and precipitating it downward
"Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud" (230).
The struggle, in other words, is incessant, just like the
expansive flight of love, its wings pinioned, fighting its
descent into death. Simultaneously, like the erotic command
of the poison that spurs its "blind flight / o‘er the wide
aery wilderness," Eros draws death along under its spell.

It might prove instructive to remind ourselves again at
this point how uncertain the convergence and divergence of
these two instincts are in Marcuse's interpretation of
Freudian theory:
Does Eros, in spite of all the evidence, in the last
analysis work in the service of the death instinct,
and is life really only one long "detour to death?"
But the evidence is strong enough and the detour is
long enough to warrant the Opposite assumption.
Eros is defined as the great unifying force that

preserves all life. The ultimate relation between
Bros and Thanatos remains obscure.12

 

12Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 25-27.

50

SO when Shelley compares the Poet "thus driven by the bright
shadow of that lovely dream" (232-233) with the preceding
images of the "fierce fiend," "eagle" and "serpent," he is
doing more than merely evoking the memory of the visionary
maiden. Her identity is that of Eros, expansive in its
imaginative incorporation of knowledge, truth, and virtue.
But in addition, it is the sensual Eros with all its com-
pulsive and dangerous demands that impress death into its
service. This is evident from the next several lines. The
desolate, cold glare of the moon that dogs the Poet's tor-
tuous steps "through tangled swamps and steep precipitous
dells" (235) reminds us again of his anxious vacancy upon
awaking from his dream. Here the tangled swamps and pre-
cipitous dells reflect his anxiety. By the time "Red
morning dawns upon his flight" his cheek is already etched
with death (235-239). The poem is filled with this thematic
movement of erotic conflict with death in the larger narra-
tive scheme of eventual redemption.

The dynamics of converging and diverging impulses is
mirrored in the Poet's journey as his inner conflict.
Dragging his wasted frame cross the vast, arid distances
and lost civilizations in search of the visionary maiden,
he reaches that point on "the lone Chorasmian shore" (272)
where he pauses before embarking on his strange journey
by water. This section between his pause and his departure
(272-311) marks the Poet's own resolution to "meet lone

Death on the drear ocean's waste" (305). Basically his

51

motivation is "a strong impulse" (274), "a restless impulse"
(304) hidden from him, perhaps in "silent death." The
beautiful, voyaging swan that lifts its flight beyond his
gaze to return to its mate exacerbates the Poet's own sense
of diSpossession and reminds him that he is an outcast in
nature. The unresponsive air, earth, and heaven (288-290)
reveal how disjointed his imaginative vision is from its
terrestrial and celestial environs. Unlike the swan whose
vision of love lifts it heavenward, the Poet's Eros is com-
plicated by the consciousness of death. In contrast to the
bird's strong flight, the frail shallop that is to convey
the Poet suggests how precarious his psychic journey is and
how uncertain his goal promises to be. Nevertheless, under
a fair sea and sky but in a threatened spirit (308-310),
the Poet embarks.

As he departs on his turbulent journey a key passage
that further develops the Nirvana theme occurs in the Poet's
first ecstatic projection of the past into the future of
his imagination: "'Vision and Love!‘ / The Poet cried
aloud, 'I have beheld / The path of thy departure. Sleep
and death / Shall not divide us longl'" (306-309). He thus
confirms irrevocably that his vision of love and death are
the same goal.

Then in a passage distinctive for its mixture of
enormous stress and assuaging calm (307—420), the boat's
continuing journey seems to merge the deep of the "unfathom-

able stream" with the "azure sky." And as it strenuously

52

mounts on the "ascending stream" the imagery seems to ex-
press both the eXpansive Bros and embracing repose of
death:
Seized by the sway of the ascending stream,
With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round,
Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,
Till on the verge of the extremest curve,
Where, through an Opening of the rocky bank,
The waters overflow, and a smooth spot
Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides
Is left, the boat paused shuddering.
(387-394)
At this point, the "strong impulse" hanging in his mind like
the powerfully illuminating "lightning in a cloud . . . ere
the floods / Of night close over it" (417-420) recalls the
brightly lit figure of the dream-maiden before night swal-
lowed her up. But here the presence of death is more
emphatic.
Beginning at line 420, as Hildebrand prOposes, the

Poet is probably afoot.13

And, as he is "led / By love or
dream or god, or mightier Death," (427-428) the unity among
the constituents of that strong impulse that drives him on
emerges more eXplicitly. Only the possibility of "god" is
new, and its inclusion probably connotes necessity's de-
sign. More likely, in light of Shelley's strong hatred of
religion, its inclusion was an oversight. Over-riding in
its influence at this point, Death impels the Poet to seek

out his sepulchre in the forest's dark recesses. Within

this dense woodland the trees and other plant life weave

 

13William H. Hildebrand, A Study of Alastor (Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1954), p.251:

 

53

an atmOSphere of interlocking relationships that express
affection, and are, as Hill Observes, "spatial and symbi-
otic."l4 These numerous images, merging to an intense
degree, deepen the sensual union of Bros and the longing
gloom of the grave. Yet from the "expanding" and "embrac-
ing" arms of the giant oak to the spreading wings of some
"gorgeous insect" (431-468), the entire passage, pene-
trated here and there by the noonday sun, is also eXpan-
sive in its mysterious promise.

Perhaps no passage is more striking for its gothic
Opposition of light and dark figures than those the Poet
glimpses reflected in the fountain (469-592). The poet
sees two images. Although they seem to be separate enti-
ties, they mirror not only his own countenance but also
his innermost frame of mind, "as the human heart / Gazing
in dreams over the gloomy grave / Sees its own treacher-
ous likeness there" (472-474). Here the classical myth of
Narcissus is most explicit. The Poet again obliquely
glimpses the prOSpeCt of a "gloomy grave." The dark
spirit beside him "clothed in no bright roles / Of shadowy
silver or enshrining light" (479-480) momentarily incar-
nates this prOSpect. Counterbalancing this deathly pre-
sence, to be sure, are the "two starry eyes" beckoning him
with their "serene and azure smiles." Both these appeals

originate from the same fountain.

 

14James L. Hill, "Shelley's Alastor and Epipsychidioni
The Implication of the Narrative Climax," an unpublished

paper, p. 5.

54

The much more animated images of the next 23 lines
(432-514), concentrate on the rivulet that "images my [the
Poet's] life" (505) and therefore "Have each their type in
[him]" (508). Water imagery throughout, as critics have
usually noticed, reflects the course of the poet's inner
search. This explicit recognition combined with the wanton
and brightly illumined images along the stream's course
promise release into a "measureless ocean." And, ever
lingering, is Eros' counterpart, perhaps in some "oozy
cavern." This converging and diverging movement in con-
junction with the contrasting images of the celestial and
terrestrial worlds and their interweaving effects of light
and darkness pervades the remainder of the Poet's journey
on foot, up to line 601.

Beginning at line 602 is a passage that might ap—
prOpriately be designated "storm of death" (609). Here,
all celestial influences are blotted out, "not a star shone,"
and the low-hanging moon converges with the ocean prelimi-
nary to ravaging scenes of war and death. Shelley's de-
-scription trenches on the declamatory in these lines, di-
gressing for the moment from his subjective and symbolic
evocations of death to scenes explicit of death:

0, storm of death.
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:
And thou, 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,

55

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;
Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men
Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,
Nor ever more Offer at thy dark shrine
The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.
(609-624)

At this suspenseful point, these echoes from Queen Mab seem

 

almost totally obtrusive. Thematically, the passage is
consistent with the death motif, but its horrendous atmo-
Sphere is totally out of tune with the otherwise hushed
quality of the poet's impending death.

When death grips the Poet "on the threshold of the
green recess" (625), he is ready. "Hope and deSpair / The
torturer, slept," and free him finally of his sweeping
anxiety. Counterpointed against this release, "the two
lessening points of light" (654), his final glimpse of the
vision fades, and the Poet expires. Gone is the Eros of
light and swift movement, time and expansiveness. In its
stead is a heaven "Utterly black, . . . An image, silent
cold, and motionless" (660-661). Now but a memory to
Shelley and his reader the Poet's vision is

. . . a bright stream
Once fed with many voiced waves, a dream
of youth, which night and time have quenched forever,
Still, dark, and dry and unremembered now,
(666-671)
Viewed from our own retrospect of the Poet's life,

as we have argued, his vision preserved as it destroyed

him. While he pursued his vision of beauty and truth in

56

the world it illuminated his being. But simultaneously,
its intensity led him, as we have seen, to embrace that
counterpart of Eros, his death instinct, Thanatos. This
irony is tragic because it transforms his special vision
into a flaw. Whatever redemption he wins is sealed in the
grave with him.

Shelley drives home this realistic conclusion most
explicitly in his epitaph for the Poet, which rules out
any Optimistic afterthought-~either moral or artistic--
from which the living might draw comfort:

Art and eloquence,
And all the shows 0' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.
(710-712)
They are left only "pale despair and cold tranquility"
(718). Shelley realizes more forthrightly than most of

his readers have cared to admit that the aesthetic dimen-

sion cannot validate or alter reality.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

The conflict between Prometheus and his self-
projected antagonist, Jupiter, evokes yet another vision
of the struggle of Life against Death. Enacted entirely
within the mind of Prometheus, the drama simultaneously
depicts mankind's struggle to rid itself of civilization's
repression and the individual's psychic struggle against
his internalized repression. The power to press this
struggle issues from the imagination. Shelley believed
that the imagination is the means through which man re-
shapes and regenerates himself. The mythical hero who
stole fire (the symbol of creative power) from the gods
and gave it to mankind, Prometheus embodies the kind of
creative power Shelley has in mind when he describes him
as "the type of the highest perfection Of moral and intel-
lectual nature."1 Moreover, imagination is the informing
power of a perfected moral and intellectual nature because,
as Shelley writes in his Defense, "The great instrument
of moral good is the imagination."2 And because Shelley
premises this argument on Eros, "The great secret of morals

is love," we see that for Shelley, as for Freud, the

 

lPoems, p. 205.

2Clark, Shelley's Prose, p. 283.

 

57

58

imagination derives its strength from Eros.3 It is a
redemptive Eros personified in those creative projections
of Prometheus' psyche--Asia, Panthea, and Ione.

This Eros generates its dynamic through the acti-
vating power of Panthea's dreams; out of these dreams
evolves the conflict that culiminates in Jupiter's downfall
and Prometheus' redemption. In Act II Panthea's remembered
dream of Prometheus' love for Asia gives way to her un-
remembered dream of Asia's love for him. The latter dream,
in turn, determines the quest of Asia and Panthea to
Demogorgon's cave. The denoument of this Journey is the
release of Prometheus and the realization of his redemptive
vision.

Jupiter, who is himself endowed with wisdom by
Prometheus and is therefore a derivative of the life-
instinct (Eros), symbolizes the complementary death in-
stinct which coalesces into institutionalized domination
and exploitation of men's minds. But Prometheus' redemp-
tive vision of love finally negates Jupiter's repressive
order of self—destructive relationships by revolutionizing
men's feelings in the direction of non-repressive and ex-
panded erotic relationships.

Jupiter is realized as internalized repression,
but he also grows out of Eros' need to preserve itself.

At first Prometheus strives to preserve his identity in a

 

3Clark, Shelley's Prose, p. 282.

59

head-on struggle, thus simultaneously repressing Eros as
he creates civilization. Then, through the necessity to
erect, step-by-step, a new, life-affirming sensibility in
Opposition to Thanatos that will lead eventually to an
expansive universe rooted in Eros, he renounces his curse
and thereby activates the quest into the unconscious by way
of Panthea's dream-visions. This quest that emerges from
Necessity, symbolized in Demogorgon, devises its own direc-
tion in tranSforming Prometheus' self-destructive psyche
into a new sensibility couched in the Narcissistic and
Orphic world of sensuous play, beauty, and contemplation.
As this ethos evolves out of the Life-Death strug-

gle in Prometheus Unbound it reveals, in its course, an

 

emergent, revolutionary sensibility that refuses to Oppose
repression aggressively. To react aggressively toward
Jupiter by throwing up another Jupiter to Oppose him, as
Shelley fully realizes, only reenforces the repressive
organization of civilization and the internalized repres-
sion of the mind. Instead, his lyric phantasy extricates
itself from this recurring cycle of repression through an
ultimate commitment to Eros. And through Panthea's dream-
visions Eros discloses the memory of its promise to deny
the descent toward death and affirm life.

The two dreams which Panthea imparts to Asia are of
central dramatic and allegorical significance in that they

are the only link between Prometheus and his divine consort

60

prior to his release. They are the fulcrum on which the
redemptive Eros pivots. Panthea's first recollection upon
her reunion with Asia at the Opening of Act II symbolically
recalls Prometheus' renunciation of hatred: "his pale,
wound worn limbs / Fell from Prometheus" (II, i, 62-63).
This image from Panthea's remembered dream reflects his
retraction of hatred toward Jupiter early in Act I, when
Prometheus recants, "Disdain! Ah No! I pity thee" (I, i,
53). But Prometheus' retracted curse does not, contrary
to what most critics maintain, signify his regeneration.
Prometheus' conversion does not occur at this point, be—
cause as Woodman correctly insists, "the process of
Prometheus' regeneration is not complete until the mytho-
logical vision of the universe and man comes into focus
in the second Act."4
This psychic growth, however, involves more than
the inevitably Platonic metaphysics that Woodman and most
critics ascribe to it. The sister nymphs are not merely
children of Prometheus' unfulfilled need. Projections of
Prometheus' mind, they have just as much need to identify
with him as he has to apprOpriate them. To interpret them
as merely auto-erotic extensions of Prometheus' psyche
limits their potential Eros. Their need is loaded with

Narcissistic and sensual content and it is limitless in its

 

4Ross Greig Woodman, The Apocalyptic Vision in the
Poetry of Shelley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1964), p. 109.

61

redemptive promise. But critics ignore the Narcissism and
sensuality of these three figures, particularly Ione and
Panthea, in favor Of allegorized and Platonized interpreta-
tions that evade their all but palpable erotic content.

The present task, in part, is to desublimate this repressed
content; for to restore the poem's sensual connotations
frees the poetic experience somewhat from the rational
formalism of purely metaphysical interpretation.

Relating her first dream, Panthea recounts how
Prometheus' presence had enwrapped her earlier in his pro-
mise of live for Asia: "I could hear / His voice, whose
accents linger ere they die / Like footsteps of weak melody:
they [Asia's] name / Among the many sounds alone I heard /
Of what might be articulate" (II, i, 87-91). While this
union of Prometheus with Panthea is rendered through the
usual related celestial and elemental associations of sun
and fire typical of that highest activity of the Shelleyan
mind, the creative power of love, it also incorporates
erotic overtones, reflecting man's earthly condition, in
addition to the divinity of imaginative power:

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,
Streamed forth like vaporous fire; and atmOSphere
Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power,

As the warm aether of the morning sun

Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew,
(II, i, 71-78)

62

As the conveyer of Prometheus' love for Asia, Panthea her-
self embodies the dream of the yet-to-be fulfilled love of
Prometheus for Asia. She personifies the dream and is in-
separable from its content. Prometheus' eventual redemp-
tion rests upon its successful transference to the inner-
most being of Asia.

Their sister nymph, Ione, however, reveals a dimen-
sion of Eros that is regressive. Buried in Panthea's arms,
she questions love's direction, "I always knew what I de-
sired before / Nor ever found delight to wish in vain. /
But now I cannot tell thee what I seek" (II, i, 95-97).
Here she seems to signify Eros' aim-inhibited form, scarcely
aware of its repressed sensuality. By contrast with
Panthea's forward-looking vision, Ione's backward glancing
personality expresses that elemental regression compulsion
inherent in the life instinct's desire for release from
tension. Through her intense and deep rapport with Panthea,
Ione shares the enveloping visitation that vitalizes
Panthea, but she is unaware that Pometheus instills this
life impulse in them both:

But now I cannot tell thee what I seek;

I know not, something sweet, since it is sweet
Even to desire; it is thy sport, false sister;
Thou hast discovered some enchantment old,
Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept
And mingled it with thine: for when just now
We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips

The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth
Of the life blood, for loss of which I faint,

Quivered between our entwining arms. .
(II, i, 97-106)

63

The Spells and enchantments that mingle their Spirits in
this passage also evoke the strongly sensual content of
their kiss and intertwining arms. For the sweet air "within
Panthea's parted lips" sustains not only Ione's spirit
but also the warm "life blood" that quickens both their
frames and links them in a single, erotic extension of
Prometheus' love.

If Panthea directs the sublimated Eros which Ione
cannot discern, Panthea, in turn, is no less dependent upon
Ione for her own existence, as she recounts earlier to
Asia:

. . . erewhile I slept
Under the glaucous caverns of old Ocean
Within dim bowers of green and purple mass,
Our young Ione's soft and milky arms
Locked then, as now, behind my dark moist hair,
While my shut eyes and cheeks were pressed within
The folded depth of her life breathing bosom
(11, i, 43-49)
Ione's "life breathing bosom" infuses Panthea with a more
explicitly sensual impulse than the latter's spiritualized
embrace imparts to her. As a consequence, Ione is more
concretely realized than Panthea; whereas Panthea goes on
immediately to declare, "I am made the wind" (II, i, 50),
with all the urgency that metaphor usually conveys as a
Spiritually informing and transmitting medium in Shelley's
poetry.
As the wind, therefore, Panthea cannot pause to

answer Ione's question about the power of love that sustains

them both. Instead, she hastens to Asia while "the Eastern

64

Star grew pale" (II, i, 107). This star is Venus, the star
closely associated with Asia throughout the poem. Asia de-
scribes it in the widening morn prior to Panthea's appear-
ance at the Opening of Act II, scene i, and its presence is
apparent in Act II, scene ii as Asia and Panthea follow
the chanting voice to "the mighty portal" of Demogorgon's
cave. As they make their way through the deep forests,
intermingled with rocks and caverns, all of the usual
sources of elemental guidance--sun, moon, rain, wind-~are
blotted out. Only "Some star of many a one" (II, ii, 14)
can pierce this deeply interwoven gloom to guide them.
Their guiding light of mutual desire, the star, connotes
their ultimate union in Eros.5 I
Prometheus' strenuous effort to fulfill his love
for Asia is everywhere apparent in the initial exchange be-
tween Panthea and Asia. Panthea is heavy-winged "with the
delight of a remembered dream" (II, i, 35). Moreover,
Asia cannot "feel" her spoken account of the dream because
the air is an inadequate medium; so she requests to read it

directly in Panthea's eyes, where Prometheus had implanted

 

5The image of the lone star (which is always Venus)
figures prominently in Shelley's poetry. It symbolizes
and guides the loftiest aspirations. When it is blotted
out in Alastor, "not a star shone," it presages the Poet's
imminent death. The Morning Star of the maiden's dream
in The Revolt of Islam, Canto I, involves a complex sen-
sual appeal and guiding impulse to revolutionary action.
The star beckoning from the abode of the eternal in Adonais
promises an Eros beyond death in Shelley's most well known
use of the star.

 

65

it. Panthea's words "are as the Air," to Asia, not like
the Promethean fire of imagination which, "enwrapped
[Panthea] in its all dissolving power" (II, i, 176). Be-
cause they are fired by the creative light of Prometheus'
imagination, Panthea's starlike eyes are a much surer
medium than words for Asia to decipher the dream. But
even as Asia peers into the deeply inwoven depths of
Panthea's eyes she can only glimpse Prometheus' shadowy
form veiled in his own smiles. Then, just as quickly as
it is glimpsed, his shadowy form disappears. A rude shape
interposes itself between Asia and her dream: "its regard
/ Is wild and quick, yet tis a thing of air" (II, i, 129).
While threatening in its aSpect, suggestive perhaps of
Jupiter, the destroyer, at the same time the golden dew
that gleams through its gray robe and reflects its stars,
leads into Panthea's other dream.

When Prometheus withdraws his curse on Jupiter in
Act I and pitches his struggle onto the plane Of love, his
identity begins to foreshadow the Narcissistic-Orphic world
that emerges in Act IV. This renunciation Of aggression
is symbolized in Panthea's first dream; as his limbs fall
from him, Prometheus becomes an image of joy and fulfill-
ment. Panthea recounts how his form then glowed radiantly
"and his voice fell / Like music which makes giddy the dim
brain" (II, i, 65-66). Marcuse distinguishes the Prometheus

of classical tradition as the dominant archetypal hero of

66

Western literature because he symbolizes the repression
mankind suffers to create civilization. But he adds,

Orpheus and Narcissus (like Dionysus to whom they

are akin: the antagonist of the god who sanctions

the logic of domination, the realm of reason)

stand for a very different reality. They have not

become the culture-heroes of the Western world:

theirs is the image of joy and fulfillment; the

voice which does not command but sings; the question

which offers and receives; the deed which is peace

and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from

time which unites man with god, man with nature.6
To be precise, beyond the Prometheus-Jupiter struggle an
aura of Orphic-Narcissism hovers about Shelley's Prometheus.

Unlike the traditional Prometheus, following his

renunciation of hatred, Shelley's Prometheus no longer en-
dures perpetual toil and pain to create civilization.
Implied in Prometheus' transformation is the knowledge that
civilizations harden around their creator and, in turn,
Oppress them--the way Jupiter, and all he stands for, Op-
presses Prometheus. On the psychical plane, the internal-
ized repression embodied in his hatred for Jupiter early
in the play is displaced by Love. In addition to his
emerging mode of being that substitutes Bros for repression
and death, the various personifications--Asia, Panthea,
Ione-—foreshadow Prometheus' Narcissism. They do not center
on him, however, in a narrowly auto-erotic sense. They

expand his vision of love and link it to a timeless realm

beyond death, which is eternal life. This feeling is the

 

6Marcuse, Bros and Civilization, pp. 156-157.

 

67

primary Narcissism which Freud described as a "limitless

I I C 7
exten51on and oneness With the universe."

But in addition
to such decidedly Narcissistic content, Prometheus, in
Shelley's conception, becomes a type of Orpheus, or the
poet as liberator and creator. Marcuse describes Orpheus
as the hero who

establishes a higher order in the world--an order

without repression. In his person, art and culture

are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemp-

tion, the god who brings peace and salvation by

pacifying man and nature, not through force, but

through song.8

In anticipation of this redemptive affirmation

Asia and Panthea pursue the unremembered dream into the
unconscious depths of Prometheus' mind--Demogorgon's cave.
Like every other element in the poem, Demogorgon's cave
belongs to the tOpography of Prometheus' psyche. And like
caves everywhere else in Shelley's poetry, his cave denotes
the deepest recesses of mind. Moreover, its location de-
mands a downward quest.9 Only the embodiment of Eros,
Panthea and principally Asia, can penetrate these nether-
regions. Lingering about the Echoes, urging Asia and

Panthea to "follow," the dream seems to promise a revela-

tion loaded with deep import. The lyrical evocations from

 

7Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 14.

 

8Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 154-155.

 

9Describing the direction of the Romantic quest,
Frye states, "In Romanticism the main direction of the
quest of identity tends increasingly to be downward and
inward, toward a hidden basis or ground of identity be-
tween man and nature. p. 33.

68

these ethereal voices at first describe the caverned re-
cesses filled with a dreamy atmOSphere of "darkness deep"
and "odour breathing sleep." Then, in the most explicit
insight into the significance of Asia's mission up to that
point, the Echoes drift nearer, chanting:

In the world unknown

Sleeps a voice unspoken;

By thy step alone

Can its rest be broken;

Child of Ocean!

(II, i, 190-194)

Asia's goal, according to these lines is plainly redemptive,
and it awaits her informing presence.

Beyond merely describing the subliminal "gloom
divine" that leads to the entrance of Demogorgon's cave,
the Spirits and Fauns of Scene ii, who inject their running
commentary on the prOgress of Asia and Panthea, forshadow
the effects implicit in Prometheus' release. This realm
which allows neither "sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain,"
(II, ii, 5) is nevertheless penetrable by the celestial
influence of "some star, of many a one" (II, ii, 14).

This isolated star as was suggested earlier, recurs as a

reminder of the unifying power of Love symbolized in Venus.
Combined with the imagery of fire associated with the cre-
ative imagination, music penetrates its voluptuous recesses

as well, suggestive of the Orphic underworld of liberation

and creative power:

69

There those enchanted eddies play
Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw,
By DemOgorgon's mighty law,
All spirits on that secret way;
(II, ii, 41-45)

This order of nonrepressive sensuality, presided over by
Demogorgon, is identified with Prometheus' release and his
vision that will "make the earth / One brotherhood" (II,
ii, 94-95).

AtOp the pinnacle overlooking "the mighty portal"
to DemOgorgon's cave, Panthea and Asia pause to reflect
on the possible meaning that issues from below them. Sym-
bolically, this promontory offers a lofty overview of the
depths of the unconscious world into which they are about
to descend. For Panthea, the "oracular vapor" that arises
from it is that "maddening wine of life" that intoxicates
youth with its promises of "truth, virtue, love, genius,
or joy" (II, iii, 6). Its effect is contagious and there-
fore threatens the world's ruling powers because it trans-
forms youth into "Maenads," whose world centers on the
pleasure principle of Eros. The mood of these lines is
reminiscent of that revolutionary storm impending in "the
bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad"
in the "Ode to the West Wind."

The Song of Spirits which impels Panthea and Asia
downward to Demogorgon's cave leads to a dream world beyond

sleep "through the cloudy strife / Of death and of Life"

(II, iii, 57-58). This dream world in which life is pitted

70

against death in the most fundamental dynamic of emotions--
"Death, despair, love, sorrow" (II, iii, 69)--explicitly
reminds us again of the psychic process of the Life-Death
struggle. At its primal source, hidden beyond the "radiance
of Heaven" and "the gloom of Earth, . . . there is one per-
vading, One alone," (II, iii, 79): Demogorgon's remote,
primal power which contains within it the potential pri-
macy of either Eros or Thanatos. Panthea and Asia, who
symbolize the former, follow the repeated imperative, "Down,
Down!" till they reach Demogorgon's cave in the opening of
Scene iv.

The dialogue between Asia and Demogorgon in this
scene recreates the historical dynamics of the conflict
between Prometheus and Jupiter more fully than any other
passage and forshadows the inevitable, redemptive Eros of
Prometheus' vision. The scene Opens with Asia's queries
on the origins of the world, and on the psychic origins of
man. Demogorgon's automatic response of "God" to all her
questions resounds with mechanical orthodoxy. For in the
conventional world, an "almighty" but "merciful" god is the
creator of "thought, passion, reason, will / Imagination"
(II, iv, 10-11). The illusion of a God fills man's need
to explain his alienation from nature. Man's reliance upon
a projected authority figure, God, hides from man his own
creative capacity for overcoming his alienation through a

correct understanding of the laws of Necessity. DemOgorgon

71

cannot admit this truth because he represents the present
stage in Man's and in Prometheus' develOpment, still under
the domination Of Jupiter. But Asia, as the countervailing
tendency to the present repression, already knows this.
When she asks, "who made terror, madness, crime, remorse"
which lead men "toward the pit of death" (II, iv, 19-23)
DemOgorgon can only intone evasively, "He reigns" (II, iv,
28).

Demogorgon cannot articulate Jupiter's identity or
that of his possible master because he does not know it
consciously. He himself personifies the unconscious and
is therefore undiscernible to the conscious mind, except
in his effects. Thus he cannot reveal the ultimate cause
of evil. Although critics have differed over DemOgorgon's
meaning, they have been in essential agreement with Mr.
Shelley that he is "the Primal power of the world," however
one chooses to define that power. In terms of the present
thesis, he signifies that terrible convergence of Life and
Death--the Nirvana principle. Traditionally, DemOgorgon
has been interpreted as Necessity, or some similar process
such as Destiny or Fate. The Nirvana principle is analo-
gous to these conceptions because, it too, incorporates
the fundamental forces of life and death.

Demogorgon does not, strictly Speaking, govern the
struggle between Prometheus and Jupiter. But his presence,

significantly unbeheld, does reflect the entire, ineluctible

72

pattern of thematic, narrative, and symbolic development

in Prometheus Unbound. It is at least clear up to this

 

point that Panthea and Asia had to descend to the sublimi-
nal depths of Prometheus' being in Demogorgon's cave to
discover the truth that must eventuate in Prometheus' re-
demption and the downfall of Jupiter. But the degree to
which either Prometheus or Demogorgon has actuated their
descent is not precisely discernible because the boundaries
between Prometheus' will and Demogorgon's necessity are
not sharply drawn. Ione and Panthea may be totally actu-
ated by and under the control of Prometheus' will, but
Asia, as the ultimately informing power of Eros, is as much
an expression of the ineluctible necessity of the Nirvana
principle as of Prometheus' will and desire. On the other
hand, Prometheus' renunciation of all his destructive (death)
impulses is at least as impelling to the entire movement of
events as the necessity implicit in Demogorgon's identity.
And while Demogorgon symbolizes both the inherent, inevitable
overthrow of the old order, represented in Jupiter, and the
regeneration of the new order in Prometheus, Asia is the
complementary extension of Prometheus' love that guarantees
a new order.

According to Asia's lengthy monologue in the cave
of Demogorgon, the origin of the struggle between Prometheus
and Jupiter lies at the heart of human history. Even before

Prometheus endows Jupiter with the strength of wisdom, the

73

oedipal conflict looms in Saturn's refusal to allow Prome-
theus and Jupiter the birthright of their being: "Self
empire and the majesty of love;" (II, ix, 42). In their
divergent response to this repression, Prometheus and
Jupiter personify the ambivalence of love and hate which
sons, in the Freudian View, feel for the father. On one
hand, they venerate him for his protection and the per-
petuation of their existence; on the other, he threatens
them and deflects them from fulfilling the pleasure prin-
ciple, which is, of course, impelled by Eros. Inevitably,
overthrow of the father is followed by the equally repres-
sive authority of one of the sons. And the struggle, now
between the sons, begins anew. Prometheus' suffering thus
results from having created the destructive power of
Jupiter to overthrow and replace Saturn's repressive
authority over Earth. The effects of this projected
"dominion of wide Heaven" (II, iv, 46) "are felt by the
race of man" in the ever Sharpening struggle for existence.
In the midst of this ananke of "Famine," "toil," "strife,"
"fierce wants," "mad disquietudes" and "unreal good" rages
"the shape of Death" (II, iv, 63) associated with the awe-
some and destructive strength of Jupiter. Against priva-
tion, toil, and madness, Prometheus arrays the "legioned
hOpes" of "Love" that envelOp death. "Love," in turn, seeks
to reunite the "Disunited tendrils of that vine / Which

bears the wine of life" (II, iv, 64-65). This expansive

74

Eros, emanating from the fire of Prometheus‘ mind, mar-
shalls the arts and sciences to create civilization:
"cities then / Were built" (II, iv, 94-95). But Prometheus
pays a price for his creativity. Jupiter his antagonist

is emblematic of the internalized repression through which
civilization institutionalizes its hegemony over men's
minds.

To signal the coming transformation of this hegemony
the return of the Spirit of the Hour (probably the star,
Venus) with its "dove-like eyes of hope" (II, iv, 160)
ascends in a fiery chariot. Its companion, the "ghastly
charioteer" that precedes it, mans the vehicle that bears
Demogorgon aloft to overthrow Jupiter. These contrasting
images foreshadow the impending resolution of tension be-
tween Eros and Death, replacing restraint, toil, and re-
pression with pleasure, joy, and absence of repression.

The Spirit of the Hour bearing Asia to her reunion
with Prometheus represents the return of the formerly re-
pressed memory of Prometheus' curse upon Jupiter, which
first appeared in the form of Jupiter's Phantasm in Act I.
By confronting this mirrored image of his own self-
destructive hatred in Act I, Prometheus was able finally
to recognize the necessity for its renunciation. To do
less would have reinforced the repressive domination of
the death instinct. Just before the resurrection of the
Phantasm, Prometheus' mother, Earth, eXplains the relation-

ship between Life and Death in terms of the Nirvana

75

principle: "For know there are two worlds Of life and
death / One that which thou beholdest, the other is under-
neath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all
forms that think and live / Till death unite them and they
part no more" (I, 195-199). Her son is about to attain
awareness of how he had supressed the curse against Jupiter
and thereby subjugated himself to suffering within the
temporal world. In denying the reality of death, Prometheus
allowed it to control him, not Jupiter, "through boundless
space and time" (I, 301). By releasing this repressed
memory he began to liberate himself. Even as the Phantasm
recounted Prometheus' curse, it foreshadowed the Spirit of
the Hour fortelling Jupiter's downfall: "let the hour /
Come when thou must appear to be / That which thou art in-
ternally" (I, 295).

In Act II, v, Asia's presence becomes ever more
rarified and transluminous in its radiating promise of
redemptive love. Panthea can scarcely endure her sister's
transformation, which, in its fiery expansion, enamors the
"whole world which seeks [Asia's] sympathy" (II, v, 34).
Asia eXpresses and embodies the commonality of love. She
has also become the transcendent power of Eros itself--
its "Life of Life." This paeon, sung by the Voice in the
Air( Often attributed to Prometheus), praises Asia's re-
generative Eros as it expresses its own annihilation of the

past under the overwhelming influence of her Love in the

76

world. Asia echoes this feeling in her responding lyric,
"My Soul is an Enchanted Boat." She becomes "like one in
slumber bound / Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
/ Into a sea profound." And as the instinctive "boat of
her desire" ultimatly harmonizes earth, it rushes backward
in time, seeks to penetrate "Through Death and Birth, to

a diviner day" (II, v, 104). To move backward in time re-
creates the Narcissism which absorbs the death instinct

by extinguishing time and suffering and substituting a
world of beauty and contemplation.

Awaiting the appearance of Demogorgon at the Open-
ing of the third act, Jupiter in Heaven reveals the degree
to which his authority rests on internalized repression
created through faith and fear. His empire remains secure
from insurrection because it is founded on man's "faith
and hell's coevil, fear," (III, 1, 10). Jupiter carries
his inheritance of guilt for having overthrown Saturn, and
he cannot divest himself of the fear that he will be over-
thrown, just as he overthrew Saturn. He therefore relies
on faith steeped in fear to keep him in power. Faith al-
lows the preservation of Jupiter's domination which, of
course, engenders fear. Fear and faith are mutually re-
inforcing. Thus, both faith and fear reside in the death
instinct and its continuous threat of annihilation.

Confident therefore that his threat of total anni-

hilation will guarantee his hegemony against the dimly

77

perceived alternative climbing "the crags of life" (III, 1,
l4), Jupiter cannot appreciate the irony of his having be-
gotten the "fatal child" (III, i, 19) whom he believes will
assure this sovereignty. Indeed, though insecure beneath
his bravado, Jupiter is unaware that his fulfillment can
only be self-annihilation--death; for his every impulse

is to deny life. His desire to possess eternally "The
dreadful might of ever living limbs" (III, i, 22) can only
be a contradiction, for his essential instinct is toward
death. Neither Jupiter nor Thetis, his consort, can attain
the fire of life for him to assure his eternal supremacy.
Heaven's wine is merely "like fire" and Thetis, unlike

her counterpart, Asia, "the child of light," is only a
"bright image of eternity" and so, as mere image, cannot
sustain the "quick flame / The penetrating presence" (III,
i, 38-39) of life.

Demogorgon's appearance before Jupiter marks the
return of the repressed death impulse. The "Eternity" of
death that Demogorgon brings as the "child" of Jupiter does
not, as it might as first appear, negate Demogorgon's func—
tion as Necessity, the ineluctible generation of historical
events. Jupiter has created the conditions for his own
downfall, and Demogorgon, as the embodiment of the Nirvana
principle, personifies the ascendency of Eros and therefore
the diSplacement of Death in favor of the pleasure principle.

Jupiter's dethronement thus coincides with the life-affirming

78

reunion of Prometheus and Asia. Demogorgon's function as
Necessity has two characteristics: in relation to Jupiter,
viewed as a repressive force, generating historical (tem-
poral) causality, he is the temporal effect from the tem-
poral cause--something close to the traditional definition
of necessity. In relation to Prometheus, he is an unhis-
torical, atemporal Necessity. Liberation from supression,
as Shelley expresses it, is an eternal possibility, any-
where, everywhere, always, in the mind.

Having imaginatively diSplaced the terror of Death
and its institutionalized reign, the new sensibility of
man harmonizing with Nature emerges. It is committed to
"the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorp-
tion of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise--the Nirvana

9 This new sensibility

principle not as death but as life."
pervades the balance of the poem and retains the Eros of
the dream-vision in its vision of man in final harmony with
Nature. It is a sensuous world filled with abundance and
therefore free of the repressive necessity imposed by time,
toil, and rationality.

As we have seen, Prometheus frees himself when he
negates the repressiveness of civilization as personified
in Jupiter. But because Shelley's drama remains on the

stage of Prometheus' mind, Jupiter remains preeminently

Prometheus' own inner antagonist, the death instinct.

 

9Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 149.

 

79

Shelley evidently chose the psychic plane to highlight
more effectively the struggle between the powers at war
in man's psyche.

The new dynamic which supplants the struggle of
Eros and Death is very much akin to that wish-fulfillment
we associate with dream. The redemptive panorama in
Act III, iii and iv and Act IV following Asia's reunion
with Prometheus is a world free of time, toil, and ration-
ality--the unconscious world of dream.

At the touch of Prometheus' lips (III, iii, 85
passim) Earth awakens to a sensuous and "immortal youth"
and transmits its rejuvenation to mankind and all other
forms of life through "happy dreams." And while death's
"last embrace" remains a reality, it does not contradict
the immortality of youth; for the return to youth implies
a return of its pleasures from the unconscious, which ex-
cludes awareness Of time and therefore excludes its corrol-
lary, the awareness of death. When Asia asks Earth,

"Cease they to love and speak / Who die?" (III, iii, 101-
108), the latter responds: "Death is the veil which those
who live call life" (III, iii, 113). This veil need not

be interpreted only as a Platonic illusion. In psychical
terms, death is a release very much to be desired when con-
sidered in light of the Narcissism at the heart of Shelley's
redemptive vision. Earth returns to describing the reju-
venation in this world as a consciousness of Love (Asia)

filled with new perceptions.

80

This new sensibility is guided by the child (the
counterpart of Jupiter's anticipated "fatal child") whose
consciousness is filled "with everlasting love: and there-
fore is unaware of the old reality of toil, time, and ra-
tionality. Prometheus' "lamp," his creative power, merges
with Asia's love and leads to "this far goal of Time" (III,
iii, 174). Here their human art arises out of a sensuous,
playful, and time-free mentality associated with the Orphic
and Narcissistic liberation of the aesthetic dimension.lo

Free from the necessity to struggle within his new
creation, Prometheus begins to recede into the background
in III, iv. As he does so, the rejuvenated Spirit of the
Earth assumes central importance in the scene. Knight's
comment on the apprOpriateness of child-like wonder that
Panthea and Ione feel as they describe the spirit of the
Earth certifies how closely the new sensibility relies upon
a "purified consciousness."ll Because, moreover, Asia is
now the "mother" of Earth, through her redemptive love,
the child, grown wiser, runs to her requesting, as Knight

puts it, "the old times again, the old play and happiness,"12

 

10"In the world symbolized by the culture-hero Pro-
metheus it [The Great Refusal] is the negation of all order;
but in this negation Orpheus and Narcissus reveal a new
reality, with an order of its own, governed by different
prinipcles. The Orphic Eros transforms beings: he masters
cruelty and death through liberation. His language is song
and his work is play. Narcissus' life is that Of beauty,
and his existence is contemplation. These images refer to
the aesthetic dimension as the one in which the reality

 

principle must be sought and validated." Marcuse, Eros and
Civilization, p. 156.
ll 12

Knight, pp. 215-216. Knight, p. 216.

81

Thus, memory, like a dream, looks forward as well as back-
ward in denying the destructive past of humankind in favor
of its liberated future.

In the lengthy, closing speech of Act III the Spirit
of the Hour announces a "change" that will transform the
earth and sky--the entire universe--into a new reality (III,
iv, 204). Not only is it a sensuous reality of "love dis-
solved" but it is "exempt from toil" and free of repressive
authority: "thrones were kingless." Without fear people
now can Speak "the wisdom once they could not think," and
look "emotions once they feared to feel" (III, iv, 157-158).
Unconscious desires are thus liberated into consciousness
in the new diSpensation.

Then in the closing speech to Act III (III, iv,
164-204), Shelley makes it quite clear that his transformed
reality principle includes all institutions, and it is
therefore an all-inclusive societal shift in values, not
merely a willed individual change. As "Thrones, alters,
judgement seats and prisons" (III, iv, 164) become relegated
to the barbarous past, so too do the "Tomes / Of reasoned
wrong" (III, iv, 166-167), rationalizations of the monstrous
authority and power of those institutions, become part of
the ghostly past. Once free of the ruling class of kings,
priests and their institutions, man becomes "Equal, un-
classed, tribeless, and nationless" (III, iv, 195). Within

the new classless and therefore conflict-free society man

82

becomes "king / Over himself; just gentle, wise" (III,
iv, 197). His new sensibility does not imply passionless-
ness, however, though it does imply a reconciliation of
rationality and sensuousness. Additionally, it frees man
"from guilt and pain" (III, iv, 198) echoing Prometheus'
renunciation of suffering discussed earlier. To remind us
that we are not dealing purely with a Platonic millenium,
we are informed that "chance, death and mutability" (III,
iv, 201) remain real, though under the will's dominion.

The expanded vision of Eros that redeems mankind
in Act IV fulfills the promised liberation of the first
three acts. And content approximates the world of dream.
Indeed there seems to be no point at which Panthea's dream
leaves off, while every event that follows its inception
grows out of the dream and retains the character of a dream-
vision. It is a vision of fulfilled desire and abundance
unhindered by the repressive demand of toil, rationality,
and time.

Because it grows out of the dream-vision, Eros in-
evitably retains the character of a dream-vision. Eros
now prevails over its aggressor, Thanatos. This expansive
and unifying principle harmonizes man and nature and sym-
bolizes its culminating expression in the sensuous, play-
ful, and fulfilling love of moon and Earth.

Again in her role of intermediary, Panthea announces

the appearance of Moon and Earth, "Two visions of strange

83

radiance" (IV, 202). Ione describes the first vision, the
moon as "Mother of the months," thereby calling attention
to its temporal reality. Although Time has been born to
his tomb in Eternity, this descent does not annihilate all
time but only the past. Wilson explains that "the death

of Time would mean the death of Demogorgon's law, the per-
manent order of recurrence and pattern which gives meaning
to Time. Demogorgon, despite his boast to Jupiter, is
eternal only by courtesy and default. The cycles of Demo-
gorgon die with death and Time."13 If we regard this anni-
hilation of time from a psychological point of view we need
only recall that unconscious desires obliterate all sense
of time and death in dream. And while, strictly speaking,
we are not dealing with a dream and its freely flowing
imagery of desires and fulfillments, we must nevertheless
recognize Shelley's intent to recreate the atmOSphere of
free flowing thought and movement inherent to dream. "The

poet dream being awake,‘ as Lamb Observed. But his crea-
tive purpose designs and informs what he dredges from the
subliminal recesses of his being: for as Freud distin-
guishes dreams from art by insisting that art has a social
reference and an element of conscious control, art shares

with dream the function of making public the contents of

the unconscious.

 

l3Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry_(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 208.

 

84

The swiftly moving Orphic lyricism "of music, and
dance, and shapes of light" (IV, 77) which the choruses of
Spirits and Hours feel as "the voice of love in dreams"
(IV, 65) paves the way for the nuptual dialogue of Moon and
Earth. The sensual setting of "woven caresses" and "Roofed
over sculpture and Poesy" sensualizes rationality, and in
turn, "Science bedews her Daedal wings" (IV, 113-116) so
that "From the depths of the Sky and ends of the earth"
(IV, 130) Nature and Man are harmonized through the creative
love that overpowers death: "And Love, Thought, and Breath
/ The powers that quell Death / Wherever we soar Shall
assemble beneath" (IV, 149-151). Hence this background,
apprOpriately, introduces the Eros of Narcissistic contem-
plation that Moon and Earth Share in the controlling image
of the final act.

Shrouded in clouds, an image Often associated with
mental activity in Shelley's poetry, and white light,
which together symbolize a newly enlightened frame of mind,
the moon is guided by a mysterious infant. This return to
the unconsciousness of infancy reflects a similarly guiding
unconscious innocence in the now sleeping infant Spirit of
Earth, "who talks of what he loves in dream" (IV, 268).

Destruction and death become only memories (IV,

280 passim) in the new union of heaven and earth built upon
the Narcissistic reliance of Earth and Moon. The Earth

(himself?) revels in the "atmosphere of light" that emanates

85

from the moon and animates time with "The Joy, the triumph
the delight, the madness / The boundless overflowing,
bursting, gladness / The vaporous exultation not to be con-
fined" (319-321). The Moon in turn responds to Earth's
penetrating Spirit in explicitly sexual language. This
sensuous exchange of love between Earth and Moon, though
explainable by the necessity of gravitational laws, also
expresses the harmonizing power of Eros which is at once
both expansive and embracing (IV, 392—405) while playful,
and free of the necessity to struggle (IV, 404-405). So
while "love rules" it is again surrounded by "Orphic song"
(IV, 410-415).

After several more such antiphons of nuptual plea-
sure, Moon and Earth begin to recede; and Ione and Panthea
again emerge to announce the mighty re-appearance of Demo-
gorgon. ApprOpriately, the symbol of the ruling Nirvana
principle presides over the drama's conclusion. But Earth
and Moon are gripped in a Simultaneous release of pleasure:
Earth: "I am as a drOp of dew that dies" (IV, 523);

Moon: "I am a leaf Shaken by thee!" (IV, 528). In addi-
tion to their symbolically sexual effect on each other the
diminutive images of dewdrOp and leaf connote the awful
power Demogorgon holds over them. Finally, his famous epi-
logue rounds out the prevailing mood of Eros while reminding
us of the ever present capability of Thanatos: "Love" can

only retain its "throne of patient power" over "Heaven's

86

despotism: through the good offices of "Gentleness, Virtue,
Wisdom, and Endurance." NO less than this total commitment
will effectively bar "Destruction's strength," from re-
asserting itself. The lines of Demogorgon's closing Speech
perfectly embody the need to create new values step-by-step,
level-by-level in order to achieve a totally new sensibility
and new social order:

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,

(570-end)

THE WITCH OF ATLAS

More fully than any of his other narrative poems,

The Witch of Atlas approximates Shelley's desire to invest

 

his redemptive Eros with beautiful idealisms. And again

he relies on the dream-vision. Knight isolates the impulse
at the heart of the poem when he describes the Witch as

"a dream-projection and, partly, an incarnation of poetry
itself."1 The most rarified and "playful" creature of
Shelley's imagination, the Witch embodies the Eros at the
center of the creative process, and she is the radiating
center from which and toward which all activity in the poem
flows. She presides over the thematic and narrative move-

ment of the poem like a female deus ex machina. She incar-

 

nates the dream-vision as She contemplates the beauty and
wisdom of her cave in trance or manifests her influence

on mankind through dreams. Thus She is both the dreamer

and the vision itself. In the course of the poem, she re-
deems pleasure, absorbs death, and halts time--1ike Narcissus.
For like Narcissus, her existence is contemplation and her
life is beauty. She is the fullest realization of the

Narcissistic impulse in Shelley's poetry.

 

lKnight, p. 226.

87

88

Unlike her predecessors, the dream-maiden in
Alastor, Asia, or even Mab, the Witch is not the counter-
part Of a single human or personified consciousness. Nor
is she a "soul out of my soul," like Emily. Her beauty
disorganizes the senses and her voice hints in low tones
of love and draws "all living things" toward herself. She
attracts and ministers to all creatures both natural and
supernatural--from cameleOpards and serpents to Silenus
and Pan--from kings and satyrs to herdsmen and mountain
maidens, who come as aspiring devotees to the shrine of
"Her love [which] subdued their wonder and their mirth"
(128). She thus personifies the expansive power of Eros,
reaching out to unify all life.

The prominent cave-dwelling of the Witch symbolizes
the deepest recesses of the mind. It does not, as we might
mention however, originate as a significant mind-symbol
with the "Witch of Atlas." To withdraw to the caverned
recesses of the physical or psychical world as a pre-
requisite to deep contemplation is a recurrent motif in
Shelley. Shelley first used the pattern in Alastor. The
poet falls asleep "Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower"
(147) where the containment of the dreamer within a cavern
is explicit. In the poems after Alastor, the typical set-
ting of the cavern extends its symbolic circumference to
the dream, and even the outer limits of the mind itself.

The narrator in Epipsychidion recalls how he encountered

 

89

Emily amid "the caves of divine sleep" (194-195). A few
lines later cavern and dream merge as he springs "from the
caverns of [his] dreaming youth" (217). In its "unremit-

ting interchange" the mind of the speaker in Mont Blanc

 

seeks among the shadows in "the still cave of the witch
Poesy" (44) for "some faint image" of that creative power
which emanates from the "Ravine of Arve." The cave, like
the ravine, is a recess analogous to the mind. And the
"witch Poesy" foreshadows that uncanny creativity of the
Witch of Atlas. Although caves are not equated explicitly

with dreams in Prometheus Unbound, one of Panthea's dreams,

 

as we have seen, leads her and Asia to the deepest limits
of Prometheus' psyche in Demogorgon's cave.
The cavern image is elaborately develOped in The

Witch of Atlas. Reminiscent of old earth mother myths,

 

the Witch's mother,"one of the Atlantides," is impregnated
by the redolent sun in a passage involving the cavern as

an erotic image: "He kissed her with his beams and made
all golden / The chamber of gray rock in which She lay"
(62-63). Then like the poet's dream-vision in Alastor, the
power of love annihilates consciousness as "She in that
dream of joy dissolved away" (64). In the following three
stanzas the cave explicitly represents the womb of the
Witch's mother, where the Witch, "a dewy splendour hidden /
Took shape and motion" (78-79). This post-erotic maternal-

ism associated with the cave then gives way to its more

90

characteristic function as creative mentality. Sexuality
is the physical eXpression of Eros' creative power. Hence,
the mental and physical symbolism of the Witch's cave is
consistent with the theme of Eros.

The elaborately wrought carvings of ancient art
and learning inside the cave belong to the Witch's conscious-
ness, which assumes the meaning of all that is potentially
and actually creative in the symbolic trappings of its
walls. Within her cave-dwelling "lay Visions swift and
sweet and quaint" (161) filled with "intensest bliss" . . .
"and each was at her beck" (164 & 168). Her visionary
powers are full of sensual appeal which is regenerative on
several levels. Through "odours" which "stir sweet thoughts
or sad in destined minds" (176), and through "liquors"
which "medicine the Sick soul to happy sleep" (178) plea-
sure is redeemed as it merges with death. In a Narcissis-
tic return to the underworld, the death impulse converges
with the pleasure principle. To put it another way, the
pleasure principle expresses itself through the Nirvana
principle, as "eternal death" is transformed into "a night
/ Of glorious dream" (179-180). In this stanza Bros and
Thanatos are reconciled in the Nirvana principle as life,
not death.

Scholars have often equated the Witch's cave with
Prometheus' cave of the mind described in his long Speech

at the opening of III, iii. But the atmOSphere of strange

91

beauty, mystery, and wisdom in the Witch's cave is quite
different from the Eden-like setting of Prometheus and
Asia. Having attained his utOpian vision, Prometheus en-
visions how he will recline at his ease and watch the new
order emerge: ". . . the progeny immortal / Of Painting,
Sculpture and rapt Poesy / And arts, the unimagined yet to

be" (Prometheus Unbound, III, iii, 54-56). Perhaps be-

 

cause it is set in the narrative present and not an "un-
imagined" potentiality, the strange but far more credible
lore within the Witch's cave holds out the possibility of
redemption for man in the real world of his social rela-
tionships.
Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device,
The works of some Saturnian Archimage,
Which taught the expiation at Whose price
Men from the Gods might win that happy age
Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice;
And might quench the Earth-consuming rage,
Of gold and blood--till men Should live and move
Harmonious as the sacred stars above.
(XVIII)
Within these scrolls is the secret of how men can regain
the golden age and live harmoniously if they will but rid
themselves of their aggressive and destructive desires for
"gold and blood." Power over the destructive forces that
seem untameable, "Time, earth, and fire--the ocean the wind
. . . and man's imperial will" (196—197) are all contained
in her cave and subject to the "inmost lore of Love" (199).
From these lines we may infer that the redemptive power of

eros informing "Wisdom's wizard skill" can master all of

the elemental forces of nature in man's behalf.

92

She absorbs death. When the Witch reveals to the
nymphs and naiads (Sts. XXII-XXV) the truth of their muta-
bility, it is not only that "Love and mutability meet in
conflict here and mutability must Triumph."2 Death does
prevail, but it prevails through love eXpressed in the
Nirvana principle. The Witch cannot die, as even nymphs
and naiads eventually must, but her Eros informs their
deaths: "over me / Your leaves Shall glance--the streams,
in which ye dwell / Shall be my paths henceforth, and so--
farewell!" (239-240). She does not deny the death instinct.
Her Eros, like that of Narcissus, is akin to Death and ful-
fills itself in the Nirvana principle. In her world rest
and sleep and dream and death are not painfully separate
or differentiated.

Within her conscious dream world "This lady never
slept, but lay in trance / All night within the fountain--
as in sleep" (265-266). Fittingly, she contemplates her
own beauty reflected from the walls of her cave. And in
the illuminated glare of her fountain, she reads her
scrolls of ancient wisdom. This fountain is rather prom-
inent and deserves comment. Often symbolic of the creative
impulse in Shelley's poetry, but not always associated
with the dream-vision, the fountain here lights the roof

of her cave and enables her to spell out the meaning in

 

2Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (New York:
Doubleday, 1963). p. 346.

 

93

her scrolls of "dread antiquity." The fountain therefore
raises to consciousness the truth as well as the beauty
which merge in the Witch's being. If the fountain reveals
the aesthetic truth of the Witch who, significantly, lies
"within the fountain" and therefore draws upon its source
in the most immediate sense, elsewhere in Shelley's poetry
the symbolic connotations of the fountain function differ-
ently. The beckoning impulse of death arising from the
"still fountain" in Alastor promises the gazing poet death,
which may return him to the arms of his beloved dream-
maiden; or just as likely, destroy him utterly. Its in-
spiration is associated with dream, for in this context

the fountain reflects his own death wish in his desire to
recapture the dream maiden "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"
(471—474). Here too then, the fountain symbolizes a
source. It mirrors the very death impulse that has been

at the root of his being. Dream-maiden and fountain in

The Triumph Of Life are linked together in Rousseau's

 

dream Similarly to their association in the Witch of Atlas.

 

The dream-maiden appears to Rousseau in "A shape all light,"
which emanates from the "Floor of the fountain," again

the source of imaginative power. But the most memorable

use of this image in Shelley's poetry is the creative well-
spring of Keats' life, the "burning fountain," to which he

returns in "AdonaiS"--in death.

94

The following two stanzas revolve on the origin of
the boat that the Witch uses for her journey. One legend
associates its creation with Vulcan, "She had a boat, which
some say Vulcan wrought / For Venus" (289-290); whereas
another legend attributes its creation to VenuS' "first
born Love," the god, Eros. Whichever is the case, the
fiery connotations of Vulcan's forge fuse with the play-
fully erotic associations of Eros in a conjunction of fire
and love that is frequent in Shelley's poetry. More in-
triguing, however, is the legend that the boat "was found
too feeble" (291) for the ardorous Venus. Yet, as we learn
in the following stanza, it was strong enough to circum-
navigate the globe under Cupid's direction. Whatever its
relative strength and weaknesses with relation to Venus
and Cupid, the boat signifies a vehicle of desire and in
its present function reinforces the Witch's primary iden-
tity as symbolic of Eros. The Witch's Eros, paranthetically,
is like Cupid's--p1ayfu1 and whimsical-~not the passion-
filled and concentrated sensuality usually identified with
Venus. This Similarity may be why the boat proves useful
to her and not to Venus.

She moors the boat upon her fountain which informs
the vessel as it has the cave with her "living spirit."
When She embarks on her journey it seems to lack a pre-
determined direction. It can scarcely be called a quest,

for no dream or dream-maiden is present to give it its

95

telos. Dreams as we have already noted in Queen Mab,

 

Alastor, and Prometheus Unbound, motivate the quest, or

 

more precisely, vision forth the motive of the quest. The
Witch's self-sufficiency as dreamer and dream, however,
would seem to obviate any single direction for her creative
Eros.

Before embarking on her journey, she performs her
most revealing act in creating Hermaphroditus. That this
creature is a "sexless thing" does not mean it is devoid of
sexuality but rather, as Shelley goes on to explain, it is
free of the defects in both sexes because it combines "all
the grace of both / In gentleness and strength" (331-332).
Knight accounts for the Homunculus in terms that are pre-
cisely aprOpos our thesis: "It is thus super-sexual rather

than asexual, as is the creative consciousness [italics

 

mine] and, perhaps the evolutionary or transcendental goal
of mankind."3 This meaning is closer to the plain intent
of Shelley's works than false dichotomies such as Grabo's:
"The Hermaphrodite then, in Shelley's symbolism, is a
natural personification of the two complementary forces of
the world, of attraction and repulsion, of love and hate."4
Nothing in Shelley's text supports this inference with

reference to the Hermaphrodite. AS Shelley was aware, hate

is a learned response, not an innate one, like love. In

 

3Knight, p. 228.

4Carl Grabo, The Meaning of the Witch of Atlas
(Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1935), p. 60.

96

terms of our present argument, hate is the outer-directed
destructive force of the diverted and socially conditioned
death instinct. If anything, Shelley wanted to free the
Hermaphrodite of all aggressive connotations that might
translate into hate. So he sought to purify his Eros with
an image of bisexuality.

Like Marcuse, Knight roots the artistic impulse
in Eros, as we just noted above. But it must be a special
kind of Eros according to Marcuse--a Narcissistic Eros--
which Knight does not deal with. As we have discussed in
previous chapters, Narcissus spurns the ordinary Eros,
which merely unites human beings, in order to embrace a
farther reaching Eros. He strives for a non—repressive
erotic attitude toward reality which incorporates all of
Nature into itself. It is a redemptive vision in Frye's
sense of the term--but only up to a point. While the Nar-
cissistic vision seeks to reintegrate the human psyche with
nature, it implies a reconciliation of Eros and Thanatos;
for in the Eros-saturated world of the Witch, death is no
longer fraught with fear. As we noted earlier, Frye simply
does not take death seriously into account in his mythos.

So, like its creator, the Hermaphrodite is governed
by a Narcissistic Eros. Symbolically and apprOpriately, in
the early stage of the voyage the Hermaphrodite can repose

in Sleep and dream:

97

And ever as She went, the Image lay

With folded wings and unawakened eyes;

And o'er its gentle countenance did play

The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies.

(361-365)
As their labyrinthine journey becomes steeper and there-
fore more arduous, his active powers are called upon.
Knight's distinction on this point is useful: "He is there-
fore now awaked, representing poetry fully conscious."5
The Hermaphrodite, in turn, is still totally under the
Witch's impetus. She spurs him along, for She herself
is possessed So that she cannot restrain her Spirit. The
Hermaphrodite therefore propels his "storm-outspeeding
wings" ever faster at her bidding.

The tempestuous journey of the Witch and her
Hermaphrodite is filled with passages of light, fire, and
storms; and it culminates momentarily with the building
of a "windless haven" beyond the reach of, yet still amid
the storm. This is not a goal in the sense of a quest-
ending, however. This pause functions primarily, and rather
importantly, to give free reign to the heart of the Witch's
ethos: an Eros that seeks to express itself in play, not

struggle. She can play "her many pranks" unhindered by the

necessity of time, toil, or death. Whether "circling the

image of a Shooting star;" (450) or playing "many quips
and cranks;" (453) or surrounding herself with "armies of
her ministering spirits;" (450) or "like Arion on the

 

SKnight, p. 299.

98

dolphin's back / Ride singing through the Shoreless air;"
(484-485) or "following the serpent lightning's winding
track;" (486) or running on the "platforms of the wind;"
(487) she embodies the Spirit of their activity in play.
And in this reSpect she also involves that Orphic spirit
which Marcuse links to Narcissus in his analysis of alter-
native culture heroes to Prometheus implied in an aesthetic
based on Freudian principles:

Like Narcissus, he rejects the normal Eros, not

for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like
Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order
of procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcisstic
Eros is to the end the negation of this order. . . .
The Orphic Eros transforms being: he masters
cruelty and death through liberation. His language
is song, and his work is la . Narcissus' life is
that of beauty, and his SXistence is contemplation.
These images refer to the aesthetic dimension as the
one in which their reality principle must be sought
and validated.6

 

 

"But," as she moves back toward her dream-filled world of
desire, "her choice sport was, in the hours of Sleep / To
glide down old Nilus . . ." (497-498) and eventually to
preside over the land of mortal dreamers:

With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet
Passed through the peopled haunts of humankind,
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet,
Through fane, and palace--court, and labyrinth mined
With many a dark and subterranean street
Under the Nile, through chambers high and deep
She passed, observing mortals in their sleep.
(521-528)

 

6Marcuse, Bros and Civilization, pp. 155-156.

 

99

All the social evils that would normally have enlisted
Shelley's outrage--re1igious superstition, cruel customs
and laws, the persecution of the weak, and war--the Witch
assails and subdues.

She is the repressed Eros returned in dream to
draw men back into a childlike world of play. She makes
her way light-heartedly past sleeping lovers and sleeping
old age and soothes "Troubled forms of sleep" with her
"holy song" and sees into the dreams of all sleepers to
View the "naked beauty" beneath. To the most beautiful
she gives a magic drink in "deep sleep," transforming
them into men of genius so that death's eternity becomes
a pleasure house. There they lived "as if some control /
Mightier than life, were in them; and the grave / Of such
when death oppressed the weary soul / Was as a green and
overarching bower / Lit by the gems of many a starry
flower" (596-600). Death is absorbed in their timeless
contemplation of beauty. On the brains of the less beauti-
ful she writes "strange dreams" that cause scribes, priests,
and kings (Shelley's old enemies) to reverse their custom-
ary behavior, with satirical effect. That Shelley could
resist all seriousness in satirizing his old foes further
testifies to the lightness of his intentions in this poem.
Finally, she reunites lovers who consummate their love in
dream and discover the reality of its erotic content nine

months later.

100

The erotic innocence of the timid lovers joined
outside the boundaries of repressed desire or guilt--in
dream--probab1y depicts the Witch's purest fusion of dream
and Eros. Back in waking reality their union attains
fruition, which, like the other transformations She has
wrought, implies a totally reformed human sensibility,
devoted to beauty and contemplation--a Narcissism of all
human experience. The Witch's Narcissism thus argues im-
plicitly that dreams must become reality; that the pleasure
principle not the reality principle must become dominant

"among the cities / Of Mortal Men" (664-665).

EPIPSYCHIDION

Unlike the dream-maiden in Alastor whom the poet-
visionary conjures from within his psyche and then pursues

to his death, the narrator's epipsyche in Epipsychidion

 

balances elusively between his dreamlike subjectivity and
waking reality. Her physical reality promises erotic ful-
fillment as it symbolizes mystical union with nature. His
lengthy invocation in this quintessential song of Romantic
love reveals how intensely he strives to penetrate the am-
biguity of her appealing though dangerous attraction, and
to purify and fix her essence beyond space and time: "Thou
living Form / Among the Dead! Thou star above the Storms /
Thou Wonder and thou Beauty and thou Terror!" (26-28). As
her love draws him toward a promised fulfillment it also
threatens to annihilate him. Like a moth, its wings singed
in flight, or a dying swan, he is being lured "toward sweet
Death" (73). Thus the tightly interwoven appeals of both
life and death within his own psyche impel the poet toward
an elusive vision of redemption.

In the course of developing his mythopoeic inter-
pretation of the "I-Thou" relationship in Shelley's poetry,
Harold Bloom touches upon the life-death struggle in

Epipsychidion, but unfortunately, he never develOpS this

 

101

 

102

point.1 Bloom postulates the life and death conflict on
the psyche's desire to absorb and thereby control reality,
certainly one Of the poem's legitimate levels of meaning.
His interpretation, moreover, takes into account that the
poet's quest for Emily is simultaneously motivated by both
Death and Eros. But the narrator-protagonist's desire for
death is not solely actuated by "deSpair in the myth," as
Bloom prOposes. To accept Bloom's view of the death im-
pulse as pure negation associated with destruction in the
poem overly simplifies the thematic possibilities of the

death impulse in Epipsychidion. Life and Death, in short,

 

are not divergent but convergent drives. Because of this
identity of desire, both Death and Eros are rooted in sen-
suality as well as timelessness. Aware too that "Epi-
psychidion is a poem about heterosexual love," Bloom, how-

. . . . 2
ever, never aSSOClateS ltS erotic content Wlth death.

 

Moreover, none of the other critics who have commented upon

the poem's sensual and erotic content ever hint at the

 

l"Shelley's myth is an impulse toward life; counter
to it is Shelley's antimyth, driving toward death because
Of despair in the myth. In 'Epipsychidion' the myth and
its contrary have intensified to their extremes, and appear
side by side. The poem violently alternates between the
quest for relationship and the quest for destruction, a
sweet mystical annihilation. The two quests are antitheti-
cal: the first is rational and poetic; the second is less
than rational and attempts to destroy the poem." Harold
Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1959), p. 211.

 

2Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 208.

 

103

fairly evident Freudian dimensions of the poem, in terms
of the fundamental struggle of life and death instincts.3
It is fairly evident from the speaker's self-
history that his projected love-ideal, or "soul out of my
soul," grew out of the access he gained to his own uncon-
scious through his "visioned wanderings." The Opening ten
lines of his history reveal his expectant and searching

frame of mind:

There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn
Upon the fairy isles of sunburnt lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps;--on an imagined shore,
Under the gray beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory
That I beheld her not.

(190-200)

There are no sharply defined boundaries between waking and
sleeping here, no clearly defined loss of consciousness;
but the narrator is at pains to Show that his psychic ex-
perience of that "Being" he encountered in the past be-
longed to the "caves / Of divine Sleep," and "air-like
waves / Of wonder-level dream." Sleep and dream form the
prevailing imaginative context for his meeting with the
idealized prefiguration of Emilia. This meeting is rooted

in the golden past of "fairy isles" and "enchanted mountains"

 

3Both Enscoe and Bostetter concentrate upon estab-

lishing its sexual dimensions while desanctifying the pre-
vailing platonic interpretations which have dominated
criticism of the poem.

104

of her pre-existence in his dream. Only in yearning for

its resurrection in the world of his future "isle under
Ionian Skies" (422) can he establish his "True love," which
he described earlier in his polemic against institutionalized
marriage, comparing love with the power of imagination:
"Love is like understanding that grows bright / Gazing on
many truths; 'tis like thy light / Imagination!" (162-164).
Eros is continuously creative and expansive, over stepping
all boundaries, whether expressing itself through Love or
through the imagination. It therefore cannot confine itself
to "one form" in love or in art. To do so is permanent
death, the kind of death that "builds / A sepulchre for

its eternity" (172-173).

But death imposed from outside the individual,
either through institutions or formal artistic limitations,
is very different from the death he must risk, according to
the speaker, in order to attain his redemptive Eros. As he
realizes that the pursuit of love promises a dangerous ful-
fillment, impelling him like a "dizzy moth" or "dead leaf"
toward the infinitely remote "setting sphere" of Hesperus;
at the same time his quest foretokens "A radiant death, a
fiery sepulchre" (220-223), redeeming him toward a "fiery
martyrdom" (215). And characteristically, this fiery sym-
bolism of his imagination informs his meaning as it drives
him on. When he springs "from the caverns of [his] dreamy

youth" (217) "as one sandelled with plumes of fire" (218),

105

not only does the fiery "lodestar" of his desire draw him
on, but because she is also the driving force within his
imagination, the "burning plumes" that contrast so sharply
with "the dreary cone of our life's shade" (228), she in-
spires him to challenge the grave itself. So the Eros
that risks and even embraces death to attain a fulfillment,
possibly beyond life itself, is very different from Eros
destroyed by the constraint of reality.

The speaker tries at first to project the content
of his imaginary Eros in dream but this narcissistic impulse,
"this soul out of my soul" has overflowed its origin in his
dream and strives forth, filled "with hope and fear," to
"find one form resembling hers" (246-254). Hence what
started as an egoistic withdrawal into dream has expanded
outward in a quest to transform reality into living ful-
fillment. The nature of this reality is scarcely discern-
ible, however, because his consciousness is almost totally
absorbed with his desire for Emily. One cannot be entirely
certain at this point in the poem whether the protagonist-
speaker has indeed awakened from his dream. Shelley seems
to obscure deliberately the boundaries between waking and
dream in his use of the habitual narrative with reference
to his youthful vision and subsequent pursuance of false
shadows "of that ideal of my thought," who seem to belong
to the waking world: "One stood on my path who seemed /

As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed" (277-278).

106

In recounting his interlude with this false creature he,
like the Knight in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is led to a
cave where he is "laid asleep" and subjected to her in-
fluence in dream: "I wept, and though it be a dream, I
weep" (307). Unlike the Knight's ambiguous suffering

which remains suspended between regret for his loss of the
voluptuous La Belle Dame and the memory of his terrifying
experience, Shelley's grief hinges evidently upon his dis-
covery of the maiden's falsity and the consequent necesSity
to again search out his true epipsyche.

The lack of customary tension between life and
death in the passage recounting his disillusioning encounter
with the false maiden (267-320) is quite explicit; and
taken in conjunction with the narcissistic origin of his
quest, the speaker's unresponsiveness to her expresses a
renunciation consistent with the Eros that Narcissus seeks.
The Narcissus of classical legend rejected the love of
ordinary human beings, for which he is punished by Eros.
Similarly, Shelley's renunciation of the moon maiden leaves
him floating in limbo,"nor alive, nor dead." If his erotic
attitude here is akin to sleep, it does not, on the other
hand, seek the ultimate union with death, although the con-
templation of death as well as life emerges in his dream.
The maiden Of the moon in his dream reveals to him, for the
first time, that Thanatos and Eros are the inseparable

though contradictory urges of his desire: "For at her

107

silver voice came Death and Life / Unmindful each of their
accustomed strife / Marked like twin babes, a sister and
a brother / The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother"
(301-304). The unity of origin and purpose in this passage
is not only explicit, but the erotic content is underscored
in the implicitly incestuous relationship between Life and
Death as personified brother and Sister.

If the dream has revealed to him the reality of
the Life-Death dynamic, it has also held that struggle in
abeyance. By rejecting the love of the moon-maiden in his
dream, the poet has chosen to seek Eros in the reality of
the waking world. Shelley's "soul out of my soul," from
a Freudian standpoint, "engulfs the 'environment,‘ inte-
grating the narcissistic ego with the objective world,"4
as Marcuse describes Narcissism. Freud calls this phe-

nomenon "primary narcissism." It attempts to resurrect an

 

earlier relationship between the ego and reality:

Originally the ego includes everything, later it
separates Off an extensual world from itself. Our
present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken
residue of a much more inclusive--indeed, an all
embracing-feeling which corresponded to a more intg-
mate, bond between the ego and the world above it.

When the dreamer is Shaken in "the ocean of [his] sleep"
(308), he feels the cold, rational light of the moon,

"whose pale and waning lips," chill his spirit and reveal

 

4Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 153.

5Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 25.

108

the guiding death impulse She casts on him: "my being
fell / Into a death of ice, immovable" (315-316). From
here on the planet imagery of moon and sun, which Carlos

Baker, in particular, has analyzed so well, also sym-

bolizes the constituent forces of the Life-Death dichotomy.

The moon and its chilling rationality is basically re-
pressive and induces a deathlike inertia, whereas the

sun and its imaginative symbolism is associated basically
with a liberating and life-affirming resolve. This juxta-
position is immediately apparent following the entry of
the poet's Vision into the obscure forest of his mind be-
cause the cold and barren scene that the moon fills with
its presence becomes gradually transformed through his en-
counter with the Vision and with Emily.

As already noted, it is unclear at what point the
speaker returns to consciousness (if indeed he awakes at
all). Unlike his predecessor in Alastor, at any rate, the
poet—visionary seems able to distinguish his idealized
Eros from its symbolic representation in Emily. His cer-
tainty that he has now encountered her living form hidden
from him so many years, suggests an awareness absent from
the poem up to this point, line 334. For at the moment of
her entrance, the previously barren scene becomes irradi-

ated with her presence; and the Speaker's frozen emotions

 

6Carlos Baker, Shelleyis Major Poetry: The Fabric

of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948),

 

pp. 215—238.

6

109

begin to revive. She floats into the "Cavern" of his
sleeping mind "Soft as an Incarnation of the Sun" (335),
and calls to him, whereupon his

Spirit, and the dreaming clay

Was lifted by the thing that dreamed below

As smoke by fire,

(338-339)
He responds,

I stood, and I felt the dawn of my long night

Was penetrating me with living light

I knew it was the Vision veiled from me

So many years--that it was Emily

(341-344)
Emily who had eluded him in his youthful dreams, seems to
belong to the conscious and waking world of the speaker at
this point.

Bound by the competing instincts of life and death,
symbolized in the "Twin Spheres of light who rule this pas-
sive Earth, / This world of love, this me" (345-346), his
pursuit of a purified love inevitably expresses the pleasure
principle which, in this poem, transcends the limitations
imposed by reality upon a complete fulfillment of his desire.
And the flight to "an Isle under Ionian Skies" (422) that
he projects for Emily and himself in both sensual and imagi-
native directions is designed to elude all the conventions
and restraints of mundane reality. In its return to a
natural world in which "till love and life / Be one" he

envisions his future with her completely absorbed in mutual

gratification.

110

Then in the final segment of his personal history
(345-387), following the entry of Emily into his life,
Shelley's use of the contending imagery of moon and sun con-
notes how Thanatos and Eros, "bright regents with alternate
sway / Govern my sphere of being, night and day!" (360-
361). Here, as at so many points throughout Shelley's
poetry, the alternating sway of life and death eXpresses
again the fundamental dynamic of life against death. More-
over, the libidinal component, symbolized in the "comet
beautiful and fierce," which accords with the central im-
pulse of "attraction and repulsion" on a universal scale,
also reflects his own state of mind. Although the comet
may be equateable with "unruly emotions" or the platonic
"appetitive soul," as Baker supposes, it need not, however,
as he also argues, be subordinate to the imagination or to
rationality. The unruly emotions or appetitive element
are rooted in perception. Elevating the conceptualizing
imagination above the appetitive perceptions separates the
sensual content from imagination, as the critics have Often
done. This separation results from dichotomizing the ra-
tional and sensual content of the aesthetic dimension. The
comet's influence over the sun and moon in the poem clearly
indicates an equal rather than subordinate function. By
incorporating the sensual content of his being into the
"azure heaven" that includes the rational and imaginative

elements, Shelley assigns the appetitive element a level of

111

importance equivalent to the rational and imaginative con-
tent. It is there "Love's folding-star," or Venus, the
goddess who symbolizes the sensuality of Eros as well as
its imaginative presence in the aesthetic dimension.
Shelley is symbolizing the liberating and strengthening
of sensuousness against the tyranny of reason.

In discussing how the aesthetic dimension lost its
sensuous content Marcuse explains that:

The term originally designated "pertaining to the
senses," with stress on the cognitive function.
Under the predominance of rationalism, the cogni-
tive function of sensuousness has been constantly
minimized. In line with the repressive concept

of reason, cognition becomes the ultimate concern
of the "higher," non-sensuous faculties of the
mind; aesthetics were absorbed by logic and meta-
physics. Sensuousness, as the "lower" and even
"lowest" faculty, furnished at best the mere stuff,
the raw material, for cognition, to be organized
by the higher faculties of the intellect. The
content and validity of the aesthetic function were
whittled down. Sensuousness retained a measure of
philosophical dignity in a subordinate epistemo-
logical position; those of its processes that did
not fit into the rationalistic epistemology--that
is, those that went beyond the passive perception
of data-become homeless.7

I have quoted the explanation at length to convey a full
sense of how Baker and most other critics have tended to
isolate Shelley's thought in an abstract and therefore
overly-sublimative direction. But as Bostetter very help—
fully points out, "The modern critic could not, even if

he wanted to, blot out the sexual implications."8 And as

 

7Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 164-165.

 

8Bostetter, p. 201.

112

he further explains, modern critics have done just this

"to protect his [Shelley's] reputation as man, philOSOpher,
and poet against his detractors." Primarily this fear for
Shelley's reputation rests, as Bostetter states, on "the
sincerity as well as the profundity of Shelley's 'Platon—

ism 'll9

We have seen, however, how the repressive dichot-
omizing of the rational and sensuous levels in the aesthetic
dimension have relegated to sensuous to a '1ower' level in
favor of the civilizing and constricting formality that
Bloom regards as the "poetic and rational" level. So it

is that Shelley's reputation has suffered perhaps more

from his supporters than from his detractors in the dOgged
allegiance of the former to a repressive idealization of
Shelley's thought.

The final section of the poem is dominated by the
poet-dreamer's projected flight to the "isle under Ionian
Skies / Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise" (422-423). It
is important for our understanding Of the poem's dichotomy
between the poet's vision and reality that this flight not
be utterly idealized. AS Enscoe puts it, "this section is
not to be seen as an invitation to flight from the physical
world; it is a flight from a physical world dominated by
customs, laws, institutions and sects which constantly inter-
fere with and prevent the realization of ideal love in

"10

mortal terms. The driving Eros of this section is also

 

9Bostetter, p. 201.

10Enscoe, p. 93.

113

rooted in the sensuous reality of the Speaker's libido and

expresses itself finally in an ecstatic Liebestod in the

 

closing lines:

We shall become the same, we Shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away;
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
and one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire——
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

(574-591)

This fiery annihilation reminds us again of Shelley's pen-
chant for the imagery of fire to inspire the loftiest vi-
sion. At the same time the passage is marked with an under-
current release of tension. If this sexual enervation is
fairly obvious, it must be remarked that critics have
usually avoided this content or deliberately understated

its import. They have, more often, reinforced the reaction-
ary idealizing of reason against the liberating order of
sensuousness so clearly present in the poem. They have not
recognized that "Art challenges the prevailing principle of
reason: in representing the order of sensuousness, it in-
vokes a tabooed logic--the logic of gratification as against

that of repression. Behind the sublimated aesthetic form,

114

the unsublimated content shows forth: the commitment of
art to the pleasure principle;"ll

While the failure Of Shelley's myth, as Bloom
argues, is valid as one probable meaning, this interpreta-
tion confines itself to the dichotomy between desire and
reality, which most critics have stressed. It therefore
tends to divide the life and death instincts between will
and individual physical necessity, respectively. But if
the unsublimated sensual union beneath the rarified lan-
guage of "one life, one death / One Heaven, one Hell" is
to be fully taken into account, then Eros and Thanatos must
be viewed as inseparable and therefore simultaneously both
will and necessity in the poet's psyche. Even Shelley's
anti-linguistic drift in this final section points to his
need to free his desire from the "chains of lead" that
fetter his expression of union with Emily in the simul-
taneous embrace of Eros and Death. Their single annihila-
tion thus seeks release in the direction of both life and
death.

Thus the tension in Epipsychidion is not only be-
tween desire and reality, as most critics interpret the
poem, but between convergent and conflicting desires--
Eros and Death. Like an interrupted dream the closing
lines of the poet's narrative hold these competing impulses

:in suspension. This unresolved tension at the conclusion

‘

llMarcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 168.

115

of Epipsychidion differs therefore from the endings in his

 

previous narrative poems. With the exception of Alastor,
in which death ultimately determines the direction of Eros,

all of the other poems--Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and

 

 

The Witch of Atlas--affirm the eventual dominance, however

 

qualified, of Eros. In Epipsychidion Shelley has chosen--

 

one may say realistically--to leave the tension between

Eros and Death unabated.

HE LLAS

Thematically and narratively, the entire develOp-
ment of Hellas hinges upon the long awaited revelation of
Mahmud's dream. Upon awaking from his dream Mahmud ex-
presses vague but strong apprehensions for the stability
and future of his rule. These fears deepen at the ominous
reports which his messengers bring from the battlefields.
So at the urging of his close adviser, Hassan, he summons
the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, to decipher his dream. This

seer is the former, defiant outcast of Queen Mab, now grown

 

older and self-assured. Not until "the ghost of [his] for-
gotten dream" is recalled at line 843 is the future demise
of his empire revealed. His dead father, the Phantasm of
Mahomet the Second, appears to him in the dream and pro-
phesies the fall of Islam and Mahmud's descent to a "world
of darkness." This demise fulfills Mahmud's earlier pre-
monitions, which were present from the moment he awoke
early in the play. Ahasuerus unfolds the content of Mahmud's
dream, which confirms the latter's worst fears--the over-
throw of his own tyranny is imminent and the redemption of
"another Hellas" is at hand.

To a far greater degree than any of the narrative

poems discussed thus far, Hellas envisages human redemption

116

117

in a social context. In part, this shift in emphasis is
due to Shelley's own long-standing convictions favoring
universal human freedom. It derives, furthermore, from
the use of a protagonist who would ordinarily fill an
antagonist role in Shelley's poetry. Shelley always de-
velOps his poems from the protagonist's point of View.
Because Mahmud speaks for the repressive structure of
authoritarianism, however, he lacks the Eros-centered con-
sciousness of the protagonists in the poems already dis-
cussed.

Mahmud's ordeal grows out of his historical commit-
ment to domination and to the preservation of an imperial
social order. In Hellas the redemptive vision, under the
guiding impulse of Eros, is eXpressed in the choruses of
the Greek Captive Women and is counterposed to the main
narrative which, as we shall see, is guided by Mahmud's
death impulse. The desire to dominate history, even if it
means total annihilation of his realm and himself, charac-
terizes his death impulse. Beginning with their subtly
stated hOpe at the Opening of the play that the Sleeping
Mahmud remain permanently asleep, their desires are clearly
subversive of the prevailing order of Mahmud's empire.

And it is a subversive intent rooted in Eros.

Gathering up the motif that "Freedom wakes as
tyrants sleep" (30), their litany over Mahmud's sleeping
form is filled with the burning optimism of Eros' redemp-

tive power.

118

Life may change, but it may fly not;

Hope may vanish, but can die not

Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;

Love repulsed-but it returneth!

(34-37)

This eventual redemption, however, is not easily won:

Yet were life a charnel where

HOpe lay coffined with Despair;

Yet were truth a sacred lie,

love were lust--

If Liberty,

Lent not life its soul of light,

Hope its iris of delight,

Truth its prOphet's robe to wear,

Love its power to give and bear.

(38-46)

In Hellas more than in his earlier narrative poetry, love
derives its power from the ever-expanding struggle for
human liberation in the social dimension of history. These
choruses culminate in one of Shelley's finest lyrics to
Freedom beginning, "In the great morning of the world" (46).
Freedom moves forward in the van of historical necessity
as the chorus recounts some of the high moments of freedom's
struggle throughout the world's history from Thermopylae
to the Greek revolution of Shelley's time. It closes, ap-
prOpriately, on a note of uncompromising demand: "Let
Freedom leave-where'er she flies / A desert or a Paradise /
Let the beautiful and the brave / Share her glory, or a
grave" (89-92). This motif is carried forward in the short,
lyrical semi-choruses that lead up to Mahmud's awaking.
Their attentive, hovering invocations of "resurrection" or
"annihilation" over Mahmud center the dramatic interest on

the import of Mahmud's dream, as he awakes to exclaim,

"The truth of day light upon my dream" (122).

119

Because of the public hOpe and concern that rest on
the eventual revelation of Mahmud's dream, its function is
that of the "public dream" as Macrobius defined it.1 This
public interest remains centered from that point onward
between the rising expectations of the main narrative and
those Of the Greek choruses later in the play. The main
narrative revolves upon Mahmud's growing fear for the con-
tinued hegemony of his empire. Besides his role as sultan
and the embodiment of repressive authority, he is the spokes-
man for the welfare of the empire, represented principally
in Hassan and the messengers who inform and advise him on
the trend of events. The Greek choruses, on the other hand,
juxtapose their redemptive Vision against Mahmud's gloomy
preoccupation.

Haunted by his troubling dream on three occasions,
Mahmud feels compelled to seek release from his vague and
threatening visions through the interpretive offices of
Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew: "'tis said his tribe /
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams" (134-135).
Hassan dwells on Ahasuerus' capacity to discern "The Pre-
sent, and the Past, and the To Come" (148). Cursed with
immortality, the aged seer "has survived / Cycles of gene-

ration and of ruin" (154), according to legend. His power

 

1A sub-classification of the "enigmatic dream," the
public dream forecasts "some misfortune or benefit [that]
has befallen the city, forum, theater, public walls, or
other public enterprise." Stahl, Macrobius' Commentapy,
p. 90.

120

or prOphesy is marked by sacrifice and renunciation, as

Hassan explains:
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science

Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know nOt'(155-161)

Mahmud's expectations rise at the prospect of meeting this
Jew, but they are tempered with despair: "Kings are like
stars-they rise and set, they have / The worship of the
world, but no repose" (195-196). Domination thus exacts
insecurity from rulers who must ever stand guard to maintain
their authority. Inevitably, they are also subject to de-
cline, no matter how high their stars may rise. This dis-
tinctively un-Shelleyan association of star imagery with
decline and mutability originates largely in the point of
view of his protagonist. Like a star which must set, Mahmud
regards the decline of his rule and his own death as final.
But elsewhere in Shelley's poetry, notably in "Adonais," the
star denotes immutable life. In "Adonais" it beckons from
the abode of the eternal. And even in Hellas, when regarded
from the perspective of the Greek choruses, Hesperus assumes
its more characteristic meanings of Eros and freedom, ideas
of enduring and transcendent value.

The theme of cyclical inevitability woven into the
Chorus of the Greek captives, beginning "Worlds on Worlds"

and, following the deSpairing Mahmud's lament, moves beyond

121

his individualized preoccupation with death to the prospect
of immortality. Reminiscent of the lyric, "My Soul is an

Enchanted Boat" from Prometheus Unbound, the chorus pro-

 

mises that:

They are immortal

Who through birth's orient portal

And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro

Clothe their unceasing flight

In the brief dust and light

Gathered around their chariots as they go.
(201-206)

In both lyrics immortality lies beyond life and death. The
redemptive potential in the chorus quoted above, aligns
itself with the Christian vision of Eros at this point in
the poem. Creative at the price of suffering like a
"Promethean conqueror" of the classical tradition, "he
[Christ] trod / The thorns of death and Shame" (213-214).
Shelley, however, does not really believe in redemption
that relies upon renunciation and suffering, as exempli-
fied in the Christian ethos. That Shelley himself dis-
trusts this motivation is evident from his note explaining
this chorus:

Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatise
upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally
ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the
origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any
Similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a
Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His
nature, having called us out of non-existence, and
after inflicting on us the misery of the commission
of error, should superadd that of the punishment
and the privations consequent upon it, still would
remain ineXplicable and incredible. That there is
a true solution of the riddle, and that in our
present state that solution is unattainable by us,
are prOpositions which may be regarded as equally

122

certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the

poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt

and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have

conjectured the condition of that futurity towards

which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable

thirst for immortality.2
Shelley's "inextinguishable thirst for immortality" emerges
in the choruses that close the play. It anticipates a
qualitatively different redemption from that expressed in
the "Worlds on Worlds" lyric just under discussion. Re-
placing the death and shame of renunciation is a vision
which fuses Death with Eros by reaffirming the continuity
of the past's redemptive love of freedom in the present for
the sake of the future in this world rather than some
future state after death.

Balanced against the Christian acceptance of suffer-
ing and renunciation are Mahmud's desperate pleas to his
minions to prevail by means of destruction even as he tries
to hOpe for some kind of salvation:

Ruin above, and anarchy below,

Terror without, and treachery within

The Chalice of destruction full, and all

Thirsting to drink; and who among us dares

To dash it from his lips? and where is hope?

(269-272)
Cynicism that runs this deep can find no logic affirming
life, so it must court its destruction. Despite Hassan's
long Speeches intended to encourage Mahmud that his domina-

tion remains firm, "We have one God, one King, one Hope,

one Law / But many headed Insurrection stands / Divided in

 

2Poems, p. 478.

123

itself, and soon must fall" (333-335), Mahmud remains
skeptical. The crescent moon and blood red air before his
Sight are heavily symbolic of ultimate annihilation. The
moon becomes a ”Wan emblem of an empire fading now" (346).
Rising above this scene of death is the Single Shelleyan
star often associated with his redemptive vision. In this
instance, and unlike Mahmud's earlier star simile, it is
"insolent and victorious," in keeping with the revolution—
ary necessity of the time. Mahmud fears this revolution-
ary spirit most: "The Spirit that lifts the Slave before
his lord / Stalks through the capitals of armed kings"
(351-352).

From this point until the announcement of Ahasuerus'
arrival, Mahmud's pessimism underscores the accounts of the
shifting fortunes of both Sides, as recounted in Hassan's
long speeches and the accounts of the messengers. And this
pessimism becomes further steeped in premonitions Of death:

Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters

They own no more the thunder-bearing banner

Of Mahmud; but like the hounds of a base breed

Gorge from a stranger's hand, and rend their master.

(466-469)

At the announcement of the Wandering Jew's arrival, Mahmud's
spirit lifts slightly, though he continues fatalistic:

We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,

And multiply upon our Shattered hOpes

The images of ruin. Come what will;
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps

124

Set in our path to light us to the edge

Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer-aught

Which he inflicts not in whose hand we are.
(641-647)

Before Ahasuerus' appearance, however, several inter-
vening semichoruses reaffirm the necessity of eventual re-
demption through Eros. This anticipated resurrection evokes
Greece's golden age. Its realization, nevertheless, relies
on the creative impulse of imagination that grows out of
the tempestuous struggle for liberty in the present. The
first semichorus draws heavily on the combination of images

and the subjunctive mood of the "Ode to the West Wind:"

Semichorus I

 

Would I were the winged cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
I would scorn
The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise if born
I would leave
The Spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
(648-657)

The chorus's impulse of creative power refuses to accept
the temporal and spatial limitations of earth and Sky. The
following antiphony between the two semichoruses reaffirms
the higher value of the mind, embodied in Greece's golden
age, over the cyclical reversals that characterize history

up to the present:

 

3The strong echo from Macbeth Significantly under-
scores Mahmud's motivations. Perhaps Shelley saw in
Shakespeare's homily on power politics the same self-
destructive repression at work in Macbeth.

125

Semichorus I

 

Temples, and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay;
But Greece and her fountains are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial Spirits,
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
(692-703)

The continuity of ancient Greece's eternal spirit reaches
forward out of the past and into the present to create the
future. And in the future an "Orphic thunder" of liberation
through song promises to replace the hitherto impervious
powers of natural law embedded in the "Titanean walls" of
history. The supplanting of the Titanic by the Orphic is
perfectly consistent with the Narcissistic tendency that
replaces the Promethean mythos that we noted earlier in

Prometheus Unbound. This Orphic message rises above the

 

crush of faith and the fall of empires to a new and reno-
vating harmony. In keeping with its emergent, transforming
harmony, men must abandon the motive of "Revenge and Wrong"
which, governing through guilt and despair, thereby per-
petuate the history of self-destruction. Men must liberate
themselves, as the closing semichorus of this passage af-
firms, through the fulfillment of Eros in themselves rather
than through dependence upon the higher authority of an

unknown deity:

126

In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain,
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood.
(733-737)

Ahasuerus arrives. But his long awaited appearance
proves disappointing to Mahmud. The aged seer does not
purport to reveal the future in the present. He is "no
interpretor of dreams" (757), but he tries to get Mahmud
to see the immutable design beneath

. . . this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the Silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
IS but a vision;-all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.
(776-780)
According to Ahasuerus, that life present to the senses is
merely an illusion, a waking dream, and therefore evanescent.
So Mahmud must divest himself of all hopes for his own
future and that of his empire. They are perishable. In-
stead, he sould recognize that "Thought / Alone, and its
quick elements, Will, Passion, / Reason, Imagination, can-
not die" (795-797). This creative capacity eludes death
through a new, liberating consciousness that can overcome
the repressive cycle of reality bound by time and place.
"What has thought / To do with time, or place or circum-
stance?" (801-802), Ahasuerus asks.
But Mahmud is so obsessed with the immediate future

he does not grasp the cyclical design of historical neces-

sity that Ahasuerus espouses. SO Ahasuerus grants his

127

desire: "Wouldst 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" (803-806).
Ahasuerus does not possess supernatural agency, but he has
apparently mesmerized his interrogator.4 He enables Mahmud
to relieve his vision of war and imperial conquest through
"the ghost of Mahmud's forgotten dream" that was "born in
Blood" and must therefore die in blood. In this respect
Ahasuerus closely resembles Demogorgon in Act II of

Prometheus Unbound. Both reveal truth by making others

 

see for themselves. It is, he intones, "The Past which now
stands before thee like an Incarnation / Of the To Come"
(852—854). Crowned with death, the vision fulfills Mahmud's
worst, earlier premonitions in forecasting his downfall

and that of his empire. When the Phantom of Mahomet the
Second appears in Mahmud's resurrected dream-vision to ex-
plain the inevitable course of Islam's overthrow and the

downfall of Mahmud, he counsels acceptance: "Islam must

 

4Shelley is concerned with establishing Ahasuerus'
psychological credibility within the larger context of
historical necessity Operating in the poem: "The manner
of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will
be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the
Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost.
I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all
pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and
as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas
may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through
the confusion of thought with the objects of thought and
the excess of passion animating the creations of imagina-
tion." Poems of Shelley, p. 497.

 

128

fall, but we will reign together / Over its ruins in the
world of death" (887-888). Like Thanatos, their realm is
death; for the present rebellion of Greece against the
authority of Islam promises "the autumn of a greener faith"
(Christianity) than that which Mahmud inherited from his
father. And in its coming the power of Islam will be laid
waste:

The storm is in its branches, and the frost

Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects

Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on Spoil

Ruin on ruin . . .

(875-878)

The recollection of his dream thus raises to con-
sciousness Mahmud's earlier fear of total annihilation,
expressed upon awaking near the Opening of the drama:

"One Spark may mix in reconciling ruin / The conqueror and
the conquered" (119-120). Besides foreshadowing the latent
content of his dream, this reaction also previsions Mahmud's
response to Mahomet's revelation. For if his own loss of
empire and his own death are to come, then, Mahmud responds,
let them encompass everyone:

Spirit, woe to all!

Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe

To the destroyer and to the destroyed!

Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!

Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the Oppressor!

Woe to those that suffer and inflict!

Those who are born and those who die!

(893-899)

Mahmud's own death impulse totally denies Eros as this pas-

sage reveals.

129

Mahmud is not merely resigned to his fate, as
critics usually maintain. Milton Wilson is representa-
tive of the prevailing view that "Mahmud feels no pity of
love; he does not expand beyond the prison of his self-
love. He is simply able to look at the cycles of history
in which he is involved and accept the inevitable downfall
of his empire with resignation."5 Not only does this view
limit its psychology to an imprisoning "self-love" but
furthermore it misconstrues Mahmud's response as "resigna-
tion" when clearly he is motivated by an active drive toward
self destruction that threatens to spill over to engulf
everyone and civilization with it if he cannot preserve
himself and his empire. As the Oppressor, Mahmud cannot
desert his vested interest in domination, no matter how
much it jeOpardizes himself. Domination thus identifies
with death itself, for it seeks to preserve its control so
absolutely that only the perfect inertia of death itself
can guarantee it.

Unsatisfied with his new knowledge that his own
destruction and that of his empire lie within the main-
stream of historical necessity, Mahmud further demands of
Mahomet that he reveal the precise hour when "Destruction
must accomplish / Her consummation" (901-902). But the
Phantom advises that this "cold pale Hour / Rich in re-

version of impending death" (903-904) cannot reveal itself

 

5Wilson, p. 190.

130

any more than old age can recapture youth and renew its
lost joys. The Phantom speaks here in the imagery of
individual reversion to death to Show that the Shaping
forces of history operate through repression, both internal
and external. Mahmud thus relives the universal fate of
mankind in the awareness that he, for all his power, can-
not circumvent his own history.

Mahmud awakes from his "mighty trance" at the cries
of "Victory" and delivers a final Speech which expresses
a limited conversion to his realization that in themselves
earthly phenomena have no value. Their value lies in what
they can give or teach him: "for nought we see or dream /
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth / More than it
gives or teaches" (921-923). But although he now rejects
the delusion of victory which can lead only to despair,
he pursues no Eros-centered vision of redemption. ReCOg-
nizing his utter finality in the inevitable future become
the past, Mahmud exits from the drama.

The alternative vision, "wrought upon the curtain
of future," according to Shelley's Preface, emerges in the
final choruses. The "final triumph of the Greek cause" is
not so unambiguously forecast in these choruses as Shelley's
Preface would lead us to believe. Not only does the Voice
Without "Shout in the jubilee of death" (931) and repeat
this death motif several times, but the choruses themselves

are full of ominous undercurrents of annihilation. At the

131

same time, they are intended to convey an ultimately pre-
vailing Optimism rooted in Eros. The first semichorus
denies the authority of death announced by the Voice Without,
though "ghastly as a tyrant's dream" (942), and envisions
a regenerated earth beneath the "pyramid of night" (943).
The semichoruses which follow and conclude the poem re-
assert the dominant motif of a new golden age beneath the
dark, brooding imagery of imminent desolation.
This narcissistic world of beauty and contemplation
is characteristically filled with the sensuous promise
that marks Shelley's Eros. First, Greece is recalled as
She was formerly: "Greece was as a hermit child / Whose
fairest thought and limbs were built / To woman's growth,
by dreams so mild / She knew not pain or guilt" (996-999).
Beauty reveals itself, through dream, free of the repres—
sive reality that motivates people through pain and guilt.
Sensuousness then merges, fittingly, with the dominant light
and star imagery that permeates this redemptive promise:
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright.
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
(1036-1041)
Earlier the "insolent star" of revolution, Hesperus here
links beauty and love together in freedom. This illuminated

vision will be realized beyond a dream world of the present

in the fragrant and music-filled world that "Burst[s] like

132

morning on dream or like Heaven on death / Through the walls
of our prison / And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!"
(1057-1059). Milton Wilson correctly observes with refer-
ence to this passage that "Whether the dream we awake from
is Time, whether the Heaven is simply metaphorical, whether
the rising of Greece is out of time or within the cycles

of Time, Shelley does not say. The Greek slaves, it seems,
look to the rebirth of Greece both in and out of Time, the
second if not the first."6 For Shelley the dream bridges,
imaginatively, the distinction between the temporal and
atemporal.

The redemptive vision is not entirely other-worldly
in design by any means. Nor is the memorable final chorus
merely metaphysics. Here too, Eros is contending against
Thanatos. Balanced against the first two optimistic stanzas
promising that "The world's great age begins anew" (1060)
and a "brighter Hellas rears its mountains" (1066) are the
two following stanzas which forecast another cycle of strug-
gle, peril and death. The return of the "golden years" re-
minds us of "death's scroll," even as the chorus repudiates
its. And even as "Another Athens Shall arise," in the fifth
stanza, it is a sunset vision which must be caught at "The
splendor of its prime." Finally, the last two stanzas invoke
a return to the Saturnian age of "Love," while striving
to thrust back the return of "hate and death." But to ful-

fill the promise of a return to the golden age, sacrifice

 

6Wilson, p. 193.

133

and struggle must give way to "votive tears and symbol
flowers," or else die.

As we have seen, the redemptive Eros in Hellas
emerges, not from the consciousness of a single individual,
but from the collective response of an entire, oppressed
nation, represented by the choruses of Greek captive women.
Coincident with their vision of redemption, Mahmud's author-
itarianism is rooted in eventual self-destruction. But
his empire and his rule must give way to the forces of free-
dom, as his dream discloses. Under Ahasuerus' spell his
recovered dream-vision reveals the cycle of historical

necessity running against him. History favors Eros.

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE

Relying upon the dream-vision more than previous
poems, "The Triumph of Life" reflects a deepening conscious-
ness of the elemental life and death struggle within the
human psyche and in human society. Balanced against the
death—in-life pageant of the poet's "waking dream,"
Rousseau's dreams express the primacy of death through the
Nirvana principle. In addition to his characteristic re-
liance upon dream-visions for personal revelation, Shelley
has moved toward revealing symbolically the social dimen-
sions in which Life and Death strive against each other.
Shelley was as interested in regenerating society (notably
in Hellas) as he was in his own vision of personal redemp-
tion. His poem thus becomes both a commentary on human
society and on his own psyche. Basically, his use of in-
wardly expanding, concentric dream-visions'involves a quest
in the human world for an Eros like that which obtains in
Nature.

The Opening forty lines of the poem are steeped in
a sublime anticipation of apocalyptic dimensions: "the
deep / Was at my feet; and Heaven above my head" (27-28).
The Sun springs forth, full of warm, beneficently paternal

influence. The elements of sea, and earth, and air respond

134

135

in turn, to "their father" with prayerful affirmation. So
harmonious is the rapport between sun and revolving world

that the struggle for existence is gratefully Shared among
all the forces of nature:

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear

The form and character of mortal mould,

Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil, which he of old

Took as his own, and imposed on them.1

(16-20)
The entire movement of feeling up to the onset of the poet's
"strange trance" is permeated with the well-being emerging
from a perfect balance throughout Nature.

Only the poet remains wakefully apart and out of
tune with this natural harmony. His all-night vigil de-
rives from Chaucer, and beyond, from classical antiquity.
Traditionally, and for Shelley, the poet's unusual wakeful-
ness and attentiveness prepare him and the reader for the
advent of his dream. The waking trance that slowly descends
over his consciousness is "not slumber." It remains sus-
pended and partly under the poet's rational control. Be-
cause he is not entirely passive, his relationship to the
vision is akin to that of Mahmud's recollected vision in
Hellas, as Shelley explains it in describing Ahasuerus'

function. If one were to codify his dream according to

the ancient criteria of Macrobius, it would probably be

 

1The text is that newly edited from Shelley's manu-
script by Donald H. Reiman, in Shelley's "The Triumph of
Life": A Critical Study (Urbana, Ill.: University of
Illinois Press, 1965).

 

 

136

considered an apparition.2 Shelley was trying evidently
to ground his poet's dream-vision in both natural psychol-
ogy and tradition.

The grim pageant which emerges as his "Vision" takes
hold seems to sweep all mankind into its streaming train.
The "terrific 'Dance of Death,'" as Hazlitt renamed the
poem in his review of it, is nowhere as pervasive as in
this section preceding the dreamer's encounter with Rousseau.3
The poet does not understand its meaning, and this heightens
its terrifying effect. While each of the multitude is
hastened onward, powerlessly, into one undifferentiated
mass like dust, or gnats, or leaves, unaware of "Whither he
went, or whence he came or why / He made one of the multi-
tude" (48-49), each of them is responding to the ultimate
necessity of death. And their responses differ. According
to Marcuse, class conflicts determine the direction of the
death instinct as it manifests itself in the innumerable
forms of human exploitation. Rendered in terms of Shelley's
social-dynamics, there are those who suffer exploitation,

"flying from the thing they feared" (54), and those who

 

2"The apparition (phantasm or visum) comes upon one

in the moment between wakefulness and Slumber, in the so-
called first cloud of sleep. In this drowsy condition he
thinks he is still fully awake and imagines he sees spec-
ters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about differing
from natural creatures in size and Shape, and hosts of
diverse things, either delightful or disturbing." Stahl,
Macrobius' Commentary, p. 89.

3P. P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William
Hazlitt (London and Toronto: Dent, 1930-1935), 16, p. 274.

 

 

137

exploit others, "Seeking the object of another's fear"
(55). But more explicitly evident of the death impulse,
there are those who are attracted "towards the tomb"
fascinated with the prospect of death. Others brood ob-
sessively on death so that it projects itself before them
in their own shadows. Still others flee, however vainly,
its frightening eventuality. But most, as the poet dis-
covers, prefer not to face death's reality. Not that they
are indifferent or unaware of it. They have repressed it
from their consciousness in their frantic, competitive
striving against each other. But they have not eluded it.
Their deep alienation from human society and from nature
reveal how severely driven they are by the death instinct;
they channel its demands toward each other in an ever in-
tensifying aggressiveness and self-destruction.

The Life-affirming elements in Nature that normally
symbolize the loftiest aspirations of the imagination in
Shelley's poetry stand in vivid contrast to the vanity of
the human scene. Unlike the rapt response of the Speaker
in "The Skylark," the crowd is unmindful of the "birds
within the noonday ether lost" (64), preferring the straight
and deathly "path where flowers never grew" (55). Caught
up in the "vain toil" of trying to outstrive each other,
men faint for thirst while oblivious to the Life-informing
powers of the fountain forever bursting melodiously from

deep mossy cells beside the path. They are insensitive to

138

the breeze that Should inspire as it sweeps from within the
forest, beckoning toward the secret recesses of "overarching
elms and caverns cold / And violet banks where sweet dreams
brood" (71-72). For "sweet dreams" are the pursuit of
poets, not men of the world who must pursue "their serious
folly as of old . . ." (73).

Within the more tempestuous gathering of the throng
and the intensified glare of icy cold light a more Sinister
mood takes hold, heralding the approach of the chariot of
Life. The ruling imagery of cold light at this point has
been thoroughly commented upon by scholars. AS Bloom has
stated, "The chariot's glare is the light of life; the
sun's of nature; the star's the visionary light of imagina-
tion and poetry."4 This equation with reference to the sun
and stars generally obtains elsewhere in Shelley's poetry-—

though not exactly or rigidly. In Epipsychidion, as we

 

noted, the light of moon and sun are equated with rationality
and imagination, respectively. Along this line Reiman adds,
"The cold, fascinating light of the moon-like car suggests
mere reason."5 Thus the light emanating from the car con-
notes the repressive rationality that can rule and corrupt
life, giving way to death.

The Shape in the car "Crouching within the shadow

of a tomb" (90), personifies one form of Death. Commanding

 

4Bloom, The Visionary Compapy, p. 37.

 

5Reiman, p. 31.

139

and dramatic, the image is consistent with the prevailing
death motif in this passage. The blind charioteer of
Destiny, or Necessity, who guides the chariot so erratically
and Spares virtually no one, first appeared very briefly

in Hellas: "The world's eyeless charioteer, / Destiny is
hurrying by!" (711-712). The blindness of Necessity sym-
bolized by the charioteer's four blindfolded faces departs
sharply from Shelley's earlier, optimistic historical deter-
minism. And whereas even as early as Mab, Necessity is
closely identified with the redemptive future of Eros,

here its arbitrary power derives from the shape of Death
herself, huddled within the car of Life.

But Necessity is not inherently blind. The blind-
fold symbolizes unnatural barriers to true understanding of
Necessity. These barriers may be interpreted as man's re-
pressive institutions as well as the deeply rooted inter—
nalized repressions that inhibit man from acting in his own
best interests as an agent of Necessity. Once freed of
these inhibitions and institutions which supress his de-
sires and divert them into self-destructive pursuits, man
can pursue finally his own redemptive Eros. The chariot
of Life and the charioteer would then become transformed.
They would probably resemble the chariot and Spirit of the
Hour who pilots Asia to her reunion with Prometheus.

Still in his trance, the poet rises aghast at the

spectacle of the charioteer and the grimly Splendoured car

 

140

around which rage "the million with fierce song and maniac
dance" (110), virtually all of mankind, in a jubilee filled
with erotic overtones that are explicitly realized in the
procession several stanzas later. Behind the chariot fol-
lows a "captive multitude" which includes those people whose
extraordinary talent or power endowed them either with fame
or infamy. Only the exceptional, "sacred few who could not
tame / Their Spirits to the conqueror" (128-129), and pre-
sumably were not corrupted by Life attained a spiritual
after-life or an immortal presence akin to Keats' death

at the conclusion of "Adonias." Critics unanimously cite
Socrates and Christ ("of Athens and Jerusalem") as clear-
cut instances of the "sacred few" to whom the poet alludes.
Socrates (and Jesus, to be sure) was not compromised by
"earthly thrones and gems" (133); Jesus, moreover, died
young and fled back like an eagle into death. Both
Socrates and Christ chose a death which each considered
redemptive because it was motivated by love.

The company of captives that next appear in the pro-
cession fall into two groups. Those in the vanguard are
the young, mutually "attracted and repelled" in a sado-
masochistic orgy. The passage, graphically explicit in its
Dionysian intoxication, needs quotation at length for sub-
sequent analysis:

Or fled before..Now swift, fierce and obscene

The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it, fleet as Shadows on the green,

141

Outspeed the chariot and without repose
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music...Wilder as it grows,
They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds Spun
Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure
Was soothed by mischief Since the world begun,
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair,
And in their dance round her who dims the Sun
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now
Bending within each other's atmOSphere
Kindle invisibly; and as they glow
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to new bright destruction come and go.
Till like clouds into one vale impelled
That shake the mountains when their lightings mingle
And die in rain,--the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps...ere the shock cease to tingle
One falls then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolation Single,
(137-160)
Swept along in the tempestuous dance and convulsed with
"agonizing pleasure," the "maidens and youths" give them-
selves up wholely to that "fierce spirit," Life, in a blend
of eroticism and self-annihilation that demands more pre-
cise analysis than the heavily moralistic criticism which
equates sexuality with "the Slavery of the lustful," which,
as Reiman assumes, "not only corrupts the soul itself but
also saps the energy that could effectively operate in the

great world at large,"6 or equates the sexuality in the

passage with a destructive "failure of love."7 This

 

6Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 373.

 

7Bloom, Shelley's Mythmakipg, p. 351.

 

 

142

traditional morality does not account for the prolixity in
the lines "Like Moths by light attracted and repelled /
0ft to their bright destruction come and go" (153-154).
Why "repelled" as well as "attracted" to their destruction?
The antagonism of Eros and Death, as Freud formulated it
in the sexual context, explains the contradiction precisely.

The two kinds of instinct (Bros and Death) seldom--

perhaps never-—appear in isolation from each other,

but are alloyed with each other in varying and very

different proportions and so become unreOOgnizable

to our judgement. In sadism, long since known to

us as a component instinct of sexuality, we should

have before us a particularly strong alloy of this

kind between trends of love and the destructive

instinct; while its counterpart, masochism, would

be a union between destructiveness directed inwards

and sexuality--a union which makes what is other-

wise an imperceptible trend into a conspicuous and

tangible one.8
This underlying tension described by Freud informs the mood
of "agonizing pleasure" that mingles the young revelers in
one repetitive and compulsive whirl of intense attraction
and repulsion. Freud's description thus transfers the
traditional love-lust antithesis to a psychological frame-
work of sado-masochistic impulses intertwined in a Love-
Death dance.

At the rear of the procession the "Old men, and

women foully dissarrayed" (165) strive impatiently to imi-
tate the obscene dance of the youthful vanguard. But Life,

having swept over them with its churning wheels, moves for-

ward, ever more inaccessibly. The more desperately they

 

8Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 66.

 

143

strive to draw abreast of the chariot the "Farther behind
and deeper in the shade" (169) of Death they are left.
Bloom is more correct perhaps than he realizes here: "their

lust is toward being juggernauted."9

They can, in other
words, only fulfill themselves in death as they strive to
attain Eros. The death motif thus still prevails as the
dominant motif in the ongoing struggle between the two con-
tending instincts.

The poet's sympathies are touched at the sight of
"this sad pagentry," which evokes two questions: "Half to
myself I said 'And what is this? / Whose shape is that
within the car?'" (177-178). The single response to either
or both of these overheard questions is "Life." No other
answer could have been more ironic or dramatic, because,
as we have observed, Death has dominated the entire pageant.

As the poet is startled to learn, his respondent,
the grotesquely distorted root growing from the hillside
behind him, is a remnant of humanity corrupted by Life.
It is all that remains "Of what was once Rousseau" (204).
He is not, it need scarcely be said, the prototypical, re-
vered guide of dream-vision tradition. For it is apparent
that this deathly figure is himself "One of that deluded
crew" (184), a victim of Life's passage. He does, however,
identify and describe the captives in the triumph passing

before them. In this respect, he functions traditionally.

 

9Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 251.

 

144

As one who has "feared, loved, hated, suffered, did,
and died" (200), in the awful triumph himself, Rousseau can
interpret with authority what the gazing poet has only
viewed and not understood: "in the battle Life and they
did wage / She remained conqueror" (239-240). Death's tri-
umph in life thus carries forward from the poet's opening
vision as the primary theme in Rousseau's discourse upon
all those "who wore / Mitres and helms and crowns, or
wreathes of light . . . mighty phantoms of an elder day--"
(209-210 & 253). The 'phantoms' Rousseau describes at
length are the "mighty captives" (135) chained to the
chariot and merely mentioned earlier in the poet's vision.
For all their might, however, they "Could not repress the
mutiny within" (213). In every instance they are led to
self-destruction. Whether aggressively striving to exert
physical power over the "giant world" like Napoleon, or
like other powerful 'hoary anarchs' who though powerful,
avail themselves only of the power to destroy, all are them-
selves destroyed. Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine
the Great of Russia, and LeOpold II of the Holy Roman Empire
are all 'Spoilers spoiled,‘ suffering from the destructive
ends to which they used their power. The demagogic Voltaire
and even the sage Kant, presumably unable to exercise their
potential for good, because they lacked the power, find
themselves among this group. Life's destructive power

exempts no favorites.

145

While Rousseau attempts to set himself apart from
life's conquest of other notable figures by asserting, "I
was overcome / By my own heart alone" (240—241), his dis-
tinction does not hold. The "mutiny within" which enabled
Life to destroy the others he identifies is no different
essentially for Rousseau. Their desires, though qualita-
tively different from his no doubt were just as limitless,
and more important, just as self-destructive in the strug-
gle with Life. He too had once been driven along in the
procession, as he later discloses:
Borne onward.--I among the multitude
Was swept; me sweetest flowers delayed not long,
Me not the shadow nor the solitude,
Me not the falling stream's Lethean song,
Me, not the phantom of that early form
Which moved upon its motion,--but among
The thickest billows of the living storm
I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime
Of that cold light, whose air too soon deform.
(460-469)
In his chronological review of man's destructive past
Rousseau goes back in time beyond the era of Napoleon and
even beyond the age of Enlightenment to the Hellenic period
to illustrate how the destructive passions rule men's
lives. Plato's star that ruled his doom (256) alludes to
the philosopher-poet's love for the Greek youth, Aster.
Unlike the star of Keats' eternal redemption beyond death
in "Adonais," Plato's star denotes the destructive capacity

of Eros: "Life where long that flower of Heaven grew not /

Conquered the heart by love" (256-257). Eros is explicitly

146

self-destructive here but not because sensuality corrupts,
as many critics imply. Eros contains within itself the
destructive potential of the death instinct irreSpective
of the distinction between mundane desire and metaphysical
design. The destructive capacities of Alexander and his
tutor Aristotle, on the other hand, are misdirected toward
power and dominion over others. The 'Dominion' Of this
'twain' had repressed men through physical conquest and
dogmatic rationalism. Alexander strove to unite the world
through force. Aristotle strove to dominate men's minds
through intellectual systems. Unlike Jesus and Socrates
who did not codify their visions, Aristotle was probably

a more destructive influence than Alexander because his
systems dominated men's minds for so many succeeding ages,
until Bacon Opened the way to scientific inquiry.

Carrying forward his chronological summary through
the destruction of the Roman Republic by Caesar, which
eventually set the stage for Constantine's inauguration of
Christianity as the state religion of Rome, Rousseau con-
cludes that this consolidation of ecclesiastical with poli-
tical power "was given / But to destroy" (292-293). This
pattern of destruction set the precedent for subsequent
"Anarches" who founded the EurOpean dynasties to follow
throughout Europe. At this point Rousseau's reflection,
significantly, prompts him to recall that the creative in-

vestment of his own endeavors may have been "but a world

147

of agony" (295). This intrOSpective pause gives the poet
an Opening to inject his own question: "'Whence camest
thou and whither goest thou? / How did thy course begin,‘
I said, 'and why?'" (296-297): whereupon the poem-fragment
involves his attempts to answer only two of the questions,
for as he explains,

Whence I come, partly I seem to know,

And how and by what paths I have been brought
To this pass, methinks even thou mayst guess;

Why this should be my mind can compass not;

Whither the conqueror hurries me still less.
(300-304)

Rousseau thereupon begins his personal narrative
with a recitation of his own dream-vision, which in its
inception resembles the poet's initiation into his own
dream. Setting and time are again natural and conventional.
He mentions the traditional spring season, "In April prime"
and describes a natural setting replete with Shelleyan
imagery:

With kindling green, touched by the azure clime

Of the young years, I found myself asleep

Under a mountain which from unknown time

Had yawned into a cavern high and deep,

And from it came a gentle rivulet.

(310-314)
Imagery of cavern, mountain and rivulet ordinarily evoke
associations of the mind's inspirational and creative powers
in Shelley's poetry, as we have seen. Their use here con-
forms to the Shelleyan pattern. They not only help fill out

the scene, but they strongly suggest a descent into the

inner recesses of Rousseau's mind.

148

Rousseau's dream suspends "All pleasure and all
pain, all hate and love / Which they had known before that
hour of rest" (319). A teleSOOpic extension of the poet's
dream, it suggests a movement into another plane of con-
sciousness. After falling asleep Rousseau awakes into a
dream world to the growing awareness of approaching light.
But unlike the vision of the poet, it is not the repressively
cold glare Of the deathly Shape of Life within the chariot.
It is a light "diviner than the common sun" (338), suffused
with melody and the harmony of Nature emanating from all
its elements, as "the Sun's image radiantly intense /

Burned on the waters of the well that glowed / Like gold,

and threaded all the forest maze / With winding paths of
emerald fire" (345-347). The dream-maiden, Iris, who emerges
from this conjunction of Sun with the elements symbolizes
that earlier harmony in Nature which the poet admired at

the Opening of the poem before the onset of his dream.
Coupled with her sensual appeal, her presence further sym-
bolizes the union of Nature with Eros and thus previsions

the characteristically Shelleyan vision of redemption.

But she is not entirely free of countervailing ten-
dencies. She is imbued with a sinister aura. A "Bright
omnipresence" heralds the coming "shape all light," the
counter-vision to the tomb-shadowed "Shape" of the poet's
dream. Her reflected dependence upon the sun as she threads

her way through the "forest maze," or vibrates on the "Floor

149

of the fountain," or casts her "many coloured scarf of the
dusky dawn" signifies the Spiritually informing power She
draws from the sun even as it suggests her ephemerality.
The glass she carries "Mantling with bright Nepenthe" (359),
a drug inducing total forgetfulness, coupled with the
imagery of "the fierce splendour" (359) that falls from her
further suggests her sinister side. That She is therefore
a fatal female motivated to betray Rousseau is, of course,
a compelling interpretation. But like the Alastor maiden
and "La Belle Dame," her presence and its consequences are
too ambiguous to admit only of this singularity. Nor does
She merely draw the poet into a sensually appealing "lotus

land of escape, as some critics assume.lo Whatever re-
demptive possibilities she contains, Rousseau's idealiza-
tion of her is premature, as is apparent when she tramples
out his thoughts, one by one, "into the dust of death" (388).
Whatever sinister or threatening connotations She contains
are attributable to Rousseau's own narrowness of vision.
She is potentially his unfulfilled Eros. Her trampling of
his thoughts therefore represents her own rejection of
Rousseau's misapprehension of his presence. Filled with
consternation, Rousseau echoes Shelley's earlier questions
to him as he asks the dream-maiden "Show whence I come and

why" (398), and implores her to "Pass not away upon the

passing stream" (399).

 

10Bostetter, p. 187.

150

AS subsequent events Show, she is not going to
allow Rousseau to remain within "this valley of perpetual
dream" (397) because She plans to initiate him into another
vision. At her command to "Arise and quench thy thirst"
(400), Rousseau obeys, and he is instantly thrust into his
second dream-vision. His brain runs to sand, as "on [his]
sight / Burst a new vision never seen before" (410-411).
With the advent of this new vision "the fair Shape" of
Iris his dream maiden, begins to wane. The thematic con-
flict of Bros and Death emerges into Sharper yet enigmatic
relief at this point in the poem. Because Iris has herself
induced the alternate vision, she is not, for this reason,
yet another Asia figure, as many critics have supposed.

She is both redemptive and sinister. She is a contradic-
tion, Life, in all its possibilities: Eros, measuring
itself against Death. Obliquely sensuous, "As veil by veil
the silent splendour drops" (412), she lingers in Rousseau's
awareness like a sweet scent or a caress, accompanying him
imperceptibly as he moves along the wilderness, "More dimly
than a day appearing dream / The ghost of a forgotten form
of Sleep" (427-428). Her presence therefore does not merely
fade before the "new Vision," but fades, like the morning
and evening star, Lucifer, in daylight, before the more
brilliant light of Life's onrushing chariot. Her presence
remains felt, however, although no longer seen: "So did

that shape its obscure tenour keep / Beside my path, as

151

silent as a ghost" (432-433), Rousseau recalls. Simul-
taneously, Rousseau feels compelled to admit that his
vision of Iris in her potential, purified form transcend-
ing all the corrupting influences of the natural world
must remain "forever sought, forever lost" (431).

Rousseau's "new Vision" gathers force through the
remainder of the poem so that the redemptive Eros gives
way till it is scarcely discernible by the time the poet
finally interrupts his narrative at the end of the poem.
Led by the "cold bright car," with its accompanying savage
and stunning music, the procession resembles a triumphal
march in its return from "some dread war." The mythos of
death thus reemerges to remind Rousseau of Life's precarious
limits. Iris is still present, against the back-drop of
vaulted sky: "a moving arch of victory the vermillion /
And green and azure plumes of Iris has / Built high over
her windwinged pavilion" (439-441). Gradually however,

. . underneath aetherial glory clad
The wilderness, and far before her flew
The tempest of the splendour which forbade

Shadow to fall from leaf to stone;
(442-445)

This blending of Death's intensifying counterpresence with
Life, whereby Life measures its finiteness, becomes trans-
formed finally into the grotesque and macabre "dance of
death," as Hazlitt described it. Unlike the earlier vision
of the poet, no one is exempted from this procession.

Whether preoccupied with the beauties of the natural world

152

and therefore "Forgetful of the chariot's swift advance"
(450), or striving to outSpeed Life's advance and its cer-
tain consequence--Death--everyone is drawn precariously
into it "like bubbles on an eddying flood" (458). Rousseau
admits that he too was swept into the pursuit of life's
challenge. He left his solitude, even spurned the strong
appeal of Lethean oblivion, to plunge into that "living

storm, exposing his innermost being to "that cold light."
So compelling was the impulse, Rousseau seems to imply,
it was the inavoidable effect of Necessity.

The elaborate compliment paid to Dante at this
point in the poem, while a digression from the narrative,
is nevertheless consistent with the theme of the Life-
Death struggle. It denotes an alternative to joining the
macabre procession of Life leading to Death. It pre-
supposes, however, having descended to the innermost
reaches of Death in order to measure the eternally enduring
capacity of love, like Dante, "who returned to tell / The
worlds of hate and awe; the wonderous story / How all
things are transfigured except Love" (474-476). It follows
therefore that since neither Rousseau nor the poet has
been deeply initiated into Death's mystery, neither of them
can graSp the fullest dimension of Life's informing power,
Love. Thus even this digression devoted to Dante incor-

porates its meaning into the overarching theme we have

traced in the poem.

153

Following this tribute the scene darkens, and the
grotesque horde of captives pass in frenetic review before
Rousseau's memory. Devoid even of the faded majesty that
may have marked their former appearance in the poet's
waking trance, they seem more a stream of asylum-house
derelicts. The air around their heads is peopled with
phantoms--elves, apes, vultures--which swarm "about the
brow / Of lawyer, statesman, priest ahd theorist" (509-
510). Whatever redemptive qualities the lives of others
possess--beauty, strength, freshness, youth--these degen-
erate:

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
(520-524)

They are then reduced to mere shadows, "numerous as the

dead leave's blown / In autumn evening from a poplar tree--"
(528-529). Blighted by the transforming power of the "car's
creative ray"--a paradoxically creative destructiveness--
but still alive, these followers of Life's chariot are
stripped of their final illusions, revealing the corrup-
tion beneath as "mask after mask fell from the countenance

/ And form of all" (536-537). With this revelation, re-
sembling an awakening from the oblivious valley of sleep,
joy dies. So as the poem reaches its fragmentary finish,
Rousseau and others like him whose strength and beauty

have passed, fall by the wayside. This account disappoints

154

the poet's expectations. His final question, "Then what is
life?" bursts forth with an urgency Rousseau doubtless can-
not satisfy. The lines retrieved by Garnett and included
in Reiman's text seem to lead toward a meretricious conso-
lation although this conjecture probably does Shelley an
injustice. The poem-fragment, as it stands, holds the out-
come in suSpense and expresses the primacy of the Nirvana
principle: Eros serves the death instinct in its long
detour to death.

In its incomplete form the poem depicts how the
death instinct governs the life of the individual psyche
and of human society. If Shelley had attempted to answer
the question, "What is Life?" he would doubtless have tried
to resolve it, just as he did in his previous narrative
poems, in the direction of Eros. The redemptive promise
of Iris in Rousseau's dream would have re-emerged in the
figure of another, less ambiguous, female figure to balance
Off the sad pageantry of Shelley's vision. Yet such a
resolution would still have entailed recognizing the on-
going dialectic of Life and Death, with only a shift in
emphasis. As it stands, the poem is fully satisfying in
that it recognizes and deepens reSpect for the forces of
death in society and in the psyche even as it poises ready

to affirm life.

CONCLUSION

The dream-visions which pervade Shelley's narrative
poetry are critical to the fundamental dynamics of his re-
demptive vision. Informed by the unremitting contest be-
tween the life and death instincts in both the human psyche
and in civilization, with varying emphases in narrative
design and thematic purpose, each of the poems from gpggp
M32 to "The Triumph of Life" develops this dynamic in terms
that Shelley rendered explicitly in his brief allegory,

Una Favola. Both in this essential tale and in the other

 

works discussed, Eros and Death emerge not merely as sepa-
rate Or alternative tendencies leading toward a metaphysical
or platonic truth. Rather, they converge and diverge,
interlacing their competing impulses so that one, then the
other, is dominant but always inseparable from its antago-
nist. Usually Shelley tries to resolve the tension in

favor of Eros. But sometimes the tension between Eros and

Death, as exemplified in Una Favola, remains unresolved--

 

most notably in Epipsychidion and "The Triumph of Life."

 

Eros seeks its release through the pleasure principle--
gratification free from time and toil. This release however
is akin to the release which the death instinct seeks

through the Nirvana principle--regression into perfect

155

156

inertia. Underlying both the Nirvana and pleasure prin-
ciples in Shelley's poetry is a Narcisstic Eros that pro-
jects a redemptive vision of beauty and contemplation.

The dream framework upon which Mab stretches past,

present and future in Queen Mab obviates the demands of

 

objective, waking reality. From her atemporal and aspatial
perspective she is able to instruct the lovely dreamer,
Ianthe (and the reader) on how the evils of the past and
the present must inevitably give way to total regeneration
of all mankind. Shelley's passion for reforming the world

is more explicit in Queen Mab than in any of the narrative

 

poems which followed it. For Mab's oracular vision of
redemption is attained primarily in the context of a re-
generated society which, in turn, enables men to regain
their own lost ties with nature.

In sections VIII and IX this new dispensation, which
had only been hinted at in the earlier sections of the poem,
emerges. Displacing the corrupt, dead and dying civiliza-
tions of past and present, the redemptive Eros of these
final two sections reveals itself free from the repressive
need to labor, within an order of abundance compatible
with this freedom; it also envisions the reconciliation of
sensuousness and reason, which entails the sensualization
of reason and the conquest of time, insofar as it under-
mines lasting gratification. This vision is not merely

transcendentalized exposition. It presupposes a total

157

revolution in the ways men perceive and feel in order to
achieve it in the material world, where Shelley at this
stage of his growth clearly believed it could happen.

The pivotal Significance of the Alastor poet's
dream-vision has eluded final definition by critics be-
cause the dream-maiden herself is both the poet's destroyer
and preserver. But it is precisely in the dialectic in-
volving these competing impulses, equatable with Freud's
life instinct and death instinct, that the poet pursues
his redemptive vision. AS we have seen, Eros, or love,
preserves him only to define the ultimate direction of his
death. By trying to affirm his imaginative vision (Eros)
in the real world, he also affirms the flaw in himself
(Thanatos), and exacts the world's retribution.

The poet's desire to redeem his dream upon awaking
activates the Nirvana principle which finally fulfills
itself through a Narcissistic release into death. This

liebestod is full of the voluptuous promise of a reunion

 

that can be attained, the poet believes, only through ulti-
mate regression into death. Unlike Mab's vision of a re-
generated society, which includes all of humankind, the
Alastor poet's desire is very private and individualistic.
The incidents and scenery of the surrounding world thus re-
flect and illuminate only his inner struggle.

Gradually, the forces of death predominate in this

struggle. The eagle plummeting to its death while locked

158

in the serpent's coils; the poet's turbulent journey by
water; his own compelling but forewarning image in the
fountain--all reveal the mastering impulse of death. While
he pursued his vision of beauty and truth in the world, it
illuminated his being. But at the same time it led him to
embrace Eros' counterpart, Death. His quest is tragic be—
cause it transforms his Special vision into a flaw.

Prometheus' multi-dimensional Eros--Asia, Panthea
and Ione--initiate the most complex redemptive vision in
all of Shelley's poetry via the medium of Panthea's dream-
visions. The sole communion between Prometheus and Asia,
Panthea's dreams, generates the guest which eventuates in
Jupiter's downfall as it redeems Prometheus. In Act II
Panthea's second and unremembered dream of Asia's love for
Prometheus emerges following her first dream expressing his
love for Asia. It is Panthea's second dream which must be
followed to the inner reaches of Prometheus' psyche, Demo-
gorgon's cave, before Asia can reunite with Prometheus and
before Demogorgon can ascend to overthrow Jupiter, the death
instinct expressing itself through individual and institu-
tionalized domination of men's minds.

Jupiter's overthrow, moreover, is as much the in—
evitable effect of Prometheus' love (Eros) as it is the re-
sult of historical necessity. Instead of opposing Jupiter
aggressively and thereby reenforcing the repressive organi-

zation of civilization and the internalized repression of

159

the mind, Prometheus liberates himself and mankind through
his total commitment to Eros. This commitment grows out

of Eros' need to preserve itself. So he renounces his
curse upon Jupiter and therefore his traditional Promethean
identity of perpetual struggle and renunciation of pleasure;
no longer can he repress Eros, thereby strengthening Jupi-
ter's power in order to create suppressive civilization.
His renunciation of his curse displaces his earlier renun-
ciation of pleasure and activates the quest into the sub-
liminal realm of Demogorgon's cave by way of Panthea's
dream-visions. Under the guiding impulse of Demogorgon,
the embodiment of the Nirvana principle, Prometheus wills
the direction of his new sensibility toward a Narcissistic
and Orphic world of sensuous play, beauty, and contempla-
tion--the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.

In The Witch of Atlas Shelley attains the fullest

 

realization of the Narcissism implicit in his redemptive
vision. The incarnation of a dream-vision herself, the
Witch redeems pleasure, absorbs death and halts time, like
Narcissus. Her world involves no unresolved tension be-
tween Eros and Death. Contemplating the art and learning
on the walls of her cave which are an extension of her own
consciousness, the Witch embodies the Eros at the heart of
the imagination, the creative process. Her Eros, like that
of Narcissus, is akin to Death and fulfills itself through

the Nirvana principle as it informs the deaths of naiads

160

and nymphs. Death is not threatening because it is per-
fectly integrated with Eros. Her creation of the Herma-
phrodite symbolizes a sexuality purified of all repressive
tendencies. Finally, presiding over the world of mortal
dreamers, She beckons them back into a childlike world of
play. In so doing she reforms men so that death's eternity
becomes a Narcissism of all human experience.

In Epipsychidion Shelley returns to the intensely

 

private vision of the Alastor poet. The narrator of

Epipsychidion single-mindedly pursues his projected love-

 

ideal or "soul out of my soul" as a personal redemption.

Unlike Queen Mab and The Witch of Atlas whose redemptive

 

 

Eros extends to all humankind, Shelley's epipsyche expands
outwardly, beyond his anticipated erotic union with Emily
to an individual and mystical reintegration into nature.
His search for Emily, like the Alastor poet's quest to re-
cover his dream-maiden, lures him "toward sweet death" and
thereby threatens to annihilate as it promises to redeem
him. But because she originates somewhere between dream
and the filmy, rarified atmOSphere that passes for reality
in the poem, Emily's presence blurs the sharp distinction
critics like to draw between the subjective world of the
narrator's desire and the harsh limitations of reality.

It is therefore overly facile to insist upon the
failure of the poet's desire because of reality's limita-

tions. It is more fruitful to recognize that the narrator's

161

entire vision is permeated with the tension between the
competing claims of Eros and Thanatos as embodied in his
desire for Emily. SO, like an interrupted dream, the poet's
vision remains suSpended between Death and Eros in its
penultimate, closing lines: "one life, one death / One
Heaven, One Hell." And it is precisely because the boun-
daries between subjectivity and objectivity remain indeter-
minate and Emily apparently belongs to both worlds, that

the tension between Bros and Death, unlike the earlier
poems, remains unresolved.

The dream-vision in Hellas, as in all the preceding
narrative poems under discussiOn, is an important motive
force. But unlike the other dream-visions it is not poten-
tially redemptive for the dreamer, Mahmud. Instead, be-
cause he is a tyrant, it foretokens his own eventual down-
fall and the demise of his empire, along with the coincident
redemption of those whom he would Oppress and destroy. This
redemptive counterforce is represented by the Greek chorus
of women captives. Throughout the poem they embody its
subversive Eros that promises to redeem Greece, and by ex-
tension, all mankind. In Hellas, Eros is so consistently
associated with social regeneration that the poem becomes
a firmer statement of the necessity for universal redemp-

tion than Queen Mab or The Witch of Atlas. Mahmud's dream,

 

 

ironically for him, vindicates the Greek chorus. His un-

remembered dream (like Panthea's) when revealed, augurs his

162

own destruction, a self-destruction rooted in his own ob-
sessive authoritarianism.

Like Jupiter, Mahmud might be said to embody the
death instinct. His every impulse is to repress and de-
stroy his enemies in order to preserve his law and his
order. His dream also echoes the redemption of mankind as
expressed by the Greek choruses. AS Ahasuerus enables
Mahmud to understand in recalling his dream, Mahmud's em-
pire and his rule must give way to a larger freedom than
his own, a freedom that liberates all men. The redemptive
Eros in Hellas emerges therefore not from the consciousness
of a Single individual but from the collective response of
an entire, oppressed pSOple.

The inwardly expanding, concentric dream-visions
of "The Triumph of Life" reflect Shelley's deepening con-
sciousness of the elemental life and death struggle in the
human psyche and in human society. Balanced against the
death-in-life pageantry of the poet's "waking dream,"
Rousseau's dreams express the primacy of death. Death is
the dominant impulse throughout most of the poem. Although
driven by the blindfolded charioteer of Necessity, Life's
chariot is under the control of Death. And all its cap-
tives, however great their station was in the world, are
Death's captives. Only Socrates and Christ died deaths
which were redemptive, because they were governed by Eros.

Rousseau admits to Shelley that he too has been a

victim of Life's destructive impulses. Like the other

163

captives in Life's train, whatever Eros he possesses is
repressed by Death. He reveals how this happened in his
personal history. The dream-maiden, Iris, who visited him
full of redemptive promise, was also like Emily, and the
dream-maiden in Alastor in that she possessed a sinister
side. Her Sinister connotations may be attributable to
Rousseau's failure perhaps to respond correctly to her
potentially redemptive promise.

Evidently Shelley intended to answer his own ques-
tion, "what is life?" on a redemptive note that affirms
Eros. This would have meant the re-emergence of Iris or
another less ambiguous female figure to guide him and re-
veal to him the possibilities of a personal regeneration
rooted in Eros. As the poem stands, it remains like its

prototype, Una Favola, an unresolved tension between the

 

competing impulses of Life and Death.

From the early framing function of Ianthe's dream,
with its Sharply drawn polarity between a redemptive Eros
and a history throttled by its own destructive institutions,
through "The Triumph of Life," which begins to eXplore
Death more subtly as a psychic and social phenomenon,
Shelley penetrated not only more intricately into the de-
structive forces of the death instinct and the precarious-
ness of Life but also into the obstinacy of Life and its
power over Death. Mab awes Ianthe with her vision of even-

tual redemption for mankind, just as she had impressed her

164

earlier with the immensely destructive capacities of man
and his institutions. AS the Alastor poet becomes in-
creasingly obsessed with death, his life becomes increas-
ingly imperiled, and he deludes himself into death in the
belief that he will embrace Love by affirming Death. For
Prometheus, his life can only be fulfilled by measuring not
toward death (Jupiter), like the Alastor poet, but from
death and toward life, in all its extraordinary ramifica-
tions, as personified by Ione, Panthea and Asia. The
Witch, on the other hand, never feels threatened by Death,
as Prometheus did prior to renouncing his curse, nor by
the precariousness of Life. She, after all, embodies Bros
and therefore absorbs death in a perfect Narcissism. But
whereas the Witch can confidently affirm Eros, Shelley's

narrator in Epipsychidipn, like the Alastor poet, must

 

risk death to attain Eros, although he is acutely aware

of the "Hell" involved in affirming Eros. And while he is
"Love's" his desire remains suspended between Bros and
Death at the conclusion of the poem. Mahmud in Hellas is
akin to the Alastor poet and Jupiter in his preoccupation
with the precariousness of life because he is obsessed

with death. And unlike the Witch, who would redeem all

men because She embodies Eros, Mahmud's death impulse would
engulf all men. Life's victims in "The Triumph of Life,"
unlike the Eros informing the Greek chorus in Hellas,

hurtle themselves toward Death in the belief that Death is

165

Life. Shelley, however, and Rousseau presumably need to
move away from Death so they can affirm Life.

Thus the exploratory device of the dream-vision
reveals how Shelley's poetic vision is redemptive and, more
importantly, how the Life-Death struggle informs this vision
and deepens its complexity and meaning. Through use of the
dream-vision, the familiar dichotomy between desire and
reality gives way to a vision of the competing desires of
Eros and Thanatos within the context of a Shifting reality.
Beyond this fundamental polarity in Shelley's poetry, how-
ever, it is possible to discern, with the aid of Marcuse
and Freud, the subtler dynamics of renunciation and repres-
sion as components of the death impulse and the imperative
of an emerging Narcissism that expresses both the pleasure
principle and the Nirvana principle in human society and

in the individual psyche.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

166

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Carpenter, Edward and Barnefield, George. The Psychology
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De La Mare, Walter. Behold, This Dreamer! New York:
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