the damage done to poetry in general by the overuse of Romantic nature lyrics in
primary school. It is still rumoured that Wordsworth’s heart danced only with
daffodils. Shelley is not only the author of ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou
never wert’ (‘To a Skylark’). His writing is intellectually abstract, and ‘Considerably
uninviting / To those who, meditation slighting, / Were moulded in a different
frame’. This is one of his own cracks at Wordsworth in Peter Bell the Third.
Wordsworth ‘had as much imagination / As a pint-pot: – he never could / Fancy
another situation, / ... Than that wherein he stood.’ Equally unetherial are the
versatile verse letters Shelley wrote to Byron, Maria Gisborne and Jane Williams. His
major achievement lies in his philosophical poems such as Mont Blanc,Prometheus
Unbound and The Triumph of Life, in the pastoral elegy Adonais, and in such lyrics
as ‘When the lamp is shattered’ and the Choruses from Hellas.
Philosophically, Shelley was a Platonist, holding the world of appearances less real
than the world of underlying Forms and Ideas. An omnivorous reader, he was keenly
interested in empirical science, and eventually became sceptical about earlier revo-
lutionary fantasies, such as that in The Masque of Anarchy where ‘ankle-deep in
blood, / Hope, that maiden most serene, / Was walking with a quiet mien’. The
atheist constructed new myths, as in his ambitious lyric drama,Prometheus
Unbound. In this completion of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the Titan who can
foresee the future is given the traits Shelley found admirable in Milton’s Satan. A
cosmic explosion releases Prometheus from the tortures imposed by a jealous
Jupiter. The play ends with prophecies of the liberation of mankind. It has lyric vari-
ety and fine passages, but the mythology is obscure. More impressive are the bleakly
apocalyptic visions ofThe Triumph of Life, incomplete at his death.
Critics who complain that Shelley’s world lacks solidity and oxygen should
reckon with his serious Platonic belief that words are inadequate to express the ulti-
mate,which is ineffable. Shelley deploys his music and rhetoric to enact a mind
racing in pursuit of complex and evanescent truths. The energy, vision and music of
the most exciting of English lyric poets are exemplified in this stanza from Adonais,
an elegy for John Keats:
The one remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. – Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! – Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Shelley here is near to despair – as a pastoral elegist should be – but self-pity
obtrudes when he ‘Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, / Which was like
Cain’s or Christ’s’.
This poet-as-victim also appears in that wonderful performance, his Ode to the
West Wind,
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
The Ode combines extreme formal complexity with rhythmic energy and a cosmic
scale ofreference. The final stanza is a prayer to the wind of inspiration to240 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837