"The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies:
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night.
Brief even as bright.
Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day,
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou--and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep."
The first verse indicates the transitoriness of all earthly beauty
and happiness; the second, the suffering that lies concealed in the
very happiness; and the third is an exhortation to enjoy the dream of
happiness as long as possible.
A mood of like nature has found expression in the incomparable poem
which bears the simple title, _Lines_. This poem Shelley could not
have written unless one after another of his own fond beliefs had
evaporated, unless his passions for Harriet, for Mary, for Emilia
Viviani, had ended in a sorrowful awakening. Yet it bears no trace of
being a personal confession. It is an impassioned proclamation of the
universal laws of life, first softly hummed, and then sung in a voice
which has never had its equal.
"When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed;
When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot."
The lines on the human heart in the third verse are as condensed as a
couplet of Pope's and as melodious as bars of Beethoven:--
"O, Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why chose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?"
And the poem ends with this prophecy, in which we can hear the passions
that have taken possession of the heart taking their wild will with
it:--
"Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high:
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter
When leaves fall and cold winds come."
A certain characteristic of Shelley, one which readers who know him
only from anthologies will at once cite as his chief characteristic,
seems to be strongly at variance with this unexampled personal
intensity. I refer to the well-known fact that the most famous of
his lyric poems are inspired by subjects outside of the emotional
life, nay, outside of the world of man altogether; they treat of the
cloud and the gale, of the life of the elements, of the marvellous
freedom and stormy strength of wind and water. They are meteorological
and cosmical poems. Yet there is no real contradiction in the most
intimately emotional of lyric poets being, to all appearance, the most
occupied with externals. We find the reason for it given by Shelley
himself in a short essay _On Love_. He describes the essence of love
as an irresistible craving for sympathy: "If we reason, we would be
understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain
were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's
nerves should vibrate to our own, that lips of motionless ice should
not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood.
This is Love ... The meeting with an understanding capable of clearly
estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize
upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to
cherish and unfold in secret ... this is the invisible and unattainable
point to which Love tends.... Hence in solitude, or in that deserted
state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathise
not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky....
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the
flowing brooks which bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes,
like the voice of one beloved singing to you alone."
In a note on _The Witch of Atlas_, Mrs. Shelley, too, writes that it
was the certainty of neither being able to arouse the sympathy nor win
the approbation of his countrymen, in combination with a shrinking from
opening the wounds of his own heart by portraying human passion, which
led her husband to seek forgetfulness in the airiest flights of fancy.
It was this very craving for a sympathy which his fellow-creatures
refused him, that made his feeling for nature an ardent desire, and
gave it its wonderful originality. Such a thing was unknown in English
poetry. The stiff, artificial school of Pope had been superseded by
the Lake School. Pope had perfumed the air with affectation; the Lake
School had thrown open the windows and let in the fresh air of the
mountains and the sea. But Wordsworth's love of nature was passionless,
whatever he may say to the contrary in _Tintern Abbey_. Nature was
to him an invigorator and a suggester of Protestant reflections.
That meanest flower which gave him thoughts that often lay too deep
for tears, he put into his buttonhole as an ornament, and looked at
sometimes in a calmly dignified manner, revolving a simile. Shelley
flees to nature for refuge when men shut their doors upon him. He
does not, like others, feel it to be something entirely outside of
himself--cold, or indifferent, or cruel. Its stony calm where man's
woe and weal are concerned, its divine impassibility as regards our
life and death, our short triumphs and long sufferings, are to him
benevolence in comparison with man's stupidity and brutality. In _Peter
Bell the Third_ he jeers at Wordsworth because in the latter's love
of nature it was "his drift to be a kind of moral eunuch"; he himself
loves her like an ardent lover; he has pursued her most secret steps
like her shadow; his pulse beats in mysterious sympathy with hers.
He himself, like his Alastor, resembles "the Spirit of Wind, with
lightning eyes and eager breath, and feet disturbing not the drifted
snow."
He calls animals and plants his beloved brothers and sisters, and
compares himself, with his keen susceptibility and his trembling
sensitiveness, to the chameleon and the sensitive plant. In one of his
poems he writes of the chameleons, which live on light and air, as the
poet does on love and fame, and which change their hue with the light
twenty times a day; and compares the life led by the poet on this cold
earth with that which chameleons might lead if they were hidden from
their birth in a cave beneath the sea. And in one of the most famous of
all he tells how
"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew;
And the young winds fed it with silver dew;
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(And) each (flower) was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear.
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all; it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver:--
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves even like Love,--its deep heart is full;
It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
Even more characteristically, even more personally, does Shelley's
inmost feeling, his heart's heart, such as it became after hard fate
had set its stamp upon it, express itself in the beautiful elegy on
Keats, which was written in a frame of burning indignation produced
by the base and rancorous attack in the _Quarterly Review. He is
describing how all the poets of the day come to weep over their
brother's bier:--
"'Midst others of less note came one frail form,
A phantom among men, companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness
Actæon-like; and now he tied astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way
Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.
A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift--
A love in desolation masked--a power
Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour.
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow;--even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood even while the heart may break.
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white and pied and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears. Well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own.
As in the accents of an unknown land
He sang new sorrow, sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured, 'Who art thou?'
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's--Oh I that it should be so."
Shelley here compares himself to Actæon, whom the sight of Nature's
naked loveliness drove distracted. It is plain that the strength of his
strong will was required to keep this man with the fragile, delicate
body from positive destruction by the visions and apparitions of his
imagination. He often felt as if they were more than his brain could
bear; and when he then, an exile in a foreign land, sought alleviation
in solitude, he experienced such impressions of nature as that which is
preserved in the entrancing _Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples_,
stanzas which contain the very essence of Shelley's poetry. He does not
describe the landscape. He never does describe. It is not the outward
forms and colours of things which he shows us, but that to which he is
extraordinarily alive, what we have called their spirit and soul.