"The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the Whirlwinds my banner unfurl."
How proud when it shouts:
"The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead."
What calm is in this:
"And, when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove."
What consciousness of power in:
"From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof;
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow."
Yet the real spirit of the Cloud is playfulness, the playfulness of a
child. Even when the sun has swept it from the sky, it only laughs:--
"I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,--
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again."
It is not only the unlikeness to Byron's gloomy passion which strikes
us in the sublime childlikeness and bounty and all-embracing love of
this Cloud; there is another characteristic in this poetry, which we
shall merely mention here, and devote more attention to later, namely,
its antique, its absolutely primitive, spirit. We are reminded of
the most ancient Aryan poetry of nature, of the Vedas, of Homer. In
comparison with this, Byron is altogether modern. When the Cloud sings:
"That orbèd maiden with white fire laden
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor
By the midnight breezes strewn!
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The Stars peep behind her and peer;"
and when it speaks of "the sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,"
the poet transports us, by the primitive freshness of his imagination,
back to the time when the phenomena of nature in all their newness were
transformed into myths.
To Shelley these phenomena were ever new. He lived among them in
a way which no poet had done before or has done since. By far the
greater part of his short life of thirty years was spent under the
open sky. The sea was his passion; he was constantly sailing; his most
beautiful poems were written while he lay in his boat with the sun
beating on him, browning his soulful face and delicate hands. It was a
passion that was the pleasure of his life and the cause of his death.
Everything that had to do with boats and sailing had an attraction for
him. He had a childlike hobby for floating paper boats; it is said
that on one occasion, having no other paper at hand, he launched a £50
bank-note on the pond in Kensington Gardens.
He never learned to swim. At the time when he was constantly, by day
and by night, sailing on the Lake of Geneva with Lord Byron, their
boat was once very nearly upset. Shelley refused all help, and calmly
prepared himself to go down. "I felt in this near prospect of death,"
he afterwards wrote, in a mixture of sensations, among which terror
entered, though but subordinately. My feelings would have been less
painful had I been alone, but I knew that my companion would have
attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation when I
thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine." A few
years later he had no painful feelings at all in contemplating such
an end. When some months before his death, Trelawny rescued him from
drowning, all he said was: "It's a great temptation; if old women's
tales are true, in another minute I might have been in another planet."
In Italy he lived in the open air; now he would be riding with Byron in
the country near Venice, Ravenna, or Pisa; now spending whole days in a
rowing-boat on the Arno or the Serchio; now out at sea in his yacht. It
is interesting to observe how frequently a boat serves him as a simile.
He wrote often out at sea, very seldom under the shelter of a roof.
_Prometheus_ he wrote in Rome, upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths
of Caracalla; wandering among the thickets of odoriferous trees on the
immense platforms and dizzy arches, he was inspired by the bright blue
sky of Rome and the vigorous, almost intoxicating, awakening of spring
in that glorious climate. _The Triumph of Life_ he wrote partly on the
roof of his house at Lerici, partly lying out in a boat during the
most overpowering heat and drought. Shelley belonged to the salamander
species; broiling sunshine was what suited him best.
It was while lying in a grove on the banks of the Arno, near Florence,
that he wrote the most magnificent of his poems, the _Ode to the West
Wind_.
In its first stanza the wind is the breath of autumn, driving
the dead leaves, "yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
pestilence-stricken multitudes"; and of spring, filling "with living
hues and odours plain and hill"--we hear it blowing, and we hear its
echo in the appealing refrain: "Hear, oh hear!"
In the second stanza we are again reminded of the old mythologies,
when the poet sings of the loose clouds on the Wind's stream, "shook
from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean," and of "the locks of the
storm" spread on the blue surface of the airy surge "like the bright
hair uplifted from the head of some fierce Mænad."
But along with the breath of the West Wind we have Shelley's whole soul
in the final outburst:
"Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse.
Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
Compare this Ode with the beautiful passage in the Third Canto of
_Childe Harold_, in which Byron cries:
"Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,--could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe--into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."
Or with his apostrophe to night, during the wild storm on the Lake of
Geneva:--
"Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,--
_A portion of the tempest and of thee!_"
There could not be a better example of the difference between the
attitude towards nature of an all-embracing and an all-defying poetic
intellect. Shelley does not, like Byron, desire to possess himself of
her thunderbolts. He loves her, not as his weapon, but as his lyre;
loves her, unappalled by her gigantic proportions, familiar with
her prodigious forces, feeling that the universe is his home. His
imagination delights in occupying itself with the heavenly bodies; he
is fascinated by their beauty and life as others are by the beauty of
the forget-me-not and the rose.
What powerful, all-compelling imagination in the poem which he writes
on hearing of the death of Napoleon!
"What! alive and so bold, O Earth?
Art thou not over-bold?
What! leapest thou forth as of old
In the light of thy morning mirth,
The last of the flock of the starry fold?
Ha! leapest thou forth as of old?
Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled,
And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?
How! is not thy quick heart cold?
What spark is alive on thy hearth?
How! is not _his_ death-knell knolled,
And livest _thou_ still, Mother Earth?
Thou wert warming thy fingers old
O'er the embers covered and cold
Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled--
What, Mother, dost thou laugh now he is dead?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
'Still alive and still bold,' shouted Earth,
'I grow bolder and still more bold.
The dead fill me ten thousandfold
Fuller of speed and splendour and mirth.
I was cloudy and sullen and cold,
Like a frozen chaos uprolled,
Till by the spirit of the mighty dead
My heart grew warm: I feed on whom I fed.'"
With the eyes of his soul Shelley beheld the soulèd spheres circling in
space, glowing within, sparkling without, lighting up the night; his
gaze sounded the unfathomable abysses where verdant worlds and comets
with glittering hair, and pale, ice-cold moons, glide past each other.
He compares them to the drops of dew which fill the flower chalices in
the morning; he sees them whirl, world after world, from their genesis
to their annihilation, like bubbles on a stream, glittering, bursting,
and yet immortal, ever generating new beings, new laws, new gods,
bright or sombre--garments wherewith to hide the nakedness of death. He
sees them as Raphael painted them in Rome in the church of Santa Maria
del Popolo, each governed and guided by its angel; and, wielding the
absolute poetic power of his imagination, he assigns to the unfortunate
Keats, lately dead, the throne of a yet kingless sphere.
His Witch of Atlas has her home in the ether. Like Arion on the
dolphin, she rides on a cloud, "singing through the shoreless air,"
and "laughs to hear the fire-balls near behind." In this poem Shelley
plays with the heavenly bodies like a juggler with his balls; in
_Prometheus Unbound_ he opens them as the botanist opens a flower. In
the Fourth Act of _Prometheus_ the earth is represented transparent
as crystal; the secrets of its deep heart are laid bare; we see its
wells of unfathomed fire, its "water-springs, whence the great sea
even as a child is fed," its mines, its buried trophies and ruins and
cities. Shelley's genius hovers over its surface, inhaling the fragrant
exhalations of the forests, watching the emerald light reflected from
the leaves, and listening to the music of the spheres. But to him the
earth is not a solid, composite sphere; it is a living spirit, in whose
unknown depths there slumbers an unheard voice, the silence of which is
broken when Prometheus is unbound.
When Jupiter has fallen, has sunk into the abyss, the Earth and the
Moon join in an exulting antiphon, a hymn of praise that has not its
equal. The Earth exults over its deliverance from the tyranny of
the Deity; the Moon sings its burning, rapturous love-song to the
Earth--tells how mute and still it becomes, how full of love, when it
is covered by the shadow of the Earth. Its barrenness is at an end:--
"Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move:
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis Love, all Love!"
Shelley's imagination resolves nature into its elements, and rejoices
over each of them with the naïveté of a child. The Witch of Atlas
delights in fire:--
"Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is;
Each flame of it is as a precious stone
Dissolved in ever-moving light, and _this_
Belongs to each and all who gaze thereon."