Shelley; an essay | Page 6

Lerici. We know not how this may affect others, but over
us it is a coincidence which has long tyrannised with an absorbing
inveteracy of impression (strengthened rather than diminished by the
contrast between the levity of the utterance and its fatal

fulfilment)--thus to behold, heralding itself in warning mockery
through the very lips of its predestined victim, the Doom upon whose
breath his locks were lifting along the coasts of Campania. The death
which he had prophesied came upon him, and Spezzia enrolled another
name among the mournful Marcelli of our tongue; Venetian glasses
which foamed and burst before the poisoned wine of life had risen to
their brims.

Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of
revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.
Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than

The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from
the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less
purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of
makebelieve raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that
his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those
which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He
dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling
amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors
nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled
thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and
out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies.
He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He
gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of
patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful
fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.
This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a
singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of Prometheus Unbound, for it
made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet. This
child-like quality assimilated him to the child-like peoples among
whom mythologies have their rise. Those Nature myths which,
according to many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very
basis of Shelley's poetry. The lark that is the gossip of heaven, the
winds that pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the clouds that
are snorted from the sea's broad nostril, all the elemental spirits of
Nature, take from his verse perpetual incarnation and reincarnation,
pass in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms
of his imagery.
Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of
Nature. For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering:
they exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the poet
should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such
following of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a picture set
for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared
for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for
his own palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character

of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of
Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze
arising from his crackling fantasies. The materials for such visionary
Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but
they are recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye
beheld. "Don't you wish you had?" as Turner said. The one justification
for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a
love even more passionate, though perhaps less profound.
Wordsworth's _Nightingale and Stockdove_ sums up the contrast
between the two, as though it had been written for such a purpose.
Shelley is the "creature of ebullient heart," who
Sings as if the god of wine
Had helped him to a valentine.
Wordsworth's is the
--Love with quiet blending,
Slow to begin and never ending,
the "serious faith and inward glee."
But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the
blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and
best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to
Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in
images. The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of
Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort
for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with
figure. Suspended in the dripping well