Shelley; an essay | Page 9

prefer Adonais_ to _Lycidas, we are following the
precedent set in the case of Cicero: Adonais is the longer. As regards

command over abstraction, it is no less characteristically Shelleian than
Prometheus. It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with
daring exquisiteness, from Morning who sought:
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears
which should adorn the ground,
and who
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day,
to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead shepherd, the Dreams
Whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed; and whom
he taught
The love that was its music;
of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning over him,
Upon the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping
flower, there lies
A tear some dream has loosened from his brain!

Lost angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with
no stain
She faded like a cloud which hath outwept its rain.
In the solar spectrum, beyond the extreme red and extreme violet rays,
are whole series of colours, demonstrable, but imperceptible to gross
human vision. Such writing as this we have quoted renders visible the
invisibilities of imaginative colour.
One thing prevents Adonais from being ideally perfect: its lack of
Christian hope. Yet we remember well the writer of a popular memoir
on Keats proposing as "the best consolation for the mind pained by this
sad record" Shelley's inexpressibly sad exposition of Pantheistic
immortality:
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely,
etc.

What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan
countenance is as the countenance of a despair? What deepest depth of
agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality
which thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved
elements may circulate through her veins?
Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am as
the vocal breath floating from an organ. I too shall fade on the winds, a
cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in the ears of
men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and from my
one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition of this
consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour, Pessimism.
Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws from his
own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery that hiss against his
tears.
With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, Adonais is
lighted; but they are obtained by implicitly assuming the personal
immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to
greet the dead youth,
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built
beyond mortal thought
Far in the unapparent.
And again the final stanza of the poem:
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my
spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling
throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest riven;
The massy
earth, the sphered skies are given:
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of
Adonais like a star
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
The Soul of Adonais?--Adonais, who is but
A portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.

After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the
lover of Shelley leans most lovingly, which he has oftenest in his mind,
which best represent Shelley to him and which he instinctively reverts
to when Shelley's name is mentioned are some of the shorter poems and
detached lyrics. Here Shelley forgets for a while all that ever makes his
verse turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes
that he is anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the
clouds. He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy
into heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that
absolute virgin-gold of song which is the scarcest among human
products, and for which we can go to but three poets--Coleridge,
Shelley, Chopin, {8} and perhaps we should add Keats. Christabel_
and _Kubla-Khan_; The Skylark_, The Cloud_, and _The Sensitive
Plant (in its first two parts). The Eve of Saint Agnes_ and _The
Nightingale; certain of the Nocturnes;--these things make very
quintessentialised loveliness. It is attar of poetry.
Remark, as a thing worth remarking, that, although Shelley's diction is
at other times singularly rich, it ceases in these poems to be rich, or to
obtrude itself at all; it is imperceptible; his Muse has become a
veritable Echo, whose body has dissolved from about her voice. Indeed,
when his diction is richest, nevertheless the poetry so dominates the
expression that we