To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things.He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed.His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse.He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other.Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and shake down the golden leaves.
The finest specimens of this faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, Prometheus Unbound.It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and a weeping mist of music fills the air.The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic reel and rout and revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to drunken waste.The choruses sweep down the wind, tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost cries for respite from the unrolling splendours.Yet these scenes, so wonderful from a purely poetical standpoint that no one could wish them away, are (to our humble thinking) nevertheless the artistic error of the poem.
Abstractedly, the development of Shelley's idea required that he should show the earthly paradise which was to follow the fall of Zeus.But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should have ceased with it.A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings (such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the scene) would have been legitimate enough.
Instead, however, the bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there is no longer an action to advance.
It is as if the choral finale of an opera were prolonged through two acts.
We have, nevertheless, called Prometheus Shelley's greatest poem because it is the most comprehensive storehouse of his power.Were we asked to name the most PERFECT among his longer efforts, we should name the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely fancy giving the slain bird a silken burial.
Seldom is the death of a poet mourned in true poetry.Not often is the singer coffined in laurel-wood.Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is Adonais.In the English language only Lycidas competes with it; and when we 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 [thought Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal 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;
