The prophetic strain: Shelley on erotic failure and world legislation.(essay)(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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Till old experience do attain



To something like Prophetic strain.

--Milton (1)

1

MICHAEL FERBER STATES THE ORTHODOX VIEW WHEN HE SAYS THAT IT IS with the completion of Alastor that "Shelley becomes Shelley," that "he arrives at the modes, themes, and style distinctive of his 'mature' poetry." (2) In Greek, "Alastor" names an "avenging demon," and there is a certain irony, if not nihilism, in the notion of coming into one's own under the aegis of vengeance. Indeed, in his preface to the poem Shelley appears to portray the world as an intrinsically vengeful place, suggesting that it rewards those who recognize its true nature by killing them off quickly rather than subjecting them, like those who fail to do so, to "slow and poisonous decay": "that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influence, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion." (3) Harold Bloom writes in his gloss of this passage:

That Power is the Imagination, in its Wordsworthian formulation, and it brings with it a choice between two kinds of destruction: ... The first becomes a quest for a finite and measured object of desire which shall yet encompass in itself the beauty and truth of the infinite and unmeasured conceptions of the Poet. This quest is necessarily in vain, and leads to the untimely death of the quester. Such a theme would not have been acceptable to Wordsworth or Coleridge, and yet is the legitimate offspring of their own art and imaginative theory.... [T]o put it as a contrary of Wordsworth's language, Nature always will and must betray the human heart that loves her, for Nature ... is not adequate to meet the demands made upon her by the human imagination. (4)

This conception of a kind of Manichean antagonism between Imagination and Nature, between man and the world in which he's fated to pass his life, certainly is in keeping with the idea that Shelley's poem, and through it what we have come to recognize as "the mature Shelley," are born under the sign of a vengeful demon. Bloom suggests that "Shelley becomes Shelley" by asserting his incommensurability not only with Nature, but also with his own poetic progenitors, Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, by denying their incompatibility with Nature, are figured as representing not the nurturing soil of Shelleyan poetics but the "slow and poisonous decay" which that poetics springs to life by repudiating.

But this is in a sense to read Alastor's title with insufficient attention to what Bloom instructively identifies as Shelley's distinctively "urbane irony" (283). The preface does not only, as Bloom claims, contrast "two kinds of destruction: the Poet's solitude and the unimaginative man's lonely gregariousness" (285), but also, crucially, contrasts the "intercourse with an intelligence similar to himself" which the Poet actually "thirsts for," and the "single image," the "prototype of his conception," with which he vainly tries to quench that thirst. The Defense argues that "[t]he great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own," and that "[t]he great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause" (517). In this light, Alastor's Poet can be seen to confuse cause and effect, devoting his love wholly to a certain "image," forgetting that the point of the imagination itself is the "requisitions" it makes "on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings." In Alastor's preface, Shelley hardly holds the quest for sympathy to be vain; rather, it is precisely in contrast to that worthy end that the Poet's "vacancy of spirit makes itself felt":

The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave. (73)

Put most simply, the problem is not the Poet's quest for human sympathy but where he looks for it; and this characterization implies that there is a right place to look for it. As we've already begun to see, I think Shelley's conception of this right place has to do with a notion of the poetic imagination as integrally dependent on human sympathy as its underlying purpose, without, however, being able to definitively capture or fulfill that purpose in any of its determinate products: the inherently 'excessive' character of that purpose, its being always "too exquisite" for any determinate poetic product to capture, is the condition of sustaining poetic production generally. This means that Shelleyan imagination doesn't presuppose repudiation of nature, and that Shelley becoming Shelley doesn't presuppose repudiating Wordsworth and Coleridge. This is not to say that Shelley did not consider his precursors' triumphant reconciliationism as a significant failure; it's to say that he saw that failure, like that of Alastor's Poet, as a matter, not of failing to assert imaginative independence from nature, but of failing to meet the imagination's own "requisitions of sympathy." If, as the purpose of the poetic imagination, sympathy may sustain such imagination only to the extent that it defies definitive embodiment, if it is inherently excessive, then there is an important sense in which for Shelley such imagination necessarily fails. Which, again, hardly makes it vain: on the contrary, the argument of the following will be that it is precisely as an attempt to reconstruct Wordsworth's, Coleridge's, the Poet's, and finally his own, failures as constitutive (or "legislative") moments in the collective project of human sympathy ("the world," or what Shelley, also in the Defense, calls the "one great poem" to which all poetic efforts belong) that Shelley offers his distinctive contribution to that project, that "Shelley becomes Shelley."

2

Thus "Alastor," the vengeful demon, is precisely what the poem's subtitle calls it: "The Spirit of Solitude," the spirit which, in the words of the preface, simultaneously animates and dooms the "attempt to exist without human sympathy" (73). The prevailing theme of the poem is the way in which the quest to achieve unity with nature--to achieve, in Wordsworth's terms, coherence in oneself through the "piety" of "nature" itself--derails when the idea, the "conceptual prototype," of such unity is given precedence over its practical execution. It is just such a distinction--between the actual practical accomplishment of love and obsession with the abstract idea of loving--that the epigraph from Augustine registers: "Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare." Augustine's less poetical contextualization makes the point most clearly:

As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love; and from a subconscious poverty of mind I hated the thought of being less inwardly destitute. I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love.... My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God. But that was not the kind of hunger I felt. I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became. (5)

Interestingly, although Augustine is talking about carnal desire, he faults himself not for incontinence itself so much as for the conceptual obfuscation that underwrites it by assimilating actual love to love of the mere idea of loving. In turn, although Alastor's Poet's failing is in a sense the opposite one of neglecting carnal love in favor of a spiritualized version, his fundamental problem is the same (which in light of the epigraph is unsurprising): if desire presupposes lack, then love of loving indicates precisely the absence of what it's after; as a love-object, the idea of loving represents a shrinking from the true practice of loving, an inversion of the "spirit of sweet human love" into a baleful "spirit of solitude:" "The spirit of sweet human love has sent / a vision to the sleep of him who spurned / Her choicest gifts" (203-5).

Like Shelley, Augustine distinguishes between the true object of his yearning and the false idea of that object. Moreover, Augustine, again like Alastor, characterizes this idea not only as false but also as part of a compulsive, strategic (albeit "subconscious") resistance to the truth: the false object does not merely misdirect the desire, but transforms it into a positive, systematic aversion to its actual aim, so that "the emptier I was, the more unappetizing [that aim] became," while "inward destitution," by contrast, became cherished for its own sake. So, as the love of loving gets established as an end in itself, its pursuit progressively exacerbates the same lack it is supposed to fulfill. It is a classic Freudian neurosis insofar as an actual, but troubling desire gives way to a very untroubling, because tightly regulated, pursuit that not only neglects the real desire but positively stigmatizes it, makes it an object of "hatred." On the other hand, what is satisfying for the neurosis is actually detrimental; one feeds off one's own hunger. In respect to its ostensible end, the love of loving is not merely vain, but positively destructive.

If the Poet's "spurning the gifts" of the beneficent spirit of love makes that spirit devolve to a baleful "spirit of solitude" that generates only a "vision," or negation, of such love, then Shelley is most concerned to show how the Poet, like Augustine, practically enacts this negation in the very moment of conceiving it. Thus, in the immediately ensuing sentence:

He eagerly pursues Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; He overleaps the bounds. Alas! Alas! Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost, In the wide pathless desart of dim sleep, That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? ... This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung His brain even like despair.

(205-22)

The "vision" is so seductively "treacherous" that merely to bear witness to it is already to "overlap the bounds." To spurn the gifts of actual love in life is to subject oneself to "doubts [i.e. intimations]" of such gifts beyond life; yet this is not in itself to transcend living, but, on the contrary, to commit oneself to an "insatiate hope" for such transcendence, to live according to...

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