Shelley [9]
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; 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
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; 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