SOURCE: “The Seashore's Path: Shelley and the Allegorical Imperative,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 51-79.

[In the following essay, White probes the didactic/allegorical quality of Shelley's works.]

Throughout Shelley's poetic career, his writings reflect on, engage with, and struggle against a particular mode of that discursive predicament more generally called allegory: didacticism. For Shelley, the ethical dimensions of poetry should reach beyond particular referential effects—the empirically determined moralities of time and place—the better to encompass the source that grounds them. In classic romantic fashion he names that source imagination. The position is articulated in the preface to Prometheus Unbound:

… it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.¹

The theoretical rejection of didactic poetry translates (intentionally or not) Coleridge's theoretical rejection of allegory into the concerns of Shelley's openly politicized poetics. Similarly, in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, “feelings” and “beauty” are preferred to “methodical system and argument.”² Poetry, in so far as it is not dedicated to the “direct enforcement of reform,” is, for that reason, the most direct route to the inward transformations on which reform ought to be predicated. Human action, to be fundamentally affected as well as authentically effected, must be grounded in such ideal distensions of inwardness as love, endurance, and hope. In this radical “politics of the spirit”³ politics per se gives way to ethics, and aesthetics becomes the passageway to historical change.

Critics of romanticism are quick to point out the evasiveness that sustains so beautiful an idealism. More than evasiveness, however, informs the contradictions of Shelley's aestheticization of a supposedly political program. His writings increasingly reflect an awareness that the most radical critique of referential meaning cannot entirely suspend referential effects, and the most transcendental of ethical imperatives cannot entirely evade historical consequences. Shelley's attacks on didacticism eventually include the ironic recognition that his poetry is nothing if not didactic. In the context of his ongoing engagement with this issue, canto I of The Revolt of Islam occupies a special position. This turns out to be, ironically enough, the position of an acknowledged or deliberate didacticism. The poem's preface states as much:

I have made no attempt to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument. I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of the virtue. … The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic.

(32)⁴

One complication of this relatively clear distinction is that the canto not only presents itself to the reader as a scene of instruction, it represents or narrates a scene of instruction, and, within that scene, it represents yet another. When the poet-narrator has something to say, he is told, repeatedly, that he is there to “listen” and to “learn” (343, 644-45). And the woman, “beautiful as morning” (262), who initiates and instructs him describes how the Spirit of Liberty once came to initiate and instruct her.⁵ Throughout, the text thematizes the encounter of text and reader so that from its inception, what is taught includes the apparatus and the act of teaching, and what is allegorized includes the possibility of allegory itself.

Ultimately, as it folds (and unfolds) this self-reflexive structure, much of canto I appears devoted to aestheticizing these pedagogical scenes, replacing “language” with what the poet-narrator calls “melody” (289) and didacticism with imaginative communion. That is, it does away with allegory by doing away with the linguistic character of its teaching. The trope of this aesthetic transformation of a didactic encounter into an imaginative one—or allegory into symbol—appears in almost every major Shelley text: “kindling.”⁶ Kindling names an eloquence that informs and yet surpasses language. When the woman tells the poet her “strange and awful tale” (334), a kindling glance opens the text:

                              … when that majestic theme
          Shrined in her heart found utterance, and she bent
                    Her looks on mine; those eyes a kindling beam
          Of love divine into my spirit sent,
And ere her lips could move, made the air eloquent.

(338-42)

The word “kindling” includes within itself a pun on interpersonal communion—common sympathies of kin or kind—that points up its crucial function as the trope of a properly poetic eloquence: persuasion without (the necessity for) didacticism; enthusiasm without argument; truth without reference. Language is secondary—an after effect of this more immediate communication.

The kindling which precedes utterance is mediated through the eye. An ideal listening is a visionary one and not only visionary. In the woman's story of her own encounter with a guiding spirit, the lips follow the eye in an openly erotic transfer. Enthusiasm becomes orgasm, albeit one that privileges the eye's agency:

          “The day passed thus: at night, methought
in dream
                    A shape of speechless beauty did appear:
          It stood like light on a careering stream
                    Of golden clouds which shook the atmosphere;
                    A wingèd youth, his radiant brow did wear
          The Morning Star: a wild dissolving bliss
                    Over my frame he breathed, approaching near,
          And bent his eyes of kindling
tenderness
Near mine, and on my lips impressed
a lingering kiss,—And said: …”

(496-505; my emphasis)

To touch the imagination, poetry must be beautiful: a vision that appears and, sensuously, impresses; language comes after the kindling encounter of eye and lip. Without the originary vision, no utterance has the power to transform or to enlighten its readers.⁷ In more strictly epistemological terms: without intentionality, referentiality is a moot point.

When the eye returns at the canto's close, it seems curiously isolated from any particularized body or agent. The scene is the Temple of the Spirit, and the Spirit itself has just appeared:

Wonder and joy a passing faintness threw
          Over my brow—a hand supported me,
Whose touch was magic strength: an eye
of blue
          Looked into mine, like moonlight, soothingly;
          And a voice said: “Thou
must a listener be
This day …”

(640-45, my emphasis)

The disembodied gathering of eye and hand with voice and light suggests a still more purified phenomenal intuition: an intuition at the limit of perception. It leads into a further set of figures which present eloquence as an originary beam, a shining through language:

I looked and lo! one stood forth eloquently
          His eyes were dark and deep, and the clear brow
Which shadowed them was like the morning sky …
                    —his gestures did obey
          The oracular mind that made his features glow
And where his curvèd lips half-open lay,
Passion's divinest stream had made impetuous way.

(649-51, 654-57)

The formulation is increasingly transcendent as traditional sources of light and dark reverse themselves to the point of hyperbolic confusion: The brow, “like the morning sky” shadows the darkness of eyes. This thickening yet dawn-like darkness is the image of a deeper light: that of “oracular mind.” The latter functions as the unseen ground of vision. Its depths underwrite the beautiful appearance of gestures and the “impetuous way” of a language that is itself a gesture. At the same time, it transcends perceptible outlines of time and place to communicate with their imaginative source, “the common sympathies of every human breast.”

The eye as the kindling agent of immediacy, an intuition that bypasses the formality of (spatial-temporal) perception, reveals its transcendent foundations, its infinite depth and darkness, even more clearly with the description of Cythna:

                              …—she was known
                    To be thus fair, by the few lines alone
          Which through her floating locks and gathered cloak,
                    Glances of soul dissolving glory, shone:—
          None else beheld her eyes—in him [Laon] they
woke
Memories which found a tongue as thus he silence broke.

(661-66)

The eye, outside the boundaries of any particularized experience, “appears”—though unseen—as the source of light and language. Whatever pathos informs its necessary indirection at least guarantees that it can never be less than absolutely universal.

Neville Rogers' study of Shelley's notebooks dwells at length on what is, apparently, a sketch of the Temple of the Spirit.⁸ Hovering over the scene are two disembodied eyes. The transcendent—the kindling—eye converges with its traditional, Platonic counterpart: it is a star made human or the human reflection of its purer light. Much later in the poem, Laon's final words to Cythna are a translation of a Platonic epigram asserting the same equation:

“Fair star of life and love,” I cried, “my
soul's delight,
Why lookest thou on the crystalline skies?
          O that my spirit were you heaven of night,
Which gazes on thee with its thousand eyes!”

(3788-91)

The star-like Cythna and the eye-like stars share a transparent “crystalline” vision each of the other, for each is essentially the same as the other.

The dedication to the poem adds a crucial element to this eye-star nexus. Troping from eye to star turns significantly through the name:

                    Nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become
          A star among the stars of mortal night,
                    If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,
          Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy belovèd name, thou Child of love and light.

(5-9)

          And through thine eyes, even in thy soul
I see
A lamp of vestal fire burning internally.
          They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
                    Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child.
          I wonder not—for one then left this earth
                    Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
                              Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
          Of its departing glory; still her fame
                    Shines on thee through the tempests dark and wild
          Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim
The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name.

(98-108)

The dedication closes with an image of Mary and Percy, “two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by” (124).

The perfected aesthetic communion that kindles the encounter between text and reader thus includes a perfected language. The language of light is name. Specifically, the dedication “To Mary——” traces in its very ellipses the memory of two names—Wollstonecraft, Godwin—whose importance to Shelley (especially in The Revolt of Islam) can hardly be over-estimated. The Revolt of Islam, however, is not in search of specific names. As the eye leads towards a deeper, darker light, so “Wollstonecraft” (figured in these lines as the morning star) and “Godwin” and even “Shelley” lead towards a valorization of the name in itself. As the eye is increasingly isolated from particular bodies, purified of its merely human agency, the name, too, may be withdrawn from the field of particular names: “——” is closer to the truth after all. A purified word, positing an ideal beyond historical referents, the name becomes an emblem of immortality. At the limit, it is immortality. To mediate eternal light—like a starry eye—is to have a name.

The cosmic history narrated by the woman in canto I foregrounds this all-but-divine name and its historical corruption in the form of partiality and abstraction—i.e. its allegorization as evil. When she speaks of Greece she shifts from description to direct address, to her own act of naming: “‘Steeping their [the Greeks’] hearts in the divinest flame / Which thy breath kindled, Power of holiest name!’” (409-10). The holiest name kindles; it inspires the passionate consummation, the enthusiastic awakening, and the visionary listening to which this poetic act of naming also aspires. (One may recall Hellas, “Another Athens shall arise …” [1084].) In contrast, specific names—even “Good” or “Liberty”—cannot inspire as does the holiest name with its pure, because purely enkindling, flame. They remain partial and abstract—mere allegories. The woman's earlier account of Evil's dominion indicates why: “‘Thus evil triumphed, and the Spirit of evil, / One Power of many shapes which none may know, / One Shape of many names …’” (361-63). The world in which evil triumphs, changing good “‘from starry shape … to a dire snake’” (368-69), is one in which appearances deceive because unified identities have been dispersed into a multiplicity of forms. Names become multiple as well, at once excessive and insufficient for their task. Evil, by definition, has too many names: “‘The Fiend, whose name was Legion: Death, Decay, / Earthquake and Blight, and Want, and Madness pale’” (379-80). These words are less personifications or even attributes than they are names of the “Fiend.” Naming itself, in its multiplicity, is fiendishly complicit: “‘His spirit is their power, and they his slaves / In air, and light, and thought, and language, dwell’” (388-89, my emphasis). Even the holiest name, when mediated by particular, historical names (Greece, France), risks partaking of evil's metamorphic powers unless those names are understood correctly to be mere names—signs that derive from and point towards the power of holiest name, but are themselves no more than the bare remainder, “——,” of a kindling that has occurred.

With this invocation of the “name” as both the ground and the critique of all possible names, the poem reaches towards a transcendence in which didacticism can recognize, if only by negation, its authentically imaginative origins. The invocation itself, however, may call forth a different kind of recognition. Not merely the act of invocation, but the very phrase “power of holiest name” indicates that poetic ideality can never remain fixed in its own rarified sublimity. Addressing the “power of holiest name” the woman ultimately refers beyond the name itself to the name as positional act. What is at stake is not the name but naming, power rather than (aesthetic) intuition or (systematic) knowledge. As a pure act naming may seem to sustain a kind of transcendence, but insofar as it draws the imagery of eye and star into a nexus of positional, linguistic determinations it displaces Shelley's idealism at its very center. Once the text admits a power of holiest name, particular names such as “Greece” or “France” are bound to appear, but do these names “reflect” a divine one—however negative the implicit theology—or are they themselves powerful, the rise rather than the reflection of History? (“Another Athens shall arise.”)

To ask a question of this kind is putting a great deal of weight on the word “power.” Given its importance elsewhere in Shelley one would be mistaken, I think, to dismiss its occurrence here as idle; as in Mont Blanc, the “power” is there. At issue is an ideal of linguistic communication that conceals an aporia. A transitive language that reflects meaning—the starry light of truth and knowledge—is easily imagined and easily conceptualized (if not so easily accounted for). An intransitive language that posits itself as meaningful is, perhaps, only slightly less so; it allows at least for the positivity of an act. The identity or equivalence of these two models remains beyond conception or imagination. The language of truth (or language as truth) and the language of power (or, again, language as power) are mutually untranslatable. Paul de Man writing on The Triumph of Life is notoriously brutal: “Language posits and language means (since it articulates) but language cannot posit meaning; it can only reiterate (or reflect) it in its reconfirmed falsehood. Nor does the knowledge of this impossibility make it less impossible.”⁹ In the earlier poem, the reversion to theological language, “holiest” name, tropes the impossible as God. This, however, can hardly be said to resolve or contain the problem, and its interpretive and narrative consequences reverberate through the text.

One of the most obvious of these consequences is that the purified word or the kindling encounter to which discursive language is secondary will turn out to have been discursive from its inception. If the name is neither simple, unified, nor one, the communion of text and reader thematized in the canto occurs across a divide, which is constitutive rather than corrupting. By analogy, didacticism is less a fall than a founding—though these metaphors, too, must partake of the partiality of names.

Each example of “kindling” or communion quoted above culminates, in fact, with an utterance. The self reflecting itself in (or with) another never eludes the externalizations of language. A particularly telling instance occurs when the Spirit of Liberty appears in the woman's dream: “‘And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness / Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss,—’” Across the spatial break that differentiates this stanza from what follows, the opening words of the next stanza replace sex with speech: “‘And said: …’” The formality of utterance is drawn out by the enjambment across stanzas, dramatizing the formal, written articulation of Shelley's verse. In this way, even speech becomes a figure for that articulation.¹⁰ The intimate climax promised by an empty mark “—” concludes with impersonal, not interpersonal, forms of language: instead of “I love thee,” “‘A Spirit loves thee …’” (503-5).

What the spirit goes on to say forces one to question whether the preceding state of “kindling tenderness” was ever more than a deluded fantasy. Articulation through language would not, in that case, dramatize a pathos-ridden fall from pure “eloquence,” but the realization of what always already must have been the structure of the woman's (or the poet's) experience: a relation to what stands “outside” a transcendent determination of self and identity. (“Outside” is in quotation marks, because, in so far as it is constitutive of its own “inside,” it may be said to precede the distinction.) The Spirit utters a reproach: “‘A Spirit loves thee, mortal maiden, / How wilt thou prove thy worth?’” (505-6). It challenges the woman to enter history, to struggle with the forms of human power. She must go to “‘that vast and peopled city … which was a field of holy warfare’” (514-15), i.e. she must go to Paris to fight for the Revolution.

To understand what is at stake in this reproach and the woman's response, one needs to consider the emergence of the Spirit as a figure of self-consciousness—reflecting itself as self-consciousness—in the stanzas immediately preceding these lines. This is one scene of instruction that stages the fate of its own idealism. It begins by positing a correspondence between desire and revolution: “‘When first the living blood through all these veins / Kindled a thought in sense, great France sprang forth …’” (469-70). Desire alone already prefigures the structure of the correspondence. It kindles the fires of “thought in sense,” a phrase that testifies to an entire revolutionary aesthetics. The identity of thought and sense, which is also the identity of desire and revolution, grounds the appearance of revolution as a series of synesthesic blendings. When thought informs sense any one sensation may, in effect, signify or even become, another; so, the clouds and waves “laughed in light and music” (477).

In the wake of (what is perceived as) revolutionary correspondence, “‘Strange desire / The tempest of a passion’” (480-81) generates the vision of the morning star. Liberty responds to a human intention; it responds to it and it surpasses it: “‘…—then I loved; but not a human lover! For when I rose from sleep, the morning star / Shone through the woodbine-wreaths which round my casement were’” (484-85). Desire awakes and finds its dreams assuming a naturalistic form of truth, but nature (the morning star), emblematically framed and superhuman, figures proleptically its coming envelopment by consciousness. This nature is never quite (or never only) nature.

In the next stanza it appears as a figure shot through and through with meaning, a sensation transparent to the light of thought—or consciousness—which absorbs it:

          “Twas like an eye which seemed to smile
on me.
                    I watched, till by the sun made pale, it sank
          Under the billows of the heaving sea;
                    But from its beams deep love my spirit drank,
                    And to my brain the boundless world now shrank
          Into one thought—one image—yes! for ever
                    Even like the dayspring, poured on vapours dank,
          The beams of that one Star did shoot and quiver
Through my benighted mind—and were extinguished never.”

(487-95)

In a reversal typical of this poem, the rising of the sun leaves the mind “benighted.” In that greater light's “severe excess,” the morning star pales,¹¹ a naturalistic fading that serves to ground the metamorphosis of nature into thought or, rather, reveals that in its meaning at any rate (as the embodiment of dream and desire) it always was thought: transcendent, eternal, all encompassing. The morning star is a symbol, one of “those images and feelings in the vivid presence of which within [the poet's] own mind consists at once his inspiration and his reward” (Preface to The Revolt of Islam 33). As such it is a symbol of symbolic language and an ideal example of what it means. It negates the merely natural universe—its transience, its darkness, its senseless infinity—to achieve a totalizing internalization of the boundless world into “one thought—one image.” The equivalence of these two terms marks the extreme end of its achievement, bringing to fulfillment the promise of “thought in sense.”

What happens, though, when thought requires the mirror of an image? when sense must correspond to its meanings? Does the process end with self-reflection? The morning star shines with a light both natural and spiritual, but as one passes into the other—as mediation shades into identity and time gives way to eternity—the woman's narrative continues to unfold to a decidedly temporal and decidedly articulate rhythm. Her story repeats itself with a difference:

“The day passed thus: at night methought in dream
          A shape of speechless beauty did appear:
It stood like light on a careering stream
          Of golden clouds which shook the atmosphere;
          A wingèd youth, his radiant brow did wear
The Morning Star …”

(496-501)

Day passes; night returns and with night a shape whose ontological status is doubly uncertain—“methought in dream.” The uncertainty is, perhaps, what is least curious, as the unity of thought and image gives way to something outside the immediacy of symbolic self-reflection. The star is openly personified; more than that, the personification is thematized. The symbol turns (inside) out to stand for its own allegorization, its appearance as figure. As part of this process, the “speechless” (but not languageless) shape must bear its name, the morning star, as a mark to be read. (Similarly, in The Mask of Anarchy, the shape that rises, mist-like, from prostrate hope wears “On its helm, seen far away, / A planet, like the Morning's” [114-15].) The vision is no longer one of crystalline transparency. Kindling does not bypass discourse. The natural-supernatural Spirit must be read as a mark, a lettering, or a sign through which the allegorical staging of the dream can be deciphered. The cosmic ornament recurs as ornamentation, an arabesque of writing that traces a difference (like Shelley's “——”) between thought and image at the very moment when they seem most intimately identified.

To uncover the allegorical argument of this passage exposes the discrepancy between thought and image which it attempts to mediate. (Even the linguistic turn of language “itself” can never fully close that self off from the power of articulation.) From this critical perspective, the passage to an ethical discourse oriented towards action is an easy step. The allegory “means” that language must always point outside itself and so, in the representative terms of the narrative, this “wingèd youth” comes to reproach the woman and urges her to leave the realm of self-reflexive consciousness behind. Aesthetic totalization, in which image and thought converge in a completely internalized mode, is merely a reflexive moment in an ongoing—increasingly critical, increasingly historical—dialectic. The sign of Liberty must be proven on the field of revolution: “‘How wilt thou prove thy worth?’” (506). The beautiful, but narcissistic pleasures of art (an image at one with thought) must be sacrificed for the sublimer pleasures of history:

                    “And to the shore I went to muse and
weep;
                    But as I moved, over my heart did creep
          A joy less soft, but more profound and strong
                    Than my sweet dream; and it forbade to keep
          The path of the sea-shore: that Spirit's tongue
Seemed whispering in my heart, and bore my steps along.
          “How to that vast and peopled city
led,
                    Which was a field of holy warfare then,
          I walked among the dying and the dead
                    And shared in fearless deeds with evil men,
                    Calm as an angel in the dragon's den—
          How I braved death for liberty and truth,
                    And spurned at peace, and power, and fame—and
when
          Those hopes had lost the glory of their youth,
How sadly I returned—might move the hearer's ruth.”

(508-22)

The woman by the seashore can only muse and weep, but (seemingly) borne by the Spirit's words, she turns to Paris and the Revolution. She turns, however, only to re-turn, for the sense of historical debacle that drives the poet-narrator drives her as well—back to the seashore's path and the scene of their encounter. The repetition suggests an irony in the dialectic at work: the allegorical demystification of aesthetics and the corresponding ethical demand for action beget failure and retreat. What begins in mourning ends in mourning.

The failure of the revolution depicted in these lines is not accidental, nor is it only to be explained by such historical diagnoses as Shelley offers, for example, in the poem's preface. The turn to action fails because it remains, in all too limited a sense, a turn. It tropes language's difference from itself—as politics, as history, as action—but in doing so remains curiously figurative, curiously self-referential. Even when she is the subject of history, the woman has not really left the seashore's path behind. The imagery of tempest and calm offers one indication of what happens (or fails to happen). It pervades the entire canto. In the natural descriptions of the opening, almost every stanza contrasts “lightning and hail and darkness” with “calm” and “light” (150, 153). Elsewhere, the dreaming self alternates “the tempest of a passion” with a “tranquil soul … calm and darkness” (480-83). The subject of this canto is a field of tension: violence and tranquility, darkness and light, storm and calm. This tension is increasingly resolved into the difference between a (particularized, human) subject and the external predicament in which it finds itself. The woman's participation in the French Revolution functions in this way. “Calm as an angel in the lion's den,” she is structurally, as a subject, what she has always been. This explains the ambivalence of the description that follows. Walking among “the dying and the dead” she encounters the world as the (dead) object of her consciousness. The subject of history stands upright, while history itself becomes yet another figure for subjective negation. In the historical context such internalization manifests itself violently, and the stanza implicates the woman directly. This is not Florence Nightingale among the dying and the dead. She shares “in evil deeds with fearless men.” As the early slippage from doubt—“the Spirit's tongue seemed whispering”—to certainty—“and bore my steps along”—already suggests: the temporal or linguistic limit that inhabits any aesthetic equation of thought and image is all too easily forgotten in the rush to realize Spirit's presence on the streets of Paris. Revolution, in this mode, is bound to fail.¹²

The woman returns to (self-) reflective nature to recover from the sorrows of history. The winged youth dissolves into a cradling universe:

                    “The Spirit whom I loved in solitude
                    Sustained his child: the tempest-shaken wood
          The waves, the fountains, and the hush of night—
                    These were his voice, and well I understood
          His smile divine, when the calm sea was bright
With silent stars, and Heaven was breathless with delight.”

(526-31)

Nature, again, is identified with Spirit: it is a voice and a smile, a living being translucent to itself and to its “child.” As that child, the woman at once understands and loves the whole of which she is a part. Only a slightly perverse reading of “breathless” would suggest darker, more alien implications. The importance of nature in this passage helps one to grasp why the earlier “natural” mediation of spirit through the morning star was necessary even if it was to be surpassed by its own allegory. When the inwardness of thought encounters the violence of a history that only confirms its negativity it requires a nature to fall back on if it is not to be left “like others, cold and dead” (325), if it is not, that is, to become itself, merely natural. However rigorously allegorical, however ethical the ultimate direction of the text, thought cannot forego the naturalizing, symbolic figure—a sustaining image perceptible, if only momentarily, before the demystifying onslaught of allegory.

Is allegory, then,—having been given its critical due—still a fall from kindling symbolic eloquence? Arguably, the very externality of Nature—that which in it remains “cold and dead” or “breathless”—guarantees that figuration, i.e. the appearance of Spirit, can never become purely symbolic. The return to and the return of the natural world proleptically figures (and in the narrative leads towards) a discursive return of reference. The self-reflexive musings of poetry, its figuration of the process of figuration cannot help but point towards an other which sustains it, and nature itself functions as a figure for this linguistic difference. It is, after all, imagined as language, a “voice” that can be “understood.”

What follows in the narrative makes explicit what can only be inferred from such hints. The self-contained forms of nature are riven apart by yet another revolution. The morning star returns, but this time as an apocalyptic figure shorn of any ties to nature or to individual agency:

                    “… after many wondrous years
were flown,
          I was awakened by a shriek of woe;
                    And over me a mystic robe was thrown,
          By viewless hands, and a bright Star did glow
Before my steps—the Snake then met his mortal foe!”

(535-40)

The mystic robe suggests a Pauline allegory of revolution: apocalypse begins with the formal power of language—“a mystic robe”—to depersonalize and to generalize the very subject it posits; the robe is thrown “over me.” It renders what it names invisible even as the morning star, in order to become thought, has first to disappear. (Elsewhere, the robe itself is characterized as “star-bright” [284].) “Mystic” here does not signify the presence of the irrational but the absence of a sustaining naturalistic perception. The disjunction of nature and “Spirit”—their, as it were, original difference—is exposed as the condition of the very historical acts and aesthetic musings that seek to join them in and as “one thought—one image.”

Criticism of this canto has largely ignored the woman's narrative. Since her story explains her role as the poet's initial teacher, the problems raised by any attempt to interpret its valorization of the aesthetic on the one hand and political action on the other are the problems that face, as well, any attempt to come to terms with Shelley's own aesthetic and political project. More generally, interpretation too often restricts itself to understanding the aesthetic in Shelley as either a self-negating mode that calls for action to supplement it or as a self-sustaining one that supplements action with the image of a utopian ideal—one returns to aesthetics to correct history. The woman's didactic narrative suggests, indeed, that aesthetics can never, finally, sustain itself, but the supplement of history is too often nothing other than an aesthetics whose figural negations have become all too literal. An ongoing interrogation of either term must recognize that what looks like mutual critique may turn out to be collaboration. For Shelley, the categories themselves demand constant rethinking and reformulation. They are not given up but are repeatedly narrativized in the allegorical history of his text.

As stake in the woman's narrative are a set of distinctions: “Spirit” and nature, reference and phenomenalism, history and aesthetics, difference and identity. In the field of romanticism these distinctions are often articulated through the debate between allegory and symbol. More important than the question of terminology is the articulation of distinction as such. When revolution “arises” or “springs forth” the kindling it manifests is not communion—“thought in sense” or synesthesia—but, precisely, the reiteration of difference, including the difference between difference and identity. The woman's other major narrative, the cosmic history that explains the emblematic battle of eagle and snake, tells the story of this difference. It tells the story, therefore, of something that cannot be contained within the mimetic, spatial, and temporal parameters of a story. The latter already assume that thought can be embodied in sense, that difference can be synthesized through narrative. The woman's cosmic history is an allegory, an allegory of difference or an allegory of allegory, which—necessarily, for it is an “other” speaking—looks like something quite different.

What it looks like—what generations of critics have taken it to be—is a Manichaean tale of good and evil. At best, the emblematic opposition between blood-red comet and morning star, has been given a psychological context, one which explains the origin of evil in terms of human error.¹³ The important stanzas allow for both interpretations:

          “Speak not to me, but hear! Much shalt
thou learn,
                    Much must remain unthought, and more untold,
          In the dark Future's ever flowing urn:
                    Know then, that from the depth of ages old,
                    Two powers o’er mortal things dominion hold
          Ruling the world with a divided lot,
                    Immortal, all-pervading, manifold
          Twin Genii, equal Gods—when life and thought
Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.
          “The earliest dweller of the world,
alone,
                    Stood on the verge of chaos. Lo! afar
          O’er the wide wild abyss two meteors shone,
                    Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar:
          A blood-red Comet and the Morning Star
          Mingling their beams in combat—as he stood,
                    All thoughts within his mind waged mutual war,
          In dreadful sympathy—when to the flood
That fair star fell, he turned and shed his brother's blood.
“Thus evil triumphed, and the Spirit of Evil,
                    One Power of many shapes which none may know …”

(343-62)

The psychological direction of this is relatively clear. The earliest dweller “alone” is yet another reflection of the poet-narrator and the woman—both of whom are described as “alone”—gazing from a “sea cliff's verge” (Coleridge, “France: An Ode”) out onto the chaos of (natural) history. That chaos originally appears as a combat of comet and star, but true combat occurs “within [the] mind.” The very early “Zeinab and Kathema” (a poem whose plot and theme look forward to The Revolt of Islam) makes explicitly psychological use of the same figures. Its victimized heroine turns against society:

Even like a mild and sweetly-beaming star
          Whose rays were wont to grace the matin prime
Changed to a comet, horrible and bright,
Which wild careers awhile then sinks in dark-red night.

(171-74)

Comet and star are warring potentialities within the “dweller,” and history's originary, cosmic act is the product of an individual subject. Although this interpretation does not do away with the text's Manichaean oppositions, it endows them with a particularly human energy. The slight incoherence of the narrative is, in this context, suggestive. The earliest dweller, alone, turns out to have a brother standing beside him. One may almost surmise that murder founds human otherness: warring thoughts are projected “outside”—the figure of a “brother”—but only to be the more effectively annihilated.

In this account history opens with transgression; it occurs as a fall. The psychological dramatizes even as it humanizes the theological. A fall, however, implies a fall from somewhere, and the text does, in fact, hint at a prior state. The “womb” from which cosmic history bursts offers an image of maternal union (an idealization of origin as feminine other that prefigures Laon's idealization of Cythna within the narrative). The capitalization of Nought tends, too, in the direction of the ideal. At the same time, the feminine Nought remains “inessential”: without essence or without transcendent being. Does anything pre-exist fall? Does society pre-exist murder? Does history—or “evil”—originate inside a lonely dweller?

The psychologized model of a fall is put in question by Cythna much later in the poem. The individual's act, even murder, is no true source of evil: “‘Speak! are your hands in slaughter's sanguine hue / Stained freshly? have your hearts in guile grown old? / Know yourselves thus! ye shall be pure as dew’” (3357-59). Earl Wasserman's commentary is helpful: “For Shelley, as for such Lockean empiricists as Godwin, the human character is morally neutral. But Shelley is not only rejecting the doctrine of original sin … he is also denying that by an act one may radically transform his innate moral nature … [man] may commit wrongs, but nothing in his character obliges him to do so, nor does such a deed stamp itself on the soul ineradicably.”¹⁴ In no simple way can evil be the product of a self. The solitary dweller is neither Adam nor Cain. His act is best characterized as inessential.

Is evil then a mysterious external force? A blood-red comet or hovering eagle? Arguably, these forms are no more essential than the nothingness they “burst.” Although the comet, as an emblem, seems clearly to be the figure of evil's triumph, in the narrative evil is said to triumph “thus” (361). “Thus”—which is, itself, a term of comparison—does not necessarily refer to the comet or to its battle. It may well refer to the entire preceding scenario, which is precisely one of comparison. “Thus” points to the “dreadful sympathy” that equates the thoughts “within his [the dweller's] mind” with cosmic configurations. Analogy, psychologically figured as “sympathy,” is the “real” origin of “evil” as it is, too, the basis of the woman's moralized history of good and evil: i.e. the basis of allegory. Its actual relation to a repetitive cosmic polemos can only be posited, never guaranteed, never essentialized. When it is essentialized (or naturalized) in the form, say, of a brother—or an empirically conceived history—it ends in violence.¹⁵

Does the shift from psychological to rhetorical terminology, from the language of self (individual) to the language of language (analogy) really mark a change in interpretation? Is the interpretative model not still one of transgression and fall, truth and error? An arbitrary judgment, the positing (of) analogy, turns paradise (the maternal womb) to hell, symbolic oneness to allegorical multiplicity: “One Power of many shapes … One Shape of many names.” A striking and comparable critical formulation occurs in the work of Walter Benjamin: “… the triumph of subjectivity, and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation. In the very fall of man the unity of guilt and signifying emerges as an abstraction.”¹⁶ The description of what ensues from the fall as “allegorical contemplation” reflects the subject's linguistic being. To return to Shelley, analogy rather than sympathy, catachresis rather than inwardness, are the crucial articulations of cosmic history. One may remember the list of evil's names quoted earlier: “‘The Fiend whose name was legion; Death, Decay, / Earthquake and Blight, and Want, and Madness pale.’” The significance of these natural disasters derives not from themselves but from the power of analogy to turn them to abstractions and so render nature (in the vocabulary of Benjamin) guilty: “‘And, without whom all these [Death, etc.] might nought avail,— / Fear, Hatred, Faith and Tyranny.’” Clearly, although the turn from a psychological to a linguistic interpretation of allegorical “subjectivity” may help one to avoid essentializing “nought,” it does not entirely dispense with the theological underpinnings of allegorical history.

The stanzas concerning the origin of comet and star implicate the problem of difference in yet another formulation, one less susceptible of either psychological or theological determinations. This occurs with the very phrase that later characterizes revolutionary France, “sprang forth”—a phrase, too, that corresponds to the kindling of “thought in sense” experienced by the woman during the revolution. She explains, in the earlier narrative, that the “‘two Powers’” are “‘twin genii, equal gods—when life and thought / Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential nought’” (350-51). A few lines down, the words are echoed: “‘Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar: / A blood-red comet and the Morning Star’” (355-56). Before falling into the Manichaean trap of good and evil, one must ask if theirs is the originary combat or difference with which this passage is most fundamentally concerned. The phrasing is slightly ambiguous; it invites the work of moral analogy with its blood-red comet and its mo[u]rning star, but it also suggests a more fundamental distinction at work, one which makes possible the moral and epistemological evaluations from which it can scarcely be distinguished. Not only does the godlike burst correspond temporally with the springing forth of “life and thought,” but the placement and punctuation of the line, “twin genii, equal gods—when life and thought,” all but suggest that life and thought are the powers in question.

This formulation is, potentially, more radical in its approach to difference as it is less mimetic and, like the revolutionary “thought in sense,” invokes the power of revolution as creation—but, crucially, conceptualizes creation as combat, polemos. While this combat is at once reconfigured in naturalistic and moralistic imagery, its hidden (or, technically, grammatically subordinate) presence displaces the traditional Manichaean interpretation of Shelley's canto and, too, accounts for why that interpretation has so often found itself at odds with what actually occurs in the text. The combat of comet and star figures this “other” combat between “life” and “thought” which is not yet morally or empirically determinate, not yet murder, not yet revolution. Nothing pre-exists this combat, inessential nought, and the combat itself does not so much precede its reconfigurations as inform or punctuate them; hence, the temporal formulation, “When life and thought / Sprang forth, they burst the womb.” “They” may be life and thought, or they may be comet and star; “when” may imply simultaneity, or priority. The spatial and temporal situation of this difference is indeterminate. It comes neither before nor after; it neither is nor is not. That being the case, the passage cannot be assimilated to the interpretive model of a fall or even to a story of origins. “Life and thought” spring forth: a cleavage in terms of which “fall” and “origin” like “good” and “evil” may be figured in “sympathetic” or, rather, aesthetic terms.¹⁷

This says very little about what “life” and “thought” may, in themselves, mean. In part, the omission is necessary to avoid essentializing the very terms through which essence is being questioned. At the same time, the opposition of life and thought is not an incidental formula in Shelley's oeuvre. It occurs elsewhere, most crucially perhaps in the “Essay on Life,” when Shelley attempts to think the problem of difference and its relationship to allegorical narratives of origin and fall, good and evil. In the present context, the “Essay on Life” is particularly helpful, because it, like The Revolt of Islam, calls forth a double reading, analyzing the dichotomy of “life” and “thought” alternately as one of “unfallen” and “fallen” states of being and as one possessing (in Wordsworth's phrase) “another and a finer connection than that of contrast.” While Shelley does not employ these terms with a technical (if you will, philosophical) consistency, their interaction in the prose text reiterates and exposes difficulties that The Revolt of Islam both contains and fails to contain through its aesthetic strategies.

According to the “Essay on Life” thoughts are habitual and mechanical; they take effect through repetition: “Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts and of a series of what are called impressions, planted by reiteration.”¹⁸ In a “wide sense” these thoughts are “signs” (Clark 173), and, having declared his conviction that “nothing exists but as it is perceived,” Shelley defines these thought-signs in such a way as to enlist perception as well as thought in an ongoing semiosis: “Almost all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others in their capacity of suggesting one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts” (Clark 173-74). This process disrupts the harmonic unity Shelley calls “Life”: “We live on and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being” (Clark 172). Signs mark a falling off from unity, the end of mystery. In a familiar paradigm, childhood has peculiar access to this being of life. As children, “we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass.” Children are like the woman in the cradle of nature; here the cradle is life and the repetitive forms of thought, as noted above, corrupt at last its idyll:

There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts and of a series of what are called impressions, planted by reiteration.

(Clark 174)

Life is an original, self-communing oneness dispersed into a series of mechanical acts and impressions through the signifying process of thought. Once again, the story is one of fall and fragmentation: the decay of symbolic consciousness into abstraction and evil, the descent into allegory.

In the midst of this story, however, the “Essay on Life” traces another relation between “life” and “thought.” It points towards a thought less nostalgic for a unified past and more open to differentiated futures. This occurs when Shelley particularizes his assent to “the intellectual system”:

Whatever may be [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being. Each is at once the center and the circumference, the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained.

(Clark 173)

The being of life that is at enmity with decay turns out to be nothing less than the “high aspirations” of thought:

… man is a being of high aspirations, ‘looking both before and after,’ whose ‘thoughts wander through eternity,’ disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be.

(Clark 173)

What was implicit in the earlier characterization of thought as reiterative and associative—setting off a train of thoughts—becomes explicit in these lines: thought is a temporal or even a temporalizing process. As semiotic and temporal, it displaces and disrupts the being of life, but that displacement is no longer considered a falling off from that being but its most characteristic mode. “Life and being” are never simply present; thought, the temporal undoing of any present, is therefore the figurative embodiment of what is most like life, or, simply, of what is most of all. This almost sounds like a recovery of paradisal unity—the oneness of life and thought—at the far end of the fallen narrative, but the correspondence of life and thought is predicated, quite literally, on nothing. The life which is most of all, the life “at enmity with nothingness and annihilation,” is also a “being” who is “not what he is, but what he has been and shall be.” (Even eternity is a space of “wandering.”) Life and thought do not so much mutually determine as mutually undetermine each other. The allegories which displace this “structure” both obscure and repeat its aporia: they obscure it with evaluations and verifications; they repeat it by virtue of the semiotic and temporal difference which they themselves enact.

This is as true for the woman's narratives as it is for the interpretations to which they give rise. The comet and star spring forth to displace the “spring” of life and thought—while “life” and “thought” themselves may be no more essential than any other figural displacement of the process through which origin may be said to take place. The dweller who identifies with their combat translates thought (his “warring” thoughts) into life—or life into thought—at the all-too-literal cost of a human life. The one who acts thus, “turned and shed his brother's blood.” Turning or troping vision into “sympathy” and thought into act leads directly to violence, which, in turn, is interpreted as the triumph of evil. A series of substitutions is set in motion: Manichaean oppositions of good and evil along with their inevitable confusion: “‘his immortal foe / He changed from starry shape, beauteous and mild, / To a dire Snake’” (367-69). These substitutions are usually and not very helpfully called “ethics” or “history.”

As an allegory of origin the narrative demands that we reconceive origin along with the historical and ethical valorizations that depend upon it. “The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance” [Im Ursprung wird kein Werden des Entsprungenen, vielmehr dem Werden und Vergehen Entspringendes gemeint (Benjamin, Origin 45; Ursprung 28)]. In the woman's (mis)interpretation of her own tale this powerful sense of origin gives way to origin as a point of departure and, ultimately, of return for a temporally unfolding narrative of revolutionary struggle in history. Only the narrative punctuation of repetition recollects origin as ongoing emergence, a becoming and disappearance that endlessly springs forth. Read as such a repetition, the eternal return of eagle and snake is no longer the figure of cyclic history at an impasse. What the poet-narrator sees in this opening emblem is the visionary trace of origin—Benjamin's Ursprung—as that which undoes the linear narrative through which history only appears to move when it is delusively figured as a teleologically determined return to original essence.¹⁹

Repetition does not, however, put an end to such delusional figurations. Its structure gives rise to the appearance of the very narrative pro- (or re-) gression which it at once punctuates and interrupts. Like the “imageless” truth which Demogorgon so ironically embodies, it generates even as it puts in question the pressure—the omnipresent possibility—of external, teleological meanings: in this instance, the possibility of a mimetic narrative through which the combat between life and thought can be contained or synthesized. Such referential effects translate history as trace into history as a gathering of phenomena:

          “Such is this conflict—when mankind
doth strive
                    With its oppressors in a strife of blood,
          Or when free thoughts like lightnings, are alive,
                    And in each bosom of the multitude
                    Justice and truth with Custom's hydra brood
          Wage silent war; when Priests and Kings dissemble
                    In smiles or frowns their fierce disquietude,
          When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble,
The Snake and Eagle meet—the world's foundations tremble!”

(415-23)

In this grand summation the recurrent encounter of Eagle and Snake becomes the apocalyptic equation of life and thought: “free thoughts … are alive.” Thought is identified with life—referentiality with phenomena, repetition with narrative.²⁰

As it suggests, in particular, the progress of a life into the higher unity of the temple of the Spirit, the asymmetry of incompleteness of this progress taints the closing canto's idealism with a remainder of uncertainty. But the text insists in several ways and at several junctures that the temple is the locus for a blending of “life” and “thought” that subsumes all difference into the totality of Spirit. This blending is, preeminently, the function of art, and the temple itself its perfect realization.²¹ At the far end of its repetitive entanglements the canto closes off its allegorical didacticism with an image of aesthetic idealism that projects, if only as a fiction, the dissolution of its tensions into symbolic identity. Already, the journey to the temple prefigures this projection: “Such were my thoughts, when the tide gan to flow; / And that strange boat like the moon's shade did sway / Amid reflected stars that in the waters lay” (321-23; my emphasis). The boat's movement seems to respond at once to the tide and the poet's thoughts. The tides, themselves, respond to the moon which, however—through its shadow-image the boat—is figuratively represented as responding to them. The reflection of the starlight on the ocean's surface offers another variation of this reciprocal empowerment. The description that follows (with its open allusions to Kubla Khan) offers a highly idealized figure of the boat as an imaginative reconciliation of opposites—stone and breath, matter and spirit. The highly wrought yet sensitive device may even evoke the ultrarefined sensitivities of the poet-narrator himself. In the course of this description the narrative breaks into a rare present tense as if the narrated journey and the textual one—like the artist and his work or like matter and spirit—no longer need to be distinguished. Reference becomes a purely auto-affective pointing:

A boat of rare device, which had no sail
          But its own curved prow of thin moonstone,
Wrought like a web of texture fine and frail,
          To catch those gentlest winds which are not known
          To breathe, but by the steady speed alone
With which it cleaves the sparkling sea; and now
          We are embarked—

(325-31)

The glimmering temple, with its “moonstone” roof is a more developed figure for the same imaginative reconciliation. It is the palace of poetry whose linguistic textures, “spell-inwoven clouds,” obscure and transmit transcendent light:

We came to a vast hall, whose glorious roof
          Was diamond, which had drank the lightning's
sheen
In darkness, and now poured it through the woof
          Of spell-inwoven clouds hung there to screen
          Its blinding splendour—through such veil was
seen
That work of subtlest power, divine and rare;
          Orb above orb with starry shapes between …

(586-92)

Increasingly, art reflects art reflecting art, and objects have only themselves as the measure against which they can be valued: “… long and labyrinthine aisles—more bright / With their own radiance than the Heaven of Day” (597-98). Through this self-identity what emerges is nothing less than the symbolic identity of life and thought—or, more technically, intuition and signification:

                              … through a portal wide
                    We passed—whose roof of moonstone carved, did
keep
          A glimmering o’er the forms on every side,
Sculptures like life and thought; immoveable, deep-eyed.

(581-85)

Immoveable yet glimmering, the sculptures embody the immortality of thought in and through the materiality of stone. The material itself glimmers as its name, “moonstone,” already combines (transparent) light and (solid) stone. Neither the seashore's path of isolated self-reflection nor the revolutionary proof of political action achieves so splendid a synthesis. Only through art can the poet-narrator commune with Liberty. One rises from the despair of human history to ascend the aesthetic heights in which Spirit manifests itself: “Paintings, the poesy of mightiest thought, / Which did the Spirit's history display” (610-11).

In so far as this climactic figure of aesthetic idealism confronts within itself the question of origin, it broaches the limits of its own articulation. The final climactic defense of Spirit (and symbol) is framed by a declaration of its unique and therefore, ultimately, incommunicable if not impossible status. This is, in part, a quite traditional, quasi-theological disclaimer. Read more closely, however, the words suggest that the description of the temple (which follows) is founded on a cleavage between the forms of art and the forms of thought—a disjunction which forces one to interpret the Temple in a more skeptical, more allegorical, “spirit.” The totality it promises never quite seals itself off from the groundless difference of origins:

          It was a Temple, such as mortal hand
                    Has never built, nor ecstasy, nor dream
          Reared in the cities of enchanted land: …
          Like what may be conceived of this vast dome,
                    When from the depths which thought can seldom pierce
          Genius beholds it rise, his native home,
                    Girt by the deserts of the Universe;
                    Yet, nor in painting's light, or mightier verse,
          Or Sculpture's marble language, can invest
                    That shape to mortal sense—such glooms immerse
          That incommunicable sight, and rest
Upon the labouring brain and overburdened breast.

(559-61, 568-76)

The temple's dome is compared to the sky; it is the world's horizon whose original rise remains all but beyond the reach of thought and altogether beyond the reach of sense. Though the art of the Temple—like a perfect image of the world—appears to synthesize “life” and “thought,” the “depths” which give rise to it remain outside its dialectic. This obscure origin is the birthplace of genius and, if one interprets genius as a peculiarly powerful (or even a peculiarly original) mode of thought, one is left with a thought that barely has access to itself. The “Treatise on Morals” (a text which is probably contemporaneous with Shelley's first work on The Revolt of Islam) makes this argument quite explicit. Thought, in that text, inhabits a temple, but one whose doors are forever barred to its own thoughtful contemplation. Though it has a home, it is never at home:

But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards—like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind. The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it were possible to be where we have been, virtually and indeed—if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience—if the passage from sensation to reflection—from a state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.

(Clark 186)

Far from being the realization of an immortal life, thought, in this passage, is temporal, which is a way of saying, as in the prose fragments quoted above, that it signifies. It is never entirely itself but always points elsewhere; it can only flow out from a source which, both lustrous and shadowy, is itself a field of conflict.

Thought's inability to think itself explains, ironically, the ensuing fantasy of the Temple. Thought cannot even identify with its own difference. Repeatedly, though, the stanzas name the Temple with a word that recalls what the narrative thus forgets: “A fane stood in the midst …”; “Encircling that vast Fane's aerial heap” (556, 581). The word “fane” echoes with a suggestion that the temple can only feign its self-reflecting total universe. In isolation, the pun may seem forced, but the canto earlier prepares one for this possibility when it evokes the blatantly deceptive temple of Evil:

                              “… for none
                    Knew good from evil, though their names were hung
          In mockery o’er the fane where many a groan,
As King, and Lord, and God, the conquering Fiend did own.”

(335-38)

The fiend feigns through the mockery (imitation as well as insult) of his fane. The Temple of the Spirit, too, is the locus of a feint. Its artificial construct, “reared in the cities of enchanted land,” introduces figures—Pyramid, Dome, islands, steps—to be repeated throughout The Revolt of Islam over the course of an increasingly unstable and disturbing narrative. As a figure for the poem as a whole—the guarantor of its unity, the didactic key to its lesson—it remains a mockery. The names of Good and Evil drawn above its entrance, like those of life and thought, are at best a partial disclosure of truth, at worst its tyrannical parody.

At times thematizing and always repeating its rhetorical breakdown, the canto proffers an allegory of allegory which is inevitably turned into another allegory. As such unhappy formulations suggest, Shelley takes his text to the very edge of allegorical transfiguration, to the brink of a language that can only be interpreted as the emptying out of interpretive possibility. “No statement,” however, “can exclude the possibility that with it, something is meant”²²—in spite of itself, the text refers: it teaches, it narrates, it describes, it names, even when what it teaches or narrates or describes or names is characterized as “incommunicable.” The consequences of this unfold in the ensuing cantos. They tell of one attempt to kindle thought in sense and thereby manifest Spirit's history in a symbolic synthesis of life and thought.

The poet-narrator who negotiates these difficulties within the text is repeatedly told to “listen,” a task implicitly enjoined upon Shelley's readers as well. In Shelley's last didactic allegory, The Triumph of Life, the word recurs in Rousseau's response to another poet-narrator. As in the earlier text, the later poem puts in question the interpersonal and mimetic valence of this term:

“But follow thou, and from spectator turn
          Actor or victim in this wretchedness,
“And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn
          From thee.—Now listen … In the April
prime
When all the forest tips began to burn …”

(305-309)

To listen is to act and to suffer, to learn and to teach, and finally to read. The April prime is the beginning not only of the natural cycle but of poetic tradition as well. Writing, like reading, through the figure of Rousseau, also unites action with suffering—political aspiration with reflective consciousness: “I / Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain! / And so my words were seeds of misery— / Even as the deeds of others …” (278-80). In the Triumph of Life, as in the earlier work, the progressive unfolding of this paradox produces increasingly violent and unstable configurations. Here, I wish only to note one of the later text's less obvious allusions to the morning star. The question to which Rousseau is responding repeats, in various modes, throughout the text: “Whence comest thou and whither goest thou? / How did thy course begin … and why?” (296-97). The allusion is to Christ: an explicitly theological figure for the appearance of Spirit in (or as) history.²³ Jesus, when challenged as to his divinity, replies in a beautifully self-confirming phrase: “Though I bear record of myself yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go” (John 8:140 and compare John 7:27-29). This Jesus is the Christian-mythical version of Shelley's eros or morning star. The textual link is Revelation. The light-bearer is not Satan but Christ: “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come …” (Revelation 22:16-17). The Revolt of Islam, with its original title, Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution in the Golden City, declares its relation to another biblical text, Isaiah, for the prophet there calls Babylon the “golden city.” (Isaiah 11:8 is also a source for Shelley's “good” snake.) In Isaiah, however, the light-bearer is Satan: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning …” (Isaiah 14:12). The confluence of good and evil, Christ and Satan, logos as divine presence and Lucifer as fallen light suggests both the mythical dimensions of this figure and its profoundly contradictory status as figure. That is, as a figure it inevitably negates itself; it is only a figure. Such contradiction is the source of the injunction to listen, or, figuratively, to read. Consider the imagery that opens and closes this canto: “Long trains of tremulous mist began to creep / Until their complicating lines did steep / The orient sun in shadow”; “she was known / To be thus fair, by the few lines alone / Which through her floating locks and gathered cloak, / Glances of soul-dissolving glory shone” (139-41, 661-64). The obscure and obscuring lines, imagined naturalistically as shadows and glances, are, in the end, nothing other than the blank facticity of writing that gives itself to be read. The didactic encounter is irreducibly textual and irreducibly figural. It poses the challenge of a history at once good and evil, reflective and active, aesthetic and didactic, self-contained and endlessly other. It refers but not to anything or not to anything that could be isolated as a thing. It is the promise of dawn and the artifice of poiesis—a bright and mourning star.

Notes

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) 135. All quotes from Shelley's poetry except those from The Revolt of Islam are from this edition.

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1912) 32. All quotes from The Revolt of Islam are drawn from this edition.

3. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: the Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980) 102.

4. Shelley's letters confirm the special status of the opening canto:

   … The whole poem with the exception of the first canto & part of the last is a mere human story without the smallest intermixture of supernatural interference. The first Canto is indeed, in some measure a distinct poem, tho’ very necessary to the wholeness of the work. I say this, because if it were all written in the manner of the first Canto, I could not expect that it should be interesting to any great number of people—

   See The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) 1: 563.

5. For a discussion of how the entire text is structured as a repeating series of such scenes of poetic instruction, see Deborah Gutschera, “The Drama of Reenactment in Shelley's Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal 35 (1986).

6. Cf. Daniel Hughes, “Kindling and Dwindling: The Poetic Process in Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal 13 (1964): 13-28.

7. Cf. William A. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 19-20.

8. Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956) 107.

9. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 117-18.

10. Cf. Paul Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 213-14.

11. A favorite Shelley image. Cf. The Triumph of Life 410-31.

12. Rogers' notes to his edition of Laon and Cythna refer to Locock's suggestion that Shelley is thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft's visit to Paris during the Revolution. He may also be thinking of a mysterious woman in Brockden Brown's Ormund. Shelley was an avid reader of Brown at this time. The Marlowe circle playfully assumed the names of characters from his novels (and Shelley named his daughter Clara, born in September 1817 when he was completing The Revolt of Islam, for the heroine of Wieland). Claire Clairmont's play-name was Constantia, the heroine of Ormund, and the lyric addressed “To Constantia” was written, too, at about this time. Not only is the novel broadly concerned with revolutionary energies gone awry, but the heroine is befriended by a beautiful older woman only to become increasingly suspicious and alienated when she learns of the latter's involvement with the French Revolution; she, too, had shared in “evil deeds with fearless men,” men like Ormund himself who by the novel's close is using revolutionary rhetoric to justify rape and murder.

13. See, for example, the chapter on The Revolt of Islam in Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1965).

14. Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965) 104. Wasserman's note to this draws attention to the influence of Wollstonecraft as well as Godwin.

15. One of the poem's main sources supports the idea that the process of analogy produces the ethical valorizations of good and evil. Volney's Ruines d’Empire describes the founding of religion as the imposition of ethical interpretation on cosmic phenomena. See Kenneth Cameron, “A Major Source of The Revolt of Islam,” PMLA 56: 175-206. Cameron quotes the Barlow translation of Volney on the naming of contrasting hemispheres: “‘by a continual metaphor these words acquired a moral sense … From that moment all the astronomical history of the constellations was changed into a political history.’” Cameron argues that “it is not unlikely that it was from this whole discussion that Shelley got the germ of the idea for ‘the blood-red comet and the morning star,’ combining this notion of conflicting celestial bodies, representative of the basic good and evil powers, with that of his usual symbolization of the star of Venus as Love” (201). The source, however, confirms that the cosmic representation of good and evil is in no way a given, but produced allegorically “by a continual metaphor.”

16. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977) 233-34. For the German, see Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974) 209. Further quotes from this work will be noted in the text.

17. Even if one concedes that life and thought figure a radical cleavage or burst through which and on which other differences articulate themselves, has one not still re-essentialized the nought of chaos, replacing the moral ground of revolutionary history with a metaphysical one? Shelley's language undoubtedly tends in that direction, though the metaphysical tendency, insofar as it limits a hypostatization of “good” and “evil,” actually serves a critical function. For Shelley, this has direct political implications. Revolution is fundamental to his concept of universal history, because creation occurs through the violent imposition of relation through chaos—the kindling aporias of thought in sense. The cosmic history of the “Ode to Liberty” begins with such a gesture: “The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth: / The burning stars of the abyss were hurled / Into the depths of heaven” (16-18). This “spring” of history, however, can also ironically seal its fate: in the same text the name of “Priest” is “hurled” from a “hell” of fiends (228-29), an imposition of clerical tyranny. To disentangle the one act from the other is an ongoing task for Shelley's poetry and its readers. It is, I believe, the properly historical task his work demands.

18. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Prose: The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (New Amsterdam and New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988) 172, 174. Future quotes from this edition will be noted in the text as Clark.

19. With this argument in mind, one should reread the actual account of the eagle and snake which is alternately clearly marked as the battle of good versus evil, tyranny versus freedom and somewhat more confusingly as an inextricable intertwining of two forms that periodically overlap and even exchange positions. In this combat what is at stake is less eagle versus snake than the combat itself: “What life, what power, was kindled and arose / Within the sphere of that appalling fray!” (217-18). The language used to describe their conflict in The Revolt of Islam even returns in The Mask of Anarchy as the description of a single revolutionary phantom:

    It grew—A Shape arrayed in mail
    Brighter than the viper's scale,
    And upborne on wings whose grain
    Was as the light of sunny rain.

    On its helm seen far away
    A planet, like the Morning's lay:

    (110-15)

20. One can (and should) expand consideration of this play of terms—life and thought—with reference to their recurrence in the apparently redemptive context of canto XII—the one part of the poem that returns to the visionary scenes of canto I.

21. Cf. Douglas Thorpe, “Shelley's Golden Verbal City,” The Journal of English and German Philology 86 (1987): 215-17. Thorpe also addresses some of the imbalances of this ideal structure.

22. Werner Hamacher, “Lectio: de Man's Imperative,” trans. Susan Bernstein, in Reading de Man Reading, edited by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 185.

23. In his prose Shelley frequently compares Rousseau to Christ both implicitly and explicitly. See, for example, the “Essay on Christianity”: “Rousseau … is perhaps the philosopher among the moderns who in the structure of his feelings and understanding resembles most nearly the mysterious sage of Judaea. It is impossible to read those passionate words in which Jesus Christ upbraids the pusillanimity and sensuality of mankind, without being strongly reminded of the more connected and systematic enthusiasm of Rousseau” (Clark 209).