SOURCE: “‘And All Things Seem Only One’: The Shelleyan Lyric,” in Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Kelvin Everest, D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 115-31.

[In the following essay, O’Neill surveys the complex character of Shelley's lyric poetry.]

1

‘It is only when under the overruling influence of some one state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in almost the vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a great poet’.¹ J. S. Mill's observation about Shelley, which he thought held particularly true of the poet's ‘lyrical poems’,² may seem to be borne out by the ‘fervid’ intensity of poems such as ‘O World, O Life, O Time’ or ‘The Flower That Smiles Today’. But in both these late pieces the poet's ‘labour of simplification’³ does not exclude complication or nuance. In the latter poem image and abstraction combine suggestively, inviting speculation about experiences to which its mood might apply: failure in personal relations, the collapse of political ideals, and metaphysical scepticism are all candidates.⁴ Moreover, Shelley ironically contravenes generic expectations. These stem from the lyric's emphasis on transience, which appears, misleadingly, to herald advice to ‘Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may’. If the opening lines, ‘The flower that smiles today / Tomorrow dies’ (ll. 1-2),⁵ are an abbreviating lift from the just-quoted poem by Herrick (‘And this same flower that smiles to day, / To morrow will be dying’),⁶ there is, from the start of Shelley's lyric, a tight-lipped acquiescence in the intolerable quite at odds with the seventeenth-century poem's acceptance of the inevitable. ‘All that we wish to stay / Tempts and then flies’ (ll. 3-4), Shelley asserts, his verbs tracing a circuit of monosyllabic disappointment. ‘This world's delight’ may be ‘Brief even as bright’ (ll. 5, 7). Yet the injunction to enjoy the present which ghosts line 7 never materializes, giving way to the statement that some things do last, though in altered form: virtue, friendship and love ‘Survive their joy, and all / Which ours we call’ (ll. 13-14).

These lines show Shelley's ability to embed astute insights in a seemingly traditional idiom. Here it is the writing's elliptical compactness which puts its lyric idiom under pressure, and implies the persistence in shrunken form of betrayed ideals that expose to us our alienation from what we thought ‘ours’. In the last stanza the use of ‘Whilst’ (ll. 15, 17 and 19) hints that the lyric will be rounded off by a Romantic equivalent to ‘seize the day’. Sardonically, though, the ensuing imperative, ‘Dream thou’ (l. 20), denies the possibility of anything but illusion as an alternative or prelude to the disillusionment tersely expressed by the last line, ‘Then wake to weep’ (l. 21). There, the lachrymose is held in check by a bitterness which the final rhyme clinches (each stanza ends with a triplet). Such bitterness bespeaks the achieved presence of a lyric voice in a poem that avoids the word ‘I’.

On the face of it ‘O World, O Life, O Time’ is a quintessentially Romantic lyric complaint; the poem uses its refrain and repeated rhyme to underscore ‘one state of feeling’, a Shelleyan version of Wordsworthian loss.⁷ Yet without losing the air of being directed by some ‘overruling influence’ the poem prompts thought about the exact nature of that influence, an influence suggested by the ‘peculiar compression’⁸ of the opening:

          O World, O Life, O Time,
          On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before …

(ll. 1-3)

The reader is struck here less by ‘the bonding of the literal and metaphorical’⁹ than by the way potent feeling subordinates any logic of metaphor to its own demands; the lines freeze the poet in a posture of endless climbing of ‘last steps’ on which he ‘had stood before’. Shelley may pit the vulnerable lyric ‘I’ against the abstractions of ‘World’, ‘Life’ and ‘Time’, as though the self were overwhelmed by vast impersonal forces. Yet his question, ‘When will return the glory of your prime?’ (l. 4), projects onto world, life and time the sense of loss experienced by the ‘I’. World, life and time, then, are both opposed to the self and words for the dimensions in and through which the self exists; indeed, the stanza half-suggests that the opening line's categories only exist by virtue of the poet's fall into awareness of loss. The second stanza undergoes tonal shifts without forfeiting the impression of conveying ‘one state of feeling’. Apostrophe and question modulate into uncomprehending statement in the line, ‘A joy has taken flight’ (l. 7), a line which mutes the poem's tone (it is not ‘joy’ but ‘A joy’ which has fled) and is the more affecting for doing so. Again, the poem moves the reader by glancing at the fact that the poet himself has not lost the capacity to be moved; he can feel ‘grief’ but not ‘delight’ (l. 9), a discovery that combines lament and understatement (there is no analysis of why this should be the case). The final line ‘No more, O never more!’ (l. 10) repeats the fifth line; but where that line was full of freshly located distress the later line is heavy with a sense of unalterable regret. The poem, then, aspires to the formal mastery which is lyric's seductive compensation for the distresses of experience; at the same time the notion of the isolated lyric ‘I’ is explored as well as asserted.

Applied to these poems, as to others by Shelley, the judgement of J. S. Mill with which this essay began is stimulating yet vulnerable on a number of counts: it presupposes, in G. M. Matthews's sardonic phrasing, that ‘the lyrical heart-cry is Shelley's typical utterance’;¹⁰ it ignores the fact that even lyrical heart-cries work within (or against) generic constraints; and it discounts Shelley's capacity to render complicated states of feeling within a single poem, indeed to redefine, albeit subtly rather than blatantly, the lyric form. Privileging ‘some one state of feeling’ as cause and effect of lyric, Mill's remark asks to be deconstructed. Tilottama Rajan does just this and yet more than this, arguing that the ‘dismantling of lyric autotelism is something which happened in Romantic texts themselves’.¹¹ In a sense, Rajan is fighting a rearguard action against the devaluing of lyric implicit in the post-structuralist idiom she employs. Thus she contends that Romantic poets contrived an ‘interdiscursive’ form of lyric in the act of dismantling lyric's ‘monological autonomy’, and concludes that ‘the survival of the lyrical voice testifes to an understanding of the self that is not quite that of poststructuralism’.¹²

Rajan's essay valuably qualifies pre-theoretical and post-structuralist assumptions. Yet Mill's emphasis on Shelley's evocations of ‘some one state of feeling’ is still salutary because it provokes thought about the degree of ‘autonomy’, ‘monological’ or otherwise, attained by Shelley's lyrics. Even so ‘dialogic’ a poem as ‘The Two Spirits—An Allegory’ offers us less a picture of the mind's debate with itself (such as is supplied by Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) than the interplay of two ‘single states of feeling’. If each spirit sees because of what it is, the poem itself achieves a kind of ‘monological autonomy’ by dictating the terms through which the poem's clash of perspectives is mediated. So the last two stanzas may offer contrasting emblems of the outlooks of the two spirits, but it is the lyric poet who asserts a final control over his poem's voices, exhibiting the changes that can be rung on a single word, ‘shape’ (ll. 38 and 45).

Certainly many of Shelley's lyrics, in the interests of a singleness or unity desired though rarely attained, tend not to pause over or point up, even as they recognize, the complex, the unassimilable, the contradictory. Rajan defines ‘autonomy’ or ‘lyric consciousness’ as coming ‘as close as possible’ to ‘a consciousness without the dimension of being-in-the-world’.¹³ Shelley's lyrics never aspire unproblematically to ‘autonomy’ in this sense; but neither are they prepared simply to make lyric consciousness dependent on some contextualizing discourse. Their pursuit of autonomy is more a question of seeking to organize their figurative inventions into imaginative structures that give the impression, possibly the illusion, of being self-sustaining. In this sense the final section of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ achieves a precarious autonomy in the act of admitting the self's dependence both on the wind for inspiration and on an audience, ‘mankind’, for actualizing the potential of the poet's ‘words’ (l. 67). Fiercely competing emotions are bound together by the onward impulsion of the terza rima. The section's initial desire that the speaker be granted the status of a natural object governed by the wind is expressed in words that deconstruct even as they formulate the desire. To be a lyre ‘even as the forest is’ (l. 57) is impossible given the presence of consciousness in the lyric ‘I’; the next line (‘What if my leaves are falling like its own!’ (l. 58)), poignantly yet almost jokily, behaves as if the problem stemmed from the processes of change and decay to which the self, like the forest, is subject. But the problem lies more in the very existence of the self which the poem pleads that the wind will possess: ‘Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (l. 62). The plea for unity tacitly recognises its impossibility, passing into an assertion of the lyric self's mastery; it is ‘by the incantation of this verse’ (l. 65) that Shelley hopes his words will reach mankind. Ronald Tetreault lays emphasis on the poet's willingness at the end of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ ‘not to force his meaning on his auditors but to yield them their autonomy’.¹⁴ Yet it is important, too, to recognize the degree to which the poem resonates within the echo-chamber of its own figurative explorations: ‘incantation’, for instance, sends us back to, while reversing the implications of, the early simile of the leaves as ‘ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’ (l. 3).

2

Lyric autonomy, the sense that the poet's words have shaped themselves into a self-sufficient discourse, is only ever momentary in Shelley, an impression, a ‘sense’; hence its pathos and unstable value. Nowhere in Shelley is its presence more intriguing than in Prometheus Unbound. In Rajan's view the lyrical drama foregrounds ‘the tension between lyric and drama’. But though she asserts that ‘Prometheus is not so much an interiorizing of the dramatic form as an exteriorizing of the lyrical’,¹⁵ it is equally arguable that, at key moments in the work, lyric converts drama into its own substance. So the ‘Life of Life’ lyric (II. v. 48-71) not only brings to a climax the second act's imagining of change, but also marks the moment at which the second act actualizes its promise of vision; temporarily, the lyrical drama resolves into ‘one state of feeling’, albeit a state compounded out of different states.

‘Life of Life!’: the exclamation is both creative of its subject and beyond the scope of philosophical or mythological translation. Life is breathed into ‘life’ by a use of words that communicates awareness of inadequacy and wonder. The rhythm is incantatory yet ordered, ‘life’ setting up alliterative intimacies with ‘lips’ and ‘love’ that begin a bewildering celebration of the division between and inseparability of spirit and body, love and life, essence and appearance, ideal and projection. No other terms will suffice, the wording of ‘Life of Life!’ implies, and yet the second and fourth stanzas begin with phrases (‘Child of Light!’ (l. 54) and ‘Lamp of Earth!’ (l. 66)) which both build on the implications of the opening and intimate the possibility of innumerable fresh starts to the poem.

The transfigured Asia is known only as she is being defined in a lyric that is concerned with the impossibility of definition. Crucial to the poem's effectiveness, however, is the sureness with which ‘impossibility of definition’ is conveyed. Stephen Spender commented on the ‘confused machinery’ of the opening stanza's imagery, asking, in relation to lines 51-3 (‘then screen them / In those looks, where whoso gazes / Faints, entangled in their mazes’), ‘How can you be screened by looks which are also mazes in which whoever gazes becomes entangled and faints?’¹⁶ One answer is Bloom's: ‘Shelley is not sending [us] to the sketching board.’¹⁷ This is true, but Bloom does not acknowledge the degree to which Shelley negotiates with, even as he departs from, the prospect of visualization. The word order of lines 51-3 persuades the reader to trust in a series of telescoped suggestions. ‘Screen’ benefits from a syntax flexible enough to permit two possible and, in reading, overlapping subjects:¹⁸ ‘lips’ (l. 48), in which case it is the movement of the lips that changes the face from ‘smiles’ to entangling looks, or the ‘smiles’ (l. 50) themselves, in which case the ‘smiles’ veil themselves—as though residually abiding—behind the ‘looks’.

On either interpretation, the language proposes that the ‘thou’ manifests itself through appearances that are and are not identical with the essence they conceal and reveal. The ‘looks’ are ‘those looks’ (my emphasis), where Shelley's avoidance of a duff epithet propels the reader forward; the looks are those ‘where whoso gazes / Faints’; the metre's stress on ‘Faints’ puts sinew into potentially weak writing, forcing together action and consequence (gazing and fainting). It is at this point of possible arrest that the image of the looks as ‘mazes’ keeps the verse busy with a sense of labyrinthine exploration. ‘Entangled’ crystallizes and refines the mood of a stanza marked by deftly unentangled presentation of increasing entanglement. The entangling mazes of Asia's looks reverse the implicit scenario of the lyric: that of an onlooker admiring the transformed Asia. The ‘mazes’ could, however, also be those engendered by ‘the onlooker's own amazement’.¹⁹ The lyric dissolves into one another the implications of these readings of ‘mazes’: that Asia's ‘looks’ preserve her otherness, and that Asia's unknowable being can be approached only through (and may be indistinguishable from) the speaker's idealizing desires. It is Shelley's achievement to make his lyric's ‘one state of feeling’ accommodate multiple shadings and nuances without fissuring or fracturing into disparate moods.

Throughout, Shelley's figures Platonize yet undo Platonic distinctions. So the ‘atmosphere’ (l. 58) through which Asia's ‘divinity’ makes itself felt also ‘Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest’ (l. 59); alliteration joins what sense ought to, but, uncannily, does not, put asunder: shining and shrouding. The moment is typical of a lyric that is ecstatic and controlled, pressing towards finality of utterance while allowing for continual modification. Shelley exploits the eager intentness offered by a trochaic metre. By contrast, the movement and mood of Byron's ‘She Walks in Beauty’, composed in iambic tetrameters, are themselves ‘mellow’d to that tender light’ (l. 5) which the poem praises.²⁰ Byron, too, is concerned with the indefinable, ‘the nameless grace / Which waves in every raven tress’ (ll. 8-9); yet where Shelley points up and relishes paradox, Byron smooths potential paradox into extravagant compliment: ‘And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes’ (ll. 3-4). Byron's idealizing is evocative—the opening four words elegantly resist paraphrase—but the process of idealizing is not simultaneously performed and scrutinized as in Shelley's poem. In Byron's lyric, idealizing has the strengths and limitations of a mode that is, for all its formality, still in touch with the tones of the drawing room. ‘She Walks in Beauty’ celebrates a ‘She’ whose potentially symbolic status is only an urbane hint; ‘ Life of Life’ entangles us in a maze where what is ‘real’ is continually redefined.

Shelley's initial rhyme of ‘enkindle’ and ‘dwindle’ is the basis for Daniel Hughes's admirable reading of the lyric as ‘a quick forming out of motion, an extremely unstable, but still definite point of coherence and completion’.²¹ This ‘quick forming out of motion’ is evident in the lyric; throughout, ‘motion’ is both a threat to and the condition of ‘forming’. ‘Dwindle’ (l. 50) may intimate extinction; in the same breath, though, it invites us to prize Asia's ‘smiles’ because of the impermanent radiance which they confer. The extra stress in ‘Make the cold air fire’ (l. 51) stabilizes our sense of this radiance, a radiance which is, none the less, composed of unstable opposites; the smiles do not so much turn ‘cold air’ into ‘fire’ as ‘Make’ what was, and still is, ‘cold air’ ‘fire’.²²

As the poem unfolds, the process of ‘forming’, of eloquent but provisional realizations, persists. For instance, in the final stanza, ‘dim shapes are clad with brightness’ (l. 67). This tribute to Asia as ‘Lamp of Earth’ goes beyond saying that once dim shapes are now bright; it allows for the co-existence of dimness and brightness, for the fact that Asia's brightness is borne witness to by the very dimness of the shapes clad in her sight-defeating brightness. The paradox builds on previous paradoxes. So the second and third stanzas subtilize and qualify the opening stanza's concern with looking. Almost nonchalantly stanza three gives up the attempt to see which stanzas one and two address. In the line ‘Fair are others;—none beholds thee’ (l. 60), ‘beholds’ suggests a contemplative calm that goes beyond gazing, a calm which the poem, with excited composure, accepts it cannot attain. So far as any permanent state is reached, it is the state of being ‘lost forever’ (l. 65) with which the stanza closes; such ‘loss’ fuses inability to sustain apprehension with, more positively, a loss of self or usual state of consciousness.

In stanza two the lyric voice has not yet conceded the inevitable separateness (from the ‘thou’ it addresses) which is one aspect of the ‘loss’ described in stanza three, an aspect attested to by the appearance at the end of stanza three of the word ‘I’. Stanza two searches for origins as the smiles which ‘Make the cold air fire’ turn into limbs ‘burning / Through the vest which seems to hide them’ (ll. 54-5). Bloom speaks of the phrase ‘seems to hide’ as ‘wonderfully ambiguous’; the vest does not hide the limbs ‘for they burn through the vest; yet the vest does hide them, because it seems to hide them’.²³ It is an ambiguity, a doubleness of sense, designed to reinforce an impression of indivisibility and singleness. And, straightaway, the paradox of ‘limbs’ which are and are not at one with the vest they burn through is subjected to a comparison; the limbs burn ‘As the radiant lines of morning / Through the clouds ere they divide them’ (ll. 56-7). But, as if forestalling the deconstructive reflex which insists that comparisons concede unlikeness in the act of asserting likeness, Shelley's comparison sustains the same dizzying sense of twoness-in-one of the original; in both cases that which ‘seems to hide’ makes possible what is ‘burning’ or ‘radiant’. So self-aware is the writing that mode mirrors theme; the poem's words seem to hide the very subject which exists by virtue of accomplished admissions of inadequacy, admissions which culminate in the final couplet, ‘Till they [the souls of whom thou lovest] fail, as I am failing, / Dizzy, lost … yet unbewailing!’ (ll. 70-1). Bloom is right to emphasize ‘Till’, with its implication that ‘Fail they must’;²⁴ the glide from walking with lightness (l. 69) to failing accepts without fuss, so far as the visionary project of the lyric (and the lyrical drama) is concerned, the necessary involvement in one another of success and failure. The poem's ‘I’ refuses to bewail the ‘failing’ of, among other things, poetic inspiration. Not the least of the flickering oppositions held in temporarily unified suspension by this fine poem is its status both as process and product.

3

Of course ‘Life of Life’ is part of a larger work; the foregoing discussion seeks less to oppose than to modify Rajan's account of the role performed by lyric in the lyrical drama. My reading privileges the lyric as a moment when, without sacrifice of complexity, Prometheus Unbound alters the way it signifies, seeming to incarnate its significances within a brief verbal span. More usually, the self is less refined out of existence in Shelley's lyrics than it is in ‘Life of Life’. Indeed, Ronald Tetreault argues that, for Shelley, ‘The lyric allowed for the exploration and expression of his inner life, but its concerns remained too uniquely private.’²⁵ Yet Shelley's negotiations with the ‘uniquely private’ resolve only ambiguously into evocations of ‘some one state of feeling’. His early lyrics often safeguard the ‘uniquely private’ by containing, even burying, suggestions of privacy within an inherited or generalizing lyric idiom. ‘Mutability’, for instance, builds towards the assertion, ‘Man's yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but Mutability’ (ll. 15-16). But this epigrammatic condensation of a famous topos comes at the end of a poem whose figurative restlessness—‘We are as clouds’ (l. 1), ‘Or like forgotten lyres’ (l. 5)—implies an impatience with epigram's offer of closure; ‘we’ bears a strong, if hidden, personal signature in the poem, which seeks controlling definition of experience's refusal to submit to control. This tug shapes the poem's form; the quatrains are tightly rhymed and the iambics mimic a headlong intensity, and yet the feminine rhymes in the first and last stanzas, plus the expertly different pace at which each quatrain moves, enact a chafing against submission to ‘one state of feeling’; emotionally and thematically, oppositions meet and indeed collapse in on one another: on the one hand, ‘no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last’ (ll. 7-8); on the other hand, ‘It is the same!’ (l. 13). The effect is of an undercurrent of private feeling both shaping and ruffling the linguistic surface of the lyric.

‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ is another early poem whose plangencies derive from Shelley's oblique dealings with the ‘uniquely private’. These dealings are ‘oblique’ in that Shelley addresses himself as ‘thou’,²⁶ instructing himself to cut his emotional losses, ‘Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood’ (l. 6); and they are ‘oblique’ because Shelley alternates between suppression and revelation of feeling, intermingling stoicism and ‘dereliction’ (l. 8), and making a skilful rhythmic music out of the intermingling, employing description to carry the reader both away from and towards the poem's emotional centre of gravity. Donald Davie argues that ‘the “Stanza, written at Bracknell” can control self-pity by controlled and judicious phrasing’,²⁷ and the ability to ‘control self-pity’ is also evident in ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’.

It is instructive to compare the poem with ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise’, written in Shelley's final year. In an implicitly self-descriptive image, ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ refers to ‘dim shades’ that ‘complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth’ (ll. 11, 12), and both this poem and the later lyric deal with, and in, ‘complication’. In the first Shelley is returning to his ‘sad and silent home’ (l. 9) after an emotional entanglement (with Cornelia Boinville Turner) has come to an end; in the second, addressed to Edward and Jane Williams, Shelley alludes to the marital problems that make his a ‘cold home’ (l. 25). Both poems long for an escape from complication, using similar tropes to convey this longing. In ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ Shelley writes,

The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
          For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in
the deep:
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;
          Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed
sleep.

(ll. 17-20)

The stylized distancing of human emotion in these lines, part and parcel of the poetry's absorption in its own rhythmic virtuosity, is striking. The lines convey what is at once an emotional presence and absence on Shelley's part: they speak eloquently of (by saying nothing about) his own ‘turbulence’ and exclusion from the universal ‘repose’ and ‘respite’ they describe. ‘Thou in the grave shalt rest’ (l. 21), the beginning of the next stanza, is perfectly judged not to disturb the effect achieved here. It is an effect that contrasts intriguingly with the weighty confessionalism of the line in Wordsworth's ‘Ode to Duty’ which may have been the younger poet's starting-point, at any rate in lines 17-20: ‘I long for a repose that ever is the same’.²⁸ Shelley's poem declines to posit so unbearably revealed a centre of self; indeed, we may feel that its deepest longing is to keep the music coming: ‘Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free / From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile’ (ll. 23-4). This is elegantly done, but the pacing is too adroitly managed for the poem's good: ‘remembrance’ trips rather cheaply into ‘repentance’, while ‘deep’ attaches itself unprofoundly to ‘musings’. The final intimation that ‘one sweet smile’ has all along been haunting the poet serves, rather, to underscore the fact that the poem has been more than half in love with its own lyric artifice.

To adapt P. H. Butter's account of ‘A Summer-Evening Churchyard’, another poem first published in the Alastor volume, ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ is a ‘product of an immature poet of genius’.²⁹ ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise’ is the product of a poet whose maturity shows in his readiness to take emotional risks, to trade the merely accomplished for the dramatization of involuntary stops and starts of feeling. So in the sixth stanza, which could be seen as a reworking of lines 17-20 of ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’, Shelley reverts to a pattern established in the first stanza. In both the first and the sixth stanzas the first line strives for a mellifluous, apparently single-toned literariness: ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’ (l. 1); ‘The crane o’er seas and forests seeks her home’ (l. 41). In both stanzas this literariness gives way to something closer to conversational utterance, guarded in the first instance (‘I, too, must seldom seek again / Near happy friends a mitigated pain’ (ll. 7-8)), almost histrionic in the second (‘Doubtless there is a place of peace / Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease’ (ll. 47-8)). Where ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ was artfully oblique, ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise’ intermittently verges on the embarrassingly explicit, as line 48 reveals. The line is as unprotected an expression of self-pity as the most ardent anti-Shelleyan could wish. And yet it is only one phase in a poem whose workings are, tonally and emotionally, far more demanding than those in ‘Stanza.—April, 1814’.

The poem cannot, in Mill's phrase, communicate ‘some one state of feeling’, because it finds out as it unfolds that its feelings are not single. Tension run through the piece. The first line ruffles the ‘literariness’ mentioned above by coupling Biblical allusion with wryly private joking (Shelley was nicknamed ‘the snake’);³⁰ lament for the serpent's exclusion blends with recognition of the fact that other people's paradises are better off without serpents. The poem is at emotional cross-purposes with itself throughout; Shelley feels he should deny himself the ‘mitigated pain’ which the company of his friends offers, only to argue that being the object of their ‘Pity’ (l. 12) is unbearable. In stanza three the poem articulates the impasse which the workings of the first two stanzas have intimated: ‘The very comfort which they [the looks of his friends] minister / I scarce can bear; yet I, / (So deeply is the arrow gone) / Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn’ (ll. 21-4). ‘I scarce can bear’; ‘Should quickly perish’: these seem the stock terms on which Romantic emotionalism might depend. Yet these intensities coexist with the poised movement of the lines across the modified ottava rima³¹ as well as with fidelity to the rhythms of speech (in, say, the recoil of ‘yet I’, or the painful semi-jest of the parenthesis which follows). The result is not to damp down the ‘sense of unrelieved, even unrelievable, frustration’³² which William Keach detects in the poem, but to add to it the further sense that the poet is driven, and knows he is being driven, to play a ‘forced part’ (l. 28) in his own poem.

This is not to accuse Shelley of insincerity; it is, rather, to observe the way the poem authenticates his unhappiness at having to assume ‘the idle mask / Of author’ (ll. 29-30); to observe, too, the way the poem seems to open up fractional silences after its assertions and qualifications, silences in which the provisionality of what has just been said is at once muted and acknowledged. Certainly it is to the poem's credit that Shelley does not wholly persuade us he has ‘relieved / His heart with words’ (ll. 51-2). The lyric allows overstatement to co-exist with indeterminacy, false notes to play against candour, explicit revelation to pass into reticence and doubt, the ‘bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’, in Yeats's words,³³ to enter into dialogue with the self projected by lyric. ‘These verses were too sad / To send to you’ (ll. 54-5) steps out of the frame of the lyric; there is both art in and an undefended rawness about this disclaimer that contrasts with the effect of the graceful apology at the end of ‘Stanzas written in Dejection—December 1818, Near Naples’, where Shelley regrets his poem's ‘untimely moan’ (l. 40). In ‘Stanzas written in Dejection’ Shelley's surprises—the self-effacing attention to nature, the delayed entrance of the self-pitying self, the self-consciousness about self-pity—are woven harmoniously into the poem's texture; they do not enforce recognition of a gulf or link between the suffering man and the creating mind. In ‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise’ Shelley shapes an impressively self-divided lyricism out of his sense of the difficulties posed by the ‘uniquely private’; the poem allows us to eavesdrop on the interplay between what Nietzsche calls ‘the lyric genius and the allied non-genius’.³⁴

4

‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise’ makes a last-minute appeal to its audience (Edward and Jane Williams) by praising them for their capacity to ‘feel another's woe’ (l. 56); in doing so, it not only moves out of its lyric space into lives beyond itself, it also draws those lives back into the lyric space it seems to be abandoning. Other late lyrics both undermine and protect their autonomy. ‘When the lamp is shattered’³⁵ wins a bleak lyric triumph out of themes of failure and aftermath, loss and survival. If ever a poem seemed intent on evoking ‘some one state of feeling’, this is it; but the poem proves to be more intricate. Indeed, if it does impress as conveying ‘one state of feeling’ it does so because of a driving intensity that extends, even as it elaborates, the poem's initial position. Loss refuses to be as absolute as the series of figures in the opening stanza intimates, and passes into survival. ‘When the lips have spoken / Loved accents are soon forgot’ (ll. 7-8) may dispose of ‘Loved accents’, yet the next stanza asserts the persistence of songs that are not songs but ‘sad dirges’ (l. 13) which come into being when ‘the spirit is mute’ (l. 12). Survival, living on after loss or hurt, turns out to be the poem's true theme; ‘music and splendour’ may ‘Survive not the lamp and the lute’ (ll. 9-10), but something does survive, something that denies the reader the easy frisson of complete loss the poem seems to offer.

With this and the emotional plot which unfolds in the third stanza in mind, the reader may find the clarity of lines 7-8 more apparent than real: ‘Loved accents are soon forgot’ but how soon is ‘soon’? The line wants to make comparable the forgetting of loved accents and the other losses described in the stanza; yet in the very attempt to make the emotional conform to laws governing the physical Shelley alerts us to subjective pressures, smuggling back the lyric subject seemingly suppressed by the poem. Again, in the second stanza, the poem's unique timbre appears, briefly and self-reflexively, to be suggested, a sad dirge written out of the spirit's muteness. Throughout, there is a contest between images that seek some conclusive definition of failure and the awareness that emotional closure is hard to come by. Failure has many gradations as the final stanza indicates through its use of a future tense and phrases that chart successive stages in some imagined divestiture of dignity; when the last line arrives, in all its spondaic finality (‘When leaves fall and cold winds come’), there is less a sense of reaching a conclusion than of realizing more fully what is involved by the word ‘endure’ in the earlier lines, ‘The weak one is singled / To endure what it once possest’ (ll. 19-20). By echoing the ‘when’ construction which governs earlier lines, but this time leads nowhere beyond itself, the last line rounds off yet questions previous attempts to argue through images, holding the poem open to the unarguable rigours suggested by falling leaves and cold winds.

The tussle between sobered delight in the ‘magic circle’ (‘To Jane. The Recollection’, l. 44) drawn by lyric art and awareness of realities outside art's magic circle vitalizes the late poems to Jane Williams. Often it is hard to know who has the upper hand: the idealizing lyricist or the sceptic leaning over his shoulder. In the last stanza of ‘To Jane: “The keen stars were twinkling”’, as Keach points out, ‘The world of ideal lyric unity is explicitly recognized as being “far from ours”’.³⁶ Yet the poem wins through (originally Shelley concluded the poem with ‘won’ rather than ‘one’)³⁷ to its glimpse of ‘ideal lyric unity’ more buoyantly than Keach allows. The ingenious use to which Shelley puts his arrangement of line-length and rhyme, so that every sixth line has a clinching effect, contributes to this buoyancy. From the start, the poem privileges the ‘voice’ of its addressee, who serves as source and correlative of poetic inspiration, a muse figure the more credible for the uninflated nature of the poet's address: ‘the notes were not sweet ‘till you sung them / Again’ (ll. 5-6). Here Jane creates and discovers harmony in the same breath; later, the voice's power to confer value is stressed as it spiritualizes ‘the strings without soul’ (l. 11). Even here there is, because of the comparison launched in line seven (‘moon's soft splendour’ (l. 7) is to ‘faint cold starlight’ (l. 8) as ‘voice most tender’ (l. 10) is to ‘strings without soul’), a suggestion that Jane's power derives from some lucky accord between the natural and the human. But in the second stanza this not wholly logical suggestion drops away: whether ‘the moon sleep a full hour later’ (l. 14) the impact of Jane's singing is not diminished; at the end of the poem it is the creative effect of her ‘voice’ (l. 20) which is praised. If this leaves the poem open to the charge that what it exhibits is merely the ‘exertion of the interpretive will’, in Keach's phrase, it should be noted that Shelley seeks to silence the charge by speaking of the voice as ‘revealing / A tone / Of some world far from ours’ (ll. 20-2; my emphasis), a classic instance of deconstructive critical strategies being outwitted in advance by a poem. Shelley protects his poem against its and our scepticism by implying that it illustrates through its workings the autonomy of song which is its theme, and that it reveals—not just fabricates—a reality ‘far from ours’.

That my commentary on ‘To Jane: “The keen stars were twinkling”’ ends with the phrase whose challenge to ‘lyric unity’ I claim the poem is able to absorb is significant; it reveals how precarious any defence of these poems against their deconstructive impulses is likely to be. None the less, Shelley's formal choices in this poem and the companion pieces, ‘To Jane. The Invitation’ and ‘To Jane. The Recollection’, are designed to play down, though not to silence, their less assimilable moods. The flowing couplets of ‘To Jane. The Invitation’, for instance, protect the poet's discovery of ‘one moment's good’ (l. 44) by suspending it in a contiguous flow of thoughts and feelings. The poem looks before and after, glancing at the humdrum misery of ‘the unpaid bill’ (l. 35), accepting the likely return of ‘Reflexion’ (l. 33) and ‘Sorrow’ (l. 34), and tacitly allowing that there will be times when, unlike the present, the ‘soul’ will need to ‘repress / Its music lest it should not find / An echo in another's mind’ (ll. 24-6), lines where the ‘echo’ enacted by rhyme holds at arm's length the fear of echolessness. Yet the poem takes on board and manages to accommodate these obstacles to lyric celebration of the ‘Radiant Sister of the day’ (l. 47). What is imaginatively projected in the final paragraph is a folding of the ‘multitudinous’ (l. 65) into ‘one’ (l. 68):

And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal Sun.—

(ll. 65-9)

Although the metre is trochaic, ‘seem’ attracts a good deal of attention here. And yet for all its momentariness, possible illusoriness and potential vulnerability to strains both within and without (‘To Jane. The Recollection’ will bring such strains to the fore), the vision attained at the end of ‘To Jane. The Invitation’ is richly, if complexly, affirmative. There is an often justifiable wariness of the unitary in contemporary criticism of Romantic poets. Despite (or because of) this, it is worth re-emphasizing that, without the impulse to imagine states in which ‘all things seem only one’, the contrary impulses chartable in many of Shelley's finest poems would lose much of their power.

Notes

1. J. S. Mill, ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’ (1833), quoted from Shelley: Shorter Poems and Lyrics, A Casebook, ed. Patrick Swinden (London and Basingstoke, 1976), p. 58; hereafter Casebook.

2. ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’, quoted from Casebook, p. 58.

3. The phrase is T. S. Eliot's in his ‘William Blake’, Selected Essays, 3rd enlarged edn (1951; London, 1976), p. 317.

4. G. M. Matthews argues that ‘the poem was evidently written for the opening of Hellas’, in ‘Shelley's Lyrics’ (1969), quoted from Casebook, p. 189. Judith Chernaik, however, in The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London, 1972), hereafter Chernaik, argues that ‘the lyric appears to be self-sufficient’ (p. 161), a view I share.

5. Quoted from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London, 1977); hereafter PP. All poems by Shelley are quoted from this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

6. ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, quoted from The Poems of Robert Herrick (London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne, 1902). On ‘Shelley's version of carpe diem’ see Chernaik, p. 155.

7. Poem is quoted from text in Chernaik, p. 246. For the influence of Wordsworth's ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ see Chernaik, pp. 146-7.

8. Chernaik, p. 147.

9. Chernaik, p. 147.

10. ‘Shelley's Lyrics’, quoted from Casebook, p. 178.

11. Tilottama Rajan, ‘Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness’, hereafter Rajan, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošsek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca and London, 1985), p. 198.

12. Rajan, pp. 206, 196, 207.

13. Rajan, p. 196.

14. Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1987), p. 220; hereafter Tetreault.

15. Rajan, pp. 204, 202.

16. Stephen Spender, Shelley (1952), quoted from Shelley's ‘Prometheus Unbound’: A Variorum Edition, ed. Lawrence John Zillman (Seattle, 1959), p. 491.

17. Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959; Ithaca, NY, 1969), p. 126; hereafter Bloom.

18. Isobel Armstrong writes perceptively about the work performed by Shelley's ‘ambiguous syntax’ in the poem in her Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Sussex and New Jersey, 1982), p. 137; hereafter Armstrong.

19. Armstrong, p. 135.

20. Byron's poem is quoted from vol. iii of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford, 1981), ed. Jerome J. McGann.

21. Daniel Hughes, ‘Kindling and Dwindling: The Poetic Process in Shelley’, Keats-Shelley Journal, xiii (1964), p. 18.

22. See discussion in Armstrong of the way language ‘quivers endlessly between negation and assertion’ in this line, p. 135.

23. Bloom, p. 127.

24. Bloom, p. 127.

25. Tetreault, p. 121.

26. ‘O! there are spirits of the air’, which Mary Shelley says was ‘addressed in idea to Coleridge’ (quoted from The Poems of Shelley: Volume 1: 1804-1817, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London and New York, 1989), p. 448), also addresses a ‘thou’ in a manner that can be construed as self-address.

27. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse, enlarged edn (1967; London, 1969), p. 147.

28. ‘Ode to Duty’, l. 40, quoted from William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. Ernest de Selincourt (1936; London, Oxford and New York, 1969).

29. Quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Alastor’ and Other Poems; ‘Prometheus Unbound’ with Other Poems; ‘Adonais’, ed. P. H. Butter (London and Glasgow, 1970), p. 249.

30. See PP, p. 447.

31. See William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York and London, 1984), hereafter Keach, for the form as a possible reflection of ‘Byron's influence on the poem’, p. 218.

32. Keach, p. 219.

33. W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ (1937), quoted from W. B. Yeats, Selected Criticism and Prose, ed. with intro. and notes by A. Norman Jeffares (London, 1980), p. 255.

34. The Birth of Tragedy, section 5; quoted from Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Case of Wagner’, trans. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), p. 50.

35. Quoted from text in Chernaik, pp. 254-6.

36. Keach, p. 228.

37. See Chernaik, p. 261; Keach also comments on this detail, emphasizing what it reveals about ‘a performance or exertion of the interpretive will’, p. 228.