[In the following essay, Ketcham interprets Shelley's fragment “A Vision of the Sea” as the poet's most direct artistic statement on the theme of man versus nature.]

From the time of the boyish wonderings that prompted his frustrated ghost-hunt at Warnham Church to the spectral events at Casa Magni in 1822, Shelley was probing, uneasily and persistently, at questions which stood ranged along the outer limits of his belief. Again and again he confronted, and fell short of finally resolving, a series of related problems—the scope of the individual will, the immortality of the soul, the extent of change which love can bring about, the relationship of man to his physical environment. Whether faith (or love, or will) can move mountains or look through death were issues which troubled him in the midst of his most fervent assertions of the power of the human spirit. He seems to have been particularly concerned with the ways in which man is limited by material nature; as Carl Grabo summed up the issue some decades ago, Shelley's “horror of the destructiveness of natural forces … alternates with his mystical faith in the ultimate powers of beauty and goodness in the world.”¹ Man may eventually achieve a sense of relationship with the glacier that crowns Mont Blanc, but it remains “a flood of ruin”;² birds of prey may dine—at least allegorically—on poisonous berries in the Promethean world to come, but man will not even then be “exempt … / From chance, and death, and mutability” (Prometheus Unbound iii.iv.79-81, 200-1).

If we except “Mont Blanc,” in which the power of Nature is partly a symbol for a higher power, Shelley's most explicit treatment of man vs. Nature is the somewhat mysterious fragment “A Vision of the Sea.” The extravagancies of this poem have, understandably, made it rather a puzzle to critics. Combining rigid patterning with violent detail and a galloping metre, it reads, in certain passages, almost like a burlesque of Shelley's more considered work; even its imagery, which sometimes rises to a certain metaphysical aptness—the sides of the waves seen as “dim mirrors of ruin” (l. 17) or the sounds crawling over the water like centipedes (l. 148)³—suffers by appearing to share in the poem's almost defiant lack of restraint. The result is that most scholars, including the most recent, have ignored “A Vision of the Sea”; and those who feel obliged to include some account of it in their work are obviously baffled by it. “Certainly, as it stands,” wrote Kenneth Cameron, “the poem makes little sense,” though he added that the mother-child passage does express “compactly and poignantly [Shelley's] doubts on immortality.”⁴ Other critics have tried to give the poem a raison d'être by suggesting that it may contain hidden autobiographical significance,⁵ or by retreating to the uncertain ground of the emergent unconscious: the poem has been described (and dismissed) as “a tale from the frontier of madness” (Blunden), “a welling-up of the unconscious” (King-Hele), or as resembling “a piece of ‘automatic’ or dream writing” (Holmes).⁶ These latter interpretations at least recognize that something beyond boyish enthusiasm may have energized Shelley's imagery; but the possibility that the poem may also operate on a consistent rational level seems hardly to have been considered, beyond a few fragmentary suggestions. Among these brief hints, those that point most clearly in the direction I plan to take in discussing “A Vision” are a few remarks made as early as 1910 by A. M. D. Hughes:

[Shelley] frequently images the awful events in the lives of the brute creation, their deadly encounters, or the distress of hunted things, the mute fear of beast and bird at the oncoming of tempest … not allowing the pain and cruelty in these things to darken his view of Nature, but fascinated simply by the daemonic power. The infant laughing on the wreck belongs to the small company of Shelley's children whose spirit-like innocence stands out against the surroundings of evil, sorrow, or fear in which they are always placed (cf. the children in the Revolt of Islam, “Rosalind and Helen,” “Julian and Maddalo”).⁷

Hughes, although he does not develop his position, at least recognizes that “A Vision” is not merely a nightmare or a crypto-autobiography, but has a more or less definable place among Shelley's other poetic renderings of his view of Nature. It may, of course, have other meanings as well: the interpretation I am about to offer by no means rules out the possibility that Shelley might also have been projecting his own experiences, or perhaps making another excursion into political allegory. But an examination of the thematic structure of the poem clearly suggests that it may be read as a systematic, even mechanical summing up of the various elements in the complex problem of man's potential in relation to the outside world.

The zest with which Shelley describes the clash of opposing forces—winds, waves, beasts, marksmen—cannot conceal that the poem is as neatly arranged as a scientific experiment. We need only make a simple list of its contents to recognize that it is a kind of controlled observation in which extremes—pure chemicals, so to speak—are brought together and allowed to act on each other as in a natural laboratory, away from the obscuring safeguards of ordinary existence. In this stark waste, where Heaven seems “ruining in,” unchecked natural power confronts perfect innocence and beauty in a state of moral isolation reminiscent of The Ancient Mariner. What seems like random confusion is actually Shelley's attempt at philosophic thoroughness. Indeed the word vision implies, not a disordered dream-world, but the completeness of an apocalyptic vision, the kind of total insight that is achieved through the daytime trance in The Triumph of Life.

It is somewhat paradoxical that Shelley's experimental zeal (assisted, of course, by his love of spectacle) explains the theatrical violence with which the poem begins. He wants to show Nature honestly and vividly at her most destructive before suggesting more hopeful possibilities. This is a protective device familiar in Shelley's work: to avert a charge of facile optimism, he often exacts not only a full but a lingeringly detailed look at the Worst—the captivity of Laon, the torturing of Prometheus by the Furies, the pervasive evil of old Cenci. At the outset of “A Vision” he plunges into a catalogue of natural horrors so complete that it approaches the comic. The voyagers have undergone nine weeks of calm and of deadly heat, followed by plague, tempest, huge waves, waterspouts, “thunder-balls,” and a hurricane. The display, in its piling up of horrendous detail, recalls the reviewer's burlesque title for a Turner painting: “A Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway; with a ship on fire, an eclipse and the effect of a lunar rainbow.”⁸ Nature is spectacularly misbehaving herself at Shelley's behest, in the interest of scientific thoroughness.

Then, with equal zeal, about midway through the poem, Shelley sets about redressing the experimental balance. The storm is broken up and dispersed by a counter-storm, a hurricane which tears its way through the clouds with the speed of a snake chasing an elephant. (This typically Shelleyan image serves both to link inanimate with animate nature and to suggest—though not to insist on—an order made up of independent forces rather than a causal mechanism.) Like the glacier of Mont Blanc, destroying trees and homes but melting into a life-giving river, the elements deal impartially with man; Nature is not hostile but indifferent. The ship had made use of wind and wave before the limit of man's control over these forces was reached. Now the destructiveness of the tempest has been ended by an apparently random play of natural power. Shelley has dramatized two simple natural facts: first, that it is an error to interpret the order of things as essentially or unchangeably evil or hostile; second, that man's will—if only the will to survive—finds scope even in a material universe governed by chance or causality. Thus, within the rigid restrictions of man's present abilities, two premises on which the ideal of the Promethean world is founded—the rejection of the finality of evil and the power of the will to attain good—can be practically demonstrated.

This view of inanimate Nature is paralleled in Shelley's account of the animal world, represented by the tigers, the sea-snake, and the sharks and dog-fish. In both orders, animate and inanimate, there is a play of energies which often neutralize each other. The sea, which first caused the tigers to break their chains in the hold and threaten the mother and child, also holds the animals in check; the menace of one of the tigers is effectively cancelled by its battle with the sea-snake. Both orders also invite misinterpretation: the human ego, when alarmed by Nature's indifference, is apt to envision a “cruel” sea or an “evil” struggle for existence among the beasts. This common mistake is especially likely when man's self-centered outlook imposes a false resemblance between his world and Nature's—when the glacier looks like a city of ice, or when the tiger and the snake appear, like rational creatures, to be inflicting deliberate suffering out of mutual hatred. Shelley never denies the suffering itself. Like Keats, he has seen “far into the sea: where every maw / The greater on the less feeds evermore.”⁹ The victor in the tiger's combat will be devoured by the shark. But Shelley, for all his fabled sensitivity, is less disturbed by this warfare than either Keats or Tennyson. He describes it with the same enthusiasm that marked his panorama of winds and waterspouts. When he gives us “the jar, and the rattle / Of solid bones crush'd” (ll. 139-40) or “the hum of the hot blood that spouts and rains / Where the gripe of the tiger has wounded the veins / Swollen with rage, strength, and effort” (ll. 142-44) the dominant tone is not horror but horrified admiration, if not positive glee. As Hughes points out, Shelley's view of brute Nature is not darkened by his awareness of pain; instead he is “fascinated simply by … daemonic power.” He sees that the tiger-snake battle involves no more hatred or cruelty than the war of the winds. The animal world, like the rest of Nature, has no moral meaning. It is part of the raw stuff of man's environment, which he may use as he can. In the Promethean age he will have learned to dominate Nature by refusing to accept evil as a governing principle; that is, he will cease to misuse or misappropriate Nature for selfish purposes, will seek remedies for natural disasters, will subordinate chance and pain by no longer responding to them with selfish fear. Even in the limited present, however, he can begin to distinguish between the legitimate need for self-preservation and the error which may arise from this need—the irrational, egotistical dread of an order which seems evil to him because it is extra-human. Recognition that Nature is impartial toward man is, as we have seen, one practical step toward removing this dread. Another step is the awareness that what seems like cruelty in the brute creation is, in fact, morally neutral. To the extent that man can thus free himself from belief in the hopeless dominance of evil in the material world, he can, even now, liberate his will to aim at and eventually achieve the good.

Having contrasted appearance and reality in Nature, Shelley turns to a reminder of another obvious ground for qualified optimism—man's superior potential in dealing with his physical surroundings. This superiority had not been much in evidence during the shipwreck. To balance his picture, Shelley now produces (out of nowhere) a mysterious boat—clearly a symbolic craft, moving “with the impulse of thought” (l. 153) and manned by a conventionalized number of rowers and three improbable marksmen. It is, much too plainly, human thought or human inventiveness, exercising its share of control over Nature. Gunpowder and hot bullets dispose of the second tiger (though it swims on for a while with the brute tenacity of self-preservation) as the sea-snake had neutralized the menace of the first. Man, Shelley asks us to remember, not only has scope to act, but has begun to develop the technical skills which are one of the necessary conditions of future progress. Shelley no longer holds the naive belief of his university days, that the shadow of the first balloon over Africa will annihilate slavery forever; in A Defence of Poetry (1821) he admits that “man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.”¹⁰ But science guided by Love and by the insights of poetry can move toward the achievement of Shelley's earlier dreams. Promethean man continues to unveil Earth's secrets, to dominate her physically as Love has enabled him to dominate her philosophically.

At the center of the contending forces in Shelley's microcosm are the mother and child, Beauty and Innocence, the victims and, within their limits, the interpreters of the disaster. As victims they seem only too well suited to their roles: lovely, vulnerable, and suspended between death and rescue, they are stock characters out of a play or a Gothic novel. The child's gleeful ignorance, the mother's somewhat pallid lament, even the pose on the sinking deck by the useless helm suggest that Shelley, instead of thinking through his characterization, was filling a gap in his poem with memories from some of his more sensational boyhood reading. Certainly he intended to appeal to the reader on the most obvious level, as he had already appealed to his love of the terrifying in describing the tigers and the tempest. It is worth noting, however, that both the child and the mother have traits in common with key figures in Shelley's other poems, and that these traits are a part of Shelley's distinctive way of thought. Although we must admit the naïveté of his presentation, it may be worthwhile to examine the two survivors in the light of Shelley's intention in “A Vision” and elsewhere.

Within the limits of the poem, the child's innocence at first appears to be little more than an excuse for facile irony. He laughs at the lightning, mimics the thunder, smiles at the ocean, wants to play with the tigers' eyes. So much for imperceptiveness in a world of real dangers. But this innocence, however crudely exploited in “A Vision,” is of a distinctively Shelleyan kind. In the less ominous settings of his other poems, it appears as an unsophisticated love of Nature, a joy in natural beauty and energy. We think of the Spirit of the Earth in Prometheus Unbound, and of several other childlike beings only slightly differentiated from the Nature they sport with or control: the fauns in Prometheus, with their fantasies about the musical spirits of the woods; Ocean, the affectionate master of the unpastured sea; or the Cloud's delight in its own playful power. These beings are survivals of the Saturnian world of innocence, possessing “the calm joy of flowers and living leaves / Before the wind or sun has withered them” (Prometheus Unbound ii.iv.36-37). And it is to this unfallen state that man, having confronted and disarmed evil, will return with new knowledge in the Promethean age.

The child's unawareness, then, is not merely an ironic device. The beauty which he perceives, though it is hidden from the mother by her knowledge of peril, is genuine, a positive value in the midst of real and immediate menace. It is the aesthetic corollary of the ethical fact that Nature is neutral. “Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated,” Keats observed, “the energies displayed in it are fine.”¹¹ When it is recognized that Nature is not fundamentally hostile, her energies—if they do not pose too immediate a threat—can be admired, or even seen as beautiful. Indeed, by the end of the poem, the child has arrived at much the same relationship with Nature that Shelley, in “Mont Blanc,” sees as man's ideal aim: the child's acceptance has established a bond as if between two personalities.¹² “Like a sister and brother, / The child and the ocean still smile on each other” (ll. 167-68). This recognition of beauty in the midst of chaos is a prime requisite for the eventual achievement of the Promethean triumph of love. As Julian insists in a familiar passage of “Julian and Maddalo,” man must seek “a ‘soul of goodness’ in things ill” (l. 204) as a first step toward willing and achieving the dominance of good. None of this, of course, changes the fact that the child's ignorance leaves him vulnerable; Shelley has no sentimental notions about innocence as a safeguard. Only infantile inexperience can pay attention to beauty in the midst of a shipwreck. The Prometheans, like the “wise, and great, and good” of “Mont Blanc” (l. 82), will combine the child's love with wisdom; their acceptance will be based on knowledge of evil at its worst. For the present, however, the child is, in one way, wiser than the mother. He is not merely an unknowing victim of disaster, but an example of the awareness of good that it is possible to seek even in the present, and of the loving union with Nature that the victory of good will bring to completion.

The mother's loveliness, like the child's innocence, has a place in Shelley's scheme of values: she is one of his many women who radiate the light of Intellectual Beauty. Like Emilia Viviani, whose glory

Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade
Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing,
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world

(Epipsychidion, ll. 92-103)

the mother seems to enkindle

                                                                                                              the atmosphere,
Which trembles and burns with the fervour of dread
Around her wild eyes, her bright hand, and her head,
Like a meteor of light o'er the waters!

(ll. 162-65)

Intellectual Beauty is Shelley's standard of truth, expressed in an unbroken continuum from physical to spiritual; hence the mother's beauty is a sign of, or part of, a state of moral truth. She represents common humanity at its best. No prophet like Prometheus, not even a beleaguered heroine like Beatrice Cenci, she nevertheless demonstrates the selflessness which, in the world of daily experience, is a practical form of Promethean love. Shelley makes clear that, in particular, she is free of the wicked egoism which passes for Christianity. The God who fed corpses from the ship to the dogfish as he had fed manna to the Jews (a bit of bravado we might think Shelley would have out-grown by this point)¹³ is evidently not her God. No creed has given her ready-made answers about immortality; like Shelley, she questions the nature of death and finds no response. Like Shelley, also, she recognizes that the body is only a disguise for the spirit, but cannot convince herself that the spirit will survive the body. Nor does she perform the unlikely feat of perceiving either beauty or goodness in the storm that seems about to overwhelm her. But there is no selfish terror in her attitude toward death—only concern for her child and a tranquil, almost philosophical lament at their coming separation. Even the colorlessness which we have noted in her speech can be seen as a token of her resignation. Without a gleam of Promethean hope, she has met one of the first conditions—surrender of the limiting awareness of self—on which the Promethean world will be built.

What has Shelley achieved in “A Vision”? First, he has outlined a complete and utterly unsentimental view of Nature. It is a view which brings together the uglier implications of several of his other poems: the plague and famine of Islam, the destructiveness of the West Wind, even the triumphant docks and darnels in “The Sensitive Plant” preach a material order which at present is neither God's nor man's. This is a sobering admission. Shelley quite unperturbedly presents, in its extremest form, a view which had nearly shattered Wordsworth's cosmos after his brother's death in 1805 and which prophesies the major intellectual upheaval of the nineteenth century. He admits a self-limiting tendency in Nature's destructiveness and a degree of technical control on man's part; but the poet of skylarks, faded violets, and Intellectual Beauty had sailed through a near-fatal squall on Lake Geneva with Byron in 1816. He knew at first hand the absolute mercilessness of an indifferent Nature.

But having dramatized the extent of this challenge to man's faith in the possibility of good, Shelley goes on to demonstrate that Nature at her worst is no final barrier to establishing the realm of hope and love which is the theme of Prometheus Unbound. Human wrongs can perhaps be forgiven, but Shelley's system must also bear the test of unchangeable natural fact. It is the thesis of “A Vision” that the test can be met, that mortals with no special insight can face appalling disaster and still find means “to love, and bear” (Prometheus Unbound iv.573). If man can renounce, or at least curb, the selfish demands of his own personality, he can perceive that the natural forces which seem bent on destroying him are in fact neutral, and that their interplay leaves scope for his will and intelligence to act. Once the inevitability of evil is denied and the qualified freedom of the will is established, it appears that there is no necessary limit to the power of the will to attain good. Eventually, when this is widely understood, man will be able to relate positively to Nature, endowing her with meaning, with personality, through the organizing power of his own mind.

Thus “A Vision” is not merely what Grabo calls it, an example of the sense of evil temporarily overcoming Shelley's belief in the ultimate power of good. Rather, it is the doctrine of “Mont Blanc” put to a severe practical trial, as Prometheus' ideal of forgiveness is tested and modified by the hideous immediacy of evil in The Cenci. “Mont Blanc” describes the moral conquest of Nature by a few of the wise, great, and good. “A Vision” suggests that the beginnings of this conquest are within the reach of anyone with enough courage and altruism not to be totally overwhelmed by the appearance of evil.

It follows that the poem is not really a fragment in the sense of being incomplete. Shelley has finished what he has to say about Nature and man's dealings with her. The abrupt breaking off at line 169 merely announces that the struggle continues on both the physical and moral plane. Man's battle to perceive and will the good is as difficult and uncertain as the survival of the mother and child on the toppling wreck. A way to truth does lie open in the midst of apparent chaos and cruelty, and no superhuman forethinking is needed to find it. But holding fast to it when found, denying the reality of the evil which Hope thinks infinite, is a treacherous conflict indeed. Man makes his own world, among worse dangers than the violence of the sea. “A Vision” records, both directly and allegorically, the beginnings of his opportunity and the perils of his choice.

Notes

1. The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley's Thought (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 286.

2. Quotations from Shelley's works are from the conveniently available Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford U. Press, 1905 and later reprintings).

3. This image was too much for the hostile critic in the Quarterly Review, who said it would be “no small addition to a cabinet of poetical monstrosities” (26 [October 1821], 173).

4. Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1974), pp. 292-93.

5. “Into it [the woman's address to her child] Shelley poured his own grief for the loss of William and Clara,” Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), ii, 170. “[The picture of the shipwreck] may or may not reflect Shelley's view of Mary's withdrawal into herself,” Newman Ivey White, Shelley (London: Secker and Warburg, 1947), ii, 189.

6. Edmund Blunden, Shelley, A Life Story (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 264; Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd ed. (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press, 1971), p. 236; Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), p. 582. Donald H. Reiman sums up the critics' difficulties in his “Shelley” chapter of The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Frank Jordan, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972), p. 368: “A prize should be given to the critic, novice or veteran, who first has the courage to offer a detailed explication of ‘A Vision of the Sea.’”

7. Shelley: Poems Published in 1820, ed. A. M. D. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 214.

8. W. L. Wylie, J. M. W. Turner (London: George Bell, 1905), p. 125.

9. “To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.,” ll. 93-95, The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), p. 487.

10. Shelley's Prose; Or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: U. of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 293.

11. The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1958), ii, 80 (to the George Keatses, 19 March 1819).

12. See especially Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1969), pp. 24 ff.

13. For the view that the poem may in fact be much earlier than the date in Mrs. Shelley's hand, “Apr. 1820,” see C. D. Locock, ed., The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Methuen, 1911), ii, 509-10.