9. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 231-254

Part III: Air, 2. The song

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The English poet loved the Italian blue sky, and "depended on it, he said, for life. In 1820 he wanted Keats too, who was dying, to see that sky and live." It reinforced in him a sense of some limitless force: "He had called it Necessity, the Soul of the Universe, all-sufficing Power, the Spirit of Nature." It was also Love, but he was conscious of how that word had been "'too often profaned,' he told Jane [Williams], 'for me to profane it again.'" But he was also conscious of how alien human beings had become from the workings of nature: "The renewal of the world in spring, though it stirred his blood, could neither ease his sadness nor lighten his burdens for long. Love did not work in him that way." But he continued his quest for that ecstatic sense of connection with "the Spirit of Beauty" that he had experienced as a boy.

In his notebooks he often sketched trees, "sometimes rooted firmly in the earth, sometimes dangerously poised at the edges of cliffs whose stones had begun to give. But most often he drew swags and snatches of foliage adrift in the air." He sought out what he called "pavilions," places where the branches of trees joined together over his head, and "green lawns among the trees, soft-carpeted with moss and strewn almost too formally with tiny, brightly coloured flowers." He listened to the song the trees sang as the wind passed through their branches. "The Spirit of Beauty, the constant object of his love and his pursuit, he had compared not to music but to 'memory of music fled': a melody heard as a child but now fading, even as far as silence."

The impact of song on him was often unbearable in its physical intensity. When women played, they played him; when they sang, they stole his own breath from him. He was in love with them, ached with wanting them, whatever his reasonings otherwise. The draft of "To Constantia," written as Claire sang at the piano in 1817, was among the most desperate and illegible he ever produced. The words lost, dissolved, consumed, drunk were tried and deleted again and again, blotted, smudged.

In composition, he often began with the rhythm: "He found the metre, then the rhymes, leaving gaps, as was necessary, when words would not come.... When a rhythm caught him he would try it in the notebook for a line or two, to see if he liked it and how well it would carry words.... With rhythm came harmony -- rhythm's spirit, as Shelley termed it -- and with harmony, meaning and power. Sound itself carried sense."

Music, rather than words, made him a Poet. Indeed metrical language, Shelley thought, worked better even than music to express "the actions and passions of our internal being," and was "susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form or motion." Poetry had no intermediary, no instrument or canvas or sculptor's marble, but was sheer thought modified only by arrangement "by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man." 

He made lists of words he liked and disliked. "Among his favourites were 'glimmering,' 'murmuring,' and 'scattering,' words of half-seeing, half-hearing and half-apprehension: his human life."

In June 1820, he and Mary were walking through fields near Leghorn when they heard the songs of the skylarks soaring above them. He had previously translated the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, using words like "unpremeditated," "unconquerable," ""joyous and wild and wanton," "sweet as Love," and the words and phrases came back to him as he wrote his piece in praise of the skylark that he could hear but not see above him: "the bird had vanished in its singing, mounting so high that it became all music, impossible to see." He posited a kinship with the bird, which "was more confident in its song than in its flying. It mounted and fell, mounted and fell, struggling to shake off the murky pull of Earth." He believed his own verse to be "unpremeditated art," that it "had nothing to do with consciousness or will or 'the active powers of the mind.'" in a famous simile he likened "the mind in creation" to "a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness."

Plato had written of the madness of poets, enchanted by nymphs and dryads or possessed by the Muses. Shelley compared writing poetry to taking laudanum.

Poets naturally knew this burst of feeling, crazily coalescing into words. Fools knew it too, and Shelley instinctively sympathised with them: Calderón's Pasquin, with his disquieting tales of blindness and masks; Shakespeare's Feste from Twelfth Night, with his sad song of rain; Edgar's Poor Tom from Lear, shadowed like Shelley by the "foul fiend"; and his own fool, Archy, in his unfinished play Charles the First. Archy-Shelley saw a rainbow once, hanging over London and its shops, "like a bridge of congregated lightnings pierced by the masonry of heaven." But at the end of the rainbow he found the carcass of a dead ass, rotten rags and broken dishes: earth-rubbish, though his eyes were still full of gold and purple light. 

But however spontaneous the inspiration of poetry may be, the agony of composition still remained. His manuscripts are full of false starts and revisions.

6. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 147-181

Part II: Water, 2. Reflection from "What he also sought in water or in mirrors ..." through end. 3. Escape through "... leaned down towards an embrace."

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Reflections were also, in Shelley's Platonic idealism, a medium through which ultimate reality could be perceived. "The mind, Plato said, should be treated like an eye, guided gently from obscurity to light." For Shelley, the eye was also the window to the soul. He gazed deeply into Mary's eyes, and sketched images of eyes in his noteooks.

Eyes, he believed, became intricate from "the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment." Dreams, too, could be read there. In their "mazy depth of colour behind colour" he could lose himself with looking, as Narcissus did, at his own idealised image reflected in the mind of another.... In deepest thought, using the inner eye of his mind, he could sometimes begin to observe within himself the bright form of which Shelley, with his lined cheeks and greying hair, was only the mortal shadow.... Hence the hours spent musing by ponds and pools and, in female company, the uncomfortable intensity of his longing, blue-eyed stare. 

It was Southey, whom Shelley visited in 1811, who suggested he read Berkeley, who conceived of reality as "a construct of mind." He didn't go to the solipsistic extreme, but argued, "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive." He also posited a universal Mind, not a divinity to be worshiped but "a source from which his thoughts drew energy." This concept was reinforced by an Alpine epiphany in the summer of 1816 in which he "sensed a presence in the mountains" when he visited the glacier at Chamounix.

As he picnicked with Mary and Claire at the glacier's edge they could hear it creak and crack; they once saw, not far off, the thunderclap smoke and rubble of an avalanche it caused, bearing down into the valley "all the ruins of the mountains."... Three years later, in Prometheus Unbound, he made this the echo of all men's thoughts suddenly released from the ice.... The great mountain represented the secret law that governed though: solemn, inaccessible, transcendent. Mutability and chance could not come near it. Only mind could ponder it. In its remoteness it marked the last of the visible and natural causes men could see before ... they lost the thread of their understanding and reached, clumsily and blindly for the notion "God." 

Shelley crossed a bridge over the river Arve and saw the torrent below as an image of "his own thoughts, 'now dark -- now glittering,' and ceaselessly bursting and raving among the rocks." He wrote to Peacock of his "realisation that his existence and the mountain's were one in his mind. He had made the whole landscape his idea, his thought, and part of him. Mind became what it contemplated, and what he saw became himself." As Poet, "he could shape, colour, fill with meaning, invest with light and life." The human mind was a mirror of the vast sea of mind. "The notion of 'distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature,' was a delusion. He was simply an infinitesimal ripple in a Mind infinitely extensive."

In Dante's Convito, God dreamed man and the divine Intelligences made him, according to God's idea. But in Shelley's Queen Mab, man dreamed God. Y los sueños, sueños son. ... Others, standing in awe under the same Swiss sky, had bowed before the God who made the mountain. Shelley had been made aware of, and had tested, his own power. 

This concept of the power of mind informed his politics. "Perceptions, opinions and dispositions could be changed, not least by his own writing and incessant, urgent arguing.... Mind would triumph over matter, and the world could be transformed."

"You talk Utopia," said Byron shortly. Perhaps Shelley did; he knew that men did not dare this, that they did not even know their lack of daring, that "the good want power, but to weep barren tears," and that the revolution in France had failed precisely because its promoters had persisted in seeing the world in terms of oppression and revenge. But he talked Utopia because "some few, like we know who" saw it believed it, and knew it had to be shown forth to other minds. It could be built that way.

Shelley thought of his political writings as stones cast into the lake, the ripple made by the disturbance spreading outward. It was an image suggested by Godwin, who called truth "the pebble in the lake." "The Necessity of Atheism had been one such pebble, in Shelley's view." In November 1817, he wrote his Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, in which he contrasted the widespread grief over the death of the young princess with the "indifference to the death of Liberty in England." Two years later, in Italy, he began work on A Philosophical View of Reform, but it was left unfinished and unpublished for a century. "Shelley crouched by the water with his mind full of spreading circles of light. But the pond, and England, slept again."

One problem is that Shelley had a short attention span: "His life seemed compounded of eddying ideas that begged to be heeded and followed. Sudden notions drove him to grab friends by the arm and tug them eastwards, westwards, sideways, into bread-shops and pawn-shops in the London streets." Trelawny said, "He overbore all opposition in those less self-willed than he was." In Hogg's view, "Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from whatever it was that moved him."

Increasingly, Shelley resorted to images of "free fall through nothingness, or water, or the illusory solidity of the body and the self." In 1820, he jumped into the Arno from the Ponte della Trinità in Florence, from which Trelawny, who had failed to teach him to swim, rescued him. Despite the horror of Harriet's drowning, he had convinced himself that he would drown calmly. In 1816, he had been sailing with Byron on Lake Geneva when they were caught in a sudden windstorm. Byron, a strong swimmer, "assured him he could save him, as long as he did not struggle. Shelley replied that he had no notion of being saved." And when Trelawny rescued him from the Arno, "Shelley was sorely disappointed that he had not left him there."

He took Jane Williams and her two small children out in a small boat in the Bay of Lerici in the spring of 1822 and fell oddly silent as the little coracle drifted far from shore. "Jane watched him as he sat, head bowed, motionless and wordless. His melancholy was terrifying." Finally he announced his interest in finding out what mysteries lay in the afterlife. Jane told him that she and the children would rather have dinner first, and when they got back to shore she "swore she would never go out in a boat with Shelley again."

He had persuaded himself that drowning "was a state much like sleeping."

He was confident ... that thought did not die. It might even become more influential once the thinker had gone. Books, paintings, sculptures, products of mind, survived, with immortality in them as long as men lived to admire them. ... Yet the question for Shelley was whether minds themselves persisted, and whether his own mind, with all its pulsings of thought, would dissolve as a billow in the ocean or go on. His reasoning self insisted that things beyond the grave could not be known. Men could believe, if they cared to, in eternal life; but in belief of that sort, the sort that priests demanded, the will was passive and the intellect suspended.... Nothing beyond visible phenomena could be subjected to rational analysis. It was a realm of phantoms and faith. The first he had outgrown, the second he rejected as poison. But looking into water -- water running deep and quiet, his own face looking back at him -- he sometimes felt he was on the edge of understanding, and leaned down towards an embrace.

5. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 117-147

Part II: Water, 1. Immersion from "Water could not be counted his friend...." through end. 2. Reflection through "... Drängt immer fremd und fremder stoff sich an."

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He disliked some forms of water, such as "The loathed baptismal fluid." And "The English rain, whenever it fell, turned him aguish, bilious and weak.... In his poems, rain fell bleakly over cities ruled by tyrants: sullen, rotting, poisoned rain." But he fancied himself invulnerable to water, like the Wandering Jew, who could not drown. He saw himself as like the tides, controlled by the moon, and he symbolized Mary as the moon: "In the early summer of 1814, when his passion for Mary had first erupted and he was threatening suicide if he could not have her, it was she -- so he claimed -- who was exerting influence on him, her passive lover. His mind without her, he told her later, was 'dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down.'" Later, it was Jane Williams whom he compared to the moon. He also likened orgasmic ecstasy to drowning:

Ecstasy, for him, was a condition of dissolution. "To sink and die" was a favourite phrase, commingling death and love as consummation to be longed for. He would expire in the deep like a lover subsiding with the spasms of the sexual act, "the quick dying gasps / Of the life meeting." 

He was fascinated by the undersea world, which was silent and filled with wonders. It "was also the realm of dreams." Shelley slept erratically, sometimes seeming to resent and resist sleep, though it "brought a disconnect between body and mind, and mind and spirit, that ceaselessly interested him." There are three recorded instances of his walking in his sleep. He tried to keep a record of his dreams, and once found himself terrified when he encountered a landscape that he thought he had seen before in a dream. He read with great fascination Calderón's La vida es sueño.

Was sleep a form of death, or a deeper form of waking life? Was life death, at least of the spirit? Was death a form of sleep in which, in Hamlet's words, "what dreams may come ... Must give us pause"? Or was it like the slumber of a baby, which "in the dim newness of its being feels / The impulses of sublunary things"? In Queen Mab Shelley called Death Sleep's brother, and described the quiescent body of Ianthe as though either Sleep or Death had embraced her, leaving her state indeterminate.

He believed in ghosts, or rather that he had seen them, and he regarded "all tyrannised notions of government, religion and God as clouds of phantoms, or bats, or Spenser's swarming flies, continually forming and fluttering around men's heads." In the spring of 1822, he saw what he believed to be the ghost of Allegra, the daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, a few weeks after she had died at the age of five. "She appeared to him as a naked child rising from the sea foam in the moonlight." And several times he encountered his Doppelgänger.

Water also provided a reflective surface, and as such "had an almost hypnotic attraction for him." The flower narcissus, named for the Greek who drowned admiring his image in the water, was also the garland for the Poet in Alastor.

Reflection was almost always more beautiful than life. Sunset on the Jura snowfields looked far lovelier to Shelley in the lake that lay below; at noon, "a more heavenly and serener light" than daylight was reflected from the "icy mirrors" of the mountain peaks.... The ripples of the surface current could not change this scene. It became for Shelley an image of timelessness and purity, the reverse of human life.

The quest for purity, for "unchanging perfect forms: Beauty, Justice, Truth, Equality," led him to the Greeks. "For him they were "those divine people who, in their very errors, are the mirrors, as it were, in which all that is delicate and graceful contemplates itself." He studied Greek statuary in this quest "for unity, harmony and simplicity, for light and life."