Shelley: The Pursuit (108 page)

Returning later to the same carved relief, he further elaborated the visual details and the symbolism.

The figures of Victory with unfolded wings & each spurning back a globe with outstretched feet are perhaps more beautiful than those on either of the others. Their lips are parted; a delicate mode of indicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at their destined resting place, & to express the eager respiration of their speed.
³³

This was now recast in the poem as a completed image, of peculiar force and beauty. Taking courage from the massive but simple dignity of the classical carving, Shelley boldly embodied the extremely abstract idea of the ‘great historical moment’, the great turning-point in the development of civilization, in a simple iconographic picture:

Demogorgon
.                         Behold!

Asia
. The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night

I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingèd steeds

Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands

A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.

Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,

And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:

Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks

Stream like a comet’s flashing hair: they all

Sweep onward.
³⁴

This
is one of the great Shelleyan images. The writing here is richer, more ornate than in the Promethean speech; yet it still retains the immense energy of movement, and its clarity of visual line really does remind one of stone-carving. It is also extraordinary how many of his most familiar themes Shelley has managed to pack into it: — the chariot-boat-airship; the fiends; the pursuer and the pursued; the sexual fire of the comet and the streaming hair. There is a unique combination of simplicity and suggestiveness achieved in such a line as ‘And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars’.

This close of Scene IV brings the climax of the whole drama. In mythic terms, Demogorgon is about to end the reign of Jupiter and restore Prometheus to his liberty. He ascends in the Chariot of the Hour driven by a spirit with ‘dreadful countenance’.

Panthea
.                              That terrible shadow floats

Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke

Of earthquake-ruined cities o’er the sea.

Lo! it ascends the car; the coursers fly

Terrified: watch its path among the stars

Blackening the night!
³⁵

In physical terms, Shelley is describing a gigantic volcanic and geophysical upheaval, a Vesuvian explosion, and the restoration of Nature to her golden equilibrium of fruitful and seasonal fluctuations.

In psychological terms, Asia, the principle of Love, has discovered her own freedom and is about to be re-united — by a second chariot, ‘an ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire’ — driven by a young and beautiful spirit, with the Promethean aspect of man’s mind. Love, the private creative and sexual part of human relationships, is freed from its inhibitions and repressions, and recombined with the social elements. It forms the unity of mind which Shelley believed could alone produce the great scientist, the artist, the doctor, the architect and the law-giver. The divided nature is healed.

Finally, in political terms, this is the moment of uprising and revolution against tyranny and imposed authority. Shelley is here not being nationally or even historically explicit. It is perhaps the old Illuminist ideal of world revolution, originally symbolized by a string of volcanic eruptions. But with the reference to the French Revolution in Act I, it is possible to believe that he was thinking of Europe; and within Europe, of England.

Was he celebrating a violent, ‘democratic’, revolution? The text, like the preface, is ambiguous. There are two chariots mentioned: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process in
society is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which ‘ruins’ cities.
[4]
The etymological reading is surely relevant here. It is the eruption of ‘demosgorgon’, the ‘people-monster’.
³⁶

Yet there is also the second chariot, with its ‘delicate strange tracery’, and its gentle charioteer with ‘dove-like eyes of hope’. This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus, and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’s curse. The end of Act II leaves both these possibilities open historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends on man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case it is inevitable, and it is to be celebrated.

The act ends with a short, final choric Scene V. Panthea describes the transformation of Asia as they fly upwards and forwards in the chariot, and compares her to the pagan Venus Anodyomene, the creative force of Love rising from the sea like ‘the atmosphere of the sun’s fire’. The famous hymns, ‘Child of Light! thy limbs are burning’ and ‘My soul is an enchanted boat’ form parts of this chorus. The final lines of the act envisage a fantastic journey through reversed-time into a metempsychotic Paradise, part womb, part regenerated planet.

We have passed Age’s icy caves,

And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,

And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray:

Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;

A paradise of vaulted bowers,

‘Lit by downward-gazing flowers,

And watery paths that wind between

Wildernesses calm and green,

Peopled by shapes too bright to see . . . .
³⁷

We are in fact back where we began, the vision has dissolved, and Shelley is sitting within the blossoming labyrinths of the Baths of Caracalla.

From the Third Act onwards, the poem no longer has the strong architectonic plotting of Aeschylus’s drama behind it. The moment Shelley attempts to develop the myth in a conscious way, by artificially adding to the structure of the action, the poem comes apart in his hands. The Prometheus who actually
and finally liberates man from the powers of Jupiter is no longer Prometheus. Prometheus represents suffering, hope, creative skill and the eternal struggle for a potential freedom. He is the symbol of those who struggle for the future; he is the symbol of those who wait the revolution, the new golden age; but he cannot be the symbol of Victory itself.

The one genuinely creative departure of Acts III and IV lies in the development of the imagery of Promethean fire. This is both poetically and intellectually a brilliant transformation. The new fire that Prometheus brings is electricity.

Ione
. Sister, it is not earthly: how it glides

Under the leaves! how on its head there burns

A light, like a green star, whose emerald beams

Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves,

The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass!

Knowest thou it?

Panthea
.                 It is the delicate spirit

That guides the earth through heaven. From afar

The populous constellations call that light

The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes

It floats along the spray of the salt sea,

Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud,

Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep,

Or o’er the mountain tops, or down the rivers,

Or through the green waste wilderness, as now,

Wondering at all it sees . . . .
³⁸

Shelley was not of course scientifically exact, and wrote without the benefit of Faraday’s work. He included indiscriminately in the electric phenomena of this ‘delicate spirit’ glow worms, phosphorescences,
ignis fatuus
, lightning, the ‘long blue meteors cleansing the dull night’, the aurora borealis, and even the ‘polar Paradise’ which ‘Magnet-like of lovers eyes’ keeps the moon in its field of attraction round the Earth. But his apparently inspired prevision of electron shells in the atomic structure of matter is celebrated:

A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,

Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass

Flow, as through empty space, music and light:

Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,

Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden . . .

Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning . . . .
³⁹

Electricity as the new fire beautifully satisfied the extension of the plot both mythically and scientifically. Electricity would be the great new power source to liberate man from physical servitude. But as a metaphor of the liberation of spiritual and political energies it suffers, like the whole of Acts III and IV, from irresolution. This could signify any kind of vague radiation of goodwill. It cannot hold together the remainder of the poem, though it served later in 1820 to give Shelley the core image of physical and psychological freedom for ‘The Witch of Atlas’.

From the opening of Act III onwards the poem completely disintegrates. The dethronement of Jupiter is a piece of creaking epic stage machinery; there is no confrontation between him and Prometheus, and thence no reconciliation. The evil principle is merely dismissed. The reunification of Prometheus and Asia when it comes is empty and anticlimactic. The vision of the world and Nature revolutionized is almost entirely a failure, anyway poetically an impossible task. The language as a whole becomes increasingly rhetorical, and the imagery depends on successive reworking and weakening of tropes and metaphors discovered in the first two acts. Prometheus’s reaction to his liberation and the revolution of human society is to retire into a kind of rural hermitage, ‘a cave, All overgrown with trailing odorous plants, Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers’. This is yet another recycling of the image of the Baths of Caracalla, a
hortus conclusus
, and it symbolizes a rejection of the world rather than universal social revolution. In this sense Shelley’s poetry remains more honest than his ideology, for the actions of Prometheus in Act III are those of a leader who has escaped defeat and gone into a jaded exile, rather than those of a genuine victor.

Shelley himself had increasingly nagging doubts about Act III. In the autumn of the year, at Florence, he returned to it, and added a Fourth Act. This was really a confession of artistic failure. He abandoned the mythic structure altogether, banished Prometheus and Asia to a forest cave from which they do not emerge at all or speak, and attempted to create a cosmic operetta of lyric duets and trios between Earth, Moon and Demogorgon. It is like the libretto for a great piece of music that he never managed to compose.

The great achievement of
Prometheus Unbound
therefore rests securely in the first two acts which together form a complete and unified poem of some 1,500 lines. The rest remains superfluous and second-rate. But the essential two-act work is undoubtedly the second of Shelley’s four Italian masterpieces. At every level it is a poem of hope achieved agonizingly through suffering: but it is not broadly an optimistic poem. It is in many ways obsessed with the evil and pain and tyranny in the world, like all Shelley’s previous writing. More than in
The Revolt of Islam
, and more perhaps than in
Queen Mab
, it sees the definite
imminence of a moral and political revolution: in this sense it is more aggressive and confident. But it also presents clearly the possibilities of both a peaceful and a violent revolution: the choice remains ahead, and in a sense, always remains ahead. Finally, says the poem and the myth, there will be Victory. But the Victory is not there in Shelley’s poem. The Revolution remains to be made.