Shelley: The Pursuit (66 page)

There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight

Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.
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The preface also draws the wider conclusion, already set out in the essay ‘On Love’, that satisfactory love can only be found within the context of a human community of responsible relationships. ‘Among those who attempt to exist
without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt.’ Yet again, this conclusion is not explicitly drawn within the text of the poem.

Something of this contradiction made itself felt in Shelley’s inability to find a name for the work. Finally, he allowed Peacock to read it, and asked his opinion. Peacock’s choice, with its careful derivation, shows how well he understood Shelley’s difficulties, and also passes an implicit comment on Shelley’s character. ‘He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude”. The Greek word
αλαστωρ
is an evil genius,
κακδáιμωυ
though the sense of the two words is somewhat different, as in . . . Aeschylus. The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed “Alastor” to be the name of the hero of the poem.’
²⁷
The distinction between ‘daimon’, the classical concept of the supernatural spirit either benevolent or neutral towards man, and the ‘kaka-daimon’, the specifically
evil
and pursuing spirit, was to become important to Shelley in his own increasingly sophisticated catalogue of wraiths and fiends.

Poetically, the main advance of the poem was the flexibility of the verse, and Shelley’s new-found ability to suggest scenes and landscapes which corresponded to mental atmospheres he wanted to define. Besides these gains, the advance in constructive skill is not very great, and the language suffers from lack of density and directive power. Although much of the description is distinctly overwrought, with that curious suggestion of the Baroque, which in his finest work is tightened to a much wirier, plainer line, there are places where his scenarios presage the direct simplicity of his mature style. Yet Milton’s epic drone is still overpoweringly loud.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore

He paused, a wide and melancholy waste

Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged

His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,

Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.

It rose as he approached, and with strong wings

Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course

High over the immeasurable main.

His eyes pursued its flight.

But Shelley got closest to what he was after, and achieved his most sustained passage in the contrasting descriptions of the Arab maiden of reality and the
visionary dancing girl of the erotic dream. Here he stated clearly the main dilemma of the poem, the choice between sexual reality and sexual fantasy.

Alastor
in this sense is a presentation of adolescent sexuality. The poem itself is purely an exploration of such a state but, when taken within the context of the preface, the prose fragments ‘On the Science of Mind’, and the essays ‘On Life’ and ‘On Love’, it is clear that Shelley was intending to present it as a critique of such a ‘situation of the human mind’. However the terms of this critique, and the form in which such a wider community of human sympathies might be reached, do not appear in the poem. His ambiguous attitude to sexual narcissism also appears in the terminology of the essay ‘On Love’, where the object of love yet remains merely the ‘anti-type’ of that ideal self or ‘prototype’ to be discovered within the lover’s own heart. The beloved remains, in other words, an ideal projection of the self, which by definition must be unchanging, self-sufficient and therefore ultimately sterile. The terms of this contradiction are set out with surprising frankness in the picture of the two girls. The first, the Arab maiden, represents what one may call domestic sexuality, a genuine human relationship which the Poet’s dreaming ‘self-centred seclusion’ cruelly frustrates:

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,

Her daily portion, from her father’s tent,

And spread her matting for his couch, and stole

From duties and repose to tend his steps: —

Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe

To speak her love: — and watched his nightly sleep,

Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips

Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath

Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn

Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home

Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.
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The main peculiarity of this portrait is the completely slavish function Shelley assigns to the girl, an inarticulate servant to the Poet’s vagaries. Later he was to write consistently and powerfully that the sexual relationship could only be satisfactory when the woman was herself completely liberated from social and intellectual servitude.

The second portrait, of the dancing girl, is clearly related to that of the Arab maiden, whom the Poet had left to continue his journeying through ‘Arabie, And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’. She is in fact the same girl, but conjured up in dream and gradually and subtly distorted into an object of exclusively sexual desire. The dream ends in what are clearly the sensations and
motions of orgasm, and the Poet’s detumescent feelings of waste and emptiness on waking immediately afterwards are brilliantly evoked. The description may well suggest why in his prose writings Shelley had consistently shied away from pursuing some of the more intimate dream-tracks into the caverns of his mind. The passage is the most sustained and successful piece of work in the poem, depending notably on radiating images of light and music, and powerfully active, driving verbs.

Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep

There came, a dream of hopes that never yet

Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid

Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.

Her voice was like the voice of his own soul

Heard in the calm of thought . . . .

Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,

And lofty hopes of divine liberty,

Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,

Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame

A permeating fire: wild numbers then

She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs

Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands

Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp

Strange symphony, and in their branching veins

The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.

The beating of her heart was heard to fill

The pauses of her music, and her breath

Tumultuously accorded with those fits

Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,

As if her heart impatiently endured

Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,

And saw by the warm light of their own life

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil

Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,

Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,

Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips

Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.

His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess

Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled

His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet

Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while,

Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,

With frantic gesture and short breathless cry

Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.

Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night

Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,

Like a dark flood suspended in its course,

Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

Roused by the shock he started from his trance —

The cold white light of morning, the blue moon

Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,

The distinct valley and the vacant woods,

Spread round him where he stood.
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Considered together, these two passages represent a considerable intellectual and artistic advance. Shelley had indeed managed to penetrate far upstream in his own mind, and one begins to understand the force of the image he gave to the difficult process, ‘like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind’. A directly autobiographical interpretation is possible, for one can see in turn the shadowy reference first to Harriet, then to Mary and finally, perhaps to Claire. These have indeed been attempted exhaustively by scholars, but they are not in the end satisfactory: Shelley wrote the poem precisely in order to
distance
himself from his own lived experience. More general observations do however throw light on his own psychological development. The Poet rejects sexual experience in the waking, domestic world, and the girl is turned away, speechless, panting and frustrated. But in the fantasy world, in the world of ‘dream’ or ‘waking reverie’ or ‘trance’ or ‘vision’, the sexual experience, and specifically the sexual act — what Shelley called in
Queen Mab
the ‘sexual connection’ — is celebrated and indulged.

Shelley was in two minds about condemning this. In the overall context of
Alastor
composition, he condemns it as not only socially inadequate but also destructive, opening the poet to the ‘furies’. Yet within the poem the ambiguity remains. One remembers his recommendation to Mary about ‘kissing the insubstantial image’ when they were separated. It was a subject to which he was to return frequently, but there is one passage, part of a prose essay written three years later in Italy, which is immediately relevant. It came in the preface to his translation of Plato’s
Symposium
and was suppressed by Mary in her edition of 1840. Shelley is somewhat circumspectly discussing modes of the ‘sexual act’
which might take place without physical penetration. The context is homosexuality, but this is not significant here.

If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associate themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires; and even that in some persons of an exalted state of sensibility that a similar process may take place in reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist . . . .
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Clearly, the second
Alastor
passage is his first attempt to describe such an ‘involuntary consequence of a state of abandonment’. There were to be many subsequent ones in his work, and it became one of his most powerful images. It is one of the triumphs of
Alastor
that Shelley succeeded in isolating this split in sexual nature as he had experienced it, and further, implied that it was a type or metaphor for a universal ‘split’ between the actual and the ideal, between the act and the desire. It was not merely the metaphor, either; it was part of the condition itself.

Another suggestive thing about the dream is the passive role which it assigns to the Poet in the sexual encounter. It is the girl who ‘Folded
his
frame in her dissolving arms’. Throughout it is the female figures who are active, and more or less aggressive, and the Poet who is passive and receptive. This also was to become a feature of later descriptions, and may have something to do with the context of the dream or reverie itself.

When Mary edited
Alastor
, it is suggestive that she tried to draw a veil across the subject matter and implications of the poem, and referred instead to the general difficulties of Shelley’s life in 1814 and 1815. Following her lead, most critics have been prepared subsequently to look at the poem in vague terms of a ‘search for ideal beauty and ideal truth’.
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Mary wrote in 1839, ‘This is neither the time nor the place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends brought home to him the sad realities of life. Physical suffering had also considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward; inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul than to glance abroad, and to make, as in
Queen Mab
, the whole universe the object and subject of his song.’
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