Shelley: The Pursuit (84 page)

The ease with which this was accomplished is perhaps surprising. On the day of Ollier’s departure, Shelley wrote defensively to Moore that
Laon and Cythna
was to be suppressed and republished shortly after Christmas as
The Revolt of Islam
. There were ‘some alterations which consist in little else than the substitution of the words
friend
or
lover
for that of
brother & sister
’.
⁵⁷

Yet Shelley was being less than frank. Though sixty-three lines of the poem were corrected, only thirteen were cancelled because of the incest reference. The rest were cancelled because of their controversial references to God, Hell, Christ, republicanism and atheism. In every case Shelley had to retreat to a vague and unsatisfactory circumlocution.
[8]
Much that had been politically explicit was now weakened and obscured.

These kind of alterations must have caused Shelley considerable heart-searching. But it is clear that once Ollier had forced him to accept alterations in principle, the rest followed. ‘His friends’, wrote Peacock, ‘finally prevailed on him to submit. Still he could not, or would not, sit down by himself to alter it, and the whole of the alterations were actually made in successive sittings of what I may call a literary committee. He contested the proposed alterations step by step . . . .’
⁵⁸
When he wrote to Byron on the next day, Shelley merely told him that ‘My long poem under the title of “The Revolt of Islam” is almost printed’.
⁵⁹

Horace Smith came down on Boxing Day to cheer up the now permanently damp and twilit rooms of Albion House, but he only remained for two days. Mary persuaded Shelley to go on a meat diet, but he soon gave it up. Shelley’s health was bad again, and certain of his letters to Godwin suggest that he may
have been relying heavily on laudanum, for the symptoms they describe are characteristic of the extreme fluctuations of mood and sensation usually associated with narcosis. If so, this suggests a state of mental exhaustion comparable to the winter of 1811 when Shelley stated explicitly that he had been taking too much opium at Keswick. ‘My health has been materially worse,’ he wrote to Godwin. ‘My feelings at intervals are of a deadly & torpid kind, or awakened to a state of such unnatural & keen excitement that only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy & inanimation, & often remain for hours on the sofa between sleep & waking a prey to the most painful irritability of thought. Such with little intermission is my condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from among these periods of endurance.’
⁶⁰
The thoughts which were preying upon Shelley’s mind centred especially on the decision to go to Italy, which he had now put off irretrievably, until the spring. The hopes attached to his poem kept him in England; but fears that he had consumption, fears that he might again be prosecuted and lose his children by Mary, fears that Godwin was yet again preparing a massive financial demand, and fears that he would be subject more and more to social sneers both public and private; — all these weighed upon his mind.

The winter of 1817-18 had become a time of deep depression and self-doubt, which sunk many of the days of December and January in the deepest gloom. Shelley could not help lumping together the possible failure of both his poetical and political hopes. On 4 January he roused himself sufficiently to donate five guineas to a ‘subscription for the permanent Welfare of Mr Hone and his family’. Hone had been prosecuted and acquitted for seditious libel three times in 1817 as part of the government’s policy of active repression. He was almost penniless by the end. The Friends of the Liberty of the Press, a radical and popular group, had advertised the subscription in the radical ‘
Champion
’. The Hunts subscribed too.

The Revolt of Islam
, with its new title leaf, and twenty-seven substituted pages, was finally released in the first days of the new year, 1818. The poem is in twelve cantos, and besides its preface, contains no notes. Canto I contains a formal allegory of the struggle between Revolution and Oppression, in the conflict of a serpent and an eagle above a stormy sea. The serpent, which symbolizes Revolution, drops wounded into the water, and swims into the arms of a beautiful lady, who on being questioned by the Poet, explains the historical development of Liberty from Athens down to the French Revolution, in terms of the eternal struggle. In the manuscript, over the stanza in which the lady first speaks, Shelley wrote: ‘Demon Lover’.
⁶¹

Cantos
II to IV comprise the mythological projection of Shelley’s own persecuted youth in the person of Laon. The passage which describes his friendship with the 12-year-old Cythna, became a favourite of the early reviewers, notably
Blackwoods
and the
Quarterly
. It is a good indication of what his contemporaries valued him for; though this is ironic, for it was originally intended to describe an incestuous passion.

She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,

A power, that from its objects scarcely drew

One impulse of her being — in her lightness

Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,

Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue,

To nourish some far desert: she did seem

Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,

Like the bright shade of some immortal dream

Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life’s dark stream.
⁶²

Less to their taste, though more to Shelley’s purpose, was the conclusion about women’s freedom which Shelley drew from this friendship. He put it into Cythna’s mouth:

 ‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?

  Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air,

To the corruption of a closed grave!

  Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear

  Scorn, heavier far than toil or anguish, dare

To trample their oppressors? in their home

  Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear

The shape of woman . . .’
⁶³

It is for this reason that Cythna goes to start the struggle for freedom in the city on her own, independently of Laon. She is immediately captured by a troop of the tyrant’s armed men. Laon is also captured. His incarceration, madness and escape, and his nursing by the wise old hermit, is based on the familiar mythological pattern with which Shelley explained his own youthful struggles.

In Canto V, Shelley presents the taking of the city by the revolutionary army. It is led by Laon, who is wounded. He manages to plead for the life of the Tyrant. In the evening Cythna, who has also escaped and reappeared under her new revolutionary name of Laone, harangues the troops about victory, political freedom, free love and atheism. Her language contains much of the crude rhetoric of Shelley’s Irish poems. But his description, part realistic and part symbolic, of
the emotional effect of her words upon the audience, points forward to the mature lyric style.

Her voice was as a mountain-stream which sweeps

The withered leaves of Autumn to the lake,

And in some deep and narrow bay then sleeps

In the shadow of the shores; as dead leaves wake

Under the wave, in flowers and herbs which make

Those green depths beautiful when skies are blue,

The multitude so moveless did partake

Such living change, and kindling murmurs flew

As o’er that speechless calm delight and wonder grew.
⁶⁴

One recognizes at once here the gathering imagery of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

In Canto VI, the Tyrant’s troops make a surprise counter-attack at dawn, burn the city and massacre the revolutionaries. This marks what Shelley saw as the almost inevitable counter-reaction of violent revolution. All Laon’s supporters, including even the white-haired old hermit, are killed round him. The scenes of battle are described with violent disgust. Laon notices how in combat the faces of friend and foe are equally distorted with exhaustion and fear and hatred —

. . .their eyes started with cracking stare,

And impotent their tongues they lolled into the air,

Flaccid and foamy, like a mad dog’s hanging . . . .
⁶⁵

At the last moment Laon himself is saved by Laone who appears on a giant black Tartarian horse, and sweeps him out of the butchery. As they ride into the mountains, in a characteristic image, the wind spreads and lashes her dark hair over Laon’s eyes.

She then reveals, what he had already guessed, that she is in fact Cythna. In the original draft, this meant his sister. Lying together on the mossy floor of an old ruin under ‘the eastern stars’ they console each other for the terrible political catastrophe by making love for the first time, ‘the solace of all sorrow’.

The five stanzas which follow are one of Shelley’s most direct attempts to describe the physical and mental sensations of love-making. Although his poetry generally is full of images and metaphors of kissing, caressing, penetration and orgasm it is rare for him to present the actions of lovers very explicitly; but here he does so. He writes with great deliberateness and tenderness. The synonymous physical meanings of words like ‘frame’, ‘heart’, ‘limb’ and ‘life’ are obvious from the context, so that the poetry is biologically explicit. But a sense of wonder, even of amazement, is pervasive. The ruins are first illuminated by the
symbolic light of a ‘wandering Meteor’, hung ‘high in the green dome’ which presages a storm.

The Meteor showed the leaves on which we sate,

And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties

Of her soft hair, which bent with gathered weight

My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,

Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies

O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,

Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,

Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,

With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.

The Meteor to its far morass returned:

The beating of our veins one interval

Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned

Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall

Around my heart like fire; and over all

A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep

And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall

Two disunited spirits when they leap

In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.

Was it one moment that confounded thus

All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one

Unutterable power, which shielded us

Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone

Into a wide and wild oblivion

Of tumult and of tenderness? or now

Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,

The seasons, and mankind their changes know,

Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?

I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps

The failing heart in languishment, or limb

Twined within limb? Or the quick dying gasps

Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim

Through tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,

In one caress? What is the strong control

Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,

Where far over the world those vapours roll,

Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul? . . .

Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,

Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,

And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn