Shelley: The Pursuit (85 page)

O’er her pale bosom: — all within was still,

And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill

The depth of her unfathomable look; —

And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,

The waves contending in its caverns strook,

For they foreknew the storm, and the gray ruin shook.
⁶⁶

The psychological acuity retained in ‘even from our own cold looks’ in the third stanza, and of ‘
almost
fill’ in the last stanza, is remarkable in such a molten passage of lyric and erotic intensity. Again, it is characteristic of the mature Shelley.

In the next two cantos, VII and VIII, Cythna relates to Laon the story of her own capture, incarceration, madness and final escape to the city with the help of friendly mariners. Her hallucinations include the grim fact that she is raped, and gives birth to a child; and she also is convinced that she has been forced to eat bits of Laon’s murdered body. On board ship, she rapidly recovers and converts the mariners to Atheism. She then persuades them to release their cargo of chained slaves and slavegirls, and encourages the crew and the slaves to put the principles of free love into practice. They do so, and on arrival at the city harbour, they are the first to join the revolution. Sexual liberation precedes political liberation. In the city, Cythna triggers off the start of the insurrection by her speeches, appealing chiefly to the women ‘who my voice did waken From their cold, careless, willing slavery’. It is at this point that Laon arrives to take charge of the revolutionary forces. Cythna’s reminiscences finish. Together, they contemplate the possible future for the revolution and for their own lives. Neither appears very promising. But Laon breaks into an impassioned paean of hope and love. This ends the Canto IX, and forms one of the great climaxes of the poem.

‘The seeds are sleeping in the soil: meanwhile

The Tyrant peoples dungeons with his prey,

Pale victims on the guarded scaffold smile

Because they cannot speak; and, day by day,

The moon of wasting Science wanes away

Among her stars, and in that darkness vast

The sons of earth to their foul idols pray,

And gray Priests triumph, and like blight or blast

A shade of selfish care o’er human looks is cast.

‘This is the winter of the world; — and here

We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade,

Expiring in the frore and foggy air. —

Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made

The promise of its birth, — even as the shade

Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings

The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed

As with the plumes of overshadowing wings,

From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs.’
⁶⁷

The extraordinarily free and forceful command of the metric pattern and cross-rhythms of the difficult Spenserian stanza is a great technical achievement, while much of the gaseous abstraction has been taken out of the rhetoric. The condemned man, like Cashman, smiling grimly on the scaffold, is a new kind of detailing, and the seasonal imagery has gained new intellectual precision, especially in lines like ‘The moon of wasting Science wanes away’. Moreover not only the style but the actual argument has grown austere. Shelley allows Laon to contemplate a long and severe political ‘winter’, and even the destruction of his own personal hopes, without despairing of the eventual spring of political and social liberty.

The image of ‘Earth like an eagle springs’ illustrates the range at which Shelley’s imagination was now working. The comparison of Earth and eagle appears at first sight to have no
visual
component, but seems merely to be a vague invocation of power, action, natural grandeur. Yet in fact the visual comparison is the primary one. In earlier stanzas Shelley wrote of the ‘winged seeds’, and the ‘wind-winged emblem’.
[9]
These ‘wings’ produce the dispersion of the seeds on the wind, and in the ‘eagle’ image, Shelley is imagining the whole earth as a ‘winged seed’. The round globe is the central pod, and the
earth shadow
, cast into space by the alternative paths of solar and lunar light, becomes the wings.

                                     thus arrayed

As with the plumes of overshadowing wings

The whole earth, tipped by its seasonal wings of solar and lunar shadow-casts, becomes one enormous ‘wind-winged emblem’. It thus becomes like a bird. The earth
looks
like an eagle, and in Shelley’s full image is transformed into a gigantic space-bird of the solar system. So the pun on ‘spring’ gains its full force: the global bird leaps into the sunlight; the global seed fructifies — ‘springs’ — as one
might say something winters, or indeed, summers. The two will happen simultaneously at the season of the revolution.
[10]

Canto x describes the fate of the people in the city under the new tyranny, which Laon discovers during his clandestine ride from the mountain. They are being destroyed by plagues and famines and droughts, while their new rulers are reverting to the old superstitions of divine appeasement. The priests have ruled that the capture and execution of Laon and Cythna alone will save the remnant of the populace from divine vengeance. This canto contains some of Shelley’s most powerful and most violent writing. It shows clearly the continuing strength of the gothic and grotesque inheritance which had run through his poetry and prose from the beginning. The sense of horror, physical revulsion and disgust are strongly at work. Ugliness and anger bring out a deadly accuracy in Shelley’s language.

First Want, then Plague came on the beasts; their food

Failed, and they drew the breath of its decay.

Millions on millions, whom the scent of blood

Had lured, or who, from regions far away,

Had tracked the hosts in festival array,

From their dark deserts; gaunt and wasting now,

Stalked like fell shades among their perilous prey;

In their green eyes a strange disease did glow,

They sank in hideous spasm, or pains severe and slow.

The fish were poisoned in the streams; the birds

In the green woods perished; the insect race

Was withered up; the scattered flocks and herds

Who had survived the wild beasts’ hungry chase

Died moaning, each upon the other’s face

In helpless agony gazing; round the City

All night, the lean hyaenas their sad case

Like starving infants wailed; a woeful ditty!

And many a mother wept, pierced with unnatural pity.
⁶⁸

The macabre implication of this last image, the mothers weeping for the starving hyenas, presages the fate which is about to overrun all society. The whole system of nature breaks down. Oppression is unnatural, so it actually
destroys Nature.

There was no food, the corn was trampled down,

The flocks and herds had perished; on the shore

The dead and putrid fish were ever thrown;

The deeps were foodless, and the winds no more

Creaked with the weight of birds, but, as before

Those winged things sprang forth, were void of shade;

The vines and orchards, Autumn’s golden store,

Were burned; — so that the meanest food was weighed

With gold, and Avarice died before the god it made.

There was no corn — in the wide market-place

All loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold;

They weighed it in small scales — and many a face

Was fixed in eager horror then: his gold

The miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold

Through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain;

The mother brought her eldest-born, controlled

By instinct blind as love, but turned again

And bade her infant suck, and died in silent pain.
⁶⁹

The small, exact verbal touches are specially noticeable, such as the winds that ‘creaked’ with the birds. Such stories of famine, forced prostitution, even cannibalism, had been rife in the parts of France which Shelley had travelled through in 1814, utterly ravaged by the post-Revolutionary wars. Shelley now shows plague, sickness and mental derangement sweeping through the streets of the city. This is the final breakdown of both outer and inner order. There is a brief glimpse of a familiar, fiendish
doppelgänger
.

It was not hunger now, but thirst. Each well

Was choked with rotting corpses, and became

A cauldron of green mist made visible

At sunrise. Thither still the myriads came,

Seeking to quench the agony of the flame,

Which raged like poison through their bursting veins;

Naked they were from torture, without shame,

Spotted with nameless scars and lurid plains,

Childhood, and youth, and age, writhing in savage pains.

It was not thirst but madness! Many saw

Their own lean image everywhere, it went

A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe

Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent

Those shrieking victims; some, ere life was spent,

Sought, with a horrid sympathy, to shed

Contagion on the sound; and others rent

Their matted hair, and cried aloud, ‘We tread

On fire! the avenging Power his hell on earth has spread!’
⁷⁰

The texture of the verse and imagery here has finally become coarse. It borders on the sensational, as Shelley pushes towards the ultimate extremities, and one feels the deliberate straining. Nevertheless, there is a power and accuracy, which presses on the surreal: the ‘lean image’ of the self, the contagion shed ‘on the sound’. In the original manuscript Shelley’s last line had read, ‘We tread On fire! Almighty God his hell on earth has spread!’
⁷¹

It is at this point in Canto x, that the historical and social part of Shelley’s poem ends. The city is plunged in disease, famine, despotism and bigotry; superstitious terrors dominate the Tyrant’s court, and the ‘Priests’ are everywhere regaining control of the minds of a cowed population. Against this are set the radical and atheist values and aspirations portrayed in the personal lives of Laon and Cythna, and affirmed especially in Cantos VI and IX.

Shelley’s poem has been completely purged of any crude social optimism or ‘perfectibility’ in the popular sense. It is fundamentally a grim poem, and it presents hope and love as growing and flourishing only in the very teeth of despair and hatred. It is moreover a post-Godwinian poem, in that it is as much about counter-revolution as revolution. Though it accepts joyfully the principles and the historical achievements of the French Revolution, it rejects that revolution as a model for further political and social change.

In the brief penultimate Canto XI, Laon and Cythna part at their mountainous stronghold, and Laon goes down to the city, and bargains his own life in sworn exchange for Cythna’s. She is allowed to go unharmed to America. In Canto XII, Laon is led chained through the streets in a manner that recalls some of the executions of 1817, while a silent crowd looks on. He is taken up to be burnt alive.

I, Laon, led by mutes, ascend my bier

Of fire, and look around: each distant isle

Is dark in the bright dawn; towers far and near,

Pierce like reposing flames the tremulous atmosphere.
⁷²