Shelley and Plato: Metaphysical Formulations

Jacqueline M. Starner English Honors Thesis

6 May 2008

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Introduction

In a letter to J. B. Pereira (September 16, 1815) Percy Bysshe Shelley highlights

his commitment to philosophical study: “I have taken a house, & continue to employ

myself in the cultivation of philosophic truth” (Jones Letters 431). Though Shelley

studied many philosophers, Plato’s philosophy influenced him greatly, which is evident

in his choice to translate Plato’s Ion and The Symposium (Cameron 302). Shelley was

introduced to Plato by Dr. Lind, his professor at Eton. During this time, Plato was “still

regarded in schools and universities as a subversive and corrupting author” (Holmes 26),

which probably heightened Shelley’s interest in the philosopher. Although Shelley did

not translate The Symposium until twelve years after his introduction to Plato (Stahmer), I

believe that Shelley consciously incorporated Plato’s philosophy into his important works

before that time, including Alastor and “Mont Blanc.” Shelley not only incorporated

aspects of Plato’s philosophy, but he reworked Plato’s metaphysical ideas through his

poetry to create his own unique metaphysical view.

I have tracked Shelley’s use of Platonic ideas through five of his poetic works;

these works in chronological order are Alastor, “Mont Blanc,” “To a Sky-Lark,” Adonais,

and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley also wrote many prose works, and “On

Life,” “On Love,” and A Defence of Poetry have helped to shed light upon his

metaphysical views. In both his prose and poetry, Shelley unlike his fellow Romantic

writers was drawn toward abstract language. This tendency of his is decidedly un-

Romantic and is rooted in Shelley’s pre-occupation with philosophy. Shelley could in

fact be labeled a philosopher (though he would not approve of such a title) because

through his poetry he seeks to formulate his metaphysical beliefs.

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Shelley’s choice to partake in the tradition of writing a defense of poetry, shows

his commitment to upholding poetry as a superior discipline to philosophy; however, this

conviction did not stop him from steeping himself in philosophical works. In his study of

Plato, he found a way around this contradiction by considering “Plato as ‘essentially a

poet’” and rejecting “Plato’s rational formulations” (Woodman 550). However, despite

his overt disapproval of philosophy, much of Shelley’s work addresses the metaphysical

questions that concerned Plato, such as “In what space does Truth or divinity exist?” He

would have bulked at identifying himself as a philosopher, and yet his work clearly

illustrates the philosophical work he was undertaking.

A very important component of Shelley’s philosophy was his conception of the

divine. By “divine” I do not mean a Christian patriarchal God figure or any sort of

religious belief. The divine as Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry is “the eternal, the

infinite, and the one” (Norton 840). Divine is actually synonymous with a Platonic type

of Truth because both are unchanging and beyond the experiential material world. I

capitalize the word “Truth” throughout my analysis to signify its divinity; Truth is

inherently divine because it shares the same qualities as divinity of being eternally

present and beyond material existence. Shelley’s philosophy differs importantly from

Plato’s in the way that Shelley constructs his idea of this Truth. Platonic Truth exists

beyond the realm of experiential existence, and while Shelley believes in an ideal

objective Truth, he situates his Truth within the phenomenological world.

In perhaps his most famous poem “Mont Blanc,” Shelley embodies the Truth in

the form of the mountain. This Truth he refers to as “the power” throughout the poem:

“Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:--the power is there/ The still and solemn power” (127-

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8). The image of power residing within a formidable mountain which rises above the rest

of the world is Platonic because the power or Truth exists separately. Shelley describes

the truth as “still and solemn” because it resides above sensory experience and therefore

does not become entangled in the mechanisms which drive everyday existence.

However, though the mountain “pierc[es] the infinite sky” (60), Shelley’s Truth is not

entirely Platonic because it resides in a form of the natural world. Mont Blanc is

reminiscent of the Platonic realm of the forms, but Mont Blanc’s position within the

natural world immediately makes its Truth more accessible. Shelley also emphasizes the

earthliness of the mountain by referring to it as a masculine entity; he describes the

glacier surrounding the summit: “Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down/

From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne” (16-17).

In his first major work Alastor Shelley also assigns gender to the entity which

embodies the Truth. The main character, the Poet, in Alastor travels “[t]o seek strange

truths in undiscovered lands” and receives a vision of a veiled maiden (77). “Knowledge

and truth and virtue were her theme” (158), and after the departure of the vision the poet

becomes obsessed with uniting once again with this being of Truth. The poet’s encounter

with the maiden is very un-Platonic because he receives her wisdom through a sexual

encounter. 1In The Symposium Plato uses Socrates’ rejection of Alcibiades, a younger

and more beautiful man, who wishes to be Socrates’ lover, to illustrate the need to reject

the physical world in order to reach the Truth. Socrates rejects sexual contact because he

knows that in order to reach the Truth he must move beyond the imperfect shadows of

mortal existence.

1 Alcibiades relates the story of his rejection: “I threw my arms around this really god-like and amazing man, and lay there with him all night long[…] when I got up next morning I had no more slept with Socrates than if I’d been sleeping with my father or elder brother” (219c-d).

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In his 1819 essay “On Life,” Shelley shifts to an extremely materialist view,

seeming to reject any type of Platonic idealism. He writes, “I confess that I am one of

those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers, who

assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived” (Reiman 476). This assertion is a direct

contradiction of Plato’s belief that the objects perceived in the world are only shadows of

the true forms; Shelley takes a skeptical position by stating that we cannot know anything

except that which we experience through the senses. Shelley’s adopted materialism was

short-lived because of the natural draw he felt toward an idealist philosophy like Plato’s.

Shelley dabbled in both materialism and idealism, negotiating between the two extremes,

because each caused him uneasiness. 2He did not want to trust in a world totally

constructed by the senses, but his abhorrence of tyranny did not lend itself to idealism

either.

In A Defence of Poetry Shelley begins to really solidify his metaphysical beliefs

by creating a compromise between strict materialism and strict idealism. Shelley

describes poetry’s function: “it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare

the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Norton 847). This

statement situates divinity within the material world; however, those objects we perceive

daily are not themselves divine. Divinity is disguised beneath the mortal coverings of

earthly objects, and the poet’s job is to reveal this hidden divinity to humanity. Shelley’s

compromise occurs in the placement of his divinity; he moves Truth from the Platonic

intelligible region into the world itself. Like the Truth of the higher Platonic realm,

2 Shelley’s first major work was Queen Mab, which was a political poem, and in my work I am consciously overlooking the political strand in Shelley’s poetry because I feel that his works, which are not overtly political, address his metaphysical beliefs to a greater extent. The works within this strand include but are not limited to The Revolt of Islam, The Mask of Anarchy, and Hellas.

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Shelley’s divinity exists eternally, and the poet simply recognizes the existence of such

Truth.

Introduction of Criticism

The critics whom I have incorporated into my analysis, situated Shelley’s

Platonism as a central factor in their essays. These critics belong to a school of thought

that is not without powerful opposition. In the opening paragraph of his essay “Shelley’s

Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” Tracy Ware acknowledges the opposition: “Two

prominent Shelley critics, Earl R. Wasserman and Harold Bloom, in emphasizing

Shelley’s artistic and intellectual consistency, have explicitly denied the relevance of

Plato for a proper study of his poetry and prose” (549). Ware affirms his belief in the

relevance of Plato by stating that

[w]hile these two critics agree in their opposition to the consideration of Platonism, that agreement obscures a long tradition in Shelley criticism, a tradition that has amassed a great deal of evidence to substantiate the claim that Shelley was profoundly influenced by Plato (549).

The latter school of thought, which regards Shelley’s Platonism as critical to an

understanding his work, is the one to which I also belong. Shelley’s Platonism is

essential to a study of his work because Plato provides the foundation from which Shelley

developed his metaphysical beliefs. Of all the philosophers whom Shelley read, Plato is

the only whom he chose to translate, and the intense work of translation very probably

caused Plato’s metaphysical beliefs to become embedded in Shelley’s own psyche. Even

if Shelley did not consciously incorporate Plato’s ideas, although at times he definitely

did, Plato’s ideas were part of Shelley’s consciousness. Though the ways in which

Shelley agreed with Plato are interesting to note, Shelley’s divergences from Plato are far

more interesting because these instances mark the points at which Shelley embarked on

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his own metaphysical formulations. Shelley like Christ in Paradise Regain’d figures out

what he is by recognizing what he is not. He absolutely cannot support Plato’s refutation

of poetry, and this causes Shelley to formulate the reasons why he believes poetry

benefits humanity. As a self-proclaimed atheist, Shelley was unwilling and unable to

conform to philosophical doctrines; instead, his thinking was centered around the

formulation of a metaphysical view to which he could subscribe.

Ross G. Woodman in his essay “Shelley’s Changing Attitude to Plato” addresses

the most obvious problem of Shelley’s affiliation with Plato, which was as mentioned

previously that Plato excluded poets from his ideal Republic. Woodman describes

Plato’s attitude toward poetry as “ambiguous” because “the poet on the one hand, is

divinely inspired; poetry, on the other, is twice-removed from Reality.” Woodman goes

on to explain that Plato believed poets had no place within an ideal society because

“[w]hile the poet may have attained the object of knowledge in a state of supernatural

possession, he can offer no more than a fictitious account of it which, when accepted as

truth, breeds dogmatism and credulity” (497). Tracy Ware in his essay “Shelley’s

Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” written twenty-three years after Woodman’s essay,

also acknowledges the irony of Shelley’s use of Platonic ideas in his poetry, but he states

that Plato “stresses the connection between the divine intuitions of the imagination and

poetry, the medium in which these intuitions find their finest expression. Plato’s deepest

influence on Shelley was as support for these divine intuitions” (550). Ware explains that

Plato’s belief in the divine inspiration of poets influenced Shelley’s view of poetry as an

expression of the divine.

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Both Woodman and Ware discuss the ways in which Shelley addressed Plato’s

conviction of the failure of poetry. Woodman believes that Shelley’s objective through

poetry is to continuously “recreate the archetypal vision” (508); the particulars of this

vision as defined by Woodman will be discussed later. The second way in which

Woodman describes Shelley escaping Platonic doubt of poetry is by “moving beyond

imagery altogether” (510). In The Triumph of Life, Woodman argues, Shelley presents

Rousseau as a poet who has fallen “victim [to] his own vision” (508). Woodman writes,

Rousseau “offers the poet a choice between being caught in the snare of his own image

world or rejecting it” (508). Through Rousseau Woodman believes that Shelley rejects

the image world of poetry: “[the poets] who drew/ New figures on its false and fragile

glass” (243-248 qtd in Woodman 509). In Adonais Woodman explains that Shelley

moves beyond the false world of images because “[t]he meaning of the poem resides

ultimately outside of the poem, and is arrived at […] through dialectic pressing both the

poet and audience beyond imagery altogether” (510).

Ware’s explanation of how Shelley rectifies Plato’s view of poetry with his own

is more convincing than Woodman’s. Ware writes, “Shelley adapts Plato’s mirror image,

discriminating between two types of mimesis” (558). Plato views poetry as “an art which

merely reflects phenomena,” but Shelley redefines poetry as “a corrective mirror,

adjusting the phenomena according to the poet’s imagination of their highest potential”

(558). This explanation is less vague than Woodman’s arguments of “archetypal image”

or “dialectic” which are not as clearly supported with textual evidence. Ware explains

that Shelley believes that the poet uses the imaginative faculty to transform

phenomenological objects: “universe is modified by the ‘inward sight,’ or the

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imagination, of the artist” (557). This phenomenon then logically causes divinity to be

located “within the psyche for Shelley” (554), instead of in a Platonic ideal region.

Joseph E. Baker in Shelley’s Platonic Answer to a Platonic Attack on Poetry

(1965) also attributes significance to Shelley’s conception of the imagination:

“Imagination does not merely create. What it perceives is real. Shelley carries this line

of thought farther than most Platonists would. According to him, there is a truth of

imagery” (27). While Woodman argues that Shelley moves beyond imagery, Baker

claims that Shelley attaches a very non-Platonic importance to imagery. Imagery in fact

can be observed and recreated as an expression of truth.

The most modern evaluation of Shelley’s Platonism comes from Tim Milnes’

article “Centre and Circumference: Shelley’s Defence of Philosophy” (2004). Milnes

assumes a dualistic view of Shelley’s relationship to Platonism: “like many modern

‘ordinary language’ philosophers [Shelley] maintained a patient indifference or double-

mindedness concerning the relation between the fixed ‘centre’ of knowledge and an

impermanent ‘circumference’ of experience” (5). The terms ‘centre’ and ‘circumference’

Milnes draws from Shelley’s essay “On Life” in which Shelley writes, “Each is at once

the centre and circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in

which all things are contained” (The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley vol. 6 194-

195 qtd in Milnes 3). ‘Centre’ Milnes associates with a Platonic centered view of

knowledge and ‘circumference’ with transitory, phenomenological experience. Milnes

argues that Shelley mediated between these opposing views: “Shelley’s interrogation of

‘knowledge’ never led him to reject outright the key assumptions underpinning

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empiricism” (5). Shelley continued to seek a Platonic type of ultimate truth, while never

devaluing the impressions and images of experience.

The critics mentioned all discuss the ways in which Shelley negotiated Plato’s

philosophy, accepting some doctrines and rejecting others as served his needs. One

instance I noted of Shelley’s agreement with Plato occurs in A Defence of Poetry (A

Defence), when Shelley describes poetic inspiration as transitory: “the mind in creation is

as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to

transitory brightness” (Norton 846). This passage echoes Woodman’s description of

Plato’s view of poetry which is that while the poet may have experienced the divine, once

he begins to compose he is already out of contact with it. Plato and Shelley also situate

the divine differently in relationship to the mortal world: Plato believes that in order for a

poet to create he must come in contact with the objects of truth in the intelligible region,

while Shelley’s description of poetic inspiration does not include this stipulation. Shelley

writes in A Defence that “this power [the invisible influence] arises from within, like the

colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions

of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (846). 3Poetic

inspiration to both Plato and Shelley is a result of the divine acting upon the mortal, but

Plato situates the divine as existing firmly outside of the poet, while Shelley describes the

divine as something already existing within the poet.

The idea about which Plato and Shelley hold radically different views concerns

their opinions about the products of poetic inspiration, poetry itself. As Woodman

mentions, Plato believes that poets were twice removed from reality; the reasoning to

3 Shelley adopts an egalitarian view of divinity, which agrees with his political beliefs. Divinity is not only located in all earthly objects but within human beings as well. The poet possesses the unique power of recognizing the existence of this divinity of which most people are unaware.

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support this conclusion stems from Plato’s view of poetry as mimetic of the physical

world. If poets recreate the physical world, which is already a shadow of true reality,

then it follows that the products of their creation will naturally be shadows of shadows or

two levels removed from the Truth. Even those poets who have experienced the truth can

only produce a “probable account” of the experience (Woodman 497). Plato views this

“probable account” as potentially dangerous because one could mistake it for the actual

Truth. Woodman uses an excerpt from Shelley’s Notes to Queen Mab to illustrate

Shelley’s agreement with Plato’s doctrine:

It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceive […] By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities (qtd in 508).

Woodman explains that what Shelley describes as the “‘vulgar mistake’ of mistaking a

metaphor for a real thing is the basis of Plato’s rejection of mythopoeic poets from his

Republic” (508). However, Shelley offers a solution to the inherent problems Plato

identifies in poetry. According to Woodman, this solution “lay in the perpetual

recreation of the archetypal vision” (508).

After stating what he believes to be Shelley’s answer to Plato, Woodman does not

explain how Shelley recreates this archetypal vision through his poetry. Woodman does,

however, provide a description of the archetypal vision which offers some insight into the

work Shelley was trying to accomplish through poetry:

This vision has its source in the poet’s response to the world about him. With time, the vision becomes separated from its source in ‘the invisible nature of man’ and takes on an independent existence of its own. Poetic vision thereby degenerates into dogma […] To recreate the archetypal vision is, then, to restore it to its source in man where it is renewed by the poet (508).

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This description of the vision produced by poetic inspiration reflects Shelley’s affiliation

with the Romantic school of thought; Shelley derived his answers to larger metaphysical

questions by examining the world around him. As he states in the opening lines of “Mont

Blanc,” “The everlasting universe of things/ Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid

waves,/ Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom” (1-3). Shelley in looking to

the physical world for guidance differs from Plato who believed the shadows of this

world could only mislead. Woodman’s description of the vision becoming disconnected

from its source in the human mind and taking on an existence of its own, reflects both

Plato’s and Shelley’s fears about the possible misunderstanding of poetry.

One poem which no critics have analyzed through a Platonic lens is Shelley’s

early poem Alastor. I noticed that in Alastor Shelley presents Woodman’s description of

the archetypal vision through the Poet’s creation of the “veiled maid”(151). This maid

visits the Poet in a vision and represents his own poetic vision as she possesses a “voice

[…] like the voice of his own soul” (153). After this visitation, the Poet’s only aim

becomes his reunification with the vision, and his quest causes his “descen[t] to an

untimely grave” (Preface). The Poet is driven to his demise by his unfortunate belief that

the maid, whose origin is within his imagination, exists outside of his mind. In order to

prevent readers and poets alike from falling victim to imaginative creations, Shelley must

strive to present a true description of the Truth of his experience in his verse. If Shelley

can present to the reader an accurate description of the truth, then the danger of “probable

accounts” becoming dogma is erased.

Shelley in even attempting to recreate the “archetypal vision” through his poetry

differs from Plato who believed the intelligible region was beyond description.

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Woodman quotes a passage from Plato’s Seventh Epistle : “I certainly have composed no

work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it

into words like other studies” (341C-341D qtd in 507). According to Woodman,

Shelley’s objective in his poetry is to accomplish the very task Plato deems impossible.

Another way in which Shelley avoids the risks of poetry, which Woodman does

not consider, is through his redefinition of the role of poets within society. In his essay

“Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” Ware outlines Plato’s stance on poetry as

expressed by Socrates in the Republic; Socrates “mocks the artist by comparing his

creations to the reflections in a mirror” (557). As discussed earlier, Ware explains how

Shelley conceives of poetry’s function differently than Plato. Ware cites a passage from

A Defence to show how Shelley changes Socrates’ mirror image to work in favor of the

poet: “A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which

should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”

(p.281 qtd in 558). Shelley’s redefinition of poetry causes his poet to function as the

philosopher kings do in Plato’s Republic. The philosopher kings are those who are meant

to rule because they have experienced the intelligible region. Instead of remaining within

that realm of truth, they must return to earth because of their responsibility to instruct

humanity about how to reach that Truth. Shelley’s definition of the poet has evolved

from Plato’s simplification of the poet as a facilitator of mimesis to a definition which

classifies the poet as something encompassing both the roles of artist and philosopher.

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Chapter 1: The Predominance of Fire in Alastor

Shelley’s second major poem Alastor has not assumed a prominent place within

Shelley criticism because of what have been interpreted by critics as its inconsistencies.

By re-interpreting this poem through the lens of Shelley’s Platonism, which has not

previously been done, I was able to make sense of the confusing status of the vision

maiden. This maiden whom the Poet gives birth to through his mind seems to have an

ambiguous relationship with the Poet because she imparts knowledge to him and then

immediately disappears. I believe the vision’s ephemeral nature is caused by Shelley’s

own anxieties over both materialist and idealist doctrines. Shelley provides the Poet with

a form of Truth outside of the material world, which then causes the Poet’s demise,

because the Poet’s devotion to the idealist vision causes him to lose touch with the

material world. The entire poem is in fact an allegory for Shelley’s confusion over his

metaphysical views.

I have compared Alastor with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because both works

are the expressions of their authors’ metaphysical views. But Shelley’s formulations of

his own views were in reaction to Plato’s idealism. For example, the attention Shelley

pays to different forms of light in Alastor is reminiscent of the way Plato differentiates

between the fire and the sun in the Allegory. I have also included a comparison of

Alastor to sections of The Symposium because without this comparison the objective of

the Poet’s journey remains mysterious. Aristophanes’ speech sheds light upon the Poet’s

wanderings after his encounter with the vision. If Shelley’s poem is not interpreted

through its connections with Plato’s dialogues, then it loses the important meanings

which are only understood through such a comparison

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In order to facilitate such a comparison, I will first begin with an overview of

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s Allegory, the character Adeimantus explains to

his brother Glaucon the nature of reality using the example of the cave. The men in the

cave, “who have been prisoners there since they were children,” cannot see the figures of

people passing on the road above the cave but can only see shadows because “their legs

and necks [are] so fastened that they cannot turn their heads” (Plato 514b). The shadows

of the figures are created by a fire burning behind the road that runs in front of the

opening of the cave. Later in the dialogue Adeimantus explains what the fire and cave

are meant to represent: “The realm revealed by sight corresponds to the prison, and the

light of the fire in the prison to the power of the sun. And you won’t go wrong if you

connect the ascent into the upper world and the sight of the objects there with the upward

progress of the mind into the intelligible region” (517b). The fire in the allegory provides

light as the sun does, which allows us to view our surroundings; however, the things we

can view by the light of the sun are like the shadows in the cave because we cannot see

the true nature of things in the visible region. In Alastor, as I will demonstrate in my

paper, fire functions differently as a symbol than in the Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s

Allegory fire represents a shadow of the Truth, while in Alastor the maid of the Poet’s

vision, who embodies Truth, possesses fire, making fire symbolize not a shadow but the

truth itself. However, the Truth embodied by the vision is a different Truth than the

ultimate Truth in Plato’s dialogues because the vision’s Truth concerns love. Ultimately,

the Poet, who already possesses that which Plato deems the highest type of knowledge,

learns that there is a greater knowledge which can only be attained through spiritual

communion with a partner.

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The Poet in “Alastor” is immediately cast as different from the prisoners of the

cave. While the prisoners believe that “the shadows of the objects […are] the whole

truth” (515c), the Poet is described as having knowledge:

[…] Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great Or good, or lovely, which sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt And knew. When early youth had past, he left His cold fireside and alienated home To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.

(Norton 68-77)

Shelley’s vocabulary in this passage echoes the Platonic vocabulary. He writes that the

Poet knew “good” things. In the Allegory, Plato explains that “the final thing to be

perceived in the intelligible region, and perceived only with difficulty, is the form of the

good” (517b-c). The one who glimpses the form of the good has seen the ultimate truth

because “in the intelligible region itself [the form of the good] is the controlling source of

truth and intelligence” (517c). The intelligible region which Adeimantus mentions is the

realm above the earthly, and this intelligible region contains the forms of which the

things on earth are merely shadows. By writing “all of great/Or good/or lovely […] he

felt/And knew,” Shelley implies that the Poet has glimpsed the form of the good.

Shelley’s use of the word “knew” especially casts the Poet as someone with access to the

Truth because Plato differentiates between having “right opinions” and having

“knowledge.”

In The Symposium, Socrates recalls a dialogue with the priestess Diotima in which

she explains the nature of knowledge: Diotima asks, “Haven’t you realized that there’s

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something between wisdom and ignorance?” Socrates replies, “What is it?” to which

Diotima answers, “It’s having right opinions without being able to give reasons for

having them. Don’t you realize that this isn’t knowing, because you don’t have

knowledge unless you can give reasons” (Gill 202a). Not all people who have not gained

access to the forms are ignorant; these people have limited access to the Truth which

allows them to have “right opinions” without having knowledge of the ultimate Truth.

In his poem Alastor, Shelley is working through his views about the relationship

of the Truth to the material world. He differs importantly from Plato because he does not

consider the senses or material existence to be completely devoid of Truth. In the

Allegory, Plato uses the “prison” of the cave to represent the “realm revealed by sight”

(517b). By “realm revealed by sight” Plato means earthly existence, so that all the things

perceived through sight are only shadows like those in the cave. Shelley rejects this idea

of Plato’s that material, earthly existence can only contain shadows of the divine because

he writes that the Poet receives impulses from “[e]very sight/And sound from the vast

earth and ambient air” (68-9). The external earthly environment grants the Poet access to

the “fountains of divine philosophy” or in other words knowledge of the good. Shelley’s

rejection of the Platonic idea that earthly things are only shadows of the truth reflects

Shelley’s belief in the power of nature. Through his preoccupation with objects within

nature not only in Alastor but also “Mont Blanc,” Shelley is exploring the ways in which

the external environment can embody metaphysical truths.

The invocation with which Shelley begins the poem before telling the story of the

Poet proves his ultimately unshakable, though sometimes questioned, belief in the power

of nature, which aligns him with the larger school of Romantic poetry. The first stanza of

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the invocation is addressed to the “Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!” (1). Shelley

recounts the offerings of nature: “sunset and its gorgeous ministers” (6), “autumn’s

hollow sighs in the sere wood” (8), “spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes/ Her

first sweet kisses” (11-12), “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast” (13). After listing those

things in nature that have inspired him, he asks forgiveness from the elements: “forgive/

This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw/ No portion of your wonted favour now!”

(15-17). The “boast” is the poem to follow about a Poet who initially rejects nature in

search of truth.

Though Shelley attributes the Poet’s untimely death to his “self-centered

seclusion” in the Preface (746), the Poet’s lack of appreciation for the natural world

might also have contributed to his demise. As the Poet wanders in search of his vision,

he is carried within a small boat to a beautiful and secluded cove. The boughs of the

trees weave together: “The oak,/ Expanding its immense and knotty arms,/ Embraces the

light beech” (431-433); so that “the woven leaves/ Make net-work of the dark blue light

of day” (445-446). However, this naturally sublime scene brings the Poet no solace

because he remains self-centered. The first image Shelley describes the Poet as noticing

is his own reflection: “His eyes beheld/ Their own wan light […] distinct in the dark

depth/ Of that still fountain” (469-472). Nature fails to revive him because in his single-

minded quest to reunite with the maiden he fails to notice nature’s beauty. In the

invocation, Shelley reveals his fear of nature, which both giveth and taketh away, when

he asks the elements to continue reaping their bounty upon him, though he will tell the

story of one who did not appreciate their gifts.

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In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato does not value the natural world because of

course the aim of the Allegory is to exhibit the fallacy of nature. Plato’s character

Adeimantus, who relates the story, differentiates between the natural world and the

heavenly realm through the example of two different types of light, which are the light of

the fire, rooted in the natural world, and the divine light of the sun. The first light that

Adeimantus presents is that of the fire, which draws the prisoners from the cave: the

prisoner is “suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards

the fire” (515c). The light of the fire is less intense than that of the sun, and Adeimantus

relates that the “thing [the prisoner] would be able to do last would be to look directly at

the sun itself” (516b). Becoming accustomed to the light of the fire is the prisoner’s first

step in preparing himself to experience the intensity of the sun.

Shelley also creates a hierarchy of fire within his poem, according to the levels of

their intensity. Shelley’s first mention of light is of the Poet’s “cold fireside” (76), and

this fireside which the Poet leaves to “seek strange truths” is comparable to the fire

burning at the entrance of the cave in the Allegory (77). The fire presented as more

intense than that of the Poet’s “cold fireside” is that of the Poet’s vision maiden: “Soon

the solemn mood/ Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame/ A permeating fire”

(161-163). Shelley’s description of the maid’s fire as “permeating,” consuming “all her

frame” and threatening to overthrow its bounds, casts it as more intense than the Poet’s

contained “cold fireside.” Shelley’s also describes of the maid’s light as “warm” (175),

which also emphasizes its intensity as compared to the Poet’s “cold fireside.” When this

hierarchy of fire is compared to the hierarchy of light within the Allegory, the Poet’s

“cold fireside” corresponds to the fire outside of the cave which is only a shadow of the

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sun, while the vision’s fire corresponds to the light of the sun. Within the Allegory the

light of the sun represents the ultimate Truth, and Shelley also describes the maid’s fire as

deriving from Truth because its source is “the solemn mood/ Of her pure mind.”

Shelley illustrates the vision as embodying Truth through his description of her

speech to the Poet: “[k]nowledge and truth and virtue were her theme/ And lofty hopes of

divine liberty” (158-9). Like the Poet, Shelley describes the maid as having

“knowledge,” which in Platonism entails having seen the forms. In Plato’s dialogues, the

words “truth” and “divine” are also associated with the intelligible region; however, in

creating a symbol of Truth whose source of light is a flame and not the sun Shelley

radically departs from the symbolic meanings of light in the Allegory of the Cave. Plato

associates Truth with the light of the sun and shadows with the light of the fire; therefore,

if Shelley’s maid were to correspond with the symbolic structure of the Allegory then her

source of light would necessarily be the sun. Shelley perhaps associates the flame with

the Truth of the vision because she does not bring Truth to a being who is devoid of it

like the prisoners of the cave. The Poet already possesses access to the divine; therefore,

the vision’s flame imparts something different to him than the Truth which the light of

the sun reveals on the prisoners of the cave. Shelley’s choice of fire as a symbol of truth

also reflects his belief in the power of nature. While Plato chose the sun, which exists

above the earth, Shelley chose an element which exists upon the earth.

The very embodiment of truth within a feminine figure is an even more radical

departure of Shelley’s from Plato. Plato believed the divine itself was beyond

description, as Woodman illustrates using Plato’s Seventh Epistle: “I certainly have

composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way

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of putting it into words like other studies” (341C-341D qtd in 507). Shelley not only

attempts to describe the divine but also embodies it not only within a figure but a

feminine figure! As Shelley notes in his “ A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient

Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love,” which served as the introduction to his

translation of The Symposium, entitled The Banquet, the women of ancient Greece

“possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions, the habits and qualities of slaves”

(Notopoulos 408). 4Plato would never choose as Shelley does to inscribe the divine onto

a mortal body because the objects of material existence are only shadows like those on

the wall of the cave. Plato would especially not choose a female body because of the

standard interpretation during his time of women as naturally closer to the earth and

therefore farther than men from the divine.

The Poet’s sexual interactions with the female vision would also not have been

sanctioned by Plato. In his speech in The Symposium, Pausanias makes the famous

differentiation between the two types of love: Uranian or Heavenly love and Pandemic or

Common love (Gill 180d-e). Common love, he says, “is the kind of love that inferior

people feel. People like this are attracted to women as much as boys, and to bodies rather

than minds” (181b). Pausanias clearly pairs women with the body and men with the

mind; therefore, loving a woman is no more than loving a body, while in order to love a

mind one must love a man. Pausanias’ description of Heavenly love further degrades the

status of women: “The other love derives from the Heavenly goddess, who has nothing of

the female in her but only maleness; so this love is directed at boys” (181c). Though

Pausanias identifies a “goddess” as the origin of Heavenly love, he qualifies the term by

4 The vision is of course not mortal, but Shelley presents her as resembling a mortal feminine figure. The form which she assumes to visit the Poet is similar to mortal body, though her nature is divine.

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defining this “goddess” as completely male. Having a “goddess” as the origin of a higher

form of love which can only be directed at males would have presented a problem had

Pausanias not redefined the term “goddess.”

Shelley completely rejects Plato’s belief in the natural inferiority of women by

positioning a female figure importantly within the poem and having her impart

knowledge to the Poet through a sexual act. The Poet’s experience with the vision

culminates in this sexual embrace: “He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled/ His

gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet/ Her panting bosom” (Norton 182-184). The

Poet’s love is not Common, though it is directed toward a female figure, and the physical

way in which the Poet and vision express their mutual love is not in accordance with

Platonic beliefs regarding love. Pausanias says of the goddess of Heavenly love that she

“is also older, and so avoids abusive violence” (181c). 5By “abusive violence” he means

penetration as would be done with a woman; the sexual act between men and boys does

not include this violence. Shelley rejects Plato’s belief that the physical act of love

between a man and woman cannot be divine by making this very act the means through

which the Poet receives knowledge from the vision.

While the maiden could be interpreted as a figure existing outside of the Poet,

there is also evidence within the poem to suggest that she is an aspect of the Poet himself.

Shelley’s description of the maid’s voice as “like the voice of [the Poet’s] own soul”

provides the strongest evidence for this interpretation (153). Frederick L. Jones in his

essay “The Inconsistency of Shelley’s Alastor” agrees that the “veiled maid is […] an

ideal combination of all the loveliest and truest elements in the Poet’s vast knowledge”

5 In her lectures concerning ancient Greek customs, Dr. Sistare explains that men would only use the external surfaces of boys’ bodies for sexual acts.

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(296). In the Preface to the poem, Shelley also describes the vision as an outward

manifestation of the Poet: “He imagines to himself the Being whom he loves.

Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in

which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful,

which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture” (Norton 746). Shelley’s

description of the vision in his Preface also supports the interpretation of the vision as the

embodiment of Truth because if the Poet is “[c]onversant with speculations of the

sublimest and most perfect natures” or in other words has access to the divine, then it

follows that the outward manifestation of his mind would itself be divine. If the Poet

already possesses knowledge, then he creates the vision not to gain knowledge but

because “[h]is mind awakened and thirst[ed] for intercourse with an intelligence similar

to itself” (Preface pg. 746). As stated previously, the vision grants the Poet something

different than the knowledge which the sun imparts to the prisoners in the Allegory of the

Cave, and an understanding of the purpose of the vision may lie in Plato’s dialogue The

Symposium.

Though Shelley states that the Poet “seek[s] strange truths” (77), the quest of the

Poet seems to be the “pursuit of wholeness” described by Aristophanes in The

Symposium (Gill 193a). Though Plato ultimately rejects the importance Aristophanes

places on unity, Shelley rejects “Plato’s rational formulations” (Woodman 550). By

regarding Plato’s dialogues as poetry, Shelley interpreted them in his own way, which

was not necessarily the way Plato designed them to be understood. In The Symposium,

Aristophanes explains using a fantastical tale why human beings desire to share love with

another person. He claims that human beings in earlier times “had four hands and the

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same number of legs, and two identical faces on a circular neck” (Gill 189e-190a).

These, what would now be considered double humans, were cut in half by Zeus to

prevent them from becoming too powerful and overthrowing the gods (190d).

Aristophanes’ main point is that each halved human “longed for its own other half”

(191a), and the vision in Alastor seems to function as the Poet’s other half.

While Shelley describes the vision as a manifestation of the Poet, an

inconsistency with this conception can be seen through the Poet’s reaction to the vision’s

departure. Through intercourse with the Poet the vision passes her flame to him, and this

flame serves as the force which drives the Poet to his early demise. Shelley describes the

wandering of the Poet which follows his experience of the vision: “Day after day, a

weary waste of hours,/Bearing within his life the brooding care/That ever fed on its

decaying flame” (245-7). As the Poet wanders searching to reunite with his vision, the

flame which she instilled in him consumes him; however, it does not follow logically

from an interpretation of the vision as a manifestation of the Poet that the power of the

vision, symbolized by the flame, could consume him. If the vision’s power derives from

the Poet’s mind, then her power could not be too much for him to bear because her power

and his would be equivalent.

Even after describing the vision as imagined by the Poet in the Preface, Shelley

complicates the role of the vision: “The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the

functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding

powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and

attaching them to a single image” (Preface 746). This passage occurs soon after

Shelley’s previous statement that the Poet’s mind “thirsts for intercourse with an

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intelligence similar to itself”; however, the being whom the Poet imagines is not only

similar to himself but surpasses him because the Poet instills in her all that is beautiful

and perfect within the world (this beauty and perfection surpasses that possessed by the

Poet). Shelley’s description of the flame of the vision within the poem illustrates the

point at which the vision takes on a life of its own separate from the Poet: “Soon the

solemn mood/ Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame/ A permeating fire: wild

numbers then/ She raised” (161-164). The mind which produces the flame is “her pure

mind” and not the Poets. The vision, like the flame, which will soon surpass the

boundaries of her shape, is surpassing the boundaries of the Poet’s mind. Once she

begins to compose her own verse, “wild numbers,” she has become her own entity. The

sexual intercourse between Poet and vision which follows only becomes possible after

the two are completely separated.

Though the Poet’s experience with the vision culminates in a sexual embrace,

their intercourse begins with a deep mental embrace that like the vision takes on a life of

its own. Before describing the physical interaction between the vision and Poet, Shelley

describes the mental one:

Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues (153-157).

The Poet is hypnotized by the voice of the vision, which echoes and then surpasses all

that is greatest within his mind. Shelley translates the purely mental interaction into a

visceral experience through his imagery. The interaction beginning within the Poet’s

mind takes on a psychedelic quality “[o]f many coloured woof and shifting hues,” and as

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the imagery becomes more intense the vision begins to take on actual physical qualities.

The power of her voice progresses from spoken words to musical imitations of nature,

“music long,/ Like woven sounds of streams and breezes,” until it can be seen and felt by

the Poet. The imagery Shelley uses to illustrate the development of the vision is of

weaving. The strands of her words weave together to form the complex sounds of

“streams and breezes,” and the strands of this music which are twice as powerful as her

words alone form a “web” which holds the Poet’s “inmost sense suspended,” though she

is not yet powerful enough to physically hold the Poet. The moment at which the mental

embrace becomes a physical one is when the power of “her pure mind kindled through all

her frame/ A permeating fire” (161-162). She literally bursts into physical existence

through the combustion of her woven power which has become too powerful to remain a

metaphysical entity.

After the vision becomes a physical entity separate from the Poet, the force of the

vision’s fire, which she implants within the Poet, drives him forward in the same way that

the prisoners of the cave are drawn from the darkness by the fire outside of the cave.

Plato hypothesizes in his dialogue what would happen if “one of [the prisoners] were let

loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards

the fire” (515c). If the prisoners could turn their heads, they would be drawn out of the

cave by the light of the fire. The Poet’s vision causes him to move into an unfamiliar

realm just as the prisoners who venture outside of the cave toward the fire. Before the

vision the Poet could “only look straight ahead” like the prisoners because he had

knowledge but not the higher form of knowledge granted to him by the vision. Unlike

the prisoners who are dealing only with shadows of the Truth, the Poet has access to the

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divine, and yet the vision accords him a higher Truth than that embodied by the sun in the

Allegory.

Once he glimpses the vision, the Poet is compelled to unite eternally with the

Truth of the vision; however, his quest is doomed from the start. Shelley writes in the

Preface, “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by disappointment,

he descends to an untimely grave” (Norton 746), explaining the inevitability of the Poet’s

death by the end of the poem. The vision, who is born from his mind but takes on a life

of her own much like the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost, cannot be found anywhere else

within nature, though the Poet searches far and wide. She is inimitable and like Plato’s

intelligible region exists outside of the material world. Her only contact with the material

world is through the Poet, who like Plato’s philosopher kings, accesses the divine while

still existing within the mortal realm.

The Truth of the vision, which in Alastor ranks above the realm of the forms, is

Shelley’s addition to Plato’s theory of the forms. Based on the relationship between the

Poet and his vision, the Truth of the vision seems to relate to the need for shared love in

grasping the true nature of reality. The second paragraph of Shelley’s Preface to the

poem mentions the need for love: “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.”

This statement echoes Aristophanes definition of love, which states that “‘love’ is the

name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness” (The Symposium 193a). The impetus for

the Poet’s journey is not to find Truth because he has already attained knowledge, but to

fill the “vacancy” of his spirit with the half from which he has been separated.

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As he wanders the Poet encounters a swan and as the bird flies away he addresses

it:

Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in lustre of their own fond joy” (280-284) He wishes to reunite with his mate as he imagines the bird will do upon return to its nest.

Interestingly, he only describes the physical embrace between the two birds, but this

physical embrace is only the superficial evidence of the link between the mates. As the

swan in the nest welcomes the wandering bird home, she does so with her eyes, which

radiate with the light of her joy at seeing her mate. This light echoes the light shining

from the Poet’s eyes, except the light from the Poet’s eyes is quickly consuming him

because it finds no reflection in the eyes of another. The light shining from the swan’s

eyes as she looks into the eyes of her mate is not a consuming fire like the one raging

within the Poet, but a calm, controlled light which seems like the light which would shine

in Plato’s intelligible region. The light of the intelligible region does not fluctuate as the

ever-growing fire shining from the Poet’s eyes, but remains constantly bright like the

light from the eyes of the swan who is united with her other half. Only the reflection of

the Poet’s fire in the flame of the vision can tame the Poet’s flame and translate it into the

calm bright light of Truth; a Truth reached only by uniting with his other half.

After the Poet experiences the vision, the flame the vision implants within the

Poet consumes him because like the prisoner who first glimpses the fire the Poet is “so

dazzled by the glare of [the light]” that he cannot see (Plato 516a). When the prisoners of

the cave first come out of the darkness, the light of the fire causes them to not “be able to

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see a single one of the things” of which only shadows are reflected in the cave (516a).

By moving in too direct a path toward Truth, the prisoners are completely blinded; they

can see even less than the shadows viewed within the cave. In The Symposium Plato

presents Diotima’s ladder as a gradual and therefore safer way of apprehending the Truth.

If a person prepares himself gradually for experiencing the full light of Truth, then he will

not be blinded by its brightness as the prisoners of the cave are when they look

immediately at the fire. The Poet too is temporarily blinded by the brightness of the

vision; Shelley describes the Poet after the vision’s departure: “Now blackness veiled his

dizzy eyes, and night/ Involved and swallowed up the vision” (188-9). By not preparing

properly for his encounter with the dazzling light of truth, the Poet suffers from the

encounter.

Though the Poet regains his sight, he does not completely recover because the

vision’s fire remains within him “sho[wing]/ As in a furnace burning secretly/ From his

dark eyes alone” (252-4). The fire of the vision’s truth continues to affect the Poet’s

sight, and the result is that he becomes blinded to all of nature. The Poet finds himself

surrounded by sublime imagery, and yet he sees nothing because he can only apprehend

those things which reflect the vision he carries within his mind. As he addresses the

parting swan, the Poet acknowledges that he can find no match for his thoughts within his

external environment. He asks the swan,

And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?” (285-290).

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The Poet believes his power to apprehend beauty is wasted on the earth; he even belittles

the animal which he is addressing. He asserts his superiority over the bird, while

recognizing that the bird lives happily united with its other half. He cannot comprehend

why an inferior being has attained the communion with another that eludes him; what he

fails to recognize is that the bird’s entrenchment within nature has allowed it to achieve

fulfillment.

Finding no reflections of his interior life, which revolves around the vision, within

nature causes the Poet to feel alienated from nature. This alienation stems from his

intense experience with the divine through the vision for which he was not sufficiently

prepared. Plato writes in the Allegory that the prisoner “made to look directly at the light

of the fire, […] would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and retreat to the things he

could see properly” (515d); however, the Poet, unlike the prisoners does not retreat. He

stumbles blindly on after the fire of the vision, and his blindness to everything but his

quest causes the fire to consume him.

Another interesting complication which Shelley applies to Plato’s metaphor of the

sun as Truth is that he describes the sun in Alastor as a less intense light. The sun,

described as “cold white light of morning” (Norton 193), grants the Poet sight after the

radiance of the vision blinds him. The other light described earlier as “cold” within the

poem is the Poet’s “cold fireside” (76). In both cases “cold” is used to signify a lack of

intensity when juxtaposed against the “warm light” of the vision (175). If the fireside is

interpreted as “cold” because it is a shadow of the vision, then the sun with its “cold

white light” is also merely a shadow. In Plato’s Allegory, the sun represents the ultimate

truth. This is Shelley’s manipulation of the symbolic status of the sun which indicates his

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shifting views within the poem about the status of nature. He places Truth not within an

object of the universe, whose presence is always felt upon the earth, but places Truth

instead in a being located outside of material existence. By reversing the hierarchy of

types of light in the Allegory and making the sun a shadow of the fire of the vision,

Shelley makes fire becomes the dominant symbol in Alastor. Shelley uses fire as his

symbol of ultimate Truth because his ultimate Truth is different than that which Plato

symbolizes using the sun. Shelley’s main character in Alastor discovers that Truth can

only be reached by uniting with a kindred spirit, a soul like that of his vision which both

reflects and enriches the soul which it augments.

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Chapter 2: Shelley’s Negotiations between Skepticism and Idealism

The vision in Alastor is the first of many instances in Shelley’s poetry and prose

in which Shelley’s negotiations between the competing ideologies of skepticism and

idealism become apparent. The vision is an anthropomorphic representation of Shelley’s

internal turmoil, but in Shelley’s essays “On Life,” “On Love,” and A Defence of Poetry

he directly addresses his philosophical beliefs. In these essays Shelley is deeply

concerned with formulating a metaphysical view that straddles the abyss between

skepticism and idealism. He is also concerned, as have been many poets including his

fellow Romantics, with defending poetry as equal to philosophical pursuits. Shelley,

especially, must resurrect poetry from Plato’s disparagement of it as “twice-Removed

from Reality” (Woodman 497).

In his 1819 essay “On Life” Shelley quotes the Italian epic poet Tasso: “No

merita nome di creatore, sennon Iddio ed il Poeta” (“None deserves the name of creator

except God and the Poet”) (Reiman 475). The idea of the Poet as a creator pervades

Shelley’s poetry and prose and is even evident in his translation of Plato’s The

Symposium, entitled The Banquet. In his 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry (A Defence),

Shelley enumerates his beliefs about the function of the poet and poetry within society.

In this essay, Shelley states that “to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in

a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting first between existence and

perception, and secondly between perception and expression” (Norton 840). This

statement is not in agreement with the passage from Tasso, which depicts the poet as a

God-like figure. The poet which Shelley portrays in A Defence is a being who perceives

Truth in the world through his unique perception and then expresses that truth. This poet

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is not the creator of that Truth, but simply “participates in the eternal” (840). In The

Banquet, translated by Shelley in June 1818, Shelley writes that “God is a wise poet”

(Notopolous 436), once again likening the poet to a divine creator; however, in A Defence

Shelley’s idea of the poet has matured from that represented in The Banquet to the idea

represented by H.D.’s lines in her poem “Tribute to the Angels”: “but he that sat upon the

throne said,/ I make all things new” (H.D. 65). The figure H.D. describes as sitting “on

the throne” in her poem, acts as Shelley’s version of the poet in A Defence because both

“make all things new.”

The poet Shelley presents in A Defence recognizes the eternal element existing

within earthly objects and uses poetry to reveal this element to others. In A Defence

Shelley defines Truth not in a Platonic sense, existing in a realm above the earthly, but as

part of the material world: “The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed

by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very

disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn” (Norton

843). All objects of experiential existence wear a disguise which veils their “spirit” or

eternal essence. The poet perceives the Truth which is muddled by earthly “vesture[s]”

because the spirit of the objects informs their masks. Shelley uses the metaphor of the

veil throughout his essay, and the idea of the truth being unveiled occurs in his poetry as

well. According to Shelley, “[poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and

lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (847). The poet

does not create the beauty which he perceives but reveals it, and he does this through an

act of creation, that of writing verse. While he does not possess creative power

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equivalent to God’s, the poet still participates in an act of creation because he “make[s]

all things new” by changing the common perception of familiar objects.

In Plato’s dialogues The Republic (specifically the Allegory of the Cave) and The

Symposium, the divine and human are strictly separated. Plato posits the divine as

existing above and not within the world. Through the Allegory of the Cave, Plato

illustrates his theory that earthly objects are imperfect shadows of the forms in the

“intelligible region” (Plato 517b). The Symposium, his translation of which Shelley

entitled The Banquet, provides a means for these strictly separated worlds to

communicate. Diotima explains to Socrates in The Banquet that “[t]he divine nature

cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and

converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they

wake, subsists through the intervention of Love” (Notopolous 442). Love is a “great

Daemon,” meaning Love links the eternal of the intelligible region to the imperfect

beings of the world (441).

Shelley’s definition of poetry gives poetry a daemonical nature like Love because

poetry communicates the divine to the mortal; however, Shelley’s daemon functions

differently from Love. Due to Shelley’s conception of the divine as not above but within

everything, poetry must penetrate the mortal coverings of objects to reach their eternal

essences. Diotima describes Love as “fill[ing] up that intermediate space between these

two classes of beings [the divine and mortal], so as to bind together by his own power,

the whole universe of things” (442). Plato envisions the intermediate space as existing

between a lower and higher world, but in Shelley’s philosophy the intermediate space

exists within a single object. The mortal coverings or guises are what separate the divine

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essences of objects from humanity. The movement of Shelley’s daemonical poetry is

therefore horizontal since the divine and mortal exist on the same plane. Plato’s daemon

of Love conversely moves in a vertical fashion because the divine and mortal are

arranged into a hierarchy, much like the Christian heaven, earth, and hell. The purpose of

poetry as explained by Shelley in A Defence is to penetrate the mortal barriers

surrounding divine essences and communicate this divinity to humanity.

In his essay “On Love,” written at the same time that he translated The

Symposium, Shelley attributes a daemonical nature to Love just as Plato did in The

Symposium. However, in this essay Shelley is beginning to form the metaphysical view,

which he elucidates in A Defence. Shelley writes,

Thou demandest what is Love. It is the powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves (Reiman 473).

In this passage, Shelley identifies a chasm between the external environment and his

internal nature, which is characteristic of Romantic poetry. This chasm is similar to the

one Plato identifies in The Symposium as existing between the divine and the mortal, and

in both Shelley’s essay and Plato’s dialogue Love acts as the intermediary between the

two realms separated the chasm. The difference between this chasm and Plato’s though

is that one of Shelley’s realms is located within the mind. Ware explains that the realm

which Shelley locates within the mind is equivalent to Plato’s divine realm because “the

paradigm for studying Shelley’s adaptation of Platonism [is] locating the Ideal Form

within the human psyche” (552). Shelley internalizes the work of Love by having Love

fill up the space which separates his mind from the external environment. When this

essay is interpreted in conjunction with Shelley’s later essay A Defence then the work of

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Love can be more fully understood as connecting the divine essences within external

objects to the divinity existing within the mind.

This divinity within the mind is essential to the production of poetry, but Shelley

believes that poetry can only be produced through the mind’s recognition of the divinity

within the external environment. Shelley’s describes poetry in A Defence as

“reproduce[ing] all that it represents” (847), and the use of the word “reproduce” echoes

Diotima’s explanation of the creative power of Love in The Banquet. Diotima informs

Socrates that “Love is the desire of generation in the beautiful, both with relation to the

body and the soul” (Notopolous 445). The beautiful to which Diotima refers is the

beauty of the good, not external beauty, but beauty originating from Truth. The beauty of

Truth produces a fertile environment in which people can produce, but human nature

cannot generate “in what is deformed” says Diotima (445).

Shelley likewise describes the production of poetry as only being possible when

the poet is exposed to the beauty of Truth: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which

some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness”

(Norton 846). The “invisible influence” grants the poet access to the divine thriving

pandemically within mortal objects, and only through this clear perception of the Truth

can the poet generate his verse. The mortal forms deform the divine essence of the

objects which they veil, and just as Diotima states that people cannot produce “in what is

deformed” so the poet cannot receive inspiration from objects marred by mortality.

Though both Shelley and Plato believe that poetry can only be produced through

direct contact with the divine, they each conceive of a different relationship between the

divine and mortal and between poetry and Truth. Plato’s conception of the beautiful is

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best symbolized by the sun, which serves as his symbol of the good in the Allegory of the

Cave; the sun sheds light upon the planet which allows all species to flourish, and though

the effects of the sun can be felt the sun itself is always beyond mortal reach. Shelley

agrees with Diotima’s doctrine in The Banquet that generation can only occur within the

beautiful, but to him the beautiful is within everything existing upon the earth. The

beauty of the mortal world is not caused by an outside force but by a force existing within

it, within reach.

The existence of this force within all objects is the reason why Shelley describes

poetry in A Defence as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (842).

Poetry expresses life’s eternal Truth by stripping earthly objects of their mortal coverings

to reveal their divine essences. Poetry’s action of revealing immortality within the mortal

world is reminiscent of Diotima’s explanation in The Banquet of how humans can

achieve immortality through reproduction: “The intercourse of male and female in

generation, a divine work, through pregnancy and production, is, as it were, something

immortal in mortality” (Notopolous 445). Though the creators will eventually die, they

will live on in some way through their progeny. In this way, through continued

reproduction humans can become immortal. In her speech, Diotima reveals the hidden

immortality of humans just as Shelley believes poetry reveals the world’s hidden

immortality.

In A Defence Shelley also states that poetry itself, not just the objects of its

inspiration, is immortal: “Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of

particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry,

and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it

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contains” (842). Time affects both men and poetry in the same manner. In men offspring

replace their creators, and this same cycle of reproduction occurs in poetry as a new form

of the poem replaces the outdated one. This new form is similar to what Woodman calls

the “archetypal vision” (508). According to Woodman, Shelley’s “solution to the

problem” of poetry being mistaken for Truth is through “the perpetual recreation of the

archetypal vision” (508). Plato held a skeptical opinion of poetry because he did not

believe that poet’s could accurately express their experience of the divine. Shelley

conversely defends the poet’s ability to express the divine and believes that poetry

remains true to its initial inspirations by constantly regenerating itself.

Poetry’s universal as opposed to particular nature may be responsible for its

immunity to time. The “story of particular facts” is ravaged by time precisely because it

is particular and not universal. 6Diotima’s speech in The Symposium in which she

explains that one must move from particular to universal beauty in order to reach the

divine can be applied to Shelley’s comparison of the “story of particular facts” to poetry.

Shelley differs greatly from Plato in his opinion of poetry because Shelley believes that

poetry contains “universal beauty” (Notopolus 449), while Plato believes that poetry is

mimetic of particular beauty, what Diotima calls “beautiful forms” (448). Plato’s opinion

of poetry is caused by his metaphysical belief that any divinity or Truth exists outside of

the material world. If poets write of their material surroundings, then their poetry will

necessarily be as fallacious as those earthly forms. Shelley upholds poetry as expressing

6 Diotima informs Socrates how to move from particular to universal beauty: “He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms, and first to make a single form the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual excellencies. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides in is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form, it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference towards one” (Notopoulos 448). This passage is commonly referred to as Diotima’s ladder.

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“the science of this universal beauty” because he places divinity within the material

world (449). Shelley believes that the poet’s ability to perceive the underlying universal

beauty of the material world causes poetry’s immunity to time. The “story of particular

facts” falls prey to time because particular unlike universal beauty is ephemeral.

Shelley’s disdain for the particular and implied favor of the universal could very

well have resulted from his study of Plato; however, a common theory in Shelley

criticism is that Shelley was strongly influenced by empiricism rather than idealism. The

critic Milnes writes that “Shelley’s relation to [the] broader tradition of empiricism has

largely been overlooked by scholars” (4), but he also qualifies his this statement by

pointing out that “[a]t the same time, a picture has emerged of Shelley as a ‘divided’

thinker; one of the leading ideas of Shelley scholarship over the past thirty years” (4).

The division Milnes explains is between Shelley’s attraction to both skepticism and

Platonic idealism. As a student of Plato, Shelley was drawn to Plato’s conception of the

intelligible region, but he could not remove himself completely from the natural world,

descriptions of which permeate his poetry. Shelley’s inability to disregard the material

world led him to place the divine within the earthly rather than creating a Platonic

hierarchical structure.

In his essay “On Life,” Shelley expresses a purely skeptical, empirical philosophy

when he writes, “Nothing exists but as it is perceived” (Reiman 477); however, within the

same essay he also expresses idealist beliefs. While skeptical philosophy is actually a

renunciation of philosophy because skepticism holds that only that perceived through the

senses can be known, Shelley defends philosophy in “On Life”:

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that which the habitual sense of its

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repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from the scene of things (476).

Shelley’s statement about philosophy is identical to his statement about poetry in A

Defence that “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes

familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (Norton 844). Even the metaphor of

Truth being revealed, in one case by lifting a veil in another by stripping a curtain, is

similar. Though Milnes feels that Shelley’s empiricism is an important aspect of the

poet’s philosophy, in this single essay Shelley demonstrates his dualistic philosophical

approach.

In another section of “On Life” Shelley addresses his discontent with empiricism

and his need for a more idealist philosophy:

The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, and its fatal consequences in morals, their violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. […] But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations “looking both before and after,” whose “thoughts that wander through eternity,” disclaim alliance with transcience and decay (Reiman 476).

Religious dogma caused by idealism initially drew Shelley to empiricism, but he soon

realized that empiricism limits the circumference of one’s existence to the present

moment. By aligning oneself with material objects, one is constantly confronted with the

reality of mortality, and without a system of knowledge in which the eternal location of

Truth is known, a centered system, there is no divinity to abate the effects of mortality.

Milnes concludes that Shelley “like many modern ‘ordinary language philosophers […]

maintained a patient indifference or double-mindedness concerning the relation between

the fixed ‘centre’ of knowledge and an impermanent ‘circumference’ of experience” (5).

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Milnes draws the terms “centre” and “circumference” from Shelley’s own line in

“On Life”: “Each is at once the centre and circumference; the point to which all things

are referred, and the line to which all things are contained” (476). Though Milnes claims

that Shelley balances an empirical and idealist perspective, the passage from which

Milnes receives his terms reflects a centered view of knowledge. All objects are

compared to the Ideal forms, which Shelley situates within the mind, and around this

center of knowledge a circumference is drawn, which contains all experience. Though

experience exists outside of the center, the center is still used to organize the material

commodities. Shelley never claims that truth exists in the intermediate region between

the center and circumference; instead, the center draws all things towards itself, and the

circumference functions as a means of containing experience.

Through his poetry Shelley explores evidences for both the empirical and idealist

systems. His prolonged descriptions of natural objects function as exploration into the

divinity within the material world. In this way Shelley performs the function of both poet

and philosopher simultaneously. In “On Life” Shelley describes a person who

apprehends that not perceived by others similarly to how he describes poets in A Defence.

The passage from “On Life” states, “But now these things are looked on with little

wonder and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the

distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person” (Reiman 475). The “things”

to which Shelley refers are phenomenal objects which human beings perceive less clearly

as the objects become familiar. In A Defence, written the year after “On Life” in 1820,

Shelley again describes people with this special perception but this time he defines these

people as poets:

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Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community (Norton 839).

The sharpening of Shelley’s ideas is demonstrated by his identification of those people he

describes in “On Life” as poets in the later essay. By clearly defining the role of the poet

and the function of poetry, Shelley rejected Plato’s skepticism of poetry by affirming his

faith in it.

Despite Shelley’s affirmation of the genius of the poet in A Defence, Ware argues

that “Shelley’s ambivalent attitude toward the poet reflects the Platonic distrust of

inspiration” (550). Shelley’s statement in A Defence that a “Poet participates in the

eternal, the infinite, and the one” or that the poet “discovers those laws according to

which present things ought to be ordered” (Norton 840), hardly reflect ambivalence about

the status of poetic inspiration. Shelley states clearly in A Defence that the poet has

access to the eternal. Ware argues that Shelley’s skepticism is a Platonic skepticism

toward the products of poetic inspiration: “For Shelley, insofar as ‘poetry redeems from

decay the visitations of the divinity in man’ (p. 295), it is to be highly respected; insofar

as poetry is but a ‘feeble shadow’ of the poet’s inspired conceptions (p. 294), it must be

regarded with skepticism” (551). Ware takes the phrase “feeble shadow” out of the

context of a longer passage in A Defence about poetic inspiration, and when the passage

is analyzed as a whole it does not entirely reflect the skepticism Ware attributes to it. In

this passage Shelley describes the nature of poetic inspiration:

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness […] Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the

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greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet (Norton 846).

Though Ware is not incorrect in interpreting this passage as reflective of Plato’s claim

that poets are only capable of “probable accounts,” Shelley’s main point seems to be to

illustrate the fleeting nature of inspiration. Shelley conceives of poetic genius as entirely

different from reason, which can be called forth at will, and through the metaphor of the

fading coal he explains how divinity visits man. Though the poet cannot entirely express

his experience of the divine, Shelley only writes that the product is less divine than it

would have been otherwise.

If the aforementioned passage occurred in isolation from the entirety of A

Defence, then Ware’s argument about Shelley’s ambivalence toward poetry would be

feasible. However, Shelley affirms the divinity of poetry over and over again in his

essay. The first sentence of the paragraph from which the passage was excerpted is

“Poetry is indeed something divine” (846). Though Shelley does regard poetry as an

imperfect reflection of the divine, he unlike Plato believes that poets are the most fit to be

legislators. Woodman summarizes Plato’s opinion of poets: “Poets, therefore, delude

listeners by presenting the ‘probable account’ as if it were the true account. For this

reason Plato rejects the myth-makers from his Republic” (507). Plato rejects poetry

because he fears people will be misled by “probable account[s]” of divinity. Shelley is

not wary of poetry, and in fact writes that poets are “the institutors of laws, and the

founders of civil society” (Norton 840); Shelley’s poets become the philosopher kings of

Plato’s republic. If Shelley regarded poetry with a Platonic skepticism, then he would not

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situate poets within a position of power. By characterizing poets as those fit to rule

Shelley refigures Plato’s societal structure laid out in The Republic.

Shelley’s unique perception of Plato as “essentially a poet” (A Defence qtd. in

Woodman 503), precipitated the specific ways in which he reworked Plato’s philosophy.

Ware writes, “Regarding Plato as ‘essentially a poet’ (p. 280), Shelley accepts the truth of

the experiences recorded in the dialogues, but he rejects as a ‘probable account’ the

details of Plato’s rational formulations” (550). Ware’s argument that Shelley could be

influenced by Plato’s philosophy while not being indoctrinated into Plato’s specific

system is sound. By saying that Shelley accepts the dialogues as Truth because of their

poetic nature, Ware implies that Shelley accepts all poetry as Truth. Ware’s accidental

contradiction of his earlier statement about Shelley’s skepticism of poetry is a more

accurate reading of Shelley’s opinions regarding poetry. Also if what Shelley labels

“probable accounts” are rational formulations, then Shelley’s definition of poetry as

divinely inspired causes poetry to fall outside the realm of rational formulation.

In the opening paragraph of A Defence, Shelley defines the “two classes of mental

action, which are called reason and imagination” (Norton 838). Reason or rational

formulation is the quality which Ware claims that Shelley rejects in Plato as the cause of

“probable accounts;” however, Shelley defines both qualities as necessary for the

production of poetry: “Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the

body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance” (838). Though both are necessary,

Imagination is for Shelley the way to the ultimate Truth. Shelley’s use of the Platonic

terms “shadow” and “substance” supports Ware’s argument that Shelley views Plato’s

rational formulations as only “probable accounts”; Imagination provides access to the

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divine “substance” while the additional mental process of reason removes one from direct

access. If Shelley only provided the final simile of the passage, then he would be

rejecting reason altogether. But the first two similes seem to be affirmations by Shelley

of the necessity of reason in the process of understanding the divine. Due to the

transitory nature of poetic inspiration, humans must employ more than Imagination.

Reason as the “instrument to the agent” provides a means for the poet to translate that

perceived through his imagination. Of course, the addition of reason causes the

experience of the imagination to lose truth through translation, but Shelley asserts in A

Defence that poetry is indeed divine because the truth is merely diminished not removed.

Woodman in his essay quotes the longer passage from A Defence from which

Ware only references briefly:

Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, the melody of his language, are the most intense it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, the dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses in his style…His language has a sweet majestic rhythm, which satisfies the intellect: it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy (503-504).

Again Shelley returns to the term “circumference” which he employed so famously in

“On Life;” however, in the later essay A Defence Shelley’s conception of the function of

the mind’s circumference has changed. In “On Life” the “circumference” was “the line

in which all things are contained” (Reiman 476); however, in A Defence Plato’s poetry

causes the mind to become so full that it “bursts the circumference” and flows out into a

reality beyond the mind. While Ware contends that Shelley’s Truth exists within the

mind, this passage proves that Shelley moved beyond the closed realm of the mind to a

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conception of reality that included the outside world. In fact, in this passage the

“circumference” of the mind from “On Life”, which housed the Ideal forms, is replaced

by a “universal element” outside of the mind. In the year which passed between the

production of these two essays, Shelley’s metaphysical views seem to have drastically

changed. His use of a centered model of knowledge in “On Life” is very Platonic, while

his movement to a “‘decentered’” model in A Defence reflects a more Romantic

sensibility concerning the positioning of the divine (Milnes 5). While Shelley does not

totally decenter knowledge by claiming that Truth does not exist, he restructures Plato’s

notion of Truth by placing Truth in the material world.

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Chapter 3: The Daemons of “To a Sky-Lark” and “Mont Blanc”

The poems “To a Sky-Lark” and “Mont Blanc” were written four years apart: “To

a Sky-Lark” in 1820 and “Mont Blanc” in 1816; however, both poems deal with similar

issues. Both are concerned, like much of Shelley’s work, with the nature of divinity, and

both lean toward a Platonic hierarchical structure of the divine. The poems seem at first

to assume an idealist philosophy, but Shelley’s inability to subscribe to strict idealism

causes him to depart from Plato in interesting ways. The earth for instance in “To a Sky-

Lark” hums in sympathy to the bird’s song because the earth recognizes itself as the

object of inspiration. In “Mont Blanc,” while the precipice is quite separate from the

mortal world, divinity extends downward from this highest place in the form of the

glacier. Shelley’s objective in these poems is the same as the objective of his work

previously discussed; through the creation of poetry he is formulating his unique

metaphysical views.

Shelley’s poem “To a Sky-Lark” is Platonic in the sense that it posits the divine as

existing above the mortal world. Shelley identifies the sky-lark as divine in the opening

lines of the poem: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!/ Bird thou never wert” (Norton 1-2). This

divine bird flies so high that it cannot be seen from the ground, but Shelley knows it

exists because he can hear its song: “Thou art unseen,--but yet I hear thy shrill delight”

(20). Shelley’s praise of the bird as a “Scorner of the ground” (100), seems to indicate

Shelley’s Platonic anti-materialist philosophy within the poem; however, Shelley is still

negotiating his position between Platonic idealism and materialism. While on one level

Shelley describes the bird as above the earth: “Higher still and higher” (6); he modifies

this description to connect the bird to the ground: “From the earth thou springest” (7). By

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linking this divine symbol with the earth, Shelley modifies Plato’s conception of divinity.

For Shelley divinity has earthly origins from which it develops to eventually exist in a

higher realm.

While being a symbol of divinity, the skylark is also a symbol of the poet.

Shelley compares the bird directly to a poet--“Like a Poet hidden/ In the light of thought”

(36-37)--and frequently references the song or poetry of the skylark. While the bird itself

does not touch the ground, it draws its poetic inspiration from earthly objects. Shelley

writes,

What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain?

What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? (71-74).

Earthly objects are used by the skylark to create divine poetry. The skylark performs an

act of transfiguration on these objects, and their journey is similar to the skylark’s own

since the origin of the skylark is also the earth.

The poetry created by the skylark is a separate entity, perhaps even more divine

than the skylark itself. Shelley compares the skylark to a series of natural objects: “a

glow-worm golden” (46), “a rose embowered/ In its own green leaves” (51-52), “Sound

of vernal showers/ On the twinkling grass” (56-57), “Rain-awakened flowers” (58). But

after making all these comparisons, Shelley declares, “All that ever was/ Joyous, and

clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass” (59-60). The skylark’s music and not the bird

itself surpasses the earthly and becomes divine. In fact, Shelley’s descriptions of the

objects to which the skylark compares all have something removed from them just as the

song leaves the skylark. “Scattering unbeholden/ Its aerial hue” (48-49), the glow-worms

light passes from the animal’s possession. The rose is “[b]y warm winds deflowered--/

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Till the scent it gives/ Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves” (53-

55); the winds steal the rose’s scent and disperse it. The song of the skylark takes on a

life of its own beyond the bird, and Shelley likewise views poetry as taking on a higher

form of existence beyond the poet.

The transformation of poetry into something divine relates to Shelley’s ideas in A

Defence about poetry’s function within society. Shelley writes in A Defence, “the

pleasure resulting from the manner in which [poets] express the influence of society or

nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of

reduplication from that community” (p. 839). In “To a Sky-Lark,” Shelley describes the

results of the bird’s song in a similar manner: “All the earth and air/ With thy voice is

loud” (26-27). The bird like the poet in A Defence expresses its impressions of the

external world, and when this poetry meets the objects which inspired it, these objects

become enhanced. The “reduplication,” which Shelley describes in A Defence, is the

reverberation of the natural world in response to the bird’s song in “To a Sky-Lark.” The

bird’s poetry causes this effect because the divinity in the natural world is enhanced by

the divinity in the poem. As discussed in chapter two, Shelley believes that mortal

objects contain divine essences, and the poem duplicates the divinity in the natural world

and then reflects it back upon nature. “All the earth and the air […] is loud” because the

material world’s divinity becomes amplified through this process. The power of the

divinity existing in the natural world is multiplied two-fold because the poem duplicates

the divinity within nature and then a “re-duplication” occurs when the natural world is

exposed to its divinity within the poem.

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The poetry or song of the skylark is disembodied because the “skylark is a small

bird that sings only in flight, often when it is too high to be visible” (note 817). Shelley

describes this phenomenon in the poem similarly to how he describes the work of the

poet in A Defence. In “To a Sky-Lark” Shelley compares the bird to

a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not (36-40). The similarities of this stanza to his description of the poet in A Defence are evident: “A

Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet

sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel

that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (p. 843). The skylark’s

songs are “unbidden,” and so the bird sings for its own purposes and not for an audience.

The poet in A Defence also does not create with the objective of gaining an audience. Yet

despite the imperviousness of the bird and poet to an audience, both the bird and poet

gain an audience which is transformed through their poetry.

The skylark and poet, working unseen, act in the same way as Love in Plato’s The

Symposium. Diotima describes Love’s daemonical nature to Socrates: “The divine nature

cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse which is

conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists

through the intervention of Love” (Notopolus 442). Like the skylark and poet, Love

communicates divinity to mortals without their knowledge. The daemon Love’s

function, like that of the poet of which the skylark is one, is to undetectably raise mortal

awareness of the divine in order to improve the human condition. The comparison of

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Shelley’s conception of the poet to the daemon Love causes the true function of the poet

to become clear. Through this comparison, the positioning of the bird between the earth

and heaven in “To a Sky-Lark” takes on new meaning because the bird’s flight is within

an “intermediate space” (442). This “intermediate space” between mortals and the divine

is the one which Diotima describes love as “fill[ing] up” (442), and the skylark, who is a

poet, performs a daemonical function like Love.

Diotima explains in The Symposium that “he who is wise in the science of this

intercourse is supremely happy, and participates in the daemonical nature; whilst he who

is wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave” (442). The intercourse

to which Diotima refers is that between mortals, Love, and the divine. Through

Diotima’s speech, Plato asserts that the only path of mortals to happiness is through

consciousness of the intervention of Love; once mortals become conscious of Love’s

actions, they function as daemons as well. The other sciences and arts which Plato

identifies as lesser because they do not lead to enlightenment include poetry; Plato

believes that the only path to the divine is through philosophy. Diotima explains that

“Love is of necessity a philosopher, philosophy being the intermediate state between

ignorance and wisdom” (443). If mortals take on Love’s daemonical nature, then they

are by transitive logic also philosophers like Love. Shelley diverges from Plato by

asserting that poetry can enlighten mortals as well. He transfers the properties that Plato

associates solely with philosophy to poetry.

The skylark as a philosopher uncovers the true nature of reality, but because he is

a poet the bird communicates the Truth of reality through verse. Shelley describes the

skylark’s poetic perception of the hidden divinity in all things:

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Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal steam? (Norton 81-85). The skylark as a poet in “deem[ing]/ Things more true and deep” sees through the mortal

exterior into the objects’ divine essences. Only by perceiving this divinity can the skylark

compose the “chrystal stream” of its song/poem.

Though Shelley separates the skylark from mortals in this stanza, he does not

argue like Plato that mortals can only reach the divine by abandoning the earthly. Near

the end of the poem, Shelley identifies mortal emotions as necessary for comprehension

of the skylark’s song:

Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near (91-95).

Just as Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost can only have knowledge of good by gaining

knowledge of evil, so Shelley argues mortals can only ascend to the joy of the skylark by

having knowledge of other less pleasant emotions. Since the song of the skylark is poetry

and therefore a representation of the divine, then mortals can only recognize the divine by

recognizing the earthly as its opposite. Plato claims that the mortal world serves no

purpose but to confuse humans into believing that the shadows of the forms are reality.

Shelley, on the other hand, advocates for the use of the earthly as a means to reach the

divine.

Shelley’s use of the earthly as a means of ascension occurs not only in this work

but in others previously discussed. In Alastor, the subject of the first chapter, Shelley

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creates an anthropomorphic representation of the Truth. The vision not only has a

somewhat human body but a female body as well. Shelley was, of course, aware of the

long tradition of associating the feminine with the earth, and so through his representation

connects the Truth to the earth. The origin of the vision’s light is also fire, which is an

element of the earth; however, fire is a fitting symbol for the vision because it is an

intermediate element. Fire is neither a solid, liquid, or gas and like the vision exists in a

liminal realm which is between two states of being. In other poems, including “Mont

Blanc,” Shelley studies the external landscape in order to determine the true nature of

reality. In this way, Shelley is part of long tradition in lyric poetry, which began with the

metaphysical poets who studied nature in order to determine God’s will. The other

Romantic poets were also part of this tradition, but by this period the aim of reading

nature became to understand one’s own internal nature. Shelley differs from his fellow

Romantics because he is not so much interested in his individual psyche but in the

universal Truths of reality, though unlike the metaphysical poets he does not associate

these Truths with a God.

In “Mont Blanc” Shelley upholds the natural world not only through his imagery

but through his belief in the ability of the senses to perceive Truth. Shelley describes the

manner in which he perceives the world, which is through the senses:

My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around (37-40). His description of the constant interchange he has with his external environment is not in

agreement with a Platonic distrust of the senses. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato

highlights the way in which the senses limit perception by describing the prisoners as

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only being able to look straight ahead because they cannot turn their heads (Plato 514a-

b). Shelley paints a very different picture of the senses, describing his mind as a sieve

which receives influences freely. His use of the adjective “clear” to describe the universe

also indicates the extent of his understanding; the workings of the universe are not

opaque but transparent or obvious to him.

After describing his experience of the external, Shelley continues to describe his

process of perception:

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy (41-44). The perception of the beginning lines of the passage leads to creation by the end, which is

in Shelley’s case the creation of poetry. Shelley’s desire to create after an intense sensory

experience recalls Diotima’s definition of Love in The Symposium as “the desire for

generation in the beautiful” (Notopolus 445). After experiencing the sublime landscape

of Mont Blanc and the Ravine of Arve, Shelley’s mind produces something of its own

volition. The beauty of nature causes this procreation. Shelley’s description of the

product of his mind as a separate entity with “wandering wings” seems to be a reference

to the Poet’s vision in Alastor. The Poet of that work produced an entity which took on

human form, while Shelley’s description of his mind’s creation is more figurative in

“Mont Blanc.” The “legion of wild thoughts” is not anthropomorphic but remains an

abstract entity. Both the vision in Alastor and the bird-like thoughts, raise the poet out of

the figurative darkness of mortality. By describing the thought entity as floating above

darkness, Shelley is referencing Plato’s binary in the Allegory of the Cave of mortality as

darkness and Truth as light. Poetic creation raises the poet out of darkness into the light

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of Truth; however, Shelley also manipulates Plato’s Allegory by having his thoughts rest

in “the still cave of the witch Poesy.” The cave in Shelley’s poem becomes a place of

access to the divine rather than a place devoid of truth. Shelley’s manipulation of the

cave metaphor indicates his divergence from Plato. Shelley locates Truth within the

cave, which Plato used to represent the mortal world, because Shelley here views sensory

experience as a means of reaching the Truth.

Another important aspect of the cave is that it belongs to a feminine being, “the

witch Poesy.” The “witch Poesy” strongly resembles the vision in Alastor, whom

Shelley identifies as “[h]erself a poet” (161). In Alastor the Poet’s thoughts gave birth to

the feminine being, but in “Mont Blanc” the “still cave of the witch Poesy” provides a

resting place for Shelley’s thoughts. The Poet’s vision ultimately leads to his demise, but

in “Mont Blanc” Shelley revises the role of poetry so that it performs a restorative

function. Poetry becomes the means by which Shelley can still his thoughts in order to

make sense of his perceptions.

Shelley’s finishes his description of perception by describing a phenomenon that

is similar to Plato’s doctrine of Reminiscence:

In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! (45-49). Shelley is still addressing the Ravine of Arve, and he describes the Ravine as searching

within his mind for its own image (note 764). The “cave of the witch Poesy” represents

Shelley’s mind, and this fits with Plato’s use of the cave to represent mortal existence

because Plato’s cave is a metaphor for the way in which the restrictive senses separate

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humans from the Truth. As mentioned previously, Shelley re-imagines the cave of the

mind as site of access to the truth. The phenomenon Shelley describes is one of

recollection: the object reunites itself with its own image in the poet’s mind and when

this happens the poet recalls the object. Plato’s doctrine of Reminiscence describes a

similar process:

The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, had knowledge of them all, and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew (Baker 32).

Plato explains that the soul possesses all the knowledge gleaned from its past lives, but

when the soul is reborn each time it is not conscious of this knowledge. The process

which humans perceive as learning is actually only recollection of subconscious

knowledge. In his own version of Reminiscence, Shelley replaces Platonic knowledge

with images of the natural world, thus raising the status of nature from shadow to Truth.

Images replace the knowledge Plato situates within the mind because Shelley values

these images as a source of knowledge in a way which Plato does not.

While Shelley diverges from Plato, he simultaneously creates a Platonic model of

the universe through his imagery of Mont Blanc. Mont Blanc is separated from the rest

of the natural world much like Plato’s intelligible region. Mont Blanc’s “Power dwells

apart in its tranquility/ Remote, serene, and inaccessible” (Norton 96-97). However,

unlike Plato’s intelligible region which is immutable and does not communicate directly

to mortals, Mont Blanc affects the mortal world. Shelley describes the glacier which

extends downward from the precipice:

Frost and Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower

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And wall impregnable with beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream (103-109). Mont Blanc’s communication with the poet is much different from the imagery which

“[f]lows through the mind” (2). Mont Blanc causes destruction as its immortal power

extends through the glacier into the mortal world. The origin of the glacier is Mont

Blanc’s precipice, and so as the glacier moves down the mountain it represents the

movement of the “Power” from the precipice.

The glacier is in some ways like the daemonical bird in “To a Sky-Lark”: both the

bird and glacier transmit communication from the divine to the mortal region. However,

the skylark is as benign as the glacier is dangerous. The skylark functions as the daemon

Love does in The Symposium because Love carries messages from the divine in order to

enlighten humans. The glacier functions differently; it serves not as an intermediary, but

as a direct extension of the “Power” of the precipice. While Love and the bird are not

divine themselves, the glacier is like the finger of God extending into the world. This

extension of the Power causes ruin in the same way that Icarus brought about his own

ruin by flying too close to the sun. Icarus as mortal could not handle the sun’s sublime

power, and likewise the mortal world is destroyed by the power of the precipice.

By making Mont Blanc’s power an active force within the mortal world, Shelley

reworks Plato’s model. The divine forms of the intelligible region cannot reach down

into the mortal world because they are static, and mortals can only attain knowledge by

traveling upwards. Shelley’s conception of the divine power as active is similar to his

model of nature’s interaction with the mind. Objects of the external environment reach

into the poet’s mind to find their corresponding images within, and so the divine takes on

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a similarly active role by reaching into the mortal world. Plato’s conception of

perception and divinity is much less tumultuous than Shelley’s because Plato views the

universe as fixed. If Shelley’s model were to exactly imitate Plato’s, then the power,

“still, snowy, and serene” (61), would remain at the precipice, unchanging, unaffected.

The power necessarily overflows from the precipice because this divine region is

active and not static. Shelley describes the activity at the precipice:

the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them:--Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! (131-136). This activity is divine because the precipice, which “pierce[s] the infinite sky” (60), is a

place existing like the intelligible region above the earth. However, the activity of this

region is similar to the activity in the mortal world, but it is also set apart because “none

beholds them there.” The precipice is divine because its activities are mysterious and

also strangely silent. The creation and destruction of the mortal world occurs, but these

natural processes have a peacefulness reflected in their silence. Once the glacier extends

the divine power into the mortal world the process of destruction becomes violent

because the process loses the divinity it had at the precipice. Shelley’s conception of the

divine region is more like Milton’s conception of Heaven and Hell in which activities

such as wars occur which will later be recreated upon the earth. The creation and

destruction upon the precipice are the prototypical processes which are then repeated

within nature. Shelley replaces Plato’s divine static forms with divine processes.

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Chapter 4: The Last Word

In Shelley’s final two works, Adonais and The Triumph of Life, Shelley continues

to search for those metaphysical Truths around which his earlier works revolve. These

two poems also return to imagery first introduced in Alastor. In Adonais, Shelley

describes Adonais as being visited by female figures, who resemble the Poet’s vision in

Alastor. In The Triumph of Life, Shelley’s speaker receives a vision in a similar locale to

where the Poet in Alastor finally succumbs to death. These works do not depart from

Shelley’s earlier work, but revisit and revise his earlier conclusions. They are not

fragments of an unfinished life but the culmination of a brief yet fruitful poetic career.

Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for his fellow English poet John Keats, is an

affirmation of the supreme power of poetry, outlined in A Defence of Poetry (A Defence).

Written only two months before Adonias, A Defence presents Shelley’s beliefs about the

function of poetry, which Shelley draws upon in order to honor a fellow poet. In stanza

twenty-nine, Urania praises the departed Adonais: “So it is in the world of living men:/

A godlike mind sours forth, in its delight/ Making earth bare and veiling heaven” (Norton

257-259). Shelley describes the function of poetry in A Defence, using the same

adjective “bare”: “it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked

and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Norton 847). Shelley describes

Keats’ function in Adonais as similar to the function of poetry itself in A Defence because

both reveal the hidden divinity within mortal objects. However, Shelley amends the

function of Keats as a poet by adding that Keats “veil[s] heaven.” At first, this addition

appears problematic because by “veiling heaven” Keats is hiding the divine. One could

conclude that Keats must hide true divinity in order to give mortal objects the appearance

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of divinity, but the note is helpful in deciphering the meaning of this passage. The note

informs the reader that Keats acts “as the sun reveal[ing] the earth but veil[ing] the other

stars” (829).

The brightness of Keats as the sun necessarily blots out the other less bright

heavenly bodies. Keats makes the “earth bare,” revealing its divinity, not through an act

of deception (hiding true divinity), but due to his status as possessor of the Truth. Keats

is represented in the poem as possessing Truth because of his association with the sun. In

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sun functions as the symbol of Truth, and Shelley uses

this association to assert Keats’ superiority. 7Also like the sun in Plato’s Allegory, Keats

as the sun has “shadows” which possess only a fraction of his power. These shadows are

the stars, whose light is much less bright than the sun’s; and the relationship of the stars

to the sun is the same as the relationship of fire to the sun in the Allegory.

Urania, who is speaking in stanza twenty-nine, continues by describing the effect

of the setting sun: “and when/ It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light/ Leave

to its kindred lamps the spirit’s awful night” (259-261). The sun of course sets with

Adonais’ death. The “swarms” are the earthly objects whose divinity was revealed

through the sun’s brilliance, and the light of the sun represents Adonais’ poetic mind.

Once Adonais’ mind is extinguished through his death, the less brilliant stars, which

represent other minds, cannot perform the function of the sun. The setting sun causes

“the spirit’s awful night” because divinity is once again hidden by the mortal coverings of

objects whose essences are divine.

7 By “shadows” I mean the shapes which the prisoners see on the cave wall. These “shadows” are lesser representations of the Ideal forms.

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Adonais’ mind functions in a similar way to Love as described by Diotima in The

Symposium. Socrates summarizes one of Diotima’s definitions of Love: “Love, then, is

collectively the desire in men that good should be forever present to them” (Notopoulos

445). Just as Diotima describes men as being impelled to surround themselves with what

is good, so “living men” in Adonais want to be exposed to the divine (Norton 257). Love

in The Symposium is the means by which men come into contact with the good, and

Adonais through his poetic powers performs the same function as Love because he

reveals divinity to those who would otherwise not apprehend it.

Earlier in the poem, Shelley describes the specific manner in which Adonais’

poetry functions. Shelley writes, “All he had loved, and moulded into thought,/ From

shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,/ Lamented Adonais” (118-120). Adonais’

raw materials were his sensory perceptions, and he used these materials to create a new

object through the power of the mind. In his essay “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a

Poetic Mode,” Wasserman uses an excerpt from A Defence to explain the relationships

between objects and the poetry inspired by them:

The difference between reason and imagination, he held, is that ‘the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity’ (Defense of Poetry). That is, the materials of poetry are already more than twice removed from the physical world: they are not merely what Hume called ‘impressions,’ but have been fully naturalized in the country of the mind as ‘ideas’ and exist in a conceptual context, having already been prepared for their artistic duty by being stamped with the qualities of the mind possessing them (276).

Keats obviously performs an act of imagination through the creation of poetry because he

translates or “mould[s]” objects into thoughts. In the excerpt Wasserman cites from A

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Defence, Shelley describes these thoughts as “containing within [themselves] the

principle of [their] own integrity,” meaning that the thoughts borne from sensory objects

become separate entities. This process is similar to the birth of the vision from the Poet’s

mind in Alastor. The thought like the vision has a legitimacy of its own separate from its

object of inspiration.

Wasserman describes the product of the creative process, poetry, using language

that recalls a Platonic view of poetry. Plato excludes poets from his ideal Republic

because “they imitate only the phenomena of the mutable world” (Ware 556). Since

“[p]henoma, for Plato, are themselves imitations of the Ideal Forms” (556), poetry is

twice removed from reality because it is the imitation of imitations. Wasserman explains

the process by which poets appropriate objects through poetic composition, therefore

removing them from the external world. The first step of removal is through sensory

perception, and after this has occurred the object metamorphosizes in the mind into an

idea. These newly minted ideas are the materials of poetry, not the initial perception of

objects. Wasserman writes that “the materials of poetry are already more than twice

removed from the physical world” because in order for the objects to become ideas they

are influenced by the qualities of their perceiver’s mind; Wasserman considers this a half

or intermediary step of removal.

Unlike Plato, Shelley does not view this process of removal as problematic. In

fact, this process is necessary in order for poetry to express the eternal. Plato was

skeptical of any means of expression because expression necessitates the process of

removal: objects of the external environment are translated through the power of the

perceiver’s mind into new products. Shelley embraces this process because he

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“conceives of the artist as an imitator of reality, not of appearance” (556). If Plato

considered mortal objects to be imitations, then any expression of them could not produce

an idea which was itself divine, having not been inspired by divine objects. Shelley must

place divinity within the mortal world because he considers poetic expressions of this

realm to be expressions of the eternal. The process of removal described by Wasserman

is necessary for a “Poet to participat[e] in the eternal” (Norton 840) because an “artist

sees through the confusion of appearances to the essence of things” (Ware 557). The

poetic or creative process is essential to humanity because only through this process can

the hidden divinity within mortality be revealed. Shelley mourns Keats in Adonais

because of Keats’ exceptional ability to strip divine essences of their mortal coverings.

In the ninth stanza of the poem, Shelley anthropomorphizes the products of

Adonais’ poetic inspiration; the ideas become “The quick Dreams/ The passion-winged

Ministers of thought,/ Who were his flocks” (Norton 73-75). After these ideas are

brought to life, one breaks away from the crowd to embrace the dead poet:

And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; ‘Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.’ Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not ’twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain (82-90). The Dream or idea laments the death of the poet, not realizing that his demise equals her

own. The narrator exclaims of the Dream’s fate,“Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!”

because he recognizes that without a mind in which to reside the idea will cease to exist.

Shelley’s reference to Adonais’ mind as “a ruined Paradise” supports Ware’s argument

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that Shelley’s “noumenal realm is located within the imagination” (557). Ware writes

that Shelley “does not postulate the existence of a transcendent realm” because of his

placement of the noumenal or beyond phenomenal realm within the imagination. Shelley

conceives of the true, the beautiful existing within the mind rather than in a distant

region, which is Plato’s conception. The mind does not automatically contain the Truth

but must give birth to it through the creative process through which the divinity of

mortality is revealed.

Plato’s conception of truth is static within the intelligible region; the forms exist

within a vacuum unaffected by human activity. While Shelley’s metaphysical views

share some commonalities with Plato’s, Shelley ultimately differs in his representation of

divinity. The “spirit” or “internal nature” of mortal objects, which Ware refers to as

“essence” in his essay, is not manipulated physically by the actions of the poet’s mind.

The essences remain unchanged like the forms of Plato’s intelligible region; however, the

poetic mind performs important manipulations which occur through a process of

duplication. The object is perceived by the poet, and this initial impression is a

duplication. The job of the poet is not to express this duplication but to “colour [the

impression] with [his] own light” (Wasserman 276). Divinity, therefore, becomes active

through the mental processes of the poet. Plato too recognized the mental faculty but did

not consider its products legitimate. To Shelley the product of the poet is the ideal form

of the object. While the divinity exists physically within nature, divinity also resides

within the poet’s mind because only through the workings of imagination can it be

revealed.

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Interestingly, the Dream of Shelley’s later work resembles the vision in his

second major work Alastor. Once again Shelley represents the divine within a feminine

figure, except the circumstances of Alastor are reversed in Adonais. In Alastor the Poet

mourns the loss of the vision, which departs first shortly followed by the Poet through his

death. In Adonais the Dream mourns the loss of the poet, who has died first, and his

death causes hers just as the vision’s departure causes the Poet’s death in Alastor. The

movement from a product of mind, the vision, which vanishes, to a product of mind, the

Dream, which outlives her creator, demonstrates a development in Shelley’s conception

of divinity.

Ware describes Shelley as “[f]undamentally a skeptic” because “Shelley refuses

to accept any dogmatic formulation of the truths of the imagination” (550). Ware’s

classification of Shelley as a skeptic, explains Shelley’s representation of the divine in

Alastor as a fickle character who quickly departs. The Poet in Alastor briefly unites with

the divine, but she slips through his grasp. Shelley’s belief in the transient nature of

divinity is present in A Defence, written two months before Adonais, in Shelley’s

description of poetic inspiration as like a fading coal: “the mind in creation is as a fading

coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory

brightness” (Norton 846). The vision like the “invisible influence” enlightens the human

mind briefly but does not remain there. In Adonais, the Dream is a constant divinity

existing within the mind of the poet. The Dream is the solidified version of the vision in

Alastor because the Dream is a product of the mind that dies only with the death of the

mind in which it resides.

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The Dream represents an “idea” because it depends upon its creator to exist, but

later in the poem Shelley introduces another character Urania, who exists independently

of the dead poet. Urania grieves over the lifeless body of Adonais:

‘Stay yet awhile! Speak to me once again; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless breast and burning brain That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive With food of saddest memory kept alive, Now thou art dead, as if it were a part Of thee, my Adonais! I would give All that I am to be as thou now art! But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart! (226-234). She like the vision in Alastor with “parted lips/ Outstretched […] and quivering eagerly”

longs for a kiss (179-180). However, the longing of Urania for the poet is a reversal of

the situation in Alastor. In that earlier poem, the divine feminine figure abandons the

Poet, and he mourns her loss. The figure in Alastor departs because she is the

representation of Shelley’s earlier transient conception of divinity. The figure of Urania

endures because she is a permanent truth, much like that existing in Plato’s intelligible

region.

While in Alastor the Poet is deprived of the vision due to his mortality, Urania is

deprived of Adonais due to her immortality. She says to him, “I would give/ All that I

am to be as thou now art!/ But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!” (232-

234). Usually being tied to “Time” means an entanglement with the mortal dilemma

described by Wasserman: “all Nature moves in time to its own annihilation” (281).

Urania’s speech presents the reader with a shift in the perception of time. Both mortal

and immortal characters in the poem are governed by Time, but instead of experiencing

the inevitability of death the immortal characters are “chained to Time” because they

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must exist as long as Time exists. Urania cannot pursue Adonais, and her grief over his

departure indicates an imperfection in immortality itself.

Her immortal, divine nature is not like the divinity of Plato’s intelligible region

because Plato’s ideal forms are static and unaffected by mortal activity. Urania, like the

vision in Alastor, entangles herself with the mortal poet. However, unlike the vision,

Urania is affected by Adonais’ verse. In the six years between the two poems, Shelley’s

conception of poetry’s function and power has evolved. While in Alastor the Poet’s

powers cannot save him from his inevitable demise, in Adonais the poet’s power is

revered by an immortal figure.

Urania reveres Adonais almost out of necessity because she is tormented like the

Poet in Alastor by his departure: “And in my heartless breast and burning brain/ That

word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive” (228-229). Urania’s situation and the Poet

of Alastor’s are identical because both Urania and the Poet mourn the physical embrace

and the “word.” Adonais and the vision in Alastor both light a fire within their lovers’

brains through their poetry; Shelley describes the vision as “[h]erself a poet” (160). After

the vision’s visitation, Shelley describes the Poet in Alastor: “Life, and the lustre that

consumed it, shone/ As in a furnace burning secretly/ From his dark eyes alone” (252-

254). This description is echoed in Urania’s complaint over her “burning brain.” The

fact that Urania can be affected by Adonais’ poetry means that there is an imperfection in

her immortality, which his poetry fulfills. She is imperfect because she is not a poet, and

poetry reveals the divine in a way that even enlightens a seemingly divine figure like

Urania.

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While Urania does outlive nature’s annihilation, she is not divine in the same way

as the vision in Alastor because the vision is a creation of the poetic mind. The Poet

actually gives birth to the vision, and she takes on a life of her own outside of him in the

same way that poetry does. While Urania too is a separate entity, she is not the product

of Adonais’ mind, which is why his poetry instills a fire within her mind. The hierarchy

that Shelley establishes through the creation of these two divine yet feminine figures is

one of poetry above a divinity not produced by the poet. Wasserman writes that to

“Shelley man’s interpretations of the phenomenal world have a validity the world itself

does not” (277). This statement applies to the relationship between the Poet and vision

because the vision instills knowledge within the Poet even though she is a creation of his

earthly mind. She has a higher status than him within the poem because she is the poetry

and he the creator. Ironically, the poetic creation has a higher status than her creator

because poetry is a revelation of the divine that becomes more powerful than its creator.

Poetry takes on a life of its own just like the vision in Alastor.

While Wasserman’s statement clarifies the relationship between the Poet and his

vision, it is problematic because it undercuts Shelley’s materialism. By implying that the

world is not valid, Wasserman posits Shelley as an idealist. Ware expresses a more

accurate view of Shelley when he writes that in Shelley’s philosophy the “artist does not

so much create an imaginative order as discover a potential order that is not apparent to

those who lack his perceptivity” (557). Ware’s statement reflects Shelley’s description of

poetry in A Defence:

It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which

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flow from death to life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms (Norton 847).

Poetry does not create divinity, but accurately expresses a divinity already present within

the material world. Urania is captivated by Adonais’ ability to make immortal that which

seems mortal, but his poetry is not more valid than its inspirations within the material

world. Poetry is valid because it is an expression of that which is already divine. The

poet’s special power comes not from his ability to make divine that which is not but to

recognize divinity within the mortal realm.

Shelley’s metaphor for the transformative power of poetry in the passage cited

above is of the alchemical process “aimed to produce a drinkable (‘potable’) form of gold

that would be an elixir of life, curing all diseases” (note 847). This process by which the

“poisonous waters” of life which cause death are changed into an elixir which protects

the human being from the strains of mortality is the same process which Keats undergoes

in Adonais. While Adonais’ physical body passes away, his spirit becomes immortal.

Plato also believed in the immortality of the soul. Socrates explains to Glaucon in Part

XI of The Republic that “the soul remains quite unaffected by fever or disease or injury”

(Lee 610b). While the immortality of the soul is also a Christian doctrine, Shelley ties his

discussion to Plato’s conception of the afterlife through his reference to the doctrine of

Reminiscience: “Awake him not! Surely he takes his fill/ Of deep and liquid rest,

forgetful of all ill” (Norton 62-63).

According to Baker, “[o]ne of the first things that interested Shelley in Plato was

evidently the doctrine of Reminiscience” (32). Baker summarizes this doctrine by

writing that “knowledge is simply recollection” (32). Souls enter another realm after

their existence on earth and are only born again after drinking from the river Lethe or

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“the Forgetful River” (Lee X 621). After drinking from the river the beings forget

heaven and their past lives and are ready to be born again. Shelley clearly alludes to the

river Lethe when he writes of “deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.” The fact that

Shelley references Plato’s conception of the afterlife causes Shelley’s belief in the

immortality of the soul to be a result of his Platonism and not only dependent upon the

influence of the Christian culture in which he lived.

Shelley’s elegy about Keats’ death and imagined Platonic afterlife highlights

Keats’ superiority above other poets, even Shelley himself. While listing the mourners

who pay homage to Adonais, Shelley includes a portrait of the Poet in Alastor, who is a

version of himself (Norton note 830):

Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness, Actaen-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness, As his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey (271-279). Shelley presents the inherent danger in poetic creation, which Woodman attributes to the

fallacious nature of poetry: “There is, then, for the poet the danger of becoming the

victim of his own vision, of mistaking the ‘probable account’ for Reality itself” (508).

However, Shelley advocates poetry in A Defence as “the very image of life expressed in

its eternal truth” (Norton 842). The danger for the poet is not the danger which

Woodman identifies; instead, the Poet in Alastor is pursued by the creation of his own

mind because he has not overcome the mortal world.

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Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, the Poet cannot withstand the power of

the divine. His poetic creation, the vision, instills divine knowledge within him, and this

knowledge consumes him because of his earthliness. Adonais’ poetic creations did not

cause his demise because Adonais ascended sufficiently above the mortal realm. As

Shelley describes Adonais, he compares Adonais to those poets like the Poet of Alastor

who met their ruin:

Not all to that bright station dared to climb And happier they their happiness who knew,

Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished; others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And yet some live, treading the thorny road, Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame’s serene abode (38-45). This stanza presents the danger of poetic creation, which Wasserman recognizes, but

“other more sublime” are not extinguished by the fallacious nature of their poetry. Some

do not continue to burn immortally as Adonais because their projects have been foiled by

the “envious wrath of man or God.” Adonais succeeds and becomes immortal because he

survives “the thorny road,/ Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame’s serene abode.”

Shelley illustrates the danger of the poetic path, and represents Adonais as a heroic figure

who conquers many obstacles to reach a place of safety beyond the mortal world.

The place Shelley refers to as “Fame’s serene abode” in Adonais is much like the

pinnacle of Mont Blanc in Shelley’s poem of the same name. Shelley describes Mont

Blanc: “Far, far above piercing the infinite sky,/ Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and

serene” (60-61). Mont Blanc’s pinnacle resembles Plato’s intelligible region because of

the separateness of its divinity. Within this place, unaffected by the mortal world, what

Shelley deems the “power” exists. This “still and solemn power of many sights,/ And

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many sounds and much of life and death” is also described within nature in Adonais

(128-129). The “Power” in Adonais assimilates Keats’ spirit into itself:

He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own (373-376). The place Keats reaches that removes him from the danger which caused demise to the

Poet in Alastor is ultimately a place within nature; however, like the “essences”

mentioned by Ware, the power is at once within and above nature. Adonais “is made one

with Nature” (370), but he becomes part of the power of nature which is the divinity

revealed through poetry.

Interestingly, the Poet in Alastor also reaches the precipice of a mountain, but this

is the place where he finally dies after his unsuccessful search for the vision. The Poet

like Adonais is described in relationship to nature: “the Poet’s blood/ That ever beat in

mystic sympathy/ With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still” (651-653). Unlike

Adonais, the Poet is not described as one with nature; the Poet’s mere sympathy toward

nature cannot grant him the immortality than can Adonais’ assimilation into nature itself.

Adonais is a poet of greater merit than Shelley’s semi-autobiographical Poet, because

Adonais merges with the divinity of nature, while the Poet only recognizes this divinity.

In Plato, the philosopher can recognize Truth but cannot merge with the intelligible

region. According to an editorial note on Adonais, Shelley “adopts for this poem the

Neoplatonic view that all life and all forms emanate from the Absolute, the eternal One”

(831). Six years before writing Adonais, at the time that he wrote Alastor, Shelley held a

more materialistic metaphysical view. The Poet in Alastor only glancingly encounters

divinity, and then meets his demise due to the absence of this divinity within his earthly

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sphere. Adonais is saved from the Poet’s fate because Shelley comes to believe

definitely in some eternal force. This eternal force absorbs Adonais after his death,

saving him from the utter dissolution experienced by the Poet. Shelley describes the Poet

upon his death as “that wondrous frame--/ No sense, no motion, no divinity” (665-666).

In Shelley’s final poem The Triumph of Life, which he was still writing when he

died, Shelley returns a scene from his early work Alastor. The site of the Poet’s death in

Alastor is much more like the site where the speaker rests in The Triumph of Life than

Mont Blanc. In Alastor, Shelley describes the pinnacle of the mountain where the Poet

finally dies:

Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine And torrent were not all;--one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots (571-574). The speaker in The Triumph of Life also rests within the roots of a large tree: “Stretched

my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem/ Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep/ Of

a green Apennine” (24-26). Though these locations are very similar, they occur at

opposite points in time within each respective poem. In Alastor, the Poet dies on the

secluded cliff at the end of the poem, while in The Triumph of Life, the speaker settles

into that place a the beginning.

The Triumph of Life seems to begin where Alastor left off because the speaker of

the later poem receives his vision in a place very similar to where the Poet in Alastor

died. When the Poet in Alastor reaches the cliff, he has already received his vision, and

conversely, the speaker in The Triumph of Life settles into a similar spot in order to

receive a vision. The speaker in The Triumph of Life describes the coming of his vision:

[…] a strange trance over my fancy grew

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Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread Was so transparent that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn O’er the evening hills they glimmer (29-33). The nature of the two visions is also different: the Poet in Alastor receives his vision “on

his sleep” (149), while the speaker in The Triumph of Life clarifies that his vision does

not occur in sleep. This important difference suggests that the vision in the later poem is

a more accurate representation of the Truth because it is not a dream produced by the

speaker’s mind.

The content of the speaker’s vision includes Rousseau as the speaker’s guide, who

shows him the reality of life. This reality is represented by a chariot passing through that

instantly ages all who remain in its wake. Interestingly, the speaker describes the coming

of this vision as a “veil of light” descending. Usually in Shelley’s work, the metaphor of

Truth being revealed is of a veil being removed. However, the veil that descends is of the

light of Truth. Through this metaphor, Shelley returns to the Platonic symbology of light

from the Allegory of the Cave by using the light of the sun to represent the light of Truth.

The light that descends upon the speaker is of the sun because he describes it as acting

upon “evening hills.” By returning to the sun as a representation of Truth, Shelley moves

towards the Platonic idealism that he was moving away from in Alastor.

Though Shelley death was due to a sudden storm that came upon his boat, the

final stanza of Adonais suggests that he had some premonition of his death:

[…] my spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am born darkly, fearfully, afar (488-492).

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Shelley also partially orchestrated his death by sea because when the storm came upon

the ship a larger boat nearby offered to save Shelley and his crew, but Shelley rebuffed

this offer. If when writing The Triumph of Life Shelley knew that his death was

imminent, then it makes sense that he would revert towards Platonic idealism because

materialism does not provide any comfort in death.

Even at the very end of his life, Shelley remained concerned with the search for

Truth addressed in Alastor. He wavered throughout his poetic career between

materialism and idealism, never subjecting himself strictly to either philosophy. It was

not in Shelley’s nature to accept another person’s views as absolute Truth; instead, he

worked to find his own Truth. He was very much like the Greek philosophers in this way

because the Greek philosophers were obsessed with the nature of reality. He was also

very much a Romantic poet because he employed nature to a great extent in his search for

Truth. In the end, it seems that the only thing Shelley knew for sure was that “all Nature

moves in time to its own annihilation” (Wasserman 281). However, in his lifetime he

formulated important ways of viewing the world, which could satisfy both the materialist

and idealist philosophies. He also remained true to his belief in the power of poetry to

transform humanity. Though he engaged in much philosophical thought, he never

degraded poetry as the lesser discipline; instead, he firmly believed that only through the

poetic process could Truth be revealed.

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Works Cited

Baker, Joseph E. Shelley’s platonic answer to a platonic attack on poetry. Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press, 1965.

Cameron, Kenneth Neil. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1974.

Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1975.

Jones, Frederick L. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley in England. Vol I.

Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1964.

Jones, Frederick L. “The Inconsistency in Shelley’s Alastor.” ELH 1946 Dec; 13 (4):

291-98. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Muhlenberg College Trexler

Lib., Allentown, PA. 21 May 2007. <http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

Milnes, Tim. “Centre and Circumference: Shelley’s Defence of Philosophy.” European

Romantic Review 2004 Mar; 15 (1) : 3-22. MLA International Bibliography.

EBSCO. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 21 May 2007.

<http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

Notopoulos, James A. The Platonism of Shelley. Durham: Duke University Press, 1949.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Sir Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin Classics, 1987.

Plato. The Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.

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Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers, eds. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York:

WW Norton & Company, 1977.

Greenblatt, Stephen ed. The Norton Anthology: The Romantic Period. 8th ed. New

York: 2006.

Shelley, Percy B. “Adonais.” Greenblatt 822-835.

-- “Alastor; or; The Spirit of Solitude.” Greenblatt 745-762.

-- “From A Defence of Poetry.” Greenblatt 837-850.

-- “Mont Blanc.” Greenblatt 762-766.

-- “On Life.” Reiman and Powers 473-474.

-- “On Love.” Reiman and Powers 474-478.

-- “To a Sky-Lark.” Greenblatt 817-819.

Stahmer, Carl. “The Shelley Chronology.” Romantic Circles: Scholarly Resources.

University of Maryland. 30 August 2007.

<http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/shelcron>.

Ware, Tracy. “Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry.” Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900 Autumn 1983; 23 (4): 549-566. JStor. Muhlenberg

College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 11 Feb. 2008. <http://www.jstor.org>.

Wasserman, Earl R. “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode.” ELH 1954

Dec; 21 (4): 274-326. JStor. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA.

20 April 2008. <http://www.jstor.org>.

Woodman, Ross G. “Shelley’s Changing Attitude Toward Plato.” Journal of the History

of Ideas 1960 Oct-Dec; 21 (4): 497-510. JStor. Muhlenberg College Trexler

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