Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man

  First famine, and then toil, and then disease,

  Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before,

  Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove

  With alternating shafts of frost and fire,

  Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:

  And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent,

  And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle

  Of unreal good, which levied mutual war,

  So ruining the lair wherein they raged.

  Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes

  Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,

  Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms,[3]

  That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings

  The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind

  The disunited tendrils of that vine

  Which bears the wine of life, the human heart;

  And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey,

  Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath

  The frown of man; and tortured to his will

  Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,

  And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms

  Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.

  He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

  Which is the measure of the universe;

  And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven,

  Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind

  Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song;

  And music lifted up the listening spirit

  Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,

  Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound;

  And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,

  With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,

  The human form, till marble grew divine;

  And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see

  Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.

  He told the hidden power of herbs and springs,

  And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep.

  He taught the implicated orbits woven

  Of the wide-wandering stars; and how the sun

  Changes his lair, and by what secret spell

  The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye

  Gazes not on the interlunar sea:

  He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs,

  The tempest-wingèd chariots of the Ocean,

  And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then

  Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed

  The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,

  And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen.

  Such, the alleviations of his state,

  Prometheus gave to man, for which he hangs

  Withering in destined pain . . . .31

  This great scene ends without the least diminution in poetic power. Asia’s questioning of Demogorgon and her celebration of Prometheus’s historic role, precipitate the moment of destiny for which the whole earth has been waiting. The volcanic fire of history begins to erupt. In a memorable image, Demogorgon shows the constant stream of the chariots of the Hours pouring up through the purple night, like sparks hurtling up a flue. One of these carries the grim destiny of Jupiter; another the happy reunion of Asia and Prometheus. Both in their political aspect are revolutionary.

  Shelley drew the picture of these chariots directly from the classical carving on the Arch of Constantine. By comparing it with his prose notes made in the Forum it is possible to see exactly the process of imaginative transformation. Shelley had first observed:

  The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as it were born from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate.32

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

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

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

  Demogorgon. Behold!

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

  I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingèd steeds

  Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands

  A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.

  Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,

  And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:

  Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

  With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

  As if the thing they loved fled on before,

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

  Stream like a comet’s flashing hair: they all

  Sweep onward.34

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

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

  Panthea. That terrible shadow floats

  Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke

  Of earthquake-ruined cities o’er the sea.

  Lo! it ascends the car; the coursers fly

  Terrified: watch its path among the stars

  Blackening the night!35

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We have passed Age’s icy caves,

  And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,

  And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray:

  Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee

  Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

  Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;

  A paradise of vaulted bowers,

  ‘Lit by downward-gazing flowers,

  And watery paths that wind between

  Wildernesses calm and green,

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

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

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

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

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

  Under the leaves! how on its head there burns

  A light, like a green star, whose emerald beams

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

  The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass!

  Knowest thou it?

  Panthea. It is the delicate spirit

  That guides the earth through heaven. From afar

  The populous constellations call that light

  The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes

  It floats along the spray of the salt sea,

  Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud,

  Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep,

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

  Or through the green waste wilderness, as now,

  Wondering at all it sees . . . .38

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

  A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,

  Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass

  Flow, as through empty space, music and light:

  Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,

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

  Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning . . . .39

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

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

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

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

  [1] Shelley’s ‘Temple of Concord’ is now called the Temple of Saturn by modern classical archaeologists, and stands at the base of the Capitoline Hill, dominating the northern end of the Via Sacra. The god’s statue was filled with olive oil, and in his hand he held a
pruning knife, symbols of Agriculture and Husbandry. His temple was suitably used as the state treasury, but was also the centre of the annual winter Saturnalia, a time of carnival and goodwill. Eight massive granite columns alone remain.

  [2] Probably what is now Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 12, a small black leather notebook which contains a draft of Prometheus Acts I–IV, though this may have been Shelley’s clean copy book.

  [3] Moly is the legendary herb, sometimes identified with the wild garlic, which Homer tells us that the god Hermes gave to Odysseus to inoculate him against the bestial sorceries of Circe. The flower was white, the root jet black. For Shelley, Moly seems to represent that power of control over one’s own mind which prevents a man from reverting into a beast. Amaranth, the purple flower sometimes identified with love-lies-bleeding, is traditionally associated with immortality; it is ‘fadeless’ in Spenser and Milton, and brings man the fruitful illusion of personal immortality. Nepenthe is also mentioned by Homer as a drug used by Odysseus to banish pain, grief and trouble from the mind; it has an Egyptian origin and Shelley probably associated it with a narcotic such as opium or hashish.