The true Romantic poet is one who is immensely enraptured by the world around him. Both the natural and the supernatural world are seen as unknown paradises which the poet longs to explore, and nature becomes such an inspiration as to enthrall as well as torture his ever-growing imagination. The vast knowledge and curiosity which exist within such brilliant minds allow an expanse of beauty to flow within them, springing from the external tumult brought on by their experiences. Although a life such as this may be wrought with beauty and rich with inspiration, it may also have the power to isolate, torture, haunt, and/or destroy he who lives it. Percey Shelley’s “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” shows the life of such a man, empty before nature’s grasp enthralled him, and Shelley’s views as expressed in “On Love” hold many evidences as to why the Poet in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” may have so fallen into his despaired fate.
The young Poet in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” is born and “by solemn vision, and bright silver dream,/His infancy was nurtured. Every sight/And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,/Sent to his heart its choicest impulses” (ln. 67-70). Even as a newborn, the majesties of the world begin to quench his thirst for life’s splendors. In most cases, an infant who is unable to speak can do nothing but easily take in the world around him, but the Poet mentioned here has “thirsting lips” (ln. 72) and greatly desires experience the moment he arrives on this earth. He soon “[leaves] his cold fireside and alienated home/To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands” (ln. 76-77). Although still a youth, a home that would seem to remain comfortable to him due to his age has instead become “alienated,” and thus, he from it. The dualism which exists here is the Romantic poet’s struggle between wanting a fulfilled life, and coming to realize that they may require complete isolation from what most see as ‘comfortable’ to obtain it. In Shelley’s “Preface” to the poem, he describes the Poet as being “a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe3.” Shelley implies that the youth was awarded certain qualities at birth, such as “uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius,” but makes the point that these qualities are later to be greatly enhanced by external forces existing in nature. The young boy is innocent and free of corruption, yet Shelley insists on the fact that he is to be “purified” still, through his connections with nature. In his article entitled “Alastor: The Spirit of Solitude,” Arthur E. Du Bois writes that this work is “a materialization of an ideal man, free, true, beautiful4.” Only through a pure and eternal union with nature can one’s imagination grow and experience all of which it is capable. Shelley stresses this point throughout the poem, and begins it with descriptions of nature as “our great Mother” (ln. 2), along with all of the glorious details of the earth, before he even introduces the Poet.
The poem begins by exalting everything in nature, “earth, ocean, air” (ln. 1), and describing that which is indescribable in the second stanza by addressing the supernatural “Mother of this unfathomable world!” (ln. 18). In its beginning, the poem reveals dark images of nature as they struggle alongside beauty. Trying to exist in a world which is so overwhelming it can be painful; the Poet forms a deep and melancholic connection with nature, and lusts after their union. The poem reads:
Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee (ln. 18-25)
He also claims that he has “mixed awful talk and asking looks,/With [his] most innocent love, until strange tears/Uniting with those breathless kisses, made/Such magic” (33-36). In Shelley’s essay “On Love,” he writes, “Thou demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves2.” The Poet so desperately thirsts for nature now, and knows only it to consume his life, but that beauty and inexpressible longing will soon be taken away.
The poem has been said to “lack in structural organization1,” but it could also be argued that some of these placements were done by Shelley on purpose, or to assign different a different significance or tone to events and thoughts as the poem moves forward. For example, as mentioned above, these sexual, dark, images of Mother Nature and death are detailed before the introduction of the Poet, which itself is written how a standard beginning to a poem may read. The first line of this introduction, which actually occurs in the third stanza, is, “There was a Poet whose untimely tomb…” Even though this sounds like the rightful beginning of the poem, it turns out to be a detailed description of the Poet’s death to come and the eternal loneliness that made up his life. “He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude” (ln. 60). Although this is not structurally sound in the plot, it has a specific purpose for having been placed there by Shelley. Before knowing that there is a specific “you” in this poem, the reader is introduced to the atmosphere and environment of the poem, through the beautifully imagery of the “sunset and its gorgeous ministers,/And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness” (ln. 6-7). An overwhelming amount of beautiful thoughts and images appear and are experienced in the poem right away, creating a descriptive scene in one’s imagination.
The invented union of the Poet, himself, with his supernatural Mother and lover soon fades and he creates within himself a different obsession, one that comes to him in the form of “a vision on his sleep/…a dream of hopes that never yet/Had flushed his cheek” (ln. 149-151). Prior to this vision, the Poet had fallen in love with nature’s unattainable glory, but was able to abandon this companionship in an effort to seek his true love. He once related the “Mother of this unfathomable world” to an “incommunicable dream” (ln. 39), but now seeks a different dream. He sees his true love in a beautiful vision where she takes the form of a philosopher, poet, and lover. The knowledgeable and wise characteristics of a philosopher, the wondrous nature of a poet, and the adoration of a lover came together before his eyes3. The speaker writes about the vision:
Suddenly she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind (ln. 172-176).
The Poet’s first view of this vision is described as being seen “by the warm light of their own life.” The Poet created in his dreams the perfect lover, the perfect ethereal embodiment of his desire. Their entities have become one, or were already joined and shall be forever bound. She is a mixture of intellect and absolute beauty, and he “images to himself the Being whom he loves” (Norton, p. 746). The vision is a part of him, but is soon to become only that which disappears and makes him insane with desperate longing.
The Poet holds another close companionship, an ironic attachment to solitude. The Spirit of Solitude, or Alastor, is a facet of the Poet, as is the vision. The Poet clings to his solitude and isolation, giving it a great level of importance and holding it to be the reason he is able to strive for more beauty, and live solely for nature. He is able to leave these obsessive behaviors behind, in a way, when he realizes that to fully experience, and to awaken the imagination with love, one mustn’t be alone. In Shelley’s essay, “On Love,” he writes on the true nature of love, and the comfort in having someone, “If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own2.”The Poet begins to deeply thirst for this connection now, realizing in a collapse of madness that his life of solitude did not bring him the truest of happiness, as he had previously believed.
Due to his intense and overwhelming desire to again see the vision without being interrupted, as he had been before when “sleep,/Like a dark flood suspended in its course,/Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain” (ln. 189-191), Death becomes the new (although temporary) companion of his desire. He has gone through so many experiences and mental anguish by this time, that with the discovery of a kindred soul (or as Shelley writes in “On Love,” “a soul within our own soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise, which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap2,”) he will do anything to experience it fully and revel in it. The Poet becomes lustful towards the idea of his own death because he craves the “joy” and “exultation” (ln. 200) of his experience with/in his vision. He laments over his lost love, as he exclaims,
Alas! Alas!
Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined
Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost,
In the wide pathless desart of dim sleep,
That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O sleep? (ln. 207-213).
His mourning and sadness becomes severe, and it is evident that the idea of suicide becomes his only path to happiness, as in death he will be forever with the one he loves, who embodies his own soul and body as well. His love begins to destroy him, and his once “sweet eyes” (ln. 80) become instead those from which “the infant would conceal/His troubled visage in his mother’s robe/In terror at the glare of those wild eyes” (ln. 262-264). His gradual deterioration and tortured response to the loss of his divine vision is described as such:
And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair
Sered by autumn of strange suffering
Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand
Hung like a dead bone within its withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone (ln. 248-254).
Not only has the Poet’s youth dissipate rapidly, with the mention of his hand which “hung like a dead bone within its withered skin,” but his once adventurous and innocent spirit has been replaced with “strange suffering” “listless[ness],” seen “from his dark eyes alone.”
As the Poet continues on his quest, he addresses his “Vision and Love” as he braves a dangerous storm on the seas hoping to find his demise, saying, “I have beheld/The path of thy departure. Sleep and death/ Shall not divide us long!” (ln. 366-369). He awaits his imminent death, preparing himself for the final acceptance of his vision, while thriving on his ability to retain a great love and admiration for nature. Death, “whose sightless speed divides this sullen night,” (ln. 610) then literally storms upon him. In his destroyed and anguished state, the Poet is at once able to feel at peace through his encounter with the very death he had longed for. “Hope and despair,/The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear/Marred his repose” (ln. 639-641). In “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude,” there exist some final thoughts on the life and death of the Poet:
All the shews o’ the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe “too deep for tears,” when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquility,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were (ln. 711-720).
Mourning the loss of his vision caused such madness within the Poet, because it is “frail and vain/To weep a loss that turns…lights to shade.” His ventures finally returned him to solitude, leaving him nothing “but pale despair and cold tranquility.” This type of obsessive search for beauty, deep connections with nature, striving to be intertwined with another soul, and/or with one’s self, led the Poet to his “untimely tomb.” Shelley writes in “On Love,” “So soon as this want or power [i.e. love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was2.” A man who is forever grasping onto that which he cannot hold, and that which is impossible to obtain, will become loveless and live a life of overwhelming senses enveloped by despair, ending in want and solitude.
References:
1. Gibson, Evan K. “Alastor: A Reinterpretation,” PMLA 1947. Vol. 62, No. 4., pp.
1022-1026.
2. Shelley, Percy. “On Love.”
3. Lynch, Deirdre S., and Jack Stillinger. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, M.H. Abrams.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Eight Ed, W.W. Norton & Company,
New York. 2006.
4. Du Bois, Arthur E. “Alastor: The Spirit of Solitude,” JEGP 1936. Vol. 35, pp.
538-539.
