Change & Decay In All Around I See

Saturday 20 December 2008, 10:52PM

‘Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself’ - A Review

Percy Bysshe Shelley is still regarded as one of the major English poets, but I suspect he is now one of the least read. His wife Mary’s marvellous novel Frankenstein is probably studied much more these days (hard to believe she was only 19 when she wrote it).

Ann Wroe’s superb Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself, which I’ve just finished reading, and more or less re-reading, suggests that part of the problem is that the events of Shelley’s chaotic life are itself so fascinating that it’s easy to overlook the poetry. He epitomised (and in many ways was the source of) the classic image of the Romantic poet: estrangement from a conservative father; expulsion from Oxford for anti-Christian polemics; flight from house to house and country to country with creditors in pursuit; ‘unconventional’ domestic arrangements; a fair amount of lounging in white open necked shirts at the foot of spreading oaks under dappled sunlight; fevered brows; and the obligatory laudanum. Inevitably he died young, drowning just before his 30th birthday in a boat - constructed according to his own specification - that was never considered seaworthy by his sailing friends.

The singular narrative of Shelley’s life is told in Richard Holmes’ classic biography Shelley: The Pursuit. Wroe’s book is focused on Shelley’s intellectual history, the story, told by his published work and notebooks, of how he pursued answers to the same essential questions: what am I? What are beauty, truth and goodness? How should I live?

As Wroe says in the book’s introduction, a person’s true identity consists their inner, mental life, a life within life, the concerns of which are often utterly different from that of the public self open to family, friends and acquaintances. For most of us this inner world (unless somehow remembered by God) vanishes forever with our death, because we don’t leave anything behind that records it. Fortunately some great minds have left a record, and Shelley, through his poetry and prose, is one of them.

Wroe pays at least as much attention to Shelley’s notebooks and drafts as his published work,which afford an absorbing account of how isolated words and images were fused into completed works. The raw materials of Shelley’s imaginative world are laid bare: his poems are tapestries woven from a set of images and tropes that was refined and added to over the years: shifting cloud shapes, ocean horizons, desert plains, rising and falling moons and suns, plunging waterfalls, Alpine peaks, valleys set in permanent shadow, the morning star, bitter and warming Boreal winds and zephyrs.

His teeming notebooks reveal a restless, acutely sensitive mind alive to intimations of beauty in nature, art and the field of human relationships. And to the sadnesses, injustices and horrors of life (which gave rise to the his political radicalism. He wrote down nearly all of his thoughts as they occurred to him, and wasted little time in transmuting them to into verse and prose, which accounts for his being able to rattle off, in the course of a very short career, nearly 800 pages of poetry, and many tracts, translations and essays (most very fine - see in particular A Defence of Poetry).

I found Wroe’s narrative truly inspiring. Her book, as Holmes’ did before her, makes plain that Shelley was no saint. Like many intellectuals who love humanity in general, he was, although an essentially kind man, often careless of the needs of the particular, real people close to him: see for example Death and the Maidens, Janet Todd’s account of the Shelley circle. But I was left with a vivid sense of what it must be to be truly intellectually alive, and to have a fierce desire to communicate one’s thoughts to the world.

I’m glad Shelley did so. Although often difficult, being packed with dense classical allusion, his poetry overflows with striking, unforgettable imagery, and is wide open to the transcendent. As a fierce critic of Christian orthodoxy Shelley would have hated the suggestion, but I think it can be fairly said from a Christian perspective that he can be considered a great poet of the Holy Spirit.

The last two stanzas from Adonais, his 1821 elegy on the death of John Keats, exemplify the peculiar intensity of his vision:

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; 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 borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.