Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley nonetheless wanted his reader to see the drama in a definitely public context, for exactly this, he argued, was what made possible the transformation of private writing into great literature.

  We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored.19

  The use of the electrical image, even here in the preface, was not coincidental in a drama about Prometheus the fire-bringer. Besides using myth, natural science and psychology, Shelley set out to write a great drama that depicted in its action and its images the vision of political freedom.

  The plot of Prometheus Unbound, as completed in three acts at Rome, is a symbolic story of man’s liberation from tyranny. The drama opens ‘in a ravine of Icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus’; Prometheus is bound to the rockface over the precipice, while two of the Daughters of Ocean, Panthea and Ione sit silently at his feet. It is a bitter winter season which we understand has lasted over the whole earth for a thousand years. Prometheus’s long opening monologue, a series of superb variations on the Aeschylean text, describes this state in a magnificent example of the multiple images with several frames of geophysical and psychological reference:

  The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears

  Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains

  Eat with their burning cold into my bones.

  Heaven’s wingèd hound, polluting from thy lips

  His beak in poison not his own, tears up

  My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,

  The ghastly people of the realm of dream,

  Mocking me . . . .20

  The grim addition to the myth, that the eagle dips its beak in Jupiter’s poisonous saliva before flying to tear out Prometheus’s innards, is a characteristic Shelleyan innovation. It implies whole dimensions of verbal slander, sneers and rumours by which established authority can sting and corrode the non-conforming individual.

  A chorus of Earth Spirits, and the Earth herself, answer Prometheus and from them we understand that both his and their suffering is the result of the ancient deadlock between Prometheus and Jupiter. Earth’s monologue is rich with echoes of Aeschylus, Lucretius and Shelley’s own ‘Mont Blanc’:

  I am the Earth, Thy mother; she within whose stony veins,

  To the last fibre of the loftiest tree

  Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,

  Joy ran, as blood within a living frame . . . .21

  From Earth we learn that, paradoxically, her own suffering is the result of a curse laid by her child Prometheus upon Jupiter in revenge for his persecution. Prometheus wishes to recall this curse, but to do this it has literally to be ‘recalled’: to be uttered a second time, in an act of exorcism. Neither Prometheus himself, nor any of the Spirits of the Earth, is able to face this appalling prospect. In an extraordinary passage, Earth reveals how these words can be recovered by calling on a ‘second world’ of spiritual existence. Here Shelley achieves a fantastic combination of classical ideas of Hades, Platonic ideas of the ‘intermediary’ world of daemons and kaka-daimons, Dantean visions of the Christian Inferno, and modern ideas of the individual and collective unconscious recoverable through psychoanalysis. On top of all this, he introduces the magician Zoroaster, a gnostic figure, attractive to Shelley for his perverse antinomian and mystic associations. This is one of the great cruxes of the drama, and deserves consideration at length. It is part of Shelley’s achievement that virtually nothing about the ideological background of this ‘second world’ concept needs to be known by the reader, except for the broad outline of the Aeschylean plot:

  Ere Babylon was dust,

  The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

  Met his own image walking in the garden.

  That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

  For know there are two worlds of life and death:

  One that which thou beholdest; but the other

  Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

  The shadows of all forms that think and live

  Till death unite them and they part no more;

  Dreams and the light imaginings of men,

  And all that faith creates or love desires . . .

  . . . all the gods

  Are there, and all the powers of nameless worlds,

  Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts;

  And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom;

  And he, the supreme Tyrant, on his throne

  Of burning gold. Son, one of these shall utter

  The curse which all remember. Call at will

  Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter . . . .

  Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge

  Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades,

  As rainy wind through the abandoned gate

  Of a fallen palace.22

  The phantasm of Jupiter is called, and repeats Prometheus’s curse, ‘Fiend I defy thee.’ Prometheus is suddenly overcome by hearing his own words thus repeated, and at this moment of weakness Mercury the messenger of Jupiter arrives, accompanied by the Furies, again following the Aeschylean plot. When the mediations and diplomacy of Mercury are rejected, then the Fiends close around Prometheus. The visions of horror and remorse they bring are public as well as private. Visions of war and famine pass before Prometheus, and the bloody failure of the French Revolution. The massive cruel conglomerations of trapped humanity brought together by industrial urbanization are already recognized:

  Look! where round the wide horizon

  Many a million-peopled city

  Vomits smoke in the bright air.

  Hark that outcry of despair!22

  The poisonous distortions of the message of ‘truth, peace and pity’ brought by the historical Christ, whom Shelley understands as a simple human and political figure ‘a youth with patient looks nailed to a crucifix’ are presented as a further pathological perversion by the forces of Jupiter. Prometheus, the all-knowing and all-seeing, seems bowed in final despair. The whole world seems in chains.

  Only when Earth summons a troop of spirits, ‘whose homes are the dim caves of human thought’, and who are associated with the eternally recurring force of Spring, is Prometheus partially rescued from his hopelessness. The Sixth Spirit is questioned about ‘The form of Love’ which is the most powerful of human psychic forces. Her answer is deeply ambiguous, but heralds the next step towards breaking the deadlock between Prometheus and Jupiter, after the recall of the curse. The imagery is drawn by Shelley directly from Agathon’s speech in the Symposium. The Spirit begins not with love, but with its absence — Desolation.

  Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing:

  It walks not on the earth, it floats not in the air,

  But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing

  The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear;

  Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above

  And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet,

  Dream visions of aëreal joy, and call the monster, Love,

  And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.24

  This introduction of the ‘monster Love’, at first nothing more than a dream, the counterpart or counterfeit of Pain, is seized upon by Panthea. She reminds Prometheus — it is perhaps significant that he had forgotten — of his own eternal love Asia, the third daughter of Oceanus, and Panthea’s siste
r. Panthea also proclaims her own love for Asia, and we glimpse for a moment a familiar emotional triangle. Panthea goes off to the ‘far Indian vale’ to waken Asia. This brings Shelley to the end of Act 1.

  Act 1 has no scene divisions, and moves forward with a steady, unhurried, operatic development. The main characters are introduced, the scene is set, the confrontation is clarified. The drama is still recognizably Aeschylean. There is, however, an entirely original Shelleyan theme working like a kind of yeast in the unleavened classical text. This is the familiar idea of the double nature, the pursuer and pursued, the doppelgänger.

  Everywhere the reader is aware of nature’s split, Nature herself divided. The permanent winter of fruitlessness, disease and icy colds has divided Earth from the warm, productive side of her seasonable self. There is even an indication that the geophysical tilt of the planet earth from a ninety-degree polar axis is taken by Shelley as an image of internal contradiction and disharmony. Zoroaster’s underworld of Unconscious, his universe of disunited doubles, indicates that Prometheus is himself a divided personality. What is he divided from? When Earth explains that he can call up either his own or Jupiter’s ghost to repeat the curse, there is an indication that paradoxically the very condition of the polar opposition between Prometheus and Jupiter proves that they were once equal parts of a single, harmonious nature. Like Frankenstein and his monster, it is the failure of ‘a community’ between the two that has turned them alternatively into persecutor and victim, pursuer and pursued.

  The Sixth Spirit in her strange Desolation speech, one of the most mysterious in the whole drama, seems to emphasize the duality of existence, the transformation of opposites between dream and waking, between desire and reality. The ‘monster Love’ can be transformed in a single shift of action or attention into the ‘shadow Pain’. Panthea’s journey to Asia proclaims clearly that, at a mythic level at least, Prometheus is separated from Love.

  This mystic separation or alienation, according to the Shelleyan interpretation of the whole drama, must have psychological and political dimensions as well. The first act therefore presents a whole world of disassociated, dispossessed, schizophrenic and alienated beings. Their ‘desolation’ is also the winter of political hope, the frozen misery of the sick and hungry and the ignorant. For Prometheus to unbind mankind and unite the opposed terms of the spiritual equation, he has to confront those parts of himself represented by Jupiter and by Asia, by tyrannic authority and by Love, and to re-embody in some new medium the gift of his ‘creative fire’ to man.

  Act II shifts the focus of attention to Prometheus’s lover Asia. Prometheus himself does not appear. The setting of Scene I is ‘a lovely vale in the Indian Caucasus’ and the season is Shelley’s Roman spring. It is Asia herself who first speaks, in rhythms that recall the Song of Songs:

  From all the blasts of Heaven thou hast descended:

  Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes

  Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,

  And beatings haunt the desolated heart,

  Which should have learnt repose; thou hast descended

  Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!

  O child of many winds!25

  The cold, hard, almost strident epic language of the first act is transformed into a rich, pliant, highly wrought medium heavily loaded with sensuous and erotic imagery. Panthea, describing to Asia her peaceful state as one of Ocean’s daughters before Prometheus’s ‘fall’ is given a characteristic passage:

  . . . I slept . . .

  Within dim bowers of green and purple moss,

  Our young Ione’s soft and milky arms

  Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair . . . .26

  Panthea needs to rouse Asia, as she had roused Prometheus, with remembrance of their separated love. She does this in another extraordinary passage where Asia is reminded of Prometheus’s emotional and sexual potency by seeing one of Panthea’s dreams of Prometheus mirrored in the ‘dark, far, measureless Orb within orb’, of Panthea’s eyes. Here Panthea is made both a kind of messenger and a spiritual medium. Her memory of Prometheus’s love-making is one of Shelley’s finest presentations of the dream-orgasm since the dancing maid of Alastor.

  I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt

  His presence flow and mingle through my blood

  Till it became his life, and his grew mine,

  And I was thus absorbed, until it passed.

  And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,

  Gathering again in drops upon the pines,

  And tremulous as they, in the deep night

  My being was condensed . . . .27

  Panthea and Asia are now drawn from the Indian vale by the dream, which first becomes personified, (‘Dream: Follow! Follow!’) and finally transforms itself into a chorus of ever-changing Echoes, Spirits and Fauns. Through three rapid scenes, Panthea and Asia are led irresistibly towards the hidden, deep, volcanic layer of Demogorgon. The descriptions are drawn from Shelley’s visit to Vesuvius. As in Act I, the importance of this movement downwards, inwards, backwards, into the abysms of memory and the earth, is stressed. They are looking, as it were, into the seeds of time, the cauldron of the unformed world. At the beginning of Scene IV they arrive in the underground realm of Demogorgon, an adaption of Aeschylus’s Typhon, who represents the forces of Necessity, Change and Revolution, and where

  rays of gloom

  Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.28

  This is a reference to the infra-red and ultra-violet ends of the spectrum of radiation beyond the reach of human vision, which Shelley loosely understood as a form of ‘creative fire’, and it provides a clue to the nature of the ‘new fire’ which Prometheus will give to man in Shelley’s adaption of the myth.

  Act II Scene IV is unquestionably the finest and most effortlessly sustained in the whole drama. It is 172 lines long, and consists mainly of an exchange between Asia and Demogorgon. It contains Asia’s marvellous monologue on the gifts which Prometheus gave to man according to the Aeschylean version of the story. All of the scene except the very end stays extremely close to the Aeschylean text, lines 435 to 525. Asia, the incarnation of Love, questions Demogorgon about the nature of power in the natural universe. Her questions finally narrow down to one: who is the author of evil within the universe? and is this author — she implies Jupiter, a Manichean, evil God — finally master or slave of his own creation? Demogorgon’s dismissal of the question, and Asia’s reply, is a celebrated philosophic crux of Shelley’s poem.

  Asia. Who is the master of the slave?

  Demogorgon. If the abysm

  Could vomit forth its secrets . . . . But a voice

  Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;

  For what would it avail to bid thee gaze

  On the revolving world? What to bid speak

  Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these

  All things are subject but eternal Love.

  Asia. So much I asked before, and my heart gave

  The response thou hast given; and of such truths

  Each to itself must be the oracle.29

  Through Demogorgon, Shelley confirms his scepticism and denies absolute knowledge either in the religious or scientific sense; he believed that both science and religion were only images of the ‘imageless’ truth. Demogorgon’s reply nevertheless confirms the freedom of Asia herself, in as far as she represents or embodies the ‘eternal Love’ which is subject to nothing. The identification between Love and Freedom, though it stands in Act II as little more than a poetic formula, points towards the kind of liberated world which Shelley hoped to depict and celebrate in the third act. The whole dialogue between Asia and Demogorgon is recreated from the Aeschylean text with immense force and authority, and an urgency which moves far beyond the classical, mythic base. The terms of the debate are modern. Asia has all her sister Panthea’s warmth and ardour, but none of her softness or languor. She is Love militant,
as she rapidly shows in the development of the argument.

  Asia. Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring

  In rarest visitation, or the voice

  Of one belovèd heard in youth alone,

  Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim

  The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,

  And leaves this peopled earth a solitude

  When it returns no more?

  Demogorgon. Merciful God.

  Asia. And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,

  Which from the links of the great chain of things,

  To every thought within the mind of man

  Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels

  Under the load towards the pit of death;

  Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;

  And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

  Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech

  Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;

  And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

  Demogorgon. He reigns.

  Asia. Utter his name: a world pining in pain

  Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.30

  This is how Love can talk when Shelley required it. If Act II Scene IV is the centre and strong point of the drama, Asia’s Promethean speech is the masterpiece of the scene. One of the strangest comments on Shelley’s own creative process is the degree to which he had anticipated this speech, even before he had read Aeschylus, six years previously in the final canto of Queen Mab. The high, sinuous clarity of the verse, its almost perfect balance between intellectual abstraction and vividly localized images, and its immense energy concentrated in a silvery plainness of statement shows Shelley writing at the very height of his poetic powers.