Mary does not at first seem to have had any grasp of what was going on in Shelley’s mind. On the 14th she wrote that she had seen little of Emilia, ‘but she was in much better spirits when I did see her than I had found her for a long time before’.44 Ten days later it was the same — surprisingly she was in ‘much better spirits’. Anyway Mary was busily engaged in other directions, taking private Greek lessons from Prince Mavrocordato, and holding tête à têtes with Tommaso Sgricci, as she explained to Claire.45
Meanwhile Emilia wrote an essay for Shelley on ‘Il Vero Amore’, which flew effortlessly between earth and heaven on the wings of adolescence: ‘But where is he, susceptible of such love? Where? Who is capable of inspiring it? Oh love! I am all love. . . . Love has no wish but for virtue. . . . Love is a fire that burns and destroys not, a mixture of pleasure and pain, a pain that brings pleasure, an essence eternal, spiritual, infinite, pure, celestial.’46 It sounded less adolescent in Italian, and some of the phraseology was imported from Shelley’s conversations.47
Claire, despite the distance of several score miles, seems to have been more au fait. The correspondence was private between her and Shelley — her letters were addressed to him at the Casa Silva, not to the Casa Galetti48 — and she was also in touch with Emilia. In a ‘kind & tender’ letter towards the end of January, she appears to have quizzed Shelley mildly on the subject. His reply was warm, but slightly defensive. ‘I see Emilia sometimes: & whether her presence is the source of pain or pleasure to me, I am equally ill-fated in both. I am deeply interested in her destiny, & that interest can in no manner influence it. She is not however insensible to my sympathy, & she counts it among her alleviations. As much comfort as she receives from my attachment to her, I lose. — There is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that which you call love.’49 He slipped into this letter the fact that the secret scheme for the Eastern expedition was ‘broken up’. But the letter was signed off: ‘I took up the pen for an instant, only to thank you. — & if you will to kiss you for your kind attention to me, & I find I have written in ill spirits. . . . Yours most tenderly.’
On the last two days of January Mary noted that Shelley was reading Dante’s essay on love and poetry, the Vita Nuova. Under the intense vision of his relationship with the beautiful Emilia, under the auspices of Dante, and struggling against his own ill health, he now wrote the extraordinary piece of autobiography, Epipsychidion. It was done within a fortnight, for a clean copy of the poem was in the post to Ollier for printing by 16 February.
Shelley’s Epipsychidion is just over 600 lines long, written without stanza form, in couplets which often flow freely on over a dozen lines. It is a conscious piece of rhetorical improvisation partly influenced by the performances of Sgricci. The whole poem is explicitly addressed to ‘the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia V — , Now imprisoned in the Convent of — ’. But it is formed from two divergent inspirations, which are in the end conflicting. The first is a courtly love-hymn to Emilia, an invitation to her to escape from the convent and take ship with him on his long-imagined expedition to the East:
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
And wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow. . . .
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?
Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest
Is a far Eden of the purple East;
And we between her wings will sit. . . .50
This courtly invitation ends in a vision of spiritual union which is presented with great and indeed almost violent erotic intensity:
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion’s golden purity,
As mountain springs under the morning sun.51
But it is a failing vision. The difficulty which Shelley had with the word ‘purity’, which is a substitute word, indicates one of the characteristic weaknesses of this part of the poem. It attempts to hold simultaneously a spiritual and a physical image of human passion, like one of the ‘multiple images’ of Prometheus. Such a union was possible for Shelley, but not within the circumstances of his feverish dream relationship with a convent heiress. The contradictions were too great, and this showed vividly in the straining and flinching in the poetry of the courtly part of Epipsychidion. The ‘invitation’ was also complicated by the bisexual or hermaphroditic status which he assigned to Emilia, implicitly in the published text, and explicitly in the subsidiary fragments, one of which refers to the ‘sweet marble monster’ of the Borghese statue.52 The second inspiration of Epipsychidion is, like Alastor, a retrospective review of his own emotional development since adolescence. To this extent the work is a poème à clef, and there are a series of references to actual women and events in Shelley’s life which are only intended to be partially disguised, and were certainly meant to be interpreted by the most intimate of his circle:
In many mortal forms I rashly sought
The shadow of that idol of my thought.
And some were fair — but beauty dies away:
Others were wise — but honeyed words betray:
And One was true — oh! why not true to me?53
The shadows of Elizabeth Shelley, Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Boinville, Sophia Stacey and perhaps others all fit along the margins of the verse. The only definite identifications are Emilia herself, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Part of the general argument of the poem thus becomes the autobiographical fact, and also to Shelley the philosophical necessity, of the lifelong search among many women for a donna ideale: the Beautiful of Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium; or the divine Beatrice of Dante’s Vita Nuova; or even in one of Shelley’s references to the mysterious Beloved of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.54 It is in this sense that the poem is about free love. Shelley’s original tenet of physical freedom as expressed in his letters of 1811–12, and in the notes to Queen Mab, and The Revolt of Islam, is maintained and extended into a complete if heterogeneous philosophical system.
Previous to Epipsychidion the evidence is that Shelley’s belief in free love was simply based on a liberal view of men and women’s biological needs, and a violent disagreement with the social institutions which defined them in terms of monogamous property. With Epipsychidion, Shelley had added to these a new philosophical dimension in which free love was understood to be an integral part of a full spiritual education. Free love, as it were, led to true love or universal love — and hereby became not merely a social but a moral and philosophical necessity. Much of the language for this was taken directly from Dante.[3] The poem is not a very consistent literary achievement, but it is a fascinating intellectual one, and a unique picture of Shelley’s emotional life at the age of 28.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.55
The parts of the poem which formed the courtly love-hymn to Emilia were to some extent an embarrassment, and even a contradiction to the more strictly autobiographical sections. He was promising eternal courtly love in a poem which actually celebrated free love. Shelley therefore resorted to a series of four ‘Advertisements’, which were designed to make the whole si
tuation of the poem — even its author — appear completely fictitious. He himself was only to appear as the ‘editor’ of another man’s poem. The first of these prefaces which he rejected, after some consideration, ran:
The following Poem was found amongst other papers in the Portfolio of a young Englishman with whom the Editor had contracted an intimacy at Florence, brief indeed, but sufficiently long to render the Catastrophe by which it terminated one of the most painful events of his life. . . . He had framed to himself certain opinions, founded no doubt upon the truth of things, but built up to a Babel height; they fell by their own weight, & the thoughts that were his architects, became unintelligible one to the other, as men upon whom confusion of tongues has fallen. . . . The melancholy charge of consigning the body of my poor friend to the grave, was committed to me by his desolated family.56
This seemed to be along the right lines, but Shelley decided to increase the realism of the ‘young Englishman’s’ situation, and thereby make the fictitious occasion of his death appear more authentic and more closely related to the actual ‘invitation’ to Emilia. In this he hoped to distance himself as the ‘Editor’ even further from his text. In fact he inadvertently did the reverse, and this second preface is perhaps the most revealing of all about the triangular relationship between Shelley, Emilia and Mary, and reverts to his Eastern expedition:
The following Poem was found in the PF of a young Englishman, who died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. . . . He was accompanied by a lady supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed so [singular — deleted] excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman — At his death this suspicion was confirmed; [blank] object speedily found a refuge both from the taunts of the brute multitude, and from the [blank] of her grief in the same grave that contained her lover. — He had bought one of the Sporades, & fitted up a Saracenic castle which accident had preserved in some repair with simple elegance, & it was his intention to dedicate the remainder of his life to undisturbed intercourse with his companions.57
Realizing that these references to his wife and ‘an effeminate looking youth’ revealed far more than they disguised, he interpolated instead, in his third draft preface, a comparison with the ideal literary character of the Vita Nuova. The fourth & final preface of ‘Advertisement’, which he included in the manuscript sent to Ollier, thus read:
The Writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades. . . . His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible. . . .58
The poem itself is headed by a suitably grave and forbidding translation of the last stanza of Dante’s first canzone in the Convivio;
My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning. . . .
This intricate web of precautions was further elaborated in Shelley’s covering letter to Ollier on 16 February, in which he insisted that the poem be published in strictest anonymity. ‘It is to be published simply for the esoteric few.’ Shelley suggested an edition of 100 copies. Why should Shelley have gone to such immense trouble to obscure the sources of his poem? Especially when he afterwards insisted that it really was a piece of pure literary convention, a piece of ‘philosophical idealism’ of no interest except to those initiated in Platonism or the fourteenth-century conventions of fino amore? The answer is simply that Epipsychidion is the most nakedly autobiographical poem he ever wrote.
The central section of the poem, lines 277 to 320, presenting Mary as the Moon (first ‘young and fair’, later chaste, cold ‘pale and waning’), refer to the story of the years 1814–15, together with the loss of Harriet, Ianthe and Charles, during the crisis of 1816–17. It ends with the terrible image drawn from the Mer de Glace:
The moving billows of my being fell
Into a death of ice, immovable; —
And then — what earthquakes made it gape and split,
The white Moon smiling all the while on it,
These words conceal. . . .59
At length, upon this frozen prospect ‘The Vision I had sought through grief and shame’ appears in her cosmological and courtly form, ‘Soft as an incarnation of the Sun’, which finally melts Shelley. The identification is explicit —
I knew it was the Vision veiled from me
So many years — that it was Emily.60
In a remarkable passage Shelley now described the triangular relationship he wanted with Emily and Mary, which is of course very far from Dante’s worshipful and singular relationship with Beatrice. The triple cosmological identifications are now, with transparent logic, Mary the Moon, Emily the Sun, Shelley the Earth. He also combined geophysical concepts of magnetic and gravitational fields affecting earth-tides and seasons, as used in Act IV of Prometheus, with the new ideas of Dr Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’ introduced to him by Medwin. The result is a spectacular ‘multiple image’ projection of the emotional and psychological forces at work in the relationship. Shelley is, as ever, essentially passive:
Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth,
This world of love, this me; and into birth
Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart
Magnetic might into its central heart;
And lift its billows, and its mists, and guide
By everlasting laws, each wind and tide
To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave. . . .
And all their many-mingled influence blend,
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end; —
So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway
Govern my sphere of being, night and day!
What Mary thought of her shared role as ‘bright regent’ — after the long, long struggle for absentia Clariae — may well be imagined. She did not mention the poem in her letters for many months, and then it was with a mixture of bitterness and relief at the outcome of the affair.61 She called it ‘Shelley’s Italian Platonics’ and quoted a popular song about Cranbourne Lane. It is the one long poem of Shelley’s she did not choose to comment on in her edition of 1839.
But what of Claire? Was she lost finally from the Shelleyan solar system? On the contrary, Shelley found her a brilliant place, in the succeeding verse passage, which is one of the high points in the uneven flow of the improvisation. While retaining its courtly grandeur, its ‘ideal tinge’, the poetry when turned towards the dark handsome features of Claire takes on a certain wit — almost irony — in the reference to their volatile relationship, and to the Moon. Though it is painful, it is altogether more sprightly. If Emilia was Sun, and Mary was Moon, then with a flash of inspiration,[4] Claire was
Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe
Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion,
Alternating attraction and repulsion,
Thine went astray and that was rent in twain;
Oh, float into our azure heaven again!
Be there Love’s folding-star at thy return;
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn
Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn
In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows; as the star of Death
And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild
Called Hope and Fear — upon the heart are piled
Their offerings, — of this sacrifice divine
A World shall be the altar.62
Writing in the autobiographical way that Shelley was, one can be certain that
both Even and Morn have personal identifications — one might hazard little Percy Florence and Allegra. There would also be deep personal reasons for identifying Claire with the ‘star of Death and Birth’, and writing of a ‘sacrifice divine’. But this was something that perhaps Claire alone was ever intended to interpret. The description of their lively and intimate relationship of the heart, however, could not be more clearly summarized than in ‘Alternating attraction and repulsion, thine went astray and [mine] was rent in twain’. It is the openness that Shelley has found to say this which is really striking.
There is one other passage in the autobiographical sections of Epipsychidion which is of special interest. Judging by its position it appears to refer to an event at the very beginning of Shelley’s career, and certainly before he met Mary in 1814. It seems to refer to a first sexual experience, probably in the Oxford and Poland Street period of 1810–11. At any rate it was a horrific one, and the verse takes on that bright, grotesque sharpness one associates with the best passages of The Revolt of Islam:
There, — One, whose voice was venomed melody
Sate by a well, under blue nightshade bowers;
The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers,
Her touch was as electric poison, — flame
Out of her looks into my vitals came,
And from her living cheeks and bosom flew
A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew
Into the core of my green heart, and lay
Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown gray
O’er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime
With ruins of unseasonable time.63
The only person who claimed to interpret this passage with any authority was, surprisingly enough, Leigh Hunt’s eldest son Thornton, who had first known Shelley at Hampstead. He stated that ‘accident has made me aware of facts’ — meaning presumably conversation at the Hunt household — which suggested that Shelley had had an unhappy sexual experience during his college life which caused him to contract a veneral disease. As Hunt puts it, ‘instead of the Florimen, he found her venal, hideous, and fatal simulacrum; and [Shelley] indicates even the material consequences to himself in his injured aspect and hair touched with grey’. At this time prematurely grey hair was regarded as an after-effect of some instances of venereal infection.64 Shelley was always markedly violent in his denunciation of prostitution and his horror of infectious and ‘hideous diseases’; though Hunt makes no specific reference to a prostitute. If what Hunt says had any basis in fact, one might reasonably expect other references to the incident in Shelley’s work. Queen Mab of course contains much general discussion of the issues, but there is a passage in Canto VI of The Revolt of Islam which seems to be dealing with the same incident. Certainly the odd placing reference to the ‘well’ recurs, and also similar images of ‘blue nightshade’ and infectious poison. The two stanzas occur at the moment when Laon has left Cythna in her mountain stronghold, and ridden secretly back into the City which is in the grip of famine and plague:
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 94