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Shelley in Eternity This is a repository copy of Shelley in Eternity. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/117324/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Callaghan, M. (2018) Shelley in Eternity. Essays in Criticism, 68 (3). pp. 308-326. ISSN 0014-0856 https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgy012 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 1 Shelley in Eternity MADELEINE CALLAGHAN Eternity, in its philosophical and religious appearances, might seem at odds with Shelley’s professed atheism; yet Shelley never lost sight of it, as separate from Christian meanings as he could manage, but nevertheless frequently borrowing its most characteristic descriptions. His poetry and prose reveal his attempt to write eternity rather than his confidence in achieving it. Poetry offers the closest you can come to approaching the eternal, a belief which Shelley chooses to develop through his response to the arguments of Christian theologians, all thinkers steeped in Platonic thought, such as Boethius, 1 Augustine, and Aquinas. The Christian God whom Shelley hated, was obviously the bedrock of the theologians’ arguments, but Shelley was all the same influenced, especially, by the way in which Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas drew a firm line between ‘eternity’, or ‘atemporality’, and ‘sempiternity’, or ‘everlastingness’. For Aquinas, ‘[t]he primary intrinsic difference of time from eternity is that eternity exists as a simultaneous whole and time doesn’t. Existence must fall short of eternity, as it is ‘subject to time’ which is ‘the proper measure of change’.2 Mortal life is mutability whereas eternity is unknowable wholeness: for Shelley, as for Plato, eternity is quite different from the mere everlastingness of the sempiternal. It is an elsewhere unknowable to mortals, but one that remains vital to mankind in its promise of ‘some bright Eternity’ (Epipsychidion, 115). 3 Epipsychidion is the pinnacle of Shelley’s attempt to image and experience the eternal in language, where the inevitable and self-conscious failure to create and sustain a vision of eternity is built into the whole logic of the poem. The later ‘Jane’ poems see a change: eternity, in its new mode, is an unsustainable but nonetheless ideal ‘momentary peace’ (‘To Jane. The Recollection’, Major Works, 3. 47) which is elegised in affectingly dry-eyed poetry. Alan M. Weinberg considers Shelley to be the ‘child of the Revolution’, claiming that ‘[o]f all Romantic poets, with the possible exception of Blake, Shelley is the most consistently subversive of the customs and institutions of the past’;4 but in relation to the concept of eternity, Shelley is notably less rebellious than he is studious. It was principally in Augustine’s Confessions that Shelley found an analogy 2 for his own struggle to apprehend the eternal. The Confessions, as M. H. Abrams argued, was ‘one of the most influential of all books, in Catholic as in Protestant Europe’;5 and Shelley had studied it with attention. (He takes his epigraph to Alastor from book III of the Confessions.) Shelley follows in Augustine’s footsteps, despite rejecting the Christian God, as he echoes Augustine’s impassioned questioning, his sense of sharing in the mystery of eternity, ‘aglow with its fire’, and his longing to ‘seize the minds of men’ while asking ‘[c]ould any words of mind have power to achieve so great a task?’6 For both Augustine and Shelley, eternity is something that we crave and can sense in our mortal lives, but for Shelley in the absence of any divine architect. Faced with previous sages’ ‘records of their vain endeavour’ (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 3. 28), Shelley explores new possibilities of imagining the eternal, attempting to go beyond those thinkers in an audacious attempt to write ‘the unascended heaven’ (Prometheus Unbound, 3. 2. 203). His interest in the Platonic-Christian tradition is not hard to explain: from first to last, Shelley was fascinated immense philosophical issues, and especially by the gulf between mortal life and the eternal. From Alastor -- which G. Kim Blank describes as the first Shelleyan poem7 -- to The Triumph of Life -- Shelley’s dark terminal exploration of ‘what is Life’ (The Triumph of Life, 544) -- the poetry works to define and refine the nature of ‘human phantasy’ (‘Frail clouds arrayed in sunlight lose the glory’, 6. 51). The animating force of Alastor is its exploration of the Poet’s quest to become one with that which lies beyond humanity. The poem was prompted, in part, by a tale related to him by Thomas Jefferson Hogg about a missionary who had become captivated by his dreams more than by his life; and Shelley’s response veers between censure and sympathetic fascination. Asking ‘who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and regret that death is so near?’,8 Shelley’s intense fellow feeling with the unfortunate missionary sees him excited and repelled by the story in equal measure. Choosing to spurn existence in favour of a dream beyond life, the Poet, pursuing that ‘fleeting shade’, ‘overleaps the bounds’ of the ‘web of human things’ (Alastor, 206, 207, and 719): the capacity for vision and its pursuit becomes a poetic standard even as this standard creates the ‘self-centred seclusion’ (‘Preface to Alastor’, 92) from which the Poet suffers. Shelley calls for a suspension of judgement, neither condemning nor celebrating the Poet: 9 the poem refuses both Richard Cronin’s view that the Poet represents the ‘nightmare of solipsism’,10 and the 3 narrator’s claim that the poet is some kind of ‘elemental god’ (Alastor, 351). Alastor seems to take as its motto Shelley’s line ‘None can reply—all seems eternal now’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 75), as the Poet transcends moral response leaving only mystery in his wake. Yet that line from ‘Mont Blanc’, in its ‘seems’, points up the ultimately impenetrable nature of such mystery: unlike Augustine and Aquinas and his other precursors in the literature of eternity, Shelley is exposed to a whirlwind of doubts. Alastor suggests, with mixed feelings, that to aspire to an understanding or experience of the eternal is life-negating. Plato offered an alternative authority for Shelley’s sense of the divine possibility of poetry. Ion, which Shelley translated, defines the poet as a conduit of eternity; 11 and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ takes up and explores this elevated status. James Notopoulos rightly shows that the Hymn is actually not directly derivative from Plato;12 but, in his ardent hope to experience ‘Intellectual Beauty’, Shelley does resemble St Augustine (‘the Christian Plato’ to borrow E. K. Rand’s phrase) 13 as he begs to witness its presence, describing it in a manner strongly reminiscent of Augustine’s experience of the divine mystery: Who can understand this mystery or explain it to others? What is that light whose gentle beams now and again strikes through to my heart, causing me to shudder in awe yet firing me with their warmth? I shudder to feel how different I am from it: yet in so far as I am like it, I am aglow with its fire. It is the light of Wisdom, Wisdom itself, which at times shines upon me, parting my clouds. But when I weakly fall away from its light, those clouds envelop me again in the dense mantle of darkness which I bear for my punishment. For my strength ebbs away for very misery,14 so that I cannot sustain my blessings. (Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, 9. 260) Yet where Augustine believes in the ‘light of Wisdom’ as God’s love, Shelley has no such support. It is Augustine who falls away from the light, not the other way around, which is how ‘Hymn’ has it: the ‘dense mantle of darkness’ is punishment rather than the stuff of life. The Scrope Davies Notebook version of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ reveals Shelley’s controlled iconoclasm even more clearly than the more tempered Examiner version: 4 While yet a boy I sought for Ghosts, and sped Thro’ many a lonely chamber, vault and ruin And starlight wood, with fearful step pursuing Hopes of strange converse with the storied dead. I called on that false name with which our youth is fed; He heard me not—I saw them not— When musing deeply on the lot Of Life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that live to bring News of buds and blossoming— Sudden thy shadow fell on me, I shrieked and clasped my hands in extasy. (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, Scrope Davies Notebook, 5. 49-60)15 Judith Chernaik characterises lines 49-72 as ‘almost painfully authentic’;16 and this stanza reveals Shelley’s approach to the ‘Power’ as proceeding from personal experience rather than mere belief. Exchanging his childish longing for ‘strange converse with the storied dead’ for the moment of ecstatic communion with ‘thy shadow’, Shelley traces his approach, using autobiography as a means of intimating a personal devotion to and experience of ‘Intellectual Beauty’.
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