Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning by Sandy Mark;

Author:Sandy, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6‘A Grief Too Sad for Song’: Shelley's Elegiac Voice and Poetic Voyages

DOI: 10.4324/9781315607009-7

Wordsworth's inescapable poetic presence and Byron's celebrity and commercial success provided both a source of vexation and a spur to Shelley's reflections on his own posthumous reception. Often these meditations on posterity centred on his angst-ridden hopes and fears about the legacy that would be associated with ‘the incantation of this verse’ whose ‘dead thoughts’, if Shelley's supplications were answered, might be driven ‘over the universe’ (‘Ode to the West Wind’, 63–4).1 These aspirations and anxieties are central to many of Shelley's poems: shaped around, and through, a dynamic of desires and imaginative possibility which often dramatically founder on a darker realisation of loss, grief, disappointment, and remorse.2 Remorse and insatiate desire are closely aligned for Shelley with the imaginative allure of the inexpressibility of, as he writes in an early poem, ‘a grief too sad for song’.3 Potential moments of poetic vision and transformation are haunted by an awareness of loss and grief that return us from the possibilities of transcendence and revelation to a confrontation with the limitations of poetry and our own contingent existences.

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1 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from SPP.

2 One of Shelley's defining qualities and bequests to T.S. Eliot, as Michael O'Neill perceptively observes, is ‘a sense of remorse’ (p. 75). See O'Neill, ASA.

3 P.B. Shelley, Shelley: Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and corr. Geoffrey Matthews (New York; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971), ‘A Dirge’, 2, 673. Hereafter SCPW.

These uncertainties about the power of poetry are often staged as a feigned falling away of the aspirant imagination. This characteristic feature of Shelley's self-conscious poetry is voiced through a complex and recurring image of the limits of existence and the existence of others as a nocturnal, treacherous, barely navigable, sea voyage. In an early meditative lyric ‘On Death’, for instance, Shelley charges the human ‘soul’ with ‘courage’ to voyage ‘Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way / And the billows of cloud that around thee roll’.4 W.B. Yeats's early twentieth-century reflections on ‘The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry’ recognise the recurrence of this sailing motif in Shelley's elegiac poetry. ‘The sea’, as W.H. Auden later formulated, seen from a ‘romantic attitude’ is ‘where the decisive events, the moments of eternal choice, of temptation, fall, and redemption occur.’5 Drawing on an imaginative composite of these treacherous voyages which the poetry frequently charts, Yeats observes of Shelley that:

A single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, … and that this one image … would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household, where the undying

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