Shelley [N.F. - Biography] by Richard Holmes

Shelley [N.F. - Biography] by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes [Holmes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Literature
ISBN: 1-59017-037-7
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 1980-01-28T02:00:00+00:00


At the last moment Laon himself is saved by Laone who appears on a giant black Tartarian horse, and sweeps him out of the butchery. As they ride into the mountains, in a characteristic image, the wind spreads and lashes her dark hair over Laon’s eyes.

She then reveals, what he had already guessed, that she is in fact Cythna. In the original draft, this meant his sister. Lying together on the mossy floor of an old ruin under ‘the eastern stars’ they console each other for the terrible political catastrophe by making love for the first time, ‘the solace of all sorrow’.

The five stanzas which follow are one of Shelley’s most direct attempts to describe the physical and mental sensations of love-making. Although his poetry generally is full of images and metaphors of kissing, caressing, penetration and orgasm it is rare for him to present the actions of lovers very explicitly; but here he does so. He writes with great deliberateness and tenderness. The synonymous physical meanings of words like ‘frame’, ‘heart’, ‘limb’ and ‘life’ are obvious from the context, so that the poetry is biologically explicit. But a sense of wonder, even of amazement, is pervasive. The ruins are first illuminated by the symbolic light of a ‘wandering Meteor’, hung ‘high in the green dome’ which presages a storm.

The Meteor showed the leaves on which we sate,

And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties

Of her soft hair, which bent with gathered weight

My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,

Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies

O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,

Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,

Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,

With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.



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