Weatherland by Alexandra Harris

Author:Alexandra Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500773178
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2015-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Shelley’s meteorological writing is always concerned in some way with a fantasized escape from the constraints of a human body and skull-encased mind, and from the singleness of a face and name. ‘So much for self’, he wrote to his friend Leigh Hunt, asking that a poem be published anonymously: ‘self, that burr which will stick to one. I can’t get it off yet’.9 He shook off the burr in 1820 by transforming himself into a cloud – not just wandering like it, but becoming it. In ‘The Cloud’ he speaks from the sky, before letting himself descend as rain into ‘ocean and shores’. ‘I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers’, he begins, joining that long line of English poets who start with rain, but going so far this time as to be the rain itself. As Shelley shows us round his cloud-body, looking up to the ‘towers’ of his ‘skiey bowers’, up through his ‘tent’s thin roof’, and down to his ‘fleece-like floor’, it is hard to believe he had seen nothing like the modern photographs taken by research scientists inside cloud systems.10

Shelley’s dissolution of self was also a magnificently expansive replication of the self. He wanted to be a cloud, but he also wanted all clouds to be him. With his usual overreaching aspiration, Shelley flirted with becoming a version of that most powerful cloud-like being, the Holy Spirit. Shelley’s cloud has wings suggestive of an angelic or spiritual presence. By the third stanza the invocation of Genesis and Paradise Lost is explicit: ‘With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, / As still as a brooding dove’. The cloud-as-dove rests, perhaps, with folded wings, after the work of insemination described by Milton in those breathtaking lines addressed to a Spirit which was present before Creation itself:

Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss

And mad’st it pregnant.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.