The Triumph of Life
The Triumph of Life
In many ways Shelley is the most difficult of the Romantic poets. Blake also wrote long difficult works of personal mythology, is apocalyptic in sensibility and can be read as a weird sort of Platonist. Both poets are capable of sustained surreal and grotesque imagery and both were exercised by the similar manias. But Blake comes from the world of working class London and his education is far less formal than Shelley’s, and far more eccentric. For all that Blake is also the more systematic thinker. Blake built a system, by necessity, and he employed bold poetic outlines as he did pictorial ones. Reading Shelley I always feel like I’m reading a poet who is taking a stab afresh with each poem at probing the abyss or at naming the unnameable. Blake is paradoxical but absolutely certain of reality. Shelley is riven with doubt, and every time he raids the inarticulate it is his own skepticism he runs up against. He goes till he can go no longer, propelled by an impulse towards the All that takes him so far that he nearly dies. His absolute can be different things though, as the occasion demands. It might be political liberty, or it might be a woman. Another difference with Blake is the mellifluous music of Shelley’s rhymes and the sensuous feel of his line, as well as the counter current in some poems of a pile-up of stressed syllables. “An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king…†Blake is archaic and rough, as well as bold. His Old Testament roots take you back to the 17th Century, to Bunyan as well as Milton, but his revival of the fourteener goes deeper into the 16th century, and eventually merges
with an English biblical tradition, which the English invented for themselves and which gives the illusion of an English antiquity. Part of that is the myth of Joseph of Arimathea bringing the Holy Grail to England after the crucifixion, or of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel landing there, or of the Irish Bardic tradition, which dates itself to a diaspora following the fall of the Tower of Babel. Shelley, under the same influences of Milton and Spenser, is more Greek, to Blake’s Hebrew. That said, The Triumph of Life is more in the biblical strain than his other works. He refers to the Charioteer at one point as having four faces, which suggests to me Ezekial’s Chariot.
I have not read all of Shelley’s poems, not even all of his best work, so my view of him is necessarily partial. Yet I have loved few works of poetry more than Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion or Adonais. And then there is that magnificent late work, The Triumph of Life. This was a different sort of poem for Shelley, one in which he turns from Milton to Dante, and signals thereby the future shift of the Modernists. Eliot and Pound may not have liked him, but Browning, Yeats, Stevens and Crane are unimaginable without him.
The Triumph of Life is a dream vision written in terza rima. In it Shelley sees a procession of the dead, led by a figure in a chariot. His guide is Rousseau. He never finished the poem, it ends in mid-line. I will only quote from the beginning, because that is all I have time to transcribe. I begin the quote after the starting matter, when Shelley falls into a swevene or swoon, as with other dream visions, Piers Plowman, The Temple of Glas, The House of Fame, The Divine Comedy, The Four Zoas, etc, when “…a vision on my brain was rolled.â€
As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream:
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, yet so
Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer’s bier–
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared and some
Seeking the object of another’s fear,
And others with steps towards the tomb
Pored on thee trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death…
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.
But more, with motions of each other crossed,
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw
Of birds within the noonday ether lost,
Upon that path where flowers never grew;
And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst
Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells forever burst,
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths, and wood lawns interspersed
With overarching elms and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old…
And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day—
And a cold glare, intenser than the noon
But icy cold, obscured the blinding light
The sun as he the stars. Like the young moon
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might
Doth, as a herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of her dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant’s chair,–
So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendor, and a Shape
So sate within as one whom years deform
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,
And o’er what seemed the head, a cloud like crape
Was bent, a dun and faint etherial gloom
Tempering the light, upon the chariot’s beam
A Janus-visaged shadow did assume
The guidance of that wonder winged team.
The shapes which drew it in thick lightnings
Were lost: I heard alone on the air’s soft stream
The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that charioteer
Had their eyes banded…little profit bring
Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quenched the Sun,
Or that these banded eyes could pierce the sphere
Of all that is, or has been, or will be done.
So ill was the car guided, but it passed
With solemn speed majestically on…
The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw like clouds upon the thunder-blast
The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around; such seemed the jubilee
As when to meet some conqueror’s advance
Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate-house and prison and theatre,
When Freedom left those who upon the free
Had bound a yoke which soon they stopped to bear.
Nor wanted here the true similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where’er
The chariot rolled a captive multitude
Was driven; all those who had grown old in power
Or misery, all who have their age subdued,
By action or by suffering, and whose hour
Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,
So that the trunk survived by fruit and flower;
All those whose fame or infamy must grow
Till that great winter lay the form and name
Of their green earth with them forever low;
All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touched the living world with living flame
Fled back like eagle to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one
Were there; for they of Athens and Jerusalem
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen,
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them
Or fled before…Now swift, fierce and obscene
The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green,
Outspeed the chariot without repose
Mixed with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music…Wilder as it grows,
They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure
Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming heair,
And in their dance round her who dims the Sun
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now
Bending within each other’s atmosphere
Kindle invisibly; and as they glow,
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to their bright destruction come and go,
Till—like two clouds into one vale impelled
That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle
And die in rain, the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps…ere the shock ceases to tingle
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolations single,
Yet ere I can say where, the chariot hath
Passed over them; nor other trace I find
But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath
Is spent upon the shore.
