Certain it is that, by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and Maddalo jestingly foretold the manner of his end."O ho! You talk as in years past," said Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); "If you can't swim, Beware of Providence." Did no unearthly dixisti sound in his ears as he wrote it? But a brief while, and Shelley, who could not swim, was weltering on the waters of Lerici.We know not how this may affect others, but over us it is a coincidence which has long tyrannised with an absorbing inveteracy of impression (strengthened rather than diminished by the contrast between the levity of the utterance and its fatal fulfilment)--thus to behold, heralding itself in warning mockery through the very lips of its predestined victim, the Doom upon whose breath his locks were lifting along the coasts of Campania.The death which he had prophesied came upon him, and Spezzia enrolled another name among the mournful Marcelli of our tongue; Venetian glasses which foamed and burst before the poisoned wine of life had risen to their brims.
Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.
Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe.The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing;it is the child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power.
He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children.The universe is his box of toys.He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars.He makes bright mischief with the moon.The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain.He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies.He runs wild over the fields of ether.He chases the rolling world.He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun.He stands in the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.
This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of Prometheus Unbound, for it made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet.
This childlike quality assimilated him to the childlike peoples among whom mythologies have their rise.Those Nature myths which, according to many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very basis of Shelley's poetry.The lark that is the gossip of heaven, the winds that pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad nostril, all the elemental spirits of Nature, take from his verse perpetual incarnation and reincarnation, pass in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms of his imagery.
Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of Nature.For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering:
they exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the poet should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid.To such following of Nature, Shelley felt no call.He saw in her not a picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own palaces.Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies.The materials for such visionary Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld."Don't you wish you had?" as Turner said.The one justification for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even more passionate, though perhaps less profound.Wordsworth's Nightingale and Stockdove sums up the contrast between the two, as though it had been written for such a purpose.Shelley is the "creature of ebullient heart," who Sings as if the god of wine Had helped him to a valentine.
Wordsworth's is the - Love with quiet blending, Slow to begin and never ending, the "serious faith and inward glee."But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and best apology.For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in images.The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of Shakespeare's are universal.It would have been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure.Suspended in the dripping well of his imagination the commonest object becomes encrusted with imagery.Herein again he deviates from the true Nature poet, the normal Wordsworth type of Nature poet: imagery was to him not a mere means of expression, not even a mere means of adornment; it was a delight for its own sake.
And herein we find the trail by which we would classify him.He belongs to a school of which not impossibly he may hardly have read a line--the Metaphysical School.To a large extent he IS what the Metaphysical School should have been.That school was a certain kind of poetry trying for a range.Shelley is the range found.
