Shelley: The Pursuit (107 page)

. . . I slept . . .

Within dim bowers of green and purple moss,

Our young Ione’s soft and milky arms

Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair . . . .
²⁶

Panthea needs to rouse Asia, as she had roused Prometheus, with remembrance of their separated love. She does this in another extraordinary passage where Asia is reminded of Prometheus’s emotional and sexual potency by seeing one of
Panthea’s dreams
of Prometheus mirrored in the ‘dark, far, measureless Orb within orb’, of Panthea’s eyes. Here Panthea is made both a kind of messenger and a spiritual medium. Her memory of Prometheus’s love-making is one of Shelley’s finest presentations of the dream-orgasm since the dancing maid of
Alastor
.

I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt

His presence flow and mingle through my blood

Till it became his life, and his grew mine,

And I was thus absorbed, until it passed.

And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,

Gathering again in drops upon the pines,

And tremulous as they, in the deep night

My being was condensed . . . .
²⁷

Panthea and Asia are now drawn from the Indian vale by the dream, which first becomes personified, (‘
Dream:
Follow! Follow!’) and finally transforms itself into a chorus of ever-changing Echoes, Spirits and Fauns. Through three rapid scenes, Panthea and Asia are led irresistibly towards the hidden, deep, volcanic layer of Demogorgon. The descriptions are drawn from Shelley’s visit to Vesuvius. As in Act I, the importance of this movement downwards, inwards, backwards, into the abysms of memory and the earth, is stressed. They are looking, as it were, into the seeds of time, the cauldron of the unformed world. At the beginning of Scene IV they arrive in the underground realm of Demogorgon, an adaption of Aeschylus’s Typhon, who represents the forces of Necessity, Change and Revolution, and where

rays of gloom

Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
²⁸

This is a reference to the infra-red and ultra-violet ends of the spectrum of radiation beyond the reach of human vision, which Shelley loosely understood as a form of ‘creative fire’, and it provides a clue to the nature of the ‘new fire’ which Prometheus will give to man in Shelley’s adaption of the myth.

Act II Scene IV is unquestionably the finest and most effortlessly sustained in the whole drama. It is 172 lines long, and consists mainly of an exchange between Asia and Demogorgon. It contains Asia’s marvellous monologue on the gifts which Prometheus gave to man according to the Aeschylean version of the story. All of the scene except the very end stays extremely close to the Aeschylean text, lines 435 to 525. Asia, the incarnation of Love, questions Demogorgon about the nature of power in the natural universe. Her questions finally narrow down to one: who is the author of evil within the universe? and is this author — she implies Jupiter, a Manichean, evil God — finally master or slave of his own creation? Demogorgon’s dismissal of the question, and Asia’s reply, is a celebrated philosophic crux of Shelley’s poem.

Asia
. Who is the master of the slave?

Demogorgon
.                 If the abysm

Could vomit forth its secrets . . . . But a voice

Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;

For what would it avail to bid thee gaze

On the revolving world? What to bid speak

Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these

All things are subject but eternal Love.

Asia
. So much I asked before, and my heart gave

The response thou hast given; and of such truths

Each to itself must be the oracle.
²⁹

Through Demogorgon, Shelley confirms his scepticism and denies absolute knowledge either in the religious or scientific sense; he believed that both science and religion were only images of the ‘imageless’ truth. Demogorgon’s reply nevertheless confirms the freedom of Asia herself, in as far as she represents or embodies the ‘eternal Love’ which is subject to nothing. The identification between Love and Freedom, though it stands in Act II as little more than a poetic formula, points towards the kind of liberated world which Shelley hoped to depict and celebrate in the third act. The whole dialogue between Asia and Demogorgon is recreated from the Aeschylean text with immense force and authority, and an urgency which moves far beyond the classical, mythic base. The terms of the debate are modern. Asia has all her sister Panthea’s warmth and ardour, but none of her softness or languor. She is Love militant, as she rapidly shows in the development of the argument.

Asia
. Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring

In rarest visitation, or the voice

Of one belovèd heard in youth alone,

Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim

The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,

And leaves this peopled earth a solitude

When it returns no more?

Demogorgon
.                                 Merciful God.

Asia
. And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,

Which from the links of the great chain of things,

To every thought within the mind of man

Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels

Under the load towards the pit of death;

Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;

And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech

Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;

And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

Demogorgon
.                                  He reigns.

Asia
. Utter his name: a world pining in pain

Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
³⁰

This is how Love can talk when Shelley required it. If Act II Scene IV is the centre and strong point of the drama, Asia’s Promethean speech is the masterpiece of the scene. One of the strangest comments on Shelley’s own creative process is the degree to which he had anticipated this speech, even before he had read Aeschylus, six years previously in the final canto of
Queen Mab
. The high, sinuous clarity of the verse, its almost perfect balance between intellectual abstraction and vividly localized images, and its immense energy concentrated in a silvery plainness of statement shows Shelley writing at the very height of his poetic powers.

And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man

First famine, and then toil, and then disease,

Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before,

Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove

With alternating shafts of frost and fire,

Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:

And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent,

And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle

Of unreal good, which levied mutual war,

So ruining the lair wherein they raged.

Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes

Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,

Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms,
[3]

That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings

The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind

The disunited tendrils of that vine

Which bears the wine of life, the human heart;

And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey,

Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath

The frown of man; and tortured to his will

Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,

And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms

Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the universe;

And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven,

Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind

Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song;

And music lifted up the listening spirit

Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,

Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound;

And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,

With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,

The human form, till marble grew divine;

And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see

Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.

He told the hidden power of herbs and springs,

And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep.

He taught the implicated orbits woven

Of the wide-wandering stars; and how the sun

Changes his lair, and by what secret spell

The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye

Gazes not on the interlunar sea:

He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs,

The tempest-wingèd chariots of the Ocean,

And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then

Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed

The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,

And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen.

Such, the alleviations of his state,

Prometheus gave to man, for which he hangs

Withering in destined pain . . . .
³¹

This great scene ends without the least diminution in poetic power. Asia’s questioning of Demogorgon and her celebration of Prometheus’s historic role, precipitate the moment of destiny for which the whole earth has been waiting. The volcanic fire of history begins to erupt. In a memorable image, Demogorgon shows the constant stream of the chariots of the Hours pouring up through the purple night, like sparks hurtling up a flue. One of these carries the grim
destiny of Jupiter; another the happy reunion of Asia and Prometheus. Both in their political aspect are revolutionary.

Shelley drew the picture of these chariots directly from the classical carving on the Arch of Constantine. By comparing it with his prose notes made in the Forum it is possible to see exactly the process of imaginative transformation. Shelley had first observed:

The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as it were born from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate.
³²