Shelley: The Pursuit (134 page)

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

To cold oblivion, though it is in the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

Who travel to their home among the dead

By the broad highway of the world, and so

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

The dreariest and the longest journey go.
⁵⁵

The parts of the poem which formed the courtly love-hymn to Emilia were to some extent an embarrassment, and even a contradiction to the more strictly autobiographical sections. He was promising eternal courtly love in a poem which actually celebrated free love. Shelley therefore resorted to a series of four ‘Advertisements’, which were designed to make the whole situation of the poem — even its author — appear completely fictitious. He himself was only to appear as the ‘editor’ of another man’s poem. The first of these prefaces which he rejected, after some consideration, ran:

The following Poem was found amongst other papers in the Portfolio of a young Englishman with whom the Editor had contracted an intimacy at Florence, brief indeed, but sufficiently long to render the Catastrophe by which
it terminated one of the most painful events of his life. . . . He had framed to himself certain opinions, founded no doubt upon the truth of things, but built up to a Babel height; they fell by their own weight, & the thoughts that were his architects, became unintelligible one to the other, as men upon whom confusion of tongues has fallen. . . . The melancholy charge of consigning the body of my poor friend to the grave, was committed to me by his desolated family.
⁵⁶

This seemed to be along the right lines, but Shelley decided to increase the realism of the ‘young Englishman’s’ situation, and thereby make the fictitious occasion of his death appear more authentic and more closely related to the actual ‘invitation’ to Emilia. In this he hoped to distance himself as the ‘Editor’ even further from his text. In fact he inadvertently did the reverse, and this second preface is perhaps the most revealing of all about the triangular relationship between Shelley, Emilia and Mary, and reverts to his Eastern expedition:

The following Poem was found in the PF of a young Englishman, who died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. . . . He was accompanied by a lady supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed so [singular —
deleted
] excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman — At his death this suspicion was confirmed; [
blank
] object speedily found a refuge both from the taunts of the brute multitude, and from the [
blank
] of her grief in the same grave that contained her lover. — He had bought one of the Sporades, & fitted up a Saracenic castle which accident had preserved in some repair with simple elegance, & it was his intention to dedicate the remainder of his life to undisturbed intercourse with his companions.
⁵⁷

Realizing that these references to his wife and ‘an effeminate looking youth’ revealed far more than they disguised, he interpolated instead, in his third draft preface, a comparison with the ideal literary character of the
Vita Nuova.
The fourth & final preface of ‘Advertisement’, which he included in the manuscript sent to Ollier, thus read:

The Writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades. . . . His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the
Vita Nuova
of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible. . . .
⁵⁸

The poem itself is headed by a suitably grave and forbidding translation of the last stanza of Dante’s first
canzone
in the
Convivio
;

My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few

Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning. . . .

This intricate web of precautions was further elaborated in Shelley’s covering letter to Ollier on 16 February, in which he insisted that the poem be published in strictest anonymity. ‘It is to be published simply for the esoteric few.’ Shelley suggested an edition of 100 copies. Why should Shelley have gone to such immense trouble to obscure the sources of his poem? Especially when he afterwards insisted that it really was a piece of pure literary convention, a piece of ‘philosophical idealism’ of no interest except to those initiated in Platonism or the fourteenth-century conventions of
fino amore
? The answer is simply that
Epipsychidion
is the most nakedly autobiographical poem he ever wrote.

The central section of the poem, lines 277 to 320, presenting Mary as the Moon (first ‘young and fair’, later chaste, cold ‘pale and waning’), refer to the story of the years 1814–15, together with the loss of Harriet, Ianthe and Charles, during the crisis of 1816–17. It ends with the terrible image drawn from the Mer de Glace:

The moving billows of my being fell

Into a death of ice, immovable; —

And then — what earthquakes made it gape and split,

The white Moon smiling all the while on it,

These words conceal. . . .
⁵⁹

At length, upon this frozen prospect ‘The Vision I had sought through grief and shame’ appears in her cosmological and courtly form, ‘Soft as an incarnation of the Sun’, which finally melts Shelley. The identification is explicit —

I knew it was the Vision veiled from me

So many years — that it was Emily.
⁶⁰

In a remarkable passage Shelley now described the triangular relationship he wanted with Emily and Mary, which is of course very far from Dante’s worshipful and singular relationship with Beatrice. The triple cosmological identifications are now, with transparent logic, Mary the Moon, Emily the Sun, Shelley the Earth. He also combined geophysical concepts of magnetic and gravitational fields affecting earth-tides and seasons, as used in Act IV of
Prometheus
, with the new ideas of Dr Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’ introduced to him by Medwin. The result is a spectacular ‘multiple image’ projection of the emotional and
psychological forces at work in the relationship. Shelley is, as ever, essentially passive:

Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth,

This world of love, this
me
; and into birth

Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart

Magnetic might into its central heart;

And lift its billows, and its mists, and guide

By everlasting laws, each wind and tide

To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave. . . .

And all their many-mingled influence blend,

If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end; —

So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway

Govern my sphere of being, night and day!

What Mary thought of her shared role as ‘bright regent’ — after the long, long struggle for
absentia Clariae
— may well be imagined. She did not mention the poem in her letters for many months, and then it was with a mixture of bitterness and relief at the outcome of the affair.
⁶¹
She called it ‘Shelley’s Italian Platonics’ and quoted a popular song about Cranbourne Lane. It is the one long poem of Shelley’s she did not choose to comment on in her edition of 1839.

But what of Claire? Was she lost finally from the Shelleyan solar system? On the contrary, Shelley found her a brilliant place, in the succeeding verse passage, which is one of the high points in the uneven flow of the improvisation. While retaining its courtly grandeur, its ‘ideal tinge’, the poetry when turned towards the dark handsome features of Claire takes on a certain wit — almost irony — in the reference to their volatile relationship, and to the Moon. Though it is painful, it is altogether more sprightly. If Emilia was Sun, and Mary was Moon, then with a flash of inspiration,
[4]
Claire was

Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce,

Who drew the heart of this frail Universe

Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion,

Alternating attraction and repulsion,

Thine went astray and that was rent in twain;

Oh, float into our azure heaven again!

Be there Love’s folding-star at thy return;

The living Sun will feed thee from its urn

Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn

In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn

Will worship thee with incense of calm breath

And lights and shadows; as the star of Death

And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild

Called Hope and Fear — upon the heart are piled

Their offerings, — of this sacrifice divine

A World shall be the altar.
⁶²

Writing in the autobiographical way that Shelley was, one can be certain that both Even and Morn have personal identifications — one might hazard little Percy Florence and Allegra. There would also be deep personal reasons for identifying Claire with the ‘star of Death and Birth’, and writing of a ‘sacrifice divine’. But this was something that perhaps Claire alone was ever intended to interpret. The description of their lively and intimate relationship of the heart, however, could not be more clearly summarized than in ‘Alternating attraction and repulsion, thine went astray and [mine] was rent in twain’. It is the openness that Shelley has found to say this which is really striking.

There is one other passage in the autobiographical sections of
Epipsychidion
which is of special interest. Judging by its position it appears to refer to an event at the very beginning of Shelley’s career, and certainly before he met Mary in 1814. It seems to refer to a first sexual experience, probably in the Oxford and Poland Street period of 1810–11. At any rate it was a horrific one, and the verse takes on that bright, grotesque sharpness one associates with the best passages of
The Revolt of Islam
:

There, — One, whose voice was venomed melody

Sate by a well, under blue nightshade bowers;

The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers,

Her touch was as electric poison, — flame

Out of her looks into my vitals came,

And from her living cheeks and bosom flew

A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew

Into the core of my green heart, and lay

Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown gray

O’er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime

With ruins of unseasonable time.
⁶³

The only person who claimed to interpret this passage with any authority was, surprisingly enough, Leigh Hunt’s eldest son Thornton, who had first known
Shelley at Hampstead. He stated that ‘accident has made me aware of facts’ — meaning presumably conversation at the Hunt household — which suggested that Shelley had had an unhappy sexual experience during his college life which caused him to contract a veneral disease. As Hunt puts it, ‘instead of the Florimen, he found her venal, hideous, and fatal
simulacrum
; and [Shelley] indicates even the material consequences to himself in his injured aspect and hair touched with grey’. At this time prematurely grey hair was regarded as an after-effect of some instances of venereal infection.
⁶⁴
Shelley was always markedly violent in his denunciation of prostitution and his horror of infectious and ‘hideous diseases’; though Hunt makes no specific reference to a prostitute. If what Hunt says had any basis in fact, one might reasonably expect other references to the incident in Shelley’s work.
Queen Mab
of course contains much general discussion of the issues, but there is a passage in Canto VI of
The Revolt of Islam
which seems to be dealing with the same incident. Certainly the odd placing reference to the ‘well’ recurs, and also similar images of ‘blue nightshade’ and infectious poison. The two stanzas occur at the moment when Laon has left Cythna in her mountain stronghold, and ridden secretly back into the City which is in the grip of famine and plague:

Beside the fountain in the market-place