Read Shelley: The Pursuit for Free Online Page B

story is that of Narcissus and Echo. The youth, ‘the Poet’, goes in search of an ideal vision of beauty, which leads him eventually to his death. It is a rite de passage . On the way he is helped by an Arab girl who falls in love with him, but is ignored; at night he dreams intensely erotic visions of a girl who can satisfy him; but unable to bring the dream and the fleshly reality together, he embarks on a wild and hopeless boat trip up the river, through fantastic landscapes and caverns, seeking the visionary beauty. Both pursuer and pursued, he is tortured by unattainable desires, grows ill and old, passes into more and more grotesque and macabre landscapes, and finally finds himself gazing at his own image in a pool.
                                         His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. 22
    All these settings, Shelley stresses from the outset, are mental landscapes, which reflect directly the spiritual state of the protagonist. There is now nothing left for him but to pursue the course of the river, which is itself a journey further inwards. ‘O stream!’ says the Poet,
Whose source is inaccessibly profound,
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. 23
    The river takes him into an utterly barren land of rocks and precipices, and, on the edge of one of these, overlooking a night landscape of jagged hills and stars, he lies down in exhaustion and dies, incapable of further emotion or feeling.
Sad mother, you bore him in vain!
I am angry at the gods.
Sister Graces, why did you let him go
Guiltless, out of his native land,
Out of his father’s house?
                             Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling: — his last sight
Was the great moon, which o’er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended . . . . 24
    The final verse paragraph of the poem stands as a coda, an elegy regretting the death of the Poet and the passing of his special vision of the world, with further Shelleyan references to dreams, alchemy and God — ‘profuse of poisons’.
    Shelley is careful, both in the preface and the verse prologue, to distinguish himself from the Poet. Yet it is clear that the value of the poem to him was the degree to which it allowed him to extend the investigations into his own psychology further than he had managed in prose. In his preface, he draws a clear judgement against the experience of the Poet, condemning it as limited and destructive. In this, he was attempting to come to terms with and reject tendencies which he had found in his past life. ‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin.’ But the text of the poem does not underwrite this judgement, especially in its coda, and there is evidence of some sense of contradiction in Shelley’s own mind. The references to the furies of solitude, the pursuing fiends of his earlier poems, remain consistent. In one passage he writes,
                             At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. 25
    And in another, just as the Poet prepares to embark on the river from which he can never return,
Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.
There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight
Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind. 26
    The preface also draws the wider conclusion, already set out in the essay ‘On Love’,