"I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven--and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth,-- And then I changed my pipings,-- Singing how down the vale of Menalus I pursued a maiden and clasp'd a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in these sad 'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is one poem-- perhaps his greatest poem--which may suggest the answer. In the 'Sensitive Plant' (1820) a garden is first described on which are lavished all his powers of weaving an imaginary landscape out of flowers and light and odour. All the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except the Sensitive Plant,"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful."Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this Eden." "A Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended the flowers from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died!" The last part of the poem, a pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corruption and decay when the power of good has vanished and the power of evil is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow,"And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that hadsmelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When winter had gone and spring came back The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels."Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we may console ourselves by believing that"In this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never passed away: 'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs which endure No light, being themselves obscure."The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with his philosophical ideas. It is the creed of the student of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging is the one spirit which interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty and delight," and this spirit--the vision which Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'--is what is always suggested by his poetry at its highest moments. The suggestion, in its fulness, is of course ineffable; only in the case of Shelley some approach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped in philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of an unsatisfied and disappointed soul.
