Alastor

 

Before analysing Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude, we have to take into account that the year 1815, was difficult for Shelley. In January his grandfather dies and in February Mary’s first child born and dies after two weeks. Other poems from this period are noticeably inward-looking and gloomy, perhaps a reflection of ill health and a sense of failure which had begun to afflict Shelley during the year. In addition, the death of Mary’s first child was the first in a series of tragic family incidents, the suicide of the abandoned Harriet following in 1816. During his second marriage, Shelley was continually attracted to other women, and his relationship with Mary was increasingly dislocated by the early deaths of a number of their other children.

  • Analysis

At first sight, Alastor seems the stereotypical ‘Romantic’ poem, epitomising many conventional elements from writing of time. Its central character is a solitary, the Poet, who has a visionary ideals and communes with Nature. Shelley critiqued of William Wordsworth for betraying his youthful commitments to social revolution by retiring into Nature and his own ego, as well as becoming political conservative. Despite Shelley’s admiration for Wordsworth, Shelley could not accept the older poet’s view of nature as a moral guide, and his own poetry from Alastor onwards offers a critique of Wordsworth philosophy.

The poem opens with a narrator who sees himself as a passive ‘lyre’ or wind harp, a Romantic image made famous by Coleridge’s poem ‘The Eolian Harp’. This ‘wise passiveness’, to quote Wordsworth’s famous phrase from Expostulation and Reply’, seems to be distinguished from the Poet’s frantic pursuit of visions; but the narrator’s acknowledgement of ‘earth, ocean, air’ as ‘beloved brotherhood’ suggests that he too might be suffering from the same self-absorbed condition as the poet, and indeed the very same image of the wind harp returns at the end to describe the dying poet himself. His story begins from line 50 and his alienated solitude is stressed from the outset [There was a Poet whose untimely tomb/ No human hands with pious reverence reared…]. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications at variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards infinite objects, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened. He images to himself the Being. Conversant with speculations of the sublimes and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful which the poet, now Shelley could depicture. We do not have to forget that Shelley wrote in an age that felt a new appreciation for the sublime in the natural world and where people became fascinated by nature’s power.

There was a poet whose untimely tomb

No human hands with pious reverence reared,

But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds

Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid

Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:-

A lovely youth,- no mouring maiden decked

With weeping flowers, or votice cypress wreath,

The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:-

(50-57)

… He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

(60)

© D.F. Macrae, Alasdir. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Selected Poetry and Prose


The solitary Poet becomes a Wanderer, undertaking a journey through suitably sublime and Gothic landscapes which mirror his own psychological state as he seeks his ideal love only to find death. He pursues the most obscure part of nature in search of «strange truths in undiscovered lands«, journeying to the Caucasus Mountains, Persia, «Arabie», Cashmire, and «the wild Carmanian waste».

© http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastor,_or_The_Spirit_of_Solitude

When early youth had past, he left

His cold fireside and alienated home

To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands

(75-77)

Obedient to high thoughts, has visited

The awful ruins of the days of old:

Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste

Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers

Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids…

… Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills

Conceals. Among the mined temples there,

Stupendous columns and wild images.

(107-117)

© D.F. Macrae, Alasdir. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Selected Poetry and Prose


Not only in Alastor, but also in other poems such as Mont Blanc, Shelley focuses in long passages on the nature alone, apart from humanity. Here again, we find the isolation that Shelley overcomes. The Poet addressed in his poem, who searches the strange truths in undiscovered lands, is nothing more than himself. His expulsion from Oxford led him an inexcusable confusion in his social life.

But far from endorsing his obsession for nature, Shelley’s poem interrogates the clichés of the period and reveals their dangers. As in Keats The Fall of Hyperion, the function of the poet himself is scrutinised. In Alastor, Shelley also shows the dangers of being a dreamer and of idealistic self-absorption, asserting the need for poetry and the poet connect to the world. This element of ‘instruction’ in the poem is outlined in the Preface, where Shelley indicates that the Poet’s ‘self-centered seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion’. The Poet’s problem is his over-intense idealism, awakened by the ‘Power’ of Nature. And here again, the concept of Nature.

© Woodcock, Bruce. The selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley

We do not have to forget that Nature meant many things to the Romantics. It was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably–nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language–the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as «organic,» rather than as a system of «mechanical» laws. Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an «organic» image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing «sensuous nuance»–and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry.

© http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html

But as the Preface also indicates, those ‘meaner spirits’ who ignore such aspirations are in some senses worse, being ‘morally dead’. Both suffer from different forms of selfishness and anti-social individualism. The need for social connection is asserted as paramount since those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives’. It is possible that this attack of the Poet has some connection with Shelley’s critique of William Wordsworth.

On the other hand, there is a passage in the poem which is overtly sexual, and its autoeroticism indicates Shelley’s view of the Poet as self-indulgent and self-obsessed. The post- coital aftermath of the Poet’s dream disrupts his earlier communion with Nature and replaces it with a sense of the world as barren, this being implicitly the revenge of ‘the spirit of sweet human love’ who sent the Arab maiden who was ‘spurned’. But instead of turning to the actual Arab maiden for real love, the Poet chooses to seek the girl in the vision.

There came, a dream of hopes that never yet

Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid

Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.

Her voice was like the voice of his own soul

Heard in the calm of thought; its music long

(150-154)

The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.

The beating of her heart was heard to fill

The pauses of her music, and her breath

Tumultuously accorded with those fits

Of intermitted song.

(168- 172)

Similarly, the Poet lapses into becoming the victim of his own egocentric delusions as he turns into a Gothic Wanderer and outcast in ways which anticipate aspects of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The descriptions of the Poet’s journey begin now to mirror his psychological and emotional state even more explicitly. He finds a small boat in which he travels through tumultuous ocean storm into a cavern, and finally he enters the serene isolation of a sepulchral landscape, the intense description of which brings to mind the surreal sublimity of Shelley’s German contemporary painter, Caspar David Friederich.

© Woodcock, Bruce. The selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley