Shelley’s poetry is justly regarded as abstract. There are various reasons which contribute to the abstractness of his poetry. In the first place, he is sometimes concerned less with the world as it is than with the world as he would have it. In Prometheus Unbound, for example, he is the architect of a universe idealised by love, in which accident disappears, incongruous and conflicting elements vanish, and all is harmony. Man is not, indeed, exempt from “chance, and death, and mutability”, but he rules them like slaves (Act III, scene iv, lines 200-201). They are subjugated to the pattern of the whole.
Shelley’s poetic thought is very elusive. This elusiveness is reflected in the disagreement which is to be found among many of his commentators. He is variously regarded as a necessitarian with a thin layer of superficial Platonism, a Platonist of the inner circle, a neo-Platonist, and so on.
Shelley seeks truth in poetry but it is a poetic truth which he pursues, by means of the creative imagination.
The truth toward which his poetry from first to last aspires is a shifting, tantalising, elusive thing which he is always striving to catch and clothe in words. The characteristic imagery of Shelley seeks through vitally metaphorical and creative language to grasp and express an unseen and unattainable truth. Feeling the inadequacy of language to produce the precise effect at which he is aiming, he nevertheless persists in continuing his effort. He cannot tell, as he would wish, exactly what manner of creature the skylark is :
What thou art, we know not,
What is most like thee?
But by creative imagery he gives us an approximation of his conception of the skylark. The skylark is a poet hidden in the light of thought, a high-born maiden in a palace tower, a glowworm golden, and so on.
The skylark itself, a symbol of perfection and truth, is significantly unseen and remote. We have here a combination of the abstract and the concrete. The similes given by the poet are concrete, but each of them is emblematic of the remoteness and the invisibility of the skylark. The poet is hidden in the light of thought; the maiden is secluded in a tower, symbol of withdrawal from actuality; the glow-worm scatters unbeholden its aerial hue ; the rose is embowered within its own green leaves.
This concrete-abstract dualism is also present elsewhere in Shelley’s poetry. The secret being of the West Wind cannot be penetrated because it is an “unseen presence.” In the visible world the West Wind is objectified by the leaves, the seeds, the clouds, and the waters upon which it acts. To the First Spirit in the ”Ode to Heaven’ Heaven is the boundless space above, a ‘palace-roof of cloudless nights,’ a ‘paradise of golden lights,’ a physical void which is more than physical because it is eternal and transcends reality. The Second Spirit conceives of Heaven as “the mind’s first chamber”, giving only a faint notion of the ‘world of new delights’ stretching out to the infinite capacity of the human mind.
This confidence in human potentialities is abruptly rejected by the Third Spirit according to whom Heaven is embodied and symbolised in ‘a globe of dew,’ a flower, insofar as it can be grasped by the human intellect. Essentially, however, it cannot be known at all.
In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the poet speaks of “the awful shadow of some unseen Power.” The images through which Shelley tries to define the quality of Beauty themselves embody the unseen. Beauty is “like summer winds that creep from flower.” This Beauty is “like moon-beams that behind some piny mountain shower.” This Beauty becomes visible only through its effects upon perceptible objects: “like hues and harmonies of evening, like clouds in starlight widely spread.” In the Ode to Heaven, Shelley throws out a number of imaginal suggestions which are voiced by three Spirits of diverse opinions. Shelley compares the dead leaves fleeing at the ‘approach of the West Wind to “ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”. Here is an example of an ‘inverse simile.’ The leaves are concrete enough but they have been compared to ghosts which are abstract.
Shelley in his poetry tries continually to express. by images an absolute truth or beauty beyond the scope of imagery. In Prometheus Unbound. Demogorgon, the symbol of the Absolute, is a “mighty darkness”, without limb, form, or outline, and his answers to the questions of Asia and Panthea are shadowy, ambiguous, and inconclusive. Demogorgon’s’ answer to Asia’s question “Whom called thou God ?” shows Shelley’s difficulty:
If the abyss
Could vomit forth its secrets -but a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless.
Thus Shelley is abstract because his poetry continually climbs toward abstraction on the steps of concrete imagery. He is abstract also because mind is as real to him as matter, and because in his poetry mind and matter are not fused as they are, for example, in Keats.
Shelley is also abstract in his conscious and consistent use of symbolism. Of all the elements of his poetic style this perhaps, is the most essential. He makes a recurring use of certain images and words, such as the veil, the lyre, the stream, the boat, the cloud, the serpent, the scorpion, poison, and the moon Other symbolic images in his poetry are the chariot, the sea-river-cave-journeys, kings, priests, and judges.
Shelley’s abstractness is also linked with what may be called his ethereality. There is much in his poetry that seems to be written by a man living, not on earth, but in the aerial regions above.
The manner in which the upward flight to the skylark is described serves as an example of this. The whole of the second stanza of the Ode to the West Wind has this ethereal quality. The West Wind, we are told in this stanza, carries on its surface loose clouds which, seem to have fallen from the sky just as withered leaves fall from the branches of trees in autumn:
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean…
The imagery in these and the lines that follow is abstract and ethereal. The Cloud is wholly an ethereal poem dealing with the cloud, lightning, thunder, sunrise, sunset, the moon, the stars, the rainbow, etc. No human interest whatever attaches to this poem. It is because of this ethereality that Matthew Arnold referred to Shelley as an “ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” n
