Part 6 (1/2)
But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to satisfy man's yearning after immortality. Therefore in the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais pa.s.ses into the company of the ill.u.s.trious dead who, like him, were untimely slain:--
The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not: Like stars to their appointed height they climb, And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there, And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought And as he fell and as he lived and loved, Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:-- Oblivion as they rose, shrank like a thing reproved.
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark, But whose transmitted effluence cannot die So long as fire outlives the parent spark, Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
”Thou art become as one of us,” they cry; ”It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an Heaven of song.
a.s.sume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!”
From the more universal and philosophical aspects of his theme, the poet once more turns to the special subject that had stirred him. Adonais lies dead; and those who mourn him, must seek his grave. He has escaped: to follow him is to die; and where should we learn to dote on death unterrified, if not in Rome? In this way the description of Keats's resting-place beneath the pyramid of Cestius, which was also destined to be Sh.e.l.ley's own, is introduced:--
Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth, Fond wretch! and show thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light Beyond all worlds, until its s.p.a.cious might Satiate the void circ.u.mference: then shrink Even to a point within our day and night; And keep thy heart light, let it make thee sink When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre, Oh, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend,--they borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey; And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time's decay, And of the past are all that cannot pa.s.s away.
Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness, Pa.s.s, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the gra.s.s is spread;
And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a h.o.a.ry brand; And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death, Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned Its charge to each; and if the seal is set, Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
Yet again the thought of Death as the deliverer, the revealer, and the mystagogue, through whom the soul of man is reunited to the spirit of the universe, returns; and on this solemn note the poem closes. The symphony of exultation which had greeted the pa.s.sage of Adonais into the eternal world, is here subdued to a graver key, as befits the mood of one whom mystery and mourning still oppress on earth. Yet even in the somewhat less than jubilant conclusion we feel that highest of all Sh.e.l.ley's qualities--the liberation of incalculable energies, the emanc.i.p.ation and expansion of a force within the soul, victorious over circ.u.mstance, exhilarated and elevated by contact with such hopes as make a feebler spirit tremble:
The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s; Heaven's light for ever s.h.i.+nes, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak.
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year, And man and woman; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near: 'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither!
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
That light whose smile kindles the Universe, That beauty in which all things work and move, That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven Far from the sh.o.r.e, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The ma.s.sy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
It will be seen that whatever Sh.e.l.ley may from time to time have said about the immortality of the soul, he was no materialist, and no believer in the extinction of the spiritual element by death. Yet he was too wise to dogmatize upon a problem which by its very nature admits of no solution in this world. ”I hope,” he said, ”but my hopes are not unmixed with fear for what will befall this inestimable spirit when we appear to die.” On another occasion he told Trelawny: ”I am content to see no farther into futurity than Plato and Bacon. My mind is tranquil; I have no fears and some hopes. In our present gross material state our faculties are clouded; when Death removes our clay coverings, the mystery will be solved.” How constantly the thought of death as the revealer was present to his mind, may be gathered from an incident related by Trelawny. They were bathing in the Arno, when Sh.e.l.ley, who could not swim, plunged into deep water, and ”lay stretched out at the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself.” Trelawny fished him out, and when he had taken breath, he said: ”I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty sh.e.l.l. Death is the veil which those who live call life; they sleep, and it is lifted.” Yet being pressed by his friend, he refused to acknowledge a formal and precise belief in the imperishability of the human soul. ”We know nothing; we have no evidence; we cannot express our inmost thoughts. They are incomprehensible even to ourselves.” The clear insight into the conditions of the question conveyed by the last sentence is very characteristic of Sh.e.l.ley. It makes us regret the non-completion of his essay on a _Future Life_, which would certainly have stated the problem with rare lucidity and candour, and would have illuminated the abyss of doubt with a sense of spiritual realities not often found in combination with wise suspension of judgment. What he clung to amid all perplexities, was the absolute and indestructible existence of the universal as perceived by us in love, beauty, and delight. Though the destiny of the personal self be obscure, these things cannot fail. The conclusion of the _Sensitive Plant_ might be cited as conveying the quintessence of his hope upon this most intangible of riddles.
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat, Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.
I dare not guess; but 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.