(no subject)

This made makes alteration in the land
Found perspective frames and deepens skies
The ground it walks upon your rooted feet
The world crams through the funnels of your eyes
You know that with you it will be complete
You enter with a piece closed in your hand

Lose choice and each step kicks you all frames fall
Skies shallow and curl up and blow away
Hair creatures whisper past your ear of harm
Lands interlap gone waters sing dismay
Your piece you find is lost inside your arm
The homes El Greco up and off the wall

How many more before no more a one
A someone pacing out their somehow rounds
Walks into you and in reunconfounds
The something spilling full unrebegun

(no subject)

I read Epipsychidion the other night, for the fourth or fifth time. It's one of the several Shelley poems where, while reading it, you (I) feel it's his best, that how can it not be his best. This one had always frightened me some with its intensity and difficulty. This last time round there was no difficulty at all, in fact it's so clear I'm rather amazed I ever had trouble. I'm not sure what to make of that. Is it because I've fully experienced romantic love? Or am close to the age at which he wrote it? More likely it's that it was my fourth or fifth time, and that by now I've read enough poetry that the mysteries and opacities are largely gone, the use and precedents of every movement are recognized.

Shelley as a whole has come together for me, too, I think. Early on if you asked me what a given poem had been about, one I'd just read even, I'd have been able to convey little but high sentiment and the spinning glare of excited love. Well, that overstates. Probably I understood even the difficult work just fine. Rereadings just let you remember complex ideas a bit better, keep the shape of the poem through the loveglare a bit more firmly, a bit longer. The price I suppose is risking fixing its meaning in a corner of itself, losing the youth values of weaker preconception.

Shelley rewrites a few key passages from Queen Mab on, and Epipsychidion's comparative disconnectedness probably comes from his revisiting these sources one by one, a power-building impatient of narrative and connection. The Womanlight passage, very strong here, is even stronger in his last poem, The Triumph of Life, and the concluding apocalypse lacks the jaw-dropping drive through and beyond of Adonais', or of the Ode to the West Wind, but a few others reach their culmination in Shelley (and anyone) here. I'm especially fond of the Paradise sequence leading up to the liebestod ("A ship is floating in the harbor now" etc., ll. 407-end), earlier presented beautifully in the Euganaean Hills poem and Prometheus Unbound.

Incidentally, the Ode to the West Wind should be read as an "end" to get its full force. Read a book, any book, or a newspaper or watch a movie, or have a conversation or take a walk, then read the Ode as its conclusion. Taken by itself with no running start it's a little bewildering and excessive.