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2. My guess is Shelley himself hadn't worked it out. He had a mood and an amazing metaphor; the poem he was unfolding from these may be to some extent its own workshop table. There are a million little half-smashed hopes crawling away from the central set piece, for example: Rousseau has lit a thousand soul-torches (but...), Bacon's science continues to tame nature (yet...), the stars within the cone of night shine on (still...), the eagle of opportunity may fly the right one up to the high place (when though), Petrarch's scheme involved not just one Triumph (however...), the fountains, lawns and caves are steps away. For a poem that sends so many to the pistol shop, Triumph is as riddled with chances for salvation as Gene Wolfe's New Sun series was with forms of time travel. And the light symbolism is, well, brilliant--but half-baked. Is the sun God is the sun to blame is God to blame is the sun the glare is the glare the car is the glare the Shape is the Shape the shape is the shape the sun is Life the glare is Life life is life the sun is nature the sun is nature Life et cetera better-a bing. Out of focus, all of it, and not schematically. Shelley was yes a skeptic but of the sort who keeps alive two, maybe three possibilities in a given breath. A dozen is no good for art, and we are dealing with a dozen here, not de Man's zero-cum-infinity. The dozen may, though, represent Shelley's personal repertory pretty well. His despair voice from one of his lyric modes joins up with various images and procedures from essays and "up" and "down" narrative poems. Quite a mix. We may be seeing Shelley plain. Or hopelessly distorted, of course.

(no subject)

3. Assuming he'd have changed the poem to finish and publish it, in one sense we have not the fragment before us but, for once, the non-fragment. We do get those questions, time and again. Some, though, are answered...the movie/model train table/mixed metaphor that is the poem may as a whole be answering all of them. But the accent of personal crisis and crossroads does seem present, and centered in the questions. Just prior to what should have been midway through the voyage of his life, Shelley sees a vision of last things that is blurry and unfinished. Or perhaps the last things themselves are blurry and unfinished.

But this isn't how one gives up. You give up like Wordsworth, by taking a slightly different line (quickly becoming much different) and pretending it's the same. Or like Blake, by deferring whatever didn't work and waving the confused away. Noise or silence. Or you find some Jesus or other. You don't repeat horrible, eloquent what-ifs at yourself all day. Frankly, I don't even think that counts as a dark season of the soul. The worse you let yourself grill yourself the better planted your feet must be. Maybe not in specific hopes, but in hope; or maybe not in hope, but in something. An ideology-cum-aesthetic. A project. A personality, in Wilde's sense.

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4. Poetry is polytheism, Bloom's saying now, and one remembers a few of his '70s pieces where Shelley and the main American poets are identified as Orphic. Love, death, power, fate, maybe one or two other things, are celebrated, defied, compared, confronted, escaped from, merged with and that's a poem. Shelley has special classes on the roof of this School because he actually collapses them together, by twos or alls. Think of the Ode, of Adonais' conclusion, of the boat journeys in Alastor and Prometheus. Explosion, but "achieved dearth of meaning". Pinning his foot to the ground to master everything that can be done through personal gesture, had Shelley closed off all other possibilities for himself? I don't really see Keats getting farther, frankly; and Browning, Yeats etc. in running all over space and time so seldom get somewhere new. But what's relevant: was Shelley himself in a cul-de-sac?

Was Shakespeare, for that matter. Instantly I think "no". But why no? Drama? Escape through Aeschylus' second voice (or was that third)? Shelley and Rousseau are as different as Dante and Virgil: a real but controlled difference. Uncontrolled difference has to come from somewhere though. Observation, I suppose, whatever that reduces to.

Polytheism. The forms of life. The sexes, the stages, the junctures, the starts and stops and changes exchanging glances. Engine Summer and Little, Big. But even there, things taper to something Shelleyan. In Hamlet things taper to something Shelleyan. Ulysses doesn't but knows to not, knows too to keep flirting with that no-return point. There is a happy foot that wiggles its toes in mirrors, has no care for what moves it about or why, and lives forever. Then there's that other foot that takes the step, climbs the stair. Novelty, hierarchy, possibility, impossibility. Definition as movement, as the only movement. Bedtime.

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The day the blind foot fell and found no ground.

And odds and ends were sought to serve for eyes.