(no subject)

And in Adonais Shelley's funeral oration addresses fellow mourners, the Muse, Keats' killers, and finally one who dares to mourn in the face of Keats' transfiguration, a one turning out to be his own heart (imagine that!), to which he issues commands:

Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,

Fond wretch! and know 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 spacious might

Satiate the void circumference: then shrink

Even to a point within our day and night;

And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink

When hope has kindled hope, and lur'd thee to the brink.

[Dickinson! Dickinson! Dickinson!]

 

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 gather'd to the kings of thought

Who wag'd contention with their time's decay,

And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

 

Go thou to Rome--at once the Paradise,

The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shatter'd mountains rise,

And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress

The bones of Desolation's nakedness

Pass, 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 grass is spread;

 

And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time

Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;

And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,

Pavilioning the dust of him who plann'd

This refuge for his memory, doth stand

Like flame transform'd to marble; and beneath,

A field is spread, on which a newer band

Have pitch'd in Heaven's smile their camp of death,

Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguish'd breath.

 

Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet

To have outgrown the sorrow which consign'd

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?

 

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,

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 pass'd 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.

He commands his own quest, collapses into the us of his heart, and turns to first person singular present tense description as he commences/culminates his enterprise. Is there a more astounding verbal gear shift possible? He gives himself up to a wind within himself, and that wind has been the speaker of the poem up to here, or at any rate the speaker became the wind while speaking. The generic form of the poem falls away, even self-address falls away. A decision has been made and hence a revelation granted, the new world of the new perspective never quite attained until now. (Maybe most disturbingly, Shelley's telling his heart to do something he's already done. He has been to Rome, he has seen these things, he knows them--for him to go back is to remember. All of this is happening in an instant--what has already been proven is sufficient, gathered together, to make the final, rational leap. And it is the wind that whispers it. 1. The wind whispers; 2. the blessing beams, 3. the breath descends, 4. The bark is driven.) In the next-to-last stanza Shelley enters the poem as a person, as an indirect object; and in the last he is a passive subject (though borne by the force that seems to have arisen out of himself). The first word of the poem, I, returns, and not just as representative orator. I don't think it exists in any stanzas but the first and last.

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 invok'd in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy 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.

(no subject)

This Dickinson:

I saw no Way -- The Heavens were stitched --
I felt the Columns close --
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres -- [massy earth and sphered skies are riven]
I touched the Universe --

And back it slid -- and I alone --
A Speck upon a Ball --
Went out upon Circumference --
Beyond the Dip of Bell --

I discovered that there is no way forward. The sky was a cohesive material and not a route to freedom. Even the lesser routes to freedom started to be blocked off by the material limitations imposed by space and time. The sudden knowledge that no external escape is possible revolutionized my relation to the universe, as though the whole planet had been stood on end. I found I knew my place in it. It was like touching the real world for the first time.

But that world slid away, leaving me alone and worldless, except for this now so little ball-shaped world, next to which I was tinier still, so tiny as to seem a speck. And where was this ballbound speck now? It had rushed away from the true world to some distant point measuring out as far back as space can go, so far back that [words failing] the movement had perhaps left any realm of comparison with images of physical recession, such as that of the curve of a churchbell from near horizontal to near vertical [or could this be the dip of its curved motion as it's wrung?].