Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life stand as three of the finest writings of Shelley’s middle to late period, showcasing the breadth of his poetic range and the pinnacle of his achievement.1 Prometheus Unbound, written at intervals between August or September 1818 and mid‐1820, is a lyrical drama that espouses ‘beautiful idealisms’ (‘Preface to Prometheus Unbound’, 232) while remaining alert to the pain‐fraught challenges to the liberty finally celebrated in the work. Adonais, Shelley’s 1821 elegy for John Keats, stands as a monument to both his esteem for Keats and his continual scrutiny of the role of the poet and poetry, as he performs, questions, and challenges the generic rules of elegy. The Triumph of Life, begun in 1822, became, by reason of Shelley’s premature death, his final and incomplete poem. Its fragmentary status has not damaged its appeal to generations of critics, with many, including T. S. Eliot,2 judging it to be his masterpiece. The three works are united by their powerful engagement with the possibilities inherent in poetry, the intensity with which Shelley imbues language, and their swift‐winged imaginative movement.
Prometheus Unbound moves between poetry and drama; the subtitle, ‘A Lyrical Drama’, offers the reader an insight into Shelley’s imaginative scheme, a scheme which seeks to explore and exploit the possibilities of both genres. The emphasis on language over action after the first act shows Shelley deliberately shifting the plot from physical to mental action, yet the importance of Prometheus’ self‐overcoming in the first act reveals Shelley’s intellectual debt to Aeschylus, the Greek playwright whose Prometheus Bound offered the impetus for the lyrical drama. Drawing on a number of influences, from Aeschylus to Milton, Prometheus Unbound shows Shelley working out a distinctively Shelleyan brand of poetry. Prometheus begins the play mired in loathing for Jupiter, his nemesis. Renouncing his hatred, Prometheus is tormented by the Furies, but overcomes them through affirming his autonomy. In Act 2, Panthea, witness to Prometheus’ self‐liberation, tells Asia of events, and then Asia and Panthea visit Demogorgon, who, during their interview, pronounces that the hour of Prometheus’ freedom is upon them. In Act 3 Demogorgon, revealed as Jupiter’s son, overthrows Jupiter, dragging him into the abyss, and Prometheus affirms humanity’s new‐found freedom after being reunited with Asia. Act 4 is where Shelley creates ‘an ocean of splendour and harmony’ (4.134) as the poetry ascends into an exultation and analysis of love and the possibilities of the human mind.
As critics have frequently pointed out, Act 1 is the site of the main action and drive of the entire play, leaving the remaining three acts to develop as a result of the earlier psychodrama. The first act also includes some of the most impressive poetry of the entire lyrical drama, as Prometheus is forced to confront the Furies, Mercury, and the spectre of his former self. Despite the ‘emergence of creative possibility’ that closes the act,3 the mental suffering endured by Prometheus, and witnessed by Panthea and Ione, underscores Shelley’s clear‐eyed assessment of the challenges to self‐rule. Shelley’s psychological acuity comes to the fore as Prometheus fears for his autonomy in the face of the torments he faces:
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms,
What and who are ye? Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster‐teeming Hell
From the all‐miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate,
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy. (Prometheus Unbound 1.444–51)
Prometheus’ potential to mirror Jupiter appears as Prometheus is forced to see the terrible spectres that emanate from the mind of his oppressor, and this moment of weakness reminds the reader of his earlier resemblance to Jupiter at the opening of the lyrical drama. The fearful questioning, horrified description of the foul phantasms, and the terror of becoming inured and then complicit in such ugliness shows Shelley emphasize the level of torment and struggle attendant on achieving psychological freedom. Prometheus is forced to face the abject horror conjured by the Furies. Yet, despite the rhetorical strength of the Furies’ arguments, and the terrifying visions imposed on Prometheus, Prometheus cuts through their attempts to make words into unchangeable physical reality. Without physically battling the Furies, Prometheus banishes what Blake described as ‘mind‐forged manacles’ from his discourse.4 The poetry enacts the mental dexterity required of Prometheus as he extricates himself from Jupiter’s psychological prison.
Shelley never allows plot to overshadow language. Prometheus Unbound attains its dazzling quality through its many facets, the formal experiments attempted throughout the ‘composite order’ of his lyrical drama.5 Shelley does not simply subvert or resist formal fixity; rather, the poem ranges through a variety of forms, each form deliberately developing its own internal direction. The rhythmic and phonetic form of the poetry goes beyond mirroring the content of the lines. It is almost impossible to divide the semantic meaning from the formal construction of the poem. Asia’s ecstasy following Prometheus’ victory over himself showcases some of the finest poetry of Prometheus Unbound as Shelley explores the beauty of language and its ability to embody heightened emotional states:
It seems to float ever, forever,
Upon that many‐winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever‐spreading sound: (2.5.78–84)
Asia’s words embody the trance‐like tranquillity of her feeling, as she floats upon the ‘silver waves’ of her metaphor. The almost echoing quality of ‘float ever, for ever’ demonstrates without insisting upon the waves on which she is borne, while the feminine half‐rhyme of ‘ever’ and ‘river’ brings out the ‘seeming’ nature of Asia’s experience of eternity. Reaching the ecstatic affirmation of ‘a paradise of wildernesses’, Asia glories in the natural beauty of the ‘mountains, woods, abysses’, as the poetry luxuriates in the paradise it enacts. The reader is bound around in sound, as the music of the poem embodies its description of the ‘sea profound, of ever‐spreading sound’.
Prometheus Unbound closes with a far from uncritical affirmation of human potential, one that pivots on the importance of remaining vigilant against the forces that would again imprison the human spirit, even as it cautiously celebrates the achievement of Prometheus and mankind. Despite the judgement of William Butler Yeats, whose harshest criticism often reveals engagement with rather than censure of his predecessors, Prometheus Unbound does not witness Shelley setting out a simplistic formula for wish‐fulfilment.6 But Yeats’s emphasis on the ‘nightmare‐ridden’ quality of Prometheus Unbound suggests its complexity. Harold Bloom’s claim, ‘The uncritical millenarianism that critics have found in “Prometheus” is what they have brought to the poem themselves’,7 seems supported by the text’s insistence on the struggle that must be faced in order to create and then sustain the climactic change that it advocates. Prometheus must become ‘king over myself’ (1.492), just as humanity must be willing ‘Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent’ (4.575).
Adonais brings into sparkling poetic life Shelley’s concerns and confidence about poetry, his ideas on the afterlife, and shows him experiment with the boundaries of genre. Michael O’Neill writes, ‘What Shelley does assert, with desperate conviction, is that great poetry endures’,8 and, rather than assume such endurance, Shelley forces poetry to earn its claims of transcendence. Written in the Spenserian stanza, the elegy displays Shelley’s formal mastery as he, like Byron, wrests the challenging form to match his distinctive poetic voice. Moving from slowed stanzas, where the poet seems acted upon, ‘And others came … Desires and Adorations, / Wingèd Persuasions and veiled Destinies, / Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations / Of hopes and fears, and twilight Fantasies’ (Adonais 13.109–12), to the toweringly dramatic: ‘Alas! that all we loved of him should be, / But for our grief, as if it had not been, / And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! / Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene / The actors or spectators?’ (Adonais 21.181–5), Shelley’s poem runs the gamut of emotional intensity while retaining tight formal control.
Drawing attention to the constructedness of Adonais, Shelley describes it as a ‘highly wrought piece of art.’9 His admiration for the younger poet, which he referred to in terms of Keats’s potential to outstrip his own poetic power, added a tense dimension to his representation of Adonais / Keats.10 Arthur Bradley emphasizes the scale of Shelley’s artistic challenges in the work: ‘Shelley’s Adonais is both an attempt to monumentalise Keats’s loss and an attempt to resist or evade all monumentalising gestures’,11 and this is one of many vacillations between extremes housed in the poetry. Shadowing the death of the elegized poet is the continuing existence of the elegizing poet, whose creation of self‐portrait becomes fraught task equal to the struggle to commemorate Keats. The parade of ‘inadequate mourners’ offers scant consolation to the elegist,12 who is forced to face the limitations of poetic consolation, and strive to find effective strategies to memorialize the dead poet. The first seventeen of fifty‐five stanzas stand as desperate attempts to find comfort for the assembled mourners, ‘sobbing in their dismay’ (Adonais 14.126). After returning to the stark fact, ‘He will awake no more, oh, never more!’ (Adonais 22.190), Shelley turns to portraiture, painting Keats / Adonais as a weak, though beautiful child who courted his own destruction: ‘Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then / Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?’ (Adonais 27.239–40). Despite some censure for this presentation of Keats / Adonais,13 Shelley’s artistic ends were far greater than to denigrate a dead rival as Adonais gains imaginative strength from the fluctuation between admiration for Adonais’s power and sadness for his vulnerability. Though Kelvin Everest views Adonais as showing Shelley as figuring himself as inferior to Keats,14 it is the close identification between the two poets that lends the poem its sublimity. The self‐portrait created by the elegist comes close to twinning the elegist and the elegized through their weakness,15 though the former is distinguished by his status as ‘neglected and apart’ (Adonais 33.296) from his fellow mourners, who include Byron, Moore, and Hunt.
The final stanzas show Shelley taking artistic flight, wresting transcendence from the previously intractable agony of Keats’s / Adonais’s loss. Shifting gear in stanza 38, Adonais begins a swift ascent, the force of the elegist’s poetry seems to propel him forward, drawing him, almost against his will, into ‘the white radiance of Eternity’ (Adonais 52.463). This sense of Shelley as being compelled rather than choosing ecstatic surrender is encapsulated by the beginning of stanza 53, which suggests the urge to draw away from the intensity of his vision: ‘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!’ (Adonais 53.469–71). What had been the struggle to achieve transcendence darkens into terror of realizing just what that transcendence means for the still mortal poet. Shivering on the edge of transfiguration, the final stanza shows Shelley in the process of being drawn into the eternity which he had previously courted:
The breath whose might I have invoked 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 spherèd 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. (Adonais 55.487–95)
The elegy has transformed from an act of commemoration into a menacingly hypnotic spell which now threatens the very life of the elegist. The passive verbs proliferate as Shelley is propelled away from the markers of mortal life, and his fearful passage seems neither positive nor negative, but inevitable. Adonais, the dead and commemorated poet, now figures as a beacon, compelling Shelley forward into his final state. Leaving the reader with this chilling ending, Shelley’s elegy reveals how far he has explored and pushed the limits of the genre. What had offered consolation has, under Shelley’s masterful poetic manipulation, become dangerously ambiguous.
The Triumph of Life, with its fleet of foot terza rima stanzas and darkly ambiguous music, is Shelley’s final and unfinished fragment poem. Indebted to Petrarch, Dante, Milton, and Goethe, amongst others,16 the poem shows Shelley weaving together his influences alongside his individual preoccupations to form a poem that speaks with his own distinctive voice. Unfolding with dazzling intensity, the poem recounts ‘the tenour of my waking dream’ (Triumph of Life, 42) where the poet watches the ‘sad pageantry’ (176) of humanity, the ‘captive multitude’ (119) driven along by Life. Interviewing Rousseau, who is disfigured into ‘an old root which grew / To strange distortion out of the hillside’ (182–3), the poet attempts to discover the meaning of ‘this harsh world in which I wake to weep’ (334). The poem scrutinizes history, philosophy, and poetry itself to create a sombre and haunting vision that asks but never answers its final question, ‘“Then, what is Life?”’ (544). The critical approbation received by the poem has occasionally led to the sense that his final poem shows Shelley finally surrendering to a belief in the futility of life. Paul de Man’s sense that ‘“The Triumph of Life” can be said to reduce all of Shelley’s previous work to nought’ represents this strain of critical thought, but it understates the relationship between the poem and its predecessors.17 Like Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, The Triumph of Life admits a complex emotional range into its parameters. Bursting with aesthetic flare even as it grieves for the plight of ‘that deluded crew’ (184), The Triumph of Life is distinguished by its ability to embody ‘many sounds woven into one / Oblivious melody, confusing sense / Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun’ (340–2).
The image of these ‘gliding waves and shadows dun’ suggests the content as well as the behaviour of the poetry. Shelley capitalizes on the quick moving terza rima, using its evasive structure to court as well as defy the mind’s desire for meaning. Walking an uneasy line between unfettered pessimism and incautious optimism, the poetry deliberately refuses the solace of certainty. From the beginning of the poem, the speaker withholds from the reader ‘thoughts which must remain untold’ (21), and offers a vision which stubbornly refuses to define itself as ‘slumber’ (30) or truth. The central action of the poem, where Rousseau relates his encounter with the Shape all Light, is equally equivocal. Asking the Shape all Light, ‘Show whence I came, and where I am, and why— / Pass not away upon the passing stream’ (398–9), Rousseau pleads, with an affecting poignancy masquerading as assertiveness, for answers. Yet no answers come. Instead, Rousseau drinks the ‘bright Nepenthe’ (359) offered: ‘“I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand”’ (403–5). Despite the temptation to form a moral judgement of Rousseau, as Hugh Roberts amongst others has,18 Shelley carefully alerts the reader to the dangers of subscribing to a single view of events through the relentlessly shifting parameters of his poem. No single emotional state takes control of the poem as Shelley proliferates possibility throughout The Triumph of Life.
This artistic principle of mutability comes, paradoxically, to be the closest thing to constancy in the poem. Even as it seems that Shelley creates a single tone, the poetry undermines any overwhelming despair:
— … ‘Let them pass’,
I cried, ‘—the world and its mysterious doom
‘Is not so much more glorious than it was
That I desire to worship those who drew
New figures on its false and fragile glass (243–7)
Apparently chilling in their denunciation of ‘the world and its mysterious doom’, the lines swell with imperious self‐will, revealing assertiveness that glories in the strength of its own rhetorical power. The soaring lines emphasize the will of the speaker and the right of the individual to refuse worship to ‘those who drew / New figures on its false and fragile glass’. Immediately following this declaration of independence, Rousseau reminds the speaker of the connection between ‘those’ and himself, ‘“Figures ever new / Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may; / We have but thrown, as those before us threw, / “Our shadows on it as it passed away”’ (248–51), refusing the speaker’s nihilistic avowal.19 The Triumph of Life swithers away from any final statement of a single vision, carefully performing doubts, shifts, and uncertainties even as its poetic power shines through the lines. The three poems are united by their determined questioning of the power of the poet and their challenge to and affirmation of the potential of poetry.