II
The Epipsychidion tells us of the poet's love adventures and gives us his beautiful dream of love. In Alastor he had depicted his longing for love; the poem was written in 1815 at the time he was living with Harriet Westbrook; it shows how lonely he felt and how he longed for love. In Epipsychidion, where he speaks of his lying "within a chaste, cold bed," he says that he had not the full measure of love from his second wife. Hence he took refuge in building a fanciful isle where he satisfies his love with Emilia Viviani. In this great poem Shelley gives us a glimpse into his polygamously inclined unconscious. He states his philosophy of free love in the poem. As physical desire was a strong factor in Keats's one solitary love, the trait most characteristic of Shelley was his polygamous instinct. This is present in the unconscious of the male, and society has tried to eradicate it by marriage. We all know that there has never been complete success in this direction. The instinct which is repressed bursts forth especially when the marriage has not been successful, or when the man does not love his wife in full measure, though as the world is aware it breaks out even in cases where he does love. Neither of Shelley's two marriages gave him the real love he sought. He wanted other women to live in his household. He invited Miss Titchener to live with him and Harriet Westbrook, and he had Jane Clairmont, his wife's half sister, who fell in love with him, live with them. He thought he would be happy with Miss Viviani, but was disillusioned with her soon, and then his polygamous instinct made Mrs. Jane Williams the object of his affections. Yet Shelley led a chaste, upright life and did not satisfy his instincts for polygamy; instead, he wrote poetry. He created fantasies because of his repressions, and gave us the beautiful day dream closing the Epipsychidion.
Mrs. Williams inspired some of the greatest lyrics in the language. The painful poem to her husband beginning with the words, "The serpent is shut out from paradise," tells how he flies because Mrs. Williams's looks stir griefs that should sleep and hopes that cannot die. The world owes to Shelley's attachment for Mrs. Williams such poems as, Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou, Spirit of Delight, One Word Is too Often Profaned, When the Lamp is Shattered, Oh, World! Oh, Hope! Oh, Time! Rough Wind, That Moanest Loud, With a Guitar, To Jane, To Jane—the Invitation, To Jane—the Recollection, Remembrance, Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici, and The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient. Here are a dozen poems that every lover of Shelley knows, yet they are the outpourings of the poet's love for another man's wife, written because he could not attain that love and satisfy his polygamous instincts. Had these instincts been satisfied, these beautiful poems would have been lost to the world.
We now come to two of his greatest odes, To the Wild West Wind and To the Skylark. Here, as in the case of Keats's two great odes, the critics have feared to trace the poems to a love repression on the part of the poet. In fact, most criticisms of the poems treat them as alien to the subject of love. And yet unconsciously Shelley is here voicing his longing for love and giving vent to his unconscious polygamous instinct. Mr. Gribble, in his Romantic Life of Shelley, surmises that the poet is really unconsciously expressing dissatisfaction with his married life. When Shelley wrote these poems he was still groping for love; he lived with his second wife, and as far as we know had no love affair. He had not yet fallen in love with either Miss Viviani or Mrs. Williams.
The Ode to the West Wind was written in the fall of 1819. The poet at the time was unhappy; a child of his had died, and his wife was suffering great depression. When the poet was complaining that he was falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, and speaking of the "autumnal tone" in his life, he was referring to the repression of his love life. He lived with Mary whom he did not love passionately. If he concludes his poem with the prayer that the wind drive his dead thoughts over the universe to quicken a new birth, he wants to profit by this in love. He unconsciously meant that if his ideas on free love should prevail, he would be able to take a new love without reproach and without suffering such misfortunes as he did when he deserted his first wife. He had been deprived of his children and was driven to exile from his native land a year and a half previously, March, 1818. It has been one of the ironies of Shelley's fate that the world has admired this West Wind ode greatly, and tabooed the most important idea Shelley wanted spread, that of free love. So if we read between the lines in this great ode pleading for the dissemination of his idea, we find the poet's unconscious stating he is unhappy and is longing for another love than that of his wife. He pleads for a satisfaction of his polygamous instincts. Should the reader think this conclusion untenable, I can reply that the facts we have of the poet's life give it unqualified support. Let us also remember that the fructifying wind was always a sex symbol.
It is the same with The Ode to the Skylark, written nearly a year later. He envies the bird its happiness. "Shadow of annoyance never came near thee," he says to it. "Thou lovest—but ne'er knew love's sad satiety." Here he betrays himself by a few words. He has had his satiety of love, and sad it was, without satisfying him. He doesn't love his present wife; he never cared deeply for his first wife; his first sweetheart rejected him; and he had been loved by girls he did not love. All these facts justify us in selecting the words, "love's sad satiety" and assigning them a definite meaning. Had we known nothing of the poet's biography we could not have spoken with such conviction. He sings "our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." His saddest thoughts have been those about the difficulties of finding love's ideal, and of loving another when pledged to some one else. Then we have the unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to be happy like the flying singing bird.
Psychoanalytic methods applied to Shelley reveal him then, in his love poems and in lyrics which were not supposed to deal with love, as a chaste man with polygamous inclinations and married to a woman he did not love passionately. There is a connection between this state of affairs and his interest in scattering liberal ideas. That he also mistook real love for platonic love may be seen by Epipsychidion and the poems to Mrs. Williams. Unconscious love elements were at the basis of other poems of his, like the Ode to Dejection.
Alastor, Julian and Maddalo and Epipsychidion of the longer poems, his dozen lyrics inspired by love for Mrs. Williams, and his two famous odes represent the personal Shelley from the love side, and are among the greatest poems in any language.
A few words should be said about Adonais, his great elegy on Keats. It is one of his personal poems, and among the best known lines are those describing himself, "who in another's fate wept his own." The critics who attacked the work of Keats, though they did not, as Shelley erroneously thought, drive Keats to death, were the very reviewers who attacked Shelley and his ideas. Even in this grand elegy Shelley was also bemoaning unconsciously his failure, and complaining that his ideas on free love, liberal religion and republicanism were attacked.