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.
CHAPTER XVI
EDGAR ALLAN POE
I
Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from the point of view of psychoanalysis. He has been analysed by pathologists and psychologists, but there remains much to be said about the work of this baffling genius. I can take up only a few phases of the pathetic life and great work of Poe.