There is so much in Shelley’s poetry which shows him in these typical preliminary stages which precede illumination, that I will only refer to the Ode to the West Wind—a poem in which the intensity of passion, the despair with this life, and the overwhelming yearning for identification with nature, which are typical of the mystic, find such poignant expression.
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
* * * * *
Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
At the age of twenty-three Shelley wrote the poem Alastor. This poem is important to us, in that it forms a record of the early spiritual adventures of the poet, at a time when he pursued the half-revealed images of Truth and Beauty, which tempted him, and yet eluded his grasp. The “argument” of the poem is, in fact, the essence of Shelley’s own inner history. Alastor, a young poet, having seen, in half-revealing visions, glimpses of the Ideal, sets out on his quest for a mortal “prototype of his conception.”
“His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself.” Now I have previously shown that Shelley set out on a similar quest, and have explained how inevitable was its failure. The poet instinctively recognised this as a fact, for he makes Alastor, “blasted by his disappointment, descend to an untimely grave.”
Alastor shows clearly that, even in 1815, Shelley had turned to inward meditation and mystical reverie, and had cultivated his imaginative faculty.
By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured.
He wrestled with his visions and
ever gazed
And gazed till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of Time.
And in another passage he says:
While daylight held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul.