In their essence these experiences of ecstasy are condensed into one phrase by St. John of the Cross:
“On this road, to have our faculties in darkness is to see the light.”
It would seem, then, that Shelley had, at the end of his life, arrived very near to the final stage of mystical illumination, in which the soul seems united to the infinite spirit of the universe, and whereby the mystery of life is solved. Yet he never actually achieved this final state; for his untimely death occurred before The Triumph of Life was completed. What he had achieved, however, was sufficiently remarkable for so young a man; and it may well explain his extraordinary indifference as to whether he lived or died.
The Triumph of Life ends with the query “Then what is Life?” and the reader guesses that Shelley’s vision broke off even as suddenly as the poem breaks, and that no answer was vouchsafed him. But the poet had himself already attempted to answer the same question.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
It always appears to the mystic as if the Eternal Spirit limited and hindered Itself by dwelling in this world of form and substance; and Shelley expresses this idea rather strikingly by his image of many-coloured glass, filtering and delimiting the various partial aspects of the pure spirit.
The Triumph of Life, and to some extent also Prometheus Unbound, point in the direction of mystical prophecy rather than of pure poetry, and I am entirely of Professor Dowden’s opinion “that The Triumph of Life may have been but the starting-point for a new and higher development of the writer’s genius.”[25] The incompleteness of the poem, and its lack of any final and comprehensive solution of the mystery of existence, signify little. Nor should we expect that Shelley, at the age of twenty-nine, could have experienced anything more than a partial fore-taste of illumination. We have to bear in mind the fact that as a general rule such illumination usually occurs when the subject is past thirty; whereas Shelley never reached that age. William Blake was thirty-three when he commenced his series of Prophetic Books with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; previous to this turning-point in his career his mystical utterances and experiences had hardly been more pronounced than those of Shelley.
I have previously contrasted Blake with Shelley in respect of the polarity of their sexual natures. But, apart from this important difference, the two poets had much in common. Both were highly sensitive and passionate natures, revolutionary pioneers of freedom, and champions of a new morality—especially in sex matters. In both men there was a strong desire for solitude and for companionship with nature, and also an ardent yearning for communion with some more spiritual universe. Both had, even in boyhood, a marked tendency to experience visions, which are commonly described as hallucinations. Blake studied the Bible, Swedenborg, and Boehme intensively; while Shelley, with all his varied reading and rationalistic proclivities, yet showed a strong predilection for mystical and occult writers.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
In later years he grew out of the more childish fancies of occultism, and turned to a more subtle mysticism. Yet, curiously enough, during the very last year of his life he seems, for the first time, to have actually undergone experiences which were occult rather than mystical. I refer to the strange apparitions which he saw shortly before his death. One of these is thus recorded in Mrs. Shelley’s Memorials (Chapter 12).