Shelley here compares himself to Actæon, whom the sight of Nature's naked loveliness drove distracted. It is plain that the strength of his strong will was required to keep this man with the fragile, delicate body from positive destruction by the visions and apparitions of his imagination. He often felt as if they were more than his brain could bear; and when he then, an exile in a foreign land, sought alleviation in solitude, he experienced such impressions of nature as that which is preserved in the entrancing Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, stanzas which contain the very essence of Shelley's poetry. He does not describe the landscape. He never does describe. It is not the outward forms and colours of things which he shows us, but that to which he is extraordinarily alive, what we have called their spirit and soul.
One or two touches, and the Bay is before us:—
"The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright;
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might."
The waves break upon the shore "like light dissolved, in star-showers thrown. "The lightning of the noontide ocean is flashing, and a tone arises from its measured motion. "How sweet," cries the poet, "did any heart now share in my emotion!"
"Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around;
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned;
Nor fame nor power nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;—
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,—
Till death like sleep might steal on me;
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan.
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not, and yet regret;
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet."
The man over whose dying brain cruel waves were so soon to close, feels, with a gentle mournfulness, his being dissolve into the beneficent elements of nature, and compares his last breath to that of the beautiful southern summer day. He did not, like Byron, love nature only in its agitated, wild moments; simple of heart himself, he loved its simplicity, its holy calm.
But this is not his most characteristic feature. Himself of the race of Titans and giants, he loves the Titanic and gigantic beauty of nature—his manner of doing so again differing entirely from Byron's. It is not the tangible, easily accessible poetry of nature, that of the flowers of the field or the trees of the forest, which inspires him at his highest. No! the finest inspirations of his great spirit are received from the grand and the distant, from the forceful motions of the sea and the air and the dance of the spheres in the firmament of heaven. In this familiarity with the great phenomena and the great vicissitudes of nature Shelley resembles Byron, but he resembles him as a fair genius resembles a dark, as Ariel resembles Lucifer the Son of the Morning.
The poetry of the sea was to Byron the poetry of shipwreck, of the raging hurricane, of the insatiable cry of the waves for prey; to him the poetry of the sky lay in the howling of the storm, the roaring of the thunder, the crackle of the lightning. It is nature as the annihilator that he lives with and glories in. The famous passage in the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, beginning: "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!" is a jubilant record of the sea's exploits in sweeping argosies from its surface and sinking empires into its depths. It boasts that nothing longer-lived than a bubble tells where man has gone down. The passage is like a prelude to the magnificent Deluge scene which is entitled Heaven and Earth, and which is a glorification of the lust of annihilation.[3]
After such verse read Shelley's famous poem, The Cloud. In it we hear all the elementary forces of nature playing and jesting, with the gaiety of giants, benevolent giants, who joy in pouring bounteous gifts upon the earth. What freshness in the lines:
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsty flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams."