Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape. This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.” Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot die,” is the cloud’s boast: For after the rain, when with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. Shelley, too, could create these beautiful and unsubstantial shapes from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis. The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy: I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the dædal Earth, And of Heaven--and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth-- And then I changed my pipings-- Singing how down the vale of Menalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings. Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction--a dissatisfaction that many people feel when reading his poetry--with a life that is too full of mirages and metamorphoses. I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung: Poets are on this cold earth, As chameleons might be, Hidden from their early birth In a cave beneath the sea. Where light is, chameleons change! Where love is not, poets do: Fame is love disguised: if few Find either, never think it strange That poets range. For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis. This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent--the gift by which the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place--but Shelley had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”: So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning’s fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail.