Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822
Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly
Turneresque; and there is much in "Prometheus Unbound" to justify this
opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows
are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated
from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of
many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.
Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.
The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and
beyond it. "I seek," he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation
of something beyond the present and tangible object." For him, as for
the poet described by one of the spirit voices in "Prometheus", the bees
in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,--
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom,
more perfectly before us than that picture does? (Forman, volume 2 page
181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the
little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act? (Forman, volume 2
page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have illustrated
this drama. He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the
trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and
the charioted Hour. Prometheus, too, with his "flowing limbs," has just
Blake's fault of impersonation--the touch of unreality in that painter's
Adam.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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