that satisfactory love can only be found within the context of a human community of responsible relationships. ‘Among those who attempt to existwithout human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt.’ Yet again, this conclusion is not explicitly drawn within the text of the poem.
Something of this contradiction made itself felt in Shelley’s inability to find a name for the work. Finally, he allowed Peacock to read it, and asked his opinion. Peacock’s choice, with its careful derivation, shows how well he understood Shelley’s difficulties, and also passes an implicit comment on Shelley’s character. ‘He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude”. The Greek word αλαστωρ is an evil genius, κακδáιμωυ though the sense of the two words is somewhat different, as in . . . Aeschylus. The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed “Alastor” to be the name of the hero of the poem.’ 27 The distinction between ‘daimon’, the classical concept of the supernatural spirit either benevolent or neutral towards man, and the ‘kaka-daimon’, the specifically evil and pursuing spirit, was to become important to Shelley in his own increasingly sophisticated catalogue of wraiths and fiends.
Poetically, the main advance of the poem was the flexibility of the verse, and Shelley’s new-found ability to suggest scenes and landscapes which corresponded to mental atmospheres he wanted to define. Besides these gains, the advance in constructive skill is not very great, and the language suffers from lack of density and directive power. Although much of the description is distinctly overwrought, with that curious suggestion of the Baroque, which in his finest work is tightened to a much wirier, plainer line, there are places where his scenarios presage the direct simplicity of his mature style. Yet Milton’s epic drone is still overpoweringly loud.
At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight.
But Shelley got closest to what he was after, and achieved his most sustained passage in the contrasting descriptions of the Arab maiden of reality and thevisionary dancing girl of the erotic dream. Here he stated clearly the main dilemma of the poem, the choice between sexual reality and sexual fantasy.
Alastor in this sense is a presentation of adolescent sexuality. The poem itself is purely an exploration of such a state but, when taken within the context of the preface, the prose fragments ‘On the Science of Mind’, and the essays ‘On Life’ and ‘On Love’, it is clear that Shelley was intending to present it as a critique of such a ‘situation of the human mind’. However the terms of this critique, and the form in which such a wider community of human sympathies might be reached, do not appear in the poem. His ambiguous attitude to sexual narcissism also appears in the terminology of the essay ‘On Love’, where the object of love yet remains merely the ‘anti-type’ of that ideal self or ‘prototype’ to be discovered within the lover’s own heart. The beloved remains, in other words, an ideal projection of the self, which by definition must be unchanging, self-sufficient and therefore ultimately sterile. The terms of this contradiction are set out with surprising frankness in the picture of the two girls. The first, the Arab maiden, represents what one may call domestic sexuality, a genuine human