Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes Read Free Book Online Page A

relationship which the Poet’s dreaming ‘self-centred seclusion’ cruelly frustrates:
Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,
Her daily portion, from her father’s tent,
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole
From duties and repose to tend his steps: —
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love: — and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned. 28
    The main peculiarity of this portrait is the completely slavish function Shelley assigns to the girl, an inarticulate servant to the Poet’s vagaries. Later he was to write consistently and powerfully that the sexual relationship could only be satisfactory when the woman was herself completely liberated from social and intellectual servitude.
    The second portrait, of the dancing girl, is clearly related to that of the Arab maiden, whom the Poet had left to continue his journeying through ‘Arabie, And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’. She is in fact the same girl, but conjured up in dream and gradually and subtly distorted into an object of exclusively sexual desire. The dream ends in what are clearly the sensations andmotions of orgasm, and the Poet’s detumescent feelings of waste and emptiness on waking immediately afterwards are brilliantly evoked. The description may well suggest why in his prose writings Shelley had consistently shied away from pursuing some of the more intimate dream-tracks into the caverns of his mind. The passage is the most sustained and successful piece of work in the poem, depending notably on radiating images of light and music, and powerfully active, driving verbs.
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought . . . .
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire: wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while,
Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.
Roused by the shock he started from his trance —
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. 29
    Considered together, these two passages represent a considerable intellectual and artistic advance. Shelley had indeed managed to penetrate far upstream in his own mind, and