Shelley: The Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page A

in England and later in Italy. In a notebook of September, he made a number of haphazard jottings, attempting to define something which he tentatively called ‘the science of mind’. In one of these fragments, taking up an idea he had first mentioned several years ago in a letter to Godwin, of 1812, he wrote:
If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears — all that they dare not, or that daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards — like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and daresnot look behind. . . . If it were possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed — if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience — if the passage from sensation to reflection — from a state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult. 11 [2]
    In this thoughtful mood he returned with the rest of the party to the village of Lechlade, where they put up for two nights at the secluded little inn. Mary began to write up a diary of the trip, and Shelley, wandering alone through the little churchyard during the evening began to draft his second poem of the year. The calm, reflective tone and pace of the opening stanzas are full of echoes of Gray, and other eighteenth-century churchyard verses. Only the supple freedom with which the iambic pentameter line is shaped and run over, and the faintly disturbing literalness with which the personifications of Evening, Silence and Twilight are used — as if they really were gigantic, floating figures like something out of a medieval pageant — suggest that ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, was not written fifty years before.
The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere
Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
In duskier braids about the languid eyes of Day:
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
They breathe their spells towards the departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
Responding to the charm with its own mystery.
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
    In the last two stanzas the pulse of the verse quickens, and Shelley’s familiar concern with the abnormal state of acute perception, the potential force of terror hovering at the margins of thought, makes itself felt. The overt ‘softening’of these forces, and the faintly ironic dismissal of the experience as an ‘inquiring child’s’ game, though beautiful and tantalizing, reflects the unusual warmth and security which the company of Mary, Peacock and Charles brought to him during this expedition. It is perhaps the most relaxed and harmonious poem he ever wrote.
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:
And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,
And mingling with the still night and mute sky
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
And terrorless as this serenest night:
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep. 12
    They set off down-river next morning at 6, and had