¹ As we are dealing with allegory may not these lines refer to travels of the spirit? The poet finds himself an alien in the work-a-day world, even in his own family; it is his function to “seek strange truths in undiscovered lands” (though not, as a rule, by travelling thither), to penetrate the mysteries of nature, and to study the records of past civilizations. As an actual journey his travels are none too convincing.

² 366–9 “I have beheld the path of thy departure” may mean, “I have discovered the path by which you left me” i.e. the path that leads to you. “He overleaps the bounds” (207) is a troublesome passage which I interpret as, “He overleaps in thought the bounds which separate him from his love.”

³ “Memoirs of Shelley” in Peacock's Works, London, 1875, iii, 423.

⁴ Two obscure passages later on may also be exceptions. The first occurs where the poet, leaving the shallop in which he had sought death, longed to deck his hair with flowers,

I do not see what this impulse which had not yet “performed its ministry” can be unless it is the “restless impulse” which “urged him to ... meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste” (304–5). If so, the passage may mean that he yearned to enjoy life but the fiend of solitude, Alastor, gripped him again, the impulse to seek death still hung upon him. That he still wished death is clear from lines 429–30 (“He sought... his sepulchre”), and that he was led to it by an evil spirit is apparently the meaning of lines 590–601 which speak of a “voice”

of its beauty, that is, led him to leave his body there. The voice seems to be that of Ruin, for in the address to Death a few lines below we read,

Since the spirit of solitude lures the poet to his destruction, it might well be named “Ruin.”

⁵ These difficulties vanish if one accepts the simple, alluring theory, which seems as if it ought to be the right one, that, as the poem is an allegory to which the preface is supposed to furnish the key, the wanderings of the solitary subsequent to his dream symbolize his seeking the ideal woman he has imagined. But he wanders as much before the dream as after it and it is only in dreams and in death that he seeks the veiled maid; he does not travel in order to find her, in fact he is not trying to find anything that earth affords—a flower, for example, which might well symbolize the woman he has imagined. And how is the attempted suicide, the means by which he expects to achieve his goal, to be fitted into the allegory? Yet, in spite of these difficulties, it may be that Shelley had some such idea in mind but failed to work it out.

Another allegory which may have been vaguely part of his intended meaning is that the solitary should exemplify the danger of neglecting the real world through too intense and exclusive a devotion to the ideal, represented by the dream maid. But it is an ideal human being that, according to the preface, the poet imagines, one who, among other excellences, satisfies the requisitions of “the functions of j sense.” And in the interpretation of the allegory we are told that, far from neglecting reality, he “seeks ... for a prototype of his conception.” A passage near the end of the preface is emphatic on this point: “Those who attempt to exist without human sympathy ... perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities [i.e. after community of sympathy], when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt.” Then, too, the solitary would hardly be described as “self-centered” if he were to typify a true idealist. But, what seems fatal to this interpretation, the veiled maid of the poem is too human to represent The Ideal, and a physical consummation of the poet's love for her is at least suggested. Certainly the physical is prominent in his recollection of her: “limbs, and breath, and being intertwined” (208). “That beautiful shape” (211).

⁶ 479–92. The dots within the lines fourth and fifth from the end do not indicate omissions but are in the original.

⁷ Queen Mab, note to vii. 13; Alastor, 45, 18.

⁸ “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.–Confess. St. August.” Since in the poem the vision of the veiled maid was unexpected, “a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek” (149–51), the motto may have been added to remind us that the dream is an allegory of the wanderer's yearning (in part unconscious) for an ideal mate.

⁹ Lyric poets and those usually characterized as “romantic” are apt to be indifferent to architectonics and to give too little thought to the structure of their own works. This deficiency is in part responsible for “that sense of disappointment which mingles with our admiration of the long poems” of the early nineteenth century to which Professor Bradley has called attention (“The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth,” Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 182). But Shelley manifested the same weakness in his life; he was unable to subordinate immediate interests and desires to larger and more remote ends; he failed to realize that an act, however well-meant or noble in itself, might seriously interfere with the effectiveness of his life as a whole. This is shown in his marrying Harriet in order to rescue her from tyranny and unhappiness and in his extravagant, unwise, though often unselfish, handling of money. Similarly he was slow in curbing the magnanimity that overflowed, to the detriment of his poems, in beautiful but irrelevant passages, in worthy but extraneous purposes.

¹⁰ On Nov. 20, 1811, he wrote Miss Hitchener: “My soul is bursting. Ideas, millions of ideas, are crowding into it.”

¹¹ Dowden's Life of Shelley, 1886, ii. 120.

¹² Percy Bysshe Shelley, an Introduction to the Study of Character, Psychological Monographs, (Princeton, N. J. and Lancaster, Pa.), XXXI, no. 2, 1922, pp. 16–17. See also note 21 below.

¹³ Original reading of line 52 of the “Dedication” to The Revolt of Islam (Dowden, i. 416).

¹⁴ Shelley's letters of Feb. 21, 1816, to Godwin, and of Aug. 15–16, 1821 to Mary.

¹⁵ I should be tempted to regard this the major impulse towards the writing of the poem if there were evidence that Shelley at any time felt himself lacking in human sympathy and if he had not frequently asserted and demonstrated his love for his fellows.

¹⁶ “The Retrospect: Cwm Elan, 1812,” 9–14, 25–31. Shelley wrote to Godwin, Jan. 28, 1812 that when he first knew Harriet he was “isolated and friendless.”

¹⁷ Dowden, i. 346. The stranger in The Coliseum, who is much like Shelley, is “forever alone.”

¹⁸ Mrs. Shelley's note on Alastor.

¹⁹ Both are noted the same day, August 30, 1814, in Mrs. Shelley's journal (Dowden, i. 457).

²⁰ Ibid. 451–2. Some of the details that Mrs. Shelley notes and some that her sister records on the same day, August 18 (ibid. 452 n.), recall Alaslor, 543–61 and make it somewhat more probable that the entire setting of the last scene in the poem was suggested by memories of this day.

²¹ Dowden, i. 454. Doubtless it is merely a coincidence that the Assassins belong to the same race as the maid who brings food to the solitary—they are Arabs.

²² This part of the poem probably owes something to the invocation and early chapters of Volney's Ruins. The geography of Alastor is surprisingly free from confusion and inconsistency, so much so that Shelley must, it would seem, have traced his hero's wanderings on a map. Locock, in his edition of Shelley's Poems (London, 1911, i. 539), mentions Beljame's plausible suggestion that they are based on the expeditions of Alexander the Great,—in which Shelley may have become interested through his reading of Plutarch.

²³ On June 6, 1811 he was eager to begin a “polemical correspondence” with Elizabeth Hitchener to whom he later wrote, “It delights me to discuss and be sceptical” (Dowden, i. 330) and again, “whenever I held the arguments, which I do everywhere” (Dec. 10, 1811; the italics are Shelley's). To Godwin he declared (Jan. 16, 1812), “I have known no tutor or adviser ... from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust ... into whatever company I go I have introduced my own sentiments.” Those who are not inclined to accept Shelley's assertion, “I go on till I am stopped and I am never stopped,” should consider his elopement with Mary (and her sister), a trip of some eight hundred miles undertaken with scarcely any funds.

²⁴ Letter to Peacock, Jan. 26, 1819. In his letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of June 6, 1811, he wrote, “My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,” and June 2, a year later, he exclaimed to her, “I have much to talk to you of. Innate Passions, God, Christianity, etc.”

²⁵ Letter to Godwin of Dec. 11, 1817.

²⁶ That is, apart from his childhood. He was wretched at school and in the period immediately preceding his first marriage. And though he was happy throughout most of his life with Harriet, he wrote to Mary when separated from her and harassed by debt, “I am mournful and dejected now, but it is exquisite pleasure that I feel compared with the happiest moments of former times” (Oct. 24, 1814).

²⁷ Dowden, i. 383. Locock, however, thinks with Beljame that Shelley has in mind “The Zodiac of the temple of Denderah in Upper Egypt, alluded to in Volney's Les Ruines” (Poems, i. 539).