"
Although Shelley outgrew his youthful taste for horrors, his
early reading left traces on the imagery and diction of his
poetry. There is an unusual profusion in his vocabulary of such
words as ghosts, shades, charnel, tomb, torture, agony, etc., and
supernatural similes occur readily to his mind. In _Alastor_ he
compares himself to
"an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,"
and cries:
"O that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lonely world."
In the _Ode to the West Wind_ his memories of an older and finer
kind of romance suggested the fantastic comparison of the dead
leaves to
"ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"
and in _Prometheus Unbound_ Panthea sees
"unimaginable shapes
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deeps."
The poem _Ginevra_, which describes an enforced wedding and the
death of the bride at the sight of her real lover, may well have
been inspired by reading the romances of terror, where such
events are an everyday occurrence. The gruesome descriptions in
_The Revolt of Islam_, the decay of the garden in _The Sensitive
Plant_, the tortures of Prometheus, all show how Shelley strove
to work on the instinctive emotion of fear.
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