Discuss Shelley as a romantic poet.

Ans.

Shelley’s Belonging to the Second Generation of the Romantic Poets

Shelley was a poet of later revolutionary group. He was a revolutionary idealist and poetic prophet of faith and hope. He was an ardent believer in the French Revolution and social revolution as a whole. He remained a champion of individual liberty all his life. He advocated free love, revolted against the time-honoured convention of marriage and denounced kings and priests as tyrants. He had a deep love for nature and man, hatred for rotten traditions and wished to replace them with his revolutionary idealism. He was interested in strong emotions and high imagination. He preached the gospel of romantic revolution in art, in thought, and in life. He carried the magic of pure poetry to its supreme height.

Shelley, the Lover of Nature

All the romantic poets are great lovers of Nature, and each of them renders her in his poetry in his own distinctive and natural way. Whereas to the neo-classical poets of the Age of Pope “return to nature” meant a return to civilization and human nature, to artificial system of the society and contemporary social phenomena, to the romantic poets it meant a return to the meadow and the forest, to the hills and river-banks, to the flowers and birds and other natural beauties. Shelley is also a lover of all these phenomena of Nature. He finds joy in Nature. It is the light and colour of nature that attract him most. In one of his poems he tells that he loved “the fresh earth in new leaves dressed”, “the starry night”, “autumn evenings”, “the morn when golden mists are born” and so on. But more characteristic of Shelley is the love of wilder, vaster and the unfamiliar in nature. Shelley loved desolate rocks and caves, the fury of the storms, lightning and thunder, the waves dancing fast and bright, and the lightning of the noon-tide ocean flashing round him.

Shelley as a poet of Nature does not love merely the calm and the serene in nature, but he loves more the indefinite and the changeful elements; the fiery and the dynamic aspects of Nature. His restless soul is constantly drawn to her ever-changing and dynamic aspects, the moving winds, on-rushing torrents, floating clouds and leaves “like ghosts from an enchanter fleeting.” He presents Nature in its different moods. Sometimes he pictures Nature in close association with human affections and some times he represents it in an absolutely detached and unconcerned way, as if, he were a scientist interested in the objective analysis of the beauties of Nature, Shelley presents the objects of Nature often personified, Nature for him is animate, full of life, movement and energy. He intellectualizes Nature. He believes that Nature has an intelligence of its own. His treatment of Nature is scientific as well as philosophical, mythical as well as human.

Shelley’s Lyricism

Shelley’s lyrics are marked with a note of spontaneity. They seem to come direct from the poet’s heart. There is absolute effortlessness in them. There is no laboured artistry and studied deliberation in his lyrics. Shelley exhaled verse as a flower exhales fragrance. His lyrics are extremely melodious and the rapture of song enlivens each one of them. The Skylark is a triumph of musical harmony and the melody of the poem rings in our ears. Each stanza of this melodious lyric can be sung to perfection. Shelley has the art of combining the quality of music with the outer rhythm of the verse and the inner rhythm of thought and imagery. He sings in To a Skylark:

“Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering beholden.

Its aerial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen

it from the view.”

Romantic Imagination

To Shelley poetry was an expression of imagination. It was a divine act. To him, the poet is a divinely inspired being, a seer blest, a legislator unacknowledged. In his poetry, he constantly soars aloft on the mighty wings of his rich and fertile imagination. He could watch reality, like the yellow bees and the ivy-bloom, illuminated by the lake-reflected sun, but he did not heed them, rather he created, ‘nursing of immortality’ out of the power of his imagination. Like his own skylark, he constantly hovered in the realm of the sun and the stars. He looked before and after, and pined for what was not. He excels even Coleridge and Keats in the fight of his imagination.

In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, he imagines the striking waves of the sea are broken into small drops looking like star showers.

Shelley’s Subjectivity

Shelley is a subjective poet. Most of his shorter lyrics and poems are expressions of his self, his experiences and sorrows, his observations and realizations. Even the poems dealing with themes from classical literature such as Prometheus Unbound and others are not free from autobiographical touches. His famous elegy Adonais reveals his own views and outlook towards life and death. In Ode to the West Wind, he becomes highly emotional at the time of describing his own miserable state of life. He says that hard time has chained and bowed him and he has fallen on the thorns of life.

“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained! and bowed.”

Shelley’s Melancholy and Sadness

The note of rapture disappears when the poet comes to the presentation of his own life. His autobiographical lyrics are uniformly sad. In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, the poet strikes the melancholic note that touches our heart. In his Ode to the West Wind, the personal cry becomes very piercing, and the agony of the poet’s heart comes out poignantly in the lines:

“Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

The note of personal grief comes out touchingly in the short lyric O World! O Life! O Time!:

“Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight:”

His Style and Diction

Shelley’s style is perfectly attuned to his purpose. Like all the finest lyrical styles, it is simple, flexible, and passionate. His style has a direct clarity, an easy yet striking lucidity, and a purity of language. His images are extremely functional and living. The effect is instantaneous. His favourite device is personification.

In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, he produces a deep sensuous effect in a very simple words when he describes the beauty of the scene:

“The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright.”

Thus, Shelley has withstood the onslaught of time, and inspite of a lapse of more than one hundred years, his poetry is still read and admired. Even in the modern age of reason and prose, of technology and science of realism and materialism, Shelley has his ardent admirers. Shelley is undoubtedly a romantic poet in heightened imagination, heightened sensibility and subjectivity, love of nature, craving for an ideal world, revolutionary zeal, melancholy, subjective note, idealism and humanism. But he has some poetic limitations. As a poet his defects are obscurity, artistic monotony, lack of humour, and weak narrative power.