ESC: English Studies in Canada

T H E “ S H A P E A LL L I G H T ” IN S H E L L E Y ’ S T H E T R I U M P H O F L I F E LINDA E. MARSHALL University of Guelph iR.ousseau’s vision of the “shape all light” 1 in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life has been diversely interpreted. The shape herself is problematic: to some she is near kin to Intellectual Beauty or to the Witch of Atlas;2to others she is the Rahab of deceptive Nature3 or the Iris of the distorting Imagination.4 Her role as Venus Pandemos, however, is one that few readers can accept, and for such critics as Butter and Reiman her ideality is blemished only by the extent to which they see her clouded by her participation in the natural world and in time.5The unseduced, on the other hand, have more logical arguments to support their mistrust of the shape, since they may relate her seemingly male­ ficent potion to her deceptive charm. Those who persist in unqualified admir­ ation for the shape have to account for the extraordinary effect of her cup; and their attempts to dilute its poison are admittedly feeble.6Yet some inter­ preters, while remaining faithful to the essential goodness of the shape, thoughtfully condemn what she effects. Kenneth Allott explains this apparent contradiction by identifying the visionary draught with Rousseau’s attempt “to realize the Ideal Vision in human love,” an attempt which necessarily corrupts and weakens the sense of the Ideal.7 Rousseau’s second Vision— the triumphal procession of Life whose captive train he joins— follows, then, as a consequence of his desire to quench his thirst for love incarnate; and this desire has eventually rooted him in a world he may never transcend, whether it be that of nature, as Bloom would have it, or of the imagination itself, as Woodman believes. Allott’s reading, however, allows the shape her ideality, and surely this is a more acceptable apprehension of her nature: she ought not to be damned on account of her cup. Bloom’s typing of the shape as the “New Testament Great Whore” is one which, strangely enough, rests in part on Yeats’s essay, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry.”8 Like most readers of The Triumph of Life, Bloom asso­ ciates the shape with some aspect of the sun, but he does not regard this rela­ tionship as the guiltless one enjoyed by Apollo and the Witch of Atlas. Instead, drawing his argument in part from Yeats’s essay, he characterizes the sun’s power as “the being and the source of all tyrannies,” 9and thus the shape, too, E n g l ish Studies in C anada, v, i , Spring 1979 shares the solar cruelty. But Yeats himself, contrary to what Bloom says— that “Yeats had nothing to say of the Shape” 10 — writes that the morning star is “personified as a woman” in The Triumph of Life, so that Yeats, who speaks so eloquently of the morning and evening star as the “symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or beauty” 11 in Shelley’s poetry, could hardly have viewed the shape as “a diabolic parody of the Witch of Atlas,” to whose wickedness poor Bradley succumbed.12 If Bradley was “ taken in” by her, then so was Yeats. Yeats goes on to say that the morning star “leads Rousseau, the typical poet of The Triumph of Life, under the power of the destroying hun­ ger of life, and it is the Morning Star that wars against the principle of evil in Laon and Cythna.”13Here Yeats characteristically sees the sun as destruc­ tive, and incidentally causes some confusion in his ambiguous expression “leads . . . under the power.” One might understand Yeats to mean that the morning star is the agent which caused Rousseau to submit to the power of life symbolized by the sun, or, conversely, that the morning star kept guiding Rousseau even whilst he was “under the power of the destroying hunger of life.” In the latter case, then, Rousseau’s hope that “his day’s path may...