Shelley’s Philosophy of Life

 

Shelley’s Philosophy of Life

Man’s ability to imagine a divine nature is often the central idea of many of Shelley’s poems. Hope is often one of his themes of his poetry, and the personification of hope could only be God.

Making freedom a reality, was God’s job according to Shelley. God was not omnipotent or a creator. Man’s rule over himself is true sovereignty. Atheists found this to be too religious. They liked his Mont Blanc but disliked his Intellectual Beauty, whereas believers thought his belief to be too independent. So, it is clear that both were bothered by it.

The deities of Shelley’s poems were not very steady and dependable. The god of Intellectual Beauty “visits with inconsistent glance each human heart and countenance”. This poem gives a superhuman and supernatural account of moments of joy and satisfaction. The temporariness and not very kind nature of Shelleyian deities make us ponder if they are gods indeed.

The diety of Alastor beckons the poet with starry eyes and serene smile. The deities of both Alastor and Intellectual Beauty are feminine who exude charm, but have limitations. This is also seen in The Witch of Atlas where the deity’s visitations are for a short period of time. The witch is beautiful, attractive, lovely, graceful and fickle-minded. She is stuck between her own immortality and her love for mortals. She wants to help mortals but her playful nature leads to randomness and instability in her help. She is a “sexless bee with an eye serene and heart unladen” (Stanzas 62-63)

The most brilliant intermixing of hope and expectations can be seen in the last two acts of Prometheus Unbound. Shelley imagines a kind of world where man becomes what he s capable of becoming.  This world is eternal but not immobile and is not free from pain or death. Time is felt differently. There is a dance in the blending of the subjective and objective elements of this New World. This world is free from worry and penitence and everyone lives in a rich and fulfilling present.

Shelley believed that truth can be arrived by looking at something from different angles. It could be that the different points of view would not match. This can be seen in Alastor where the tantalizing eyes of the maiden cannot be read by the poet. Does this mean that his vision is weakening? It can also mean that she is calling him for his benefit. Or that she has an unkind nature. Shelley suggests all these possibilities and says that he cannot decide upon a particular point. One of the least pluralistic viewpoints would be in Prometheus Unbound where what happens is largely, not wholly how you see it,   and what you make of it. The God you get is the God you are able to imagine.

The most assertively optimistic is Adonais but the optimism is valid only in the boundaries of its settings; that of a dead poet who was gifted tremendously. But his gifts were not fully utilized while he was alive. Adonais is a baroque apotheosis; it blends the sensuous and the ascetic, the ceremonial and the moral. Its hope for man is the cleansing and directing of his imagination to create the god that he wants to invoke. It is more personal and insistent than Prometheus Unbound. The accomplishments are open to all and are less heroic than Prometheus Unbound. The saving god of Adonais is our inmost thoughts; they are incomprehensible even to ourselves”. He believed in the existence of the universal as perceived by us in love, beauty, and delight. We do not know the destiny of the soul but these things are permanent. In the conclusion of The Sensitive Plant, “for love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change their might, exceeds our organs, which endure. No light, being themselves obscure.”

The thought of death is recurrent in Shelley’s poems. His death by drowning is prophesized in Adonais, Alastor, The Ode to Liberty, and the Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples. The central theme of his poems are that true virtue consists in clarity of vision, discovery of the divine law’s intent, and leadership in moral action.

Upto 1818, Shelley illustrated four views of the mind’s relationship to external and internal forces. They were materialistic necessitarianism leading to inevitability of progress, a form of psychological determinism, leading to inevitability of aspiration, the third was a necessity for idealistic human leadership which due to or despite martyrdom could lead to a moralistic society and the fourth was psychological self-determinism. This is necessary for the clear vision, moral leadership, spiritual catharsis, rejections of evils which corrupt the soul’s receptivity. Man is capable of vanquishing his ancient enemy which is himself.