ABSTRACT

Music signals a fundamental division within Shelley’s collective fantasy regarding the nature and purpose of human relationships and the nature and purpose of poetry. Often, music promises or confirms the formation of intimacy; regularly, however, it provokes the recognition of loss and of lacking; it accompanies moments of emptiness. In the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” for example, Shelley likens the unpredictable visitations of “unseen Power” to the “memory of music fled” (SPP 1, 10), but compares the sacred “light” offered by the “Spirit of BEAUTY” to animating “music by the night wind sent / Through strings of some still instrument” (SPP 13, 32-4). The “Hymn” expresses Shelley’s frustration with this “Spirit’s” inconstancy and with its apparent abandonment of intimacies he shared with it when he was “yet a boy” (SPP 49). In Alastor, the appearance of a “veiled maid” in the Poet’s dream tantalizes him with the prospect of extraordinary fulfillment. The poem’s narrator records that the maid speaks to the Poet in “low solemn tones, / Her voice … like the voice of his own soul / … its music long” (SPP 152-4). The sounds of her harp serenade him with a “strange symphony” of longing, and her sudden disappearance leaves him with a “vacant brain,” surrounded by “vacant woods,” as “His wan eyes / Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly / As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven” (SPP 191-202). The maid’s overpowering psychosomatic effect on him resembles Laone’s enchantment of Laon in The Revolt of Islam.