ABSTRACT
This chapter complements Daniel Hughes's fine study by looking at a different but closely related set of images, those of melting, dissolving and erasing. It looks at these figurative patterns as distinctive instances of imagery 'drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed'. The chapter emphasis on Shelley's ways of imaging the process of dwindling, on his effort to arrest moments of experience as they move towards that absence or emptiness which is the condition of desire and regret. Impressions, erasure, traces: these are the main elements of another of Shelley's figures of evanescence, elaborated in various contexts and degrees of completeness throughout his poetry. In the Ocean-King's 'pleasure-house', Shelley presents us with a sequence of fadings and erasings: an original paradisal imagery is replaced by an interdependent succession of substitutions in which increasingly remote natural phenomena function as artifice.
