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Rabbit Hill posted:Shelley deserved a solid asskicking.. "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" I mean, how could he even stand to face himself in the mirror each day knowing he had written those lines, wirh those exclamation marks? Truly shameful. Shelley is probably the best of the Romantic poets, though, is the thing. Yeah, that line by itself is kind of "we get it," and I had a great Romantic lit professor who thought it was the worst thing Shelley ever wrote, but I think it comes from a fundamental misinterpretation of "Ode to the West Wind" and Shelley's stuff as a whole. So the wind in Shelley is an image of philosophical necessity, going as far back as Queen Mab, which kind of establishes his whole poetic language. And this image pops up again and again in his mid-period poetry: it's in Prometheus Unbound, reconfigured as Demogorgon's law, and it's in "The Masque of Anarchy" as the voice of the Earth. And both of those poems could, I guess, be interpreted with the wind as a positive force, though it's definitely still a violent one. But then suddenly in "West Wind" the wind's actually kind of a huge jerk, right? Literally every other bit of nature cowers before it, and it drives literal "pestilence-stricken multitudes" out of its sight like dead leaves. So I think there's this really fascinating thing going on where Shelley still believes in necessity as a controlling force driving the universe, even if he's gotten really disillusioned with it in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre. So as to that specific line, he's begging necessity to start giving a poo poo about human needs - "Be thou me!" is a literal call for necessity to emulate social radical Percy Bysshe Shelley, who "falls upon the thorns of life" and "bleeds." So it's not so much "poor, pitiful me" as it is "get on my level." Shelley's a crazy good writer. If all you know are the lyrics, you're missing out on his coolest stuff.
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Apr 10, 2016 10:01
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:50 |
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