No song when the spirit is mute.

The abstractions of music and splendour that sum up, as it were, the light, rainbow, lute and voice of the 1st stanza are given poetic life by the verb to survive: since they can (or cannot, as may happen) survive, — this means they are, or may be, living reali­ties. Within this simile metaphor jostles metaphor, so to speak: "the heart's echoes" (that is, the remains of past love) which "render no song", "the mute spirit" — all these metaphors are further devel­oped: there is no song to come from a mute spirit ("No song but sad dirges"). This is followed by a new outburst of similes: the sad dirges are likened to wind passing through a ruined cell and to the sorrowful sound of sea-waves. These auditory images are musically expressed by delicate orchestration of n and m:

No song when the spirit is mute: —

No song but sad dirges,

Like the wind through a ruined cell,

Or the mournful surges

That ring the dead seaman's knell.

The sad passing of love is expressed metaphorically in the 3rd and 4th stanzas in their resolute breach with the hard and fast logic of common sense: the hearts that "mingle" — a metaphor that would certainly be rejected by the classics, the comparison of a strong heart to the well-built nest of love, lines that do not lend themselves to ordinary paraphrase but must be interpreted (as, for instance, the lines "The weak one is singled / To endure what it once pos­sessed", which seems to mean that the weaker heart of the two must be resigned to bear stoically and to still cherish the memory of what had been happiness before) — were certainly new in the poetry of the period. Blake had written things like that — but who ever read him then? So had Coleridge, in a way, but his inspiration soon ran dry, and he left behind only a small body of verse.

The evolution of love is condensed in three images rendering its-birth, life and death (cradle, home, and bier). The despair and helpless misery of the forsaken lover is made clear by a string of rare and striking similes, all associated with high altitudes and the cruel cold inevitable high up above the earth, with storms tossing the ravens (as likely as not the association is caused by the nest mentioned in the preceding stanzas, and Shelley was thinking of ravens' nests shaken by north winds and thence about the birds themselves), with the cold beams of the sun, with the rotting nest of love set up eagle-high and pitifully crumbling to pieces.

The climax of the stanza and, probably, of the poem as well, is the profoundly illogical metaphor "leave thee naked to laughter". The literal meaning seems to be 'leave thee naked to be laughed at', but the way Shelley has it points to a figurative meaning — helpless, defenseless before the cruel laughter of others. Bringing together these words from entirely different and logically discon­nected planes is a way of depicting broken-down defenses and ut­ter desolation in the most powerful and dramatic manner. The juxta­position of the lofty "eagle home" and the miserable nakedness ex­posed to the wintry suns and cold winds, is most poignant.

The poetic illogicality of meaning is seconded by the illogicality of the grammatic structure:

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 769