If, as has chanced to others--as chanced, for example, to Mangan--outcast from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered without self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death.But no such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life.Shelley had competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a tired child and weep away his life of care.Is it ever so with you, sad brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or having it is satisfied?"It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated.Like them, he suffered from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet.But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by want of vogue.Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to tend.Never a bone less dry for all the tears!
第4章 Shelley ： AN ESSAY(4)（2 / 3）