* * * * *
I stood and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light:
I knew it was the vision veiled from me
So many years,--that it was Emily."
To grasp the entire meaning of this autobiographical episode, we must
remember the extent to which Shelley idealizes. "More popular poets
clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible imagery; Shelley loved
to idealize the real,--to gift the mechanism of the material universe
with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate
and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind. Sophocles was
his great master in this species of imagery." The heroine of the
"Epipsychidion" is an imagination; a creature, like Raphael's Galatea,
copied from no living model, but from "_una certa idea_"; a thing
originally created by himself, and suggested only by the living
portrait, as each one of the admired had previously suggested its
ideal counterpart. Emilia, then, was the bride of a dream, and, in the
indulgence of disappointed longing for a fuller satisfaction of his
soul, Shelley mournfully contrasts this vision, who had so eloquently
responded to his idealizing through her convent-bars, with Mary, whose
stubborn, independent realism had checked and daunted him.
Pages:
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177