Shelley, Dante, and Romantic Irony By John B. Padgett Table of Contents    Works Cited
Copyright © 1991, 1995 by John B. Padgett

Chapter 3

Love's Rare Universe: Epipsychidion

Where Shelley's transformations of Dante in Prometheus Unbound seem hidden in his syncretism of so many other myths, rising to the surface unbidden in only a couple of places,[1] such transformations in Epipsychidion (1821) are apparent from the start. The "Advertisement" prefacing the poem likens it to the Vita Nuova, which Dante claims is understandable only to a chosen few: "This confusion," Dante says, "is impossible to resolve for one who is not in like degree a faithful follower of Love; to one who is, that which would resolve the uncertainty is already clear" (Vita Nuova 25). Shelley seconds this idea in his own preface; after relating a fictionalized tale that the supposed writer of the poem had died — in Dante's hometown Florence, no less — while preparing for a voyage "to one of the wildest of the Sporades" (which is dramatized in the last third of the poem), he says the poem, like Dante's, "is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats" (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 373).

Thus, as with Prometheus Unbound earlier, Shelley includes in the preface a reference to Dante which indicates his importance in a fuller understanding of the poem. Whereas in Prometheus Shelley alerted the reader that operations of the human mind would play a role, here he draws attention to "organs of perception" entering into the reader's consideration and understanding of the poem. In this development from mental processes in Prometheus to perceptive processes in Epipsychidion, Shelley imbues the latter poem with a subtle, but crucial, shift in psychological subtext. Prometheus's imagery of mental operations exists entirely within the work; it is the poetry itself, Shelley says, in which this multi-layered synesthesia exists, there to be found by any reader adept enough to recognize it. Epipsychidion's mention of perceptive organs, however, refers not to something within the poem but rather to an external reader's ability to comprehend; understanding depends not so much upon locating such synesthesia as the reader's innate ability to recognize it. The emphasis is hence shifted from a reader's interaction with the imagery found in the work, as with Prometheus, to the author's more private concerns with his text. Any irony which exists in the two poems, then, moves from one existing between the narrative and the reader in Prometheus to one between the narrator and his narrative in Epipsychidion, resulting in a form of romantic irony. Lilian R. Furst notes this distinction between the two types, saying that while the traditional ironist looks outward to the narrative, and hence to readers, the romantic ironist looks inward to the work he is creating and onto himself as creator; the reader becomes a spectator of the creative process, thus breaking the "contract between narrator and reader" as a reliable "basis for communication" and depriving the reader of his "sense of assurance vis-ΰ-vis the narrative" (231). The result of this "unsettling" of meaning between narrator and reader is particularly noteworthy with respect to Epipsychidion: 

On the one hand, the unreliable narrator implies that it is the reader who is unreliable; on the other, the reader comes to query the narrator's competence and to doubt his knowledge.... In place of the reader's participation in knowledge, as in the case of traditional irony, in romantic irony he is, by devious manoeuvres, made to realise the unattainability of truth and the prevalence of paradox. (Furst 231-32)

Shelley's appeal to "a certain class of readers," therefore, might arguably be reduced to an audience of one, himself as the subject, narrator, and creator of the poem.

Thus, even before the poem proper begins, Shelley establishes clearly that the poem is to incorporate elements of romantic irony. A clarification is in order, therefore, of what exactly constitutes romantic irony.

As I mentioned in the introduction, defining romantic irony is a task more easily proposed than accomplished. A good working definition, which I alluded to earlier, emerges in Stuart Sperry's stress on the "indeterminacy," or "a kind of irresolution," which he linked to "the beginnings of that fragmentation and skepticism we see on all sides of us today" ("Towards a Definition of Romantic Irony" 5). Furst seconds this view, as it "has the advantage of steering between limiting specificity and unserviceable vagueness" (225). Anne K. Mellor, in building to her terse summary of romantic irony as a "mode of consciousness or a way of thinking about the world that finds a corresponding literary mode" (24), says such irony can be "a process of simultaneous creation and decreation: as two opposed voices or personae, or two contradictory ideas or themes, which the author carefully balances and refuses to synthesize or harmonize." Two classic examples Mellor cites are the opposition between Juan and the narrator in Byron's Don Juan and the conflicting ontological systems presented by the text and gloss in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." These opposing voices, ideas and even structures, she says, operate "both to affirm and to undermine the artist and his vision" (18). Mellor's definition, eloquent as it is, falls short, however, in its exclusive reliance on Friedrich Schlegel's original postulations into the nature of this irony, a definition of which, Furst says, must examine not so much the postulates of German Romantic theory as the actuality of romantic irony as it is found in artistic works (227).

The limitations of a definition of romantic irony confined to two opposed voices or personae become clear in a work such as Epipsychidion, as much of the irony results not just from the opposition between two contrary incarnations of Shelley but also from their allegiance and opposition to a third voice, a persona whose theological, philosophical, and poetic presence spans five centuries of constant change. Shelley, by likening himself to Dante both poetically and biographically, in essence injects into Epipsychidion the persona of a poet whose philosophy and intention in his poetry differ markedly from Shelley's similar pursuits.

Such contradictions between Shelley and the Dante-persona arise as early as the Advertisement. The first, perhaps clearest example of this phenomenon is in the simultaneous co-existence of contradictory aims in the poem. Shelley calls attention to his view (posited in A Defence of Poetry) of the presence of timeless and eternal poetry sometimes hidden beneath the artifice and gloss of more "temporal" aspects of the poetry. "Great would be his shame," Shelley writes in Italian, "who should rhyme anything under the garb of metaphor or rhetorical figure; and, being requested, could not strip his words of this dress so that they might have a true meaning" (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 373n). When one considers the poem's heavy reliance upon — and subsequent undercutting of — poetic hyperbole and metaphor, Shelley's Dantesque allusion serves simultaneously to obscure the autobiographical passages (hence distancing Shelley from persistent charges of loose or otherwise base morality) and to suggest the presence of a deeper, more meaningful "truth" beneath the surface imagery. Those readers unable to perceive "the eternal, the infinite, and the one" (A Defence of Poetry 483) in the poem will be at a supreme disadvantage in comprehending the poem. The Dantesque allusions serve to remind us also, however, that Dante's incorporation of autobiography into a fictional masterpiece in world literature was more successful than similar endeavors were for any other writer in history. Implicit in his association with Dante, Shelley suggests a similar attempt on his part at a profound act of fictionalized autobiography.

Even as Shelley attempts to convey immutable ideals in a temporal shell, more importantly, he must overcome the difficulties inherent in language as a finite, limited system to convey timeless, eternal truths. Thus, conflicting with the formation of timeless poetry is the ineffability of poetry, and hence of language, to express truly our strongest, most heart-felt thoughts and emotions. Ineffability of language is a persistent motif for Dante, especially in Paradiso, in which all sensory stimuli are reduced (or, perhaps, elevated) to bright, blinding light. It is necessary, therefore, for Dante — and by extension, for Shelley — to use metaphor or allegory as a "human" means to convey the intangible. Dante employs metaphor to such an extreme in Paradiso that it becomes, as John Freccero notes, autonomous even to the narrative, as the souls of the blessed appear to Dante not in their true assigned location in the primum mobile (the highest realm) but in the sphere most according to their different states of blessedness; "the whole of Paradiso," Freccero says, "has no existence, even fictional, beyond the metaphoric" (Paradiso, Introduction xi-xii).

The romantic-ironic possibilities open to Shelley in appropriating such a schema abound. According to Schlegel's conception, romantic irony is a means for an artist to acknowledge his or her consciousness of the limitations of human knowledge and language (Mellor 11-15). Allegory or metaphor, distinct from symbolism, serves usefully in this role because it "acknowledges or preserves the differences between the way the world is in reality and the way it appears in language, between the object and its subject, between eternity and temporality, between the infinite and the finite" (Mellor 22). The difference between Shelley's use of metaphor in Epipsychidion and Dante's in Paradiso thus becomes one largely of degree. Where Dante searches earnestly for tangible imagery that will sustain his narrative description of the realm as beyond human representation — what Freccero calls "anti-images" — Shelley's deliberately abstract image-making does the reverse; that is, he tends to use imagery beyond human comprehension to describe what is essentially tangible.

This alternate form of image-making results partly from the contrary goals behind Dante's poetic questing and Shelley's. Shelley's poem, narratively about the quest for and attainment of an ideal love, compares this noble goal to the creation of poetry and to the imaginative process itself. An utmost irony in the poem is a consistent wavering between creation and de-creation, between the speaker's poetic hymn to Emily and his self-perceived failure to achieve it. This ambivalence is summarized within the Advertisement and by the opposing poems which frame Epipsychidion. The Advertisement concludes with Shelley's translation of "Dante's famous Canzone":

(Ye who intelligent, the third sphere move)[2]
My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful. (373-74)

The third sphere is a reference to the realm inhabited by Venus, which in Dante's cosmology was that of lovers. Even here, however, Shelley has subtly rearranged Dante's poem by separating the first line from the nine lines which follow by a prose paragraph. As a result, Shelley's translation becomes an address not to the angelic hosts of the third sphere but rather to the poem itself, in essence an act of "thumbing his nose" at those readers unable to perceive the finer nuances of love. As Brown points out, this Dantesque reference asserting an "absolute confidence in the superiority of the idealist's enterprise" contrasts with the condescension displayed elsewhere in the Advertisement (226), as when Shelley admonishes the speaker for the "presumptuous application" of the concluding envoy to the poem. The envoy will raise a smile, Shelley says, "at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity" (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 373).

The envoy, meanwhile, direly contrasts with the innate superiority of the poet in Dante's canzone:

Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet,
And say:— "We are the masters of thy slave;
What wouldst thou with us and ours and thine?"
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave,
All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."
So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet
Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest
And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's.

Whereas Dante was the master in his poem, telling it to disregard any "base company," in the envoy, the poem is the master of the poet, despite its supposed weakness in the first line. The reason the poem prevails over the poet, Donald H. Reiman suggests, is that like Keats's Grecian urn, the poem will outlive the poet. The superiority expressed is therefore not in the idealist's enterprise, as in Dante's canzone, but in the poetry which the idealist has created. Though in the text proper of Epipsychidion Shelley writes about Emily as the ideal, about his history of the search for this ideal, and about his proposal to join with her in a mystical union "uninhibited either by social conventions or by the very encumbrances of flesh and blood," in the envoy Shelley makes clear "that the real achievement of his inner being lies in its projection of itself ... in the creation of the poem" (Shelley 110). The true ideal, in Shelley's view, then becomes neither Beatrice nor Emily but the poems which celebrate them.

Such ambivalence, of the poet balanced between love-as-ideal and poem-as-ideal, is a primary dialectic in the poem and is sustained in large part by Shelley's allusions to and borrowings from Dante. Dante is a primary allusion because of his credibility in writing about ideal love, which Shelley uses in Epipsychidion as a metaphor to signify poetic achievement. Shelley accords Dante high praise for his ability to write love poetry:

Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language.... His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness ... is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. (A Defence of Poetry 497)

Dante is implicitly portrayed in Epipsychidion and its Advertisement, Brown says, "as the strong, confident visionary who has succeeded, more than any other mortal, in writing about ideal love" (225).

Dante also works wonderfully well as an allusive figure for Shelley because of his conflicting attitudes toward himself as a poet. He proudly claims affinity in Inferno with Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan in Limbo, yet he is "excruciatingly aware of personal weakness when confronted by his glorious vision of Beatrice, or troubled by the problem of putting that vision into adequate speech" (Brown 226), a weakness made apparent in his numerous references to the weakness of his verse[3] and, most clearly, when Beatrice herself rebukes him in Purgatorio.[4] This double-depiction of self Shelley adopts as a model for Epipsychidion. As Dante did in the Comedy, Shelley fictionalizes himself as the speaker for his poem, a link illustrated by two identical phrases from Shelley's prose. In the Defence Shelley calls the Vita Nuova "the idealized history of that period and those intervals of [Dante's] life that were dedicated to love"; similarly, in a letter to John Gisborne he says that Epipsychidion is "an idealized history of my life and feelings" (qtd. in Brown 227).

Most important, Shelley's adaptation of Dante allows for a romantic-ironic reworking of Dantesque ideals which simultaneously praise and undermine the medieval poet. Though Shelley is most concerned with Dante as a love poet, his interpretation of Dante's works becomes a "fresh attempt," in Schulze's words, "to shape their materials and meaning to the intellectual, social and literary situation in which Shelley finds himself." Shelley's debt to Dante, Schulze says, is immense and ironic, "ironic because he discovers that he must transform everything he adopts, and that the meaning he thus re-shapes clashes with that of the original"; nonetheless, Shelley's meaning is dependent upon his "wholesale appropriation" of Dantesque motifs (Schulze 197). Shelley's poem is romantic-ironic precisely because of such a dual attitude toward the earlier poet. Indeed, what Brown calls the "circular structure of discovery, loss and rediscovery" in the Comedy (229) parallels the romantic-ironic sequence of creation, de-creation and re-creation.

Hence, the same archetypal pattern employed in Dante's Comedy, Prometheus Unbound, and numerous other epic quests, both ancient and modern, finds a place in Epipsychidion. The three main sections of the poem correspond well to Joseph Campbell's description in The Hero with a Thousand Faces of the stages of the hero's quest as separation, initiation, and return (30). This separation-initiation-return sequence, however, is conducted not within the narrative itself, as in traditional quest poems, but in the process of creating the narrative itself. The narrative of Epipsychidion is not being, to use Schlegel's terms, but rather becoming. In his paradoxical quest both to externalize Emily as a power over him and to internalize her as a presence within, the Shelleyan speaker creates a narrative that continually undercuts itself, partly because of his own limitations, partly because of the limitations of language itself.

These limitations are made manifest from the very beginning of the poem proper and constitute the speaker's separation from the object of his quest. After the speaker admits in the opening stanza that the poem to follow is "withered memory," the imagery he uses to describe Emily grows increasingly abstract, moving from an initial comparison to a captive bird in the second stanza to addresses calling her a "High, spirit-winged Heart," "Seraph of Heaven," "Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse," "Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe," and so forth. Drawn to such blinding light, the speaker realizes that his very words grow dim, obscuring her. Her radiance overwhelms him, leading him to the curiously apt figure of an insect consumed by the flame which attracts it: "my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings" (53).

After his train of light images has failed, the speaker tries another tactic, this time a series of questions focusing upon secrecy:

      Art thou not void of guile,
A lovely soul formed to be blest and bless?
A well of sealed and secret happiness,
Whose waters like blithe light and music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star
Which moves not in the moving Heavens, alone?
A smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone
Amid rude voices? a beloved light?
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight? ... (56-64)

But this effort, like the earlier, is vain: "I measure / The world of fancies, seeking one like thee," the speaker says, "And find — alas! mine own infirmity" (69-71).

The speaker then begins yet another fresh attempt to clarify his relationship with Emily, the style of which is his clearest link thus far in the poem to the opening of Dante's Comedy: "She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way, / And lured me towards sweet Death" (72). Again he begins with imagery couched in tangible familiarity:

        An antelope,
In the suspended impulse of its lightness,
Were less ethereally light: the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless Heaven of June
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful ... (75-82)

But once again, he gets caught up in his own rhetorical flourish, culminating as before in imagistic abstractions:

An image of some bright Eternity;
A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love
Under whose motions life's dull billows move;
A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning;
A vision like incarnate April, warning,
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy
Into his summer grave. (115-23)

In his third realization of his failure to describe Emily, the speaker seems to have the first inkling of the ineffability of what he is attempting. Emily is but the image of eternity, the shadow of a dream. In sudden despair, he laments, "Ah, woe is me! / What have I dared? where am I lifted? how / Shall I descend, and perish not?" (123-25).

Fortunately, for the poem's sake and for that of the reader, who has been led down three different dead-end paths in search of Emily, the poet does not perish — not yet, at any rate. Already visible in the poem is an irony explicitly self-critical of the language, which becomes, Schulze says, a "means to an esthetic poise." Shelley "balances an ironic awareness of human limitations with a commitment to explore the sources of consciousness and thought and the possibility of their unity" (196). After three honest and earnest attempts, the speaker seems no closer to any such unity, in part because the "unity" he seeks is contradictory. Such contradiction is evident in his address to Emily in the next stanza as "Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate / Whose course has been so starless!" (130-31). As Sperry notes, the three different relationships are each incomplete and demonstrate the speaker's search for a feminine archetype by which to reconcile them (Shelley's Major Verse 165). The speaker laments the limitations of human life, wishing that he could have known her "in the fields of immortality" (133), where any such limitations could easily be overcome.

No less important is the parallelism between the speaker's three initial attempts to describe Emily and the similar ways Dante attempted the same for Beatrice. In the first, the speaker mimics the hyperbolic light imagery Dante employed in Paradiso to much greater effect, largely because Dante more skillfully handled tangible images to depict this nonrepresentational realm. Shelley's speaker seems to be trying to imitate Dante, and failing miserably.

The second attempt similarly resembles Dante's careful hiding of his love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. Dante even leaves unclear that his ideal's name is Beatrice; early in the work, Dante says, "She was called Beatrice by many people who did not know her name" (3), thus implying that "Beatrice" was merely a label attached to her. Shelley, however, immediately names his ideal "Emily," and does not care who knows of his love for her: "I love thee; though the world by no thin name / Will hide that love from its unvalued shame" (43-44).

In the third attempt, in which Shelley addresses the reader directly as "Stranger," Shelley imitates the opening of Inferno in a dark wood and sustains in subsequent lines perhaps the closest approximation (to this point) of Dante's visionary ideal, describing Emily as "a mortal shape indued / With love and life and light and deity, / And motion which may change but cannot die" (112-14). Beatrice, after all, has died, but for Dante she lives on as an ideal apotheosis, "luring" him, as does Emily for Shelley's speaker, toward the salvation which occurs only after death.

This equating Emily to a divine being suggested here and elsewhere (as in "Seraph of Heaven"), and her corresponding realm, have obvious connections to Dante, who summoned the entire Ptolemaic universe to his beck and call in order to glorify Beatrice. As Charles Williams points out, the Beatrice in the Comedy serves as an image for Dante of nobility or virtue of redemption, and even in a sense of God himself, but her most significant role in the poem is as an image of woman, "and, subsequently, of romantic love" (8, 14). Love for Dante is an outpouring of himself, "a quality of himself towards Beatrice" (Williams 18). Hence, Dante's grandiose, hyperbolic imagery describing her is a heavenly construct to portray the ethereal through the tangible.

Love for Shelley is a similar outpouring, suggested in his essay "On Love." Love, Shelley writes, is "that powerful attraction" we experience when we discover within a "chasm of an insufficient void," which is a projection of ourselves:

We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or desire, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 473-74)

This miniature version includes both external and internal views of the self; it is "a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap" (474). However, Shelley's ideal does not equate to divinity in the way that Beatrice does for Dante. Rather, this outpouring from his "intellectual nature" is grounded in his task as a poet to create verse that is beautiful and "ever accompanied by pleasure" (A Defence of Poetry 486); poetry, defined as "the expression of the Imagination" (Defence 480), is "something divine." Its two-fold function, Shelley says, is to create "new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure" and to engender "in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good" (Defence 503).

Just such a desire has motivated the speaker of Epipsychidion thus far in the poem, and it is this desire that impels him to seek from his own past the "materials" by which to order and arrange his imaginary creation. After his anticlimactic realization of the futility of what he is attempting, the speaker says, "Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare / Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt" (147-48), invoking yet a new image in which to dress Emily: this time, wisdom. This knowledge leads directly into what are probably the most remembered lines from the poem:

I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go. (149-59)

Generally interpreted as an attack on marriage and argument for free love, the passage, as Sperry points out, springs from a deeper understanding, "the truth that no single woman can ever prove adequate to satisfy man's appetite for love or beauty" (Shelley's Major Verse 166-67). Critics have long noted the irony of this passage, that in a poem glorifying one woman as the ideal, Shelley seems to advocate free love. This apparent contradiction, explicit in the narrative, constitutes an unresolved dilemma characteristic of romantic irony, a dilemma made all the more puzzling in its apparent genesis within the ideal.

The passage, however, is remarkable for other reasons, most importantly in that it is the strongest criticism in the poem of the idealizing of Dante. Dante was a member of "that great sect," choosing to select a single mistress upon whom to vest his poetic interests. The latter half of the passage is a succinct summary of Dante's Comedy, in which Dante traveled "among the dead / By the broad highway of the world." Whether consciously or unconsciously, the speaker implicitly criticizes a quest like Dante's: the quest itself, the speaker suggests, is the "dreariest and the longest journey," those who travel it are "poor slaves," and even one who travels with the quester, such as Virgil in the Comedy, becomes "one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe."[5]

But just as soon as this critique ends, the speaker begins implicitly to praise Dante by alluding to specific passages in the Comedy which "support" this view. Shelley writes in the next stanza:

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. (160-69)

The allusion in these lines is to canto 15 of Purgatorio, in which Virgil discourses upon the distinction between material and spiritual good. Virgil tells Dante,

The infinite and inexpressible Grace
which is in Heaven, gives itself to Love
as a sunbeam gives itself to a bright surface.

As much light as it finds there, it bestows;
thus, as the blaze of Love is spread more widely,
the greater the Eternal Glory grows.

As mirror reflects mirror, so, above,
the more there are who join their souls, the more
Love learns perfection, and the more they love. (15.67-75)

As Steve Ellis explains, the love enjoyed by the penitent "grows rather than diminishes with the growth in the number of those who partake of it, as opposed to what happens in the division of earthly goods" (13). That Shelley is able to transform Dante's depiction of divine love into a rationale for free love is itself ironic. The speaker of the poem, Ellis says, seems to be "a sort of Dante in wild disarray," allowing Shelley vicariously "to participate in ... imaginative sexual assault while reserving judgment about the 'philosophy' of love the poem expresses" (14). Such wavering of conviction is woven into the very fabric of romantic irony.

More to the point, however, is the manner in which Shelley adapts Dante's philosophizing about the nature of divine love. As suggested in the analogy to imagination in line 164, "true love" is depicted as a mental operation:

Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth. (174-89, italics added)

According to Schulze, Shelley transforms Dante's comparison between relative and absolute modes of good to focus instead "on the characteristically Shelleyan awareness of the mortal, transitory nature of all things, and on the characteristically Shelleyan possibility that our limited awareness may obscure from us 'the wonder of our being.'" Only mind, or the imagination, can preserve the Dantesque vision, and only in ironic form, as a truth that defies logic (Schulze 198). Thus, while undermining Virgil's ontology, Shelley "seizes on the master's moral implication." In Dante's original lecture, Virgil explains the mortal error of envy, telling the pilgrim that in the spirit realm no reflector of love has too much or too little. Shelley borrows this motif in his depiction of those working to reclaim this ravaged "world of life" who are nourished by "the unenvied light of hope." Schulze says,

The modifier "unenvied" is precise, not only in focusing the moral import of Virgil's lecture, but also in specifying the distinctive quality of Shelley's laborers, their jealousy-dissolving commitment to freedom, equality and communal sharing. Hope, the main virtue of those in Purgatory, becomes in Shelley's vision the "eternal law" by which a love ethic strives to redeem a fallen society. (198-99)

Thus, Schulze says, Shelley "makes over Dante's theological mystery into a secular ethic, without losing either the Dantean sense of triumph over the fallen understanding or his own more modest sense of human vulnerability" (199). Through this transformation of Dante, Shelley thus posits what may be his most overtly romantic-ironic statement in this poem: that love, like understanding and imagination, "grows bright, / Gazing on many truths" (162-63). The imagination's ability, and indeed necessity, to hold simultaneously multiple "truths," like Keats's conception of negative capability, is a hallmark of romantic irony. The "many truths" encompass not just specific romantic love but also the fundamental chaos of becoming Schlegel posits in his treatises on romantic irony. As Mellor points out, the romantic ironist must be aware of both the value and the falsity of his perceptions and ideas; he must "always sustain the incredibly difficult but not impossible dual awareness that everything one believes is both true and false; that what one is both exists and is constantly changing; that nature and society are as stable as they appear and yet are built on the quicksand of chaos" (12-13).

Throughout the poem Shelley suggests such multiple versions of truth. Sperry argues that the poem includes two "forces" governing the speaker's actions: one centrifugal, "the effort to externalize Emily, to see her as an influence governing nature and humankind, a power concentrated in the universe of sun, moon, and stars"; and the other centripetal, "the recognition that Emily and her power are constituents of the self." The poem's initial momentum comes from the former, externalizing force and culminates in the philosophizing on love, in which the verse "struggles to objectify and mediate its understanding if not within the imagery of nature and the macrocosm then through the eternal philosophical principles behind them." However, this momentum cannot be maintained; it collapses into the "autobiographical rhapsody" which begins immediately after the three stanzas on love (Shelley's Major Verse 162-67).

The speaker's poetic separation from his ideal thus demonstrated, this second major section constitutes a detailing of the steps of initiation through whose experience the speaker hopes to attain his vision. "There was a Being," Shelley's speaker stridently begins in his account of a vision beheld when he was a youth; his account is a familiar refrain for Shelley, continuing a tradition begun in Alastor and depicted in other poems such as "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." In fact, Epipsychidion is often compared to Alastor, both for the similar treatments of a "visionary maiden" and for their common thread of irony. However, a distinguishing feature between the two poems is found in the importance of self-awareness demonstrated by the poet-speaker in the latter poem. Alastor is by far a more "objective" poem, depicting a quest for a visionary ideal and told by a more or less objective third-person narrator. Epipsychidion, on the contrary, revels in its subjectivity, particularly in this middle section, detailing in a barely veiled form Shelley's own "idealized history."

Shelley begins by telling how, as a youth, he first envisioned this ideal "on an imagined shore, ... robed in such exceeding glory, / That I beheld her not" (197-200). But then the speaker says, "from the caverns of my dreamy youth / I sprang" (217-18); he attempts to grasp her, but he cannot. Narratively, of course, this is the literal "separation" from the ideal; however, as we have seen, the speaker's inability in the first major section to grasp her has already effectively separated him from her. Hence, the speaker's faltering utterances in the first part of the poem merely foreshadow the narrative separation of speaker from ideal in the second part; the first section depicts his separation from an external Emily, while the second section depicts his separation from a more internal version of the ideal. As Sperry suggests, the autobiographical section depicts the quest turned inward upon himself, the speaker's search within for the ideal.

Related to this internal separation is the alliance between the speaker's persona and the Dante-persona, both of whom experienced similar divisions of self. On the one hand, the self attempts to experience the quest externally, bodily, trying empirically to find his ideal; on the other, the self is confined to his own thoughts and emotions, attempting to come inwardly to terms with what his quest means. It is this latter quest, the inward journey, by which he must find the means to impart this experience, spiritually and intellectually, to an audience. The autobiographical section depicts Shelley's attempt to find within himself the goal of his quest, both the ideal itself and the language through which to convey it. Like Dante, he is indulging in what John Freccero calls a "novel of the self." According to Freccero, to write such a work, an author tries "to capture the essence of one's experience and then to dramatize it in terms that are intelligible to others" (Dante 4). This attempt to verbalize, Freccero suggests, is not remote from the experience but rather is an integral part of the "conversion" process: the self who is telling of the self who was. Dante's Vita Nuova, literally "New Life," is such a "conversion" poem: "The experience of conversion for Dante is at the same time the experience of writing the novel of the self, just as the novel of the self depends for its very existence on the conversion which is its subject matter" (Freccero, Dante 5). Throughout the autobiographical section of Epipsychidion, Shelley's speaker stresses that his youth's vision is a force of conversion. Freccero might well have been writing about Shelley when he says,

[T]his detachment of the self that was from the self that is constitutes the first requirement of any literature of the self that pretends to sincerity. This is most apparent in some of the modern forms of the literature of the self which end not in synthesis, but in infinite regression — a series of attempts to grasp the truth about oneself which are constantly being replaced by fresh attempts.... In such cases there is no real detachment, no gap between persona who was and author who is. Because of the essential continuity of subject and object, of observer and the self which is observed, there is no place to stand from which the flow of consciousness can be measured, let alone judged, because both subject and object are swept along by the flow of time. (Dante 5)

As we have seen, Shelley attempts repeatedly in the first section of the poem to grasp Emily, but in vain. Similarly, the speaker's repeated attempts in the middle section to find the ideal show no real gap between the present poet and his autobiographical past; the first section's depiction of the author who is bears a marked resemblance to the middle section's ostensible depiction of the persona who was. The speaker repeats the first section's image of a moth consumed by the flame which attracts it, saying, "towards the loadstar of my one desire, / I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight / Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet night" (219-21). The ideal is described, similarly, as a "God throned on a winged planet / Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, / Into the dreary cone of our life's shade" (226-28). Schulze suggests that Shelley's references to "a God throned on a winged planet" and to "tenfold swiftness" may pun on features of Dante's universe even as they recall Beatrice's glory (202); more important, they resemble the apotheosizing of Emily the speaker demonstrated in the opening stanzas of the poem. Dante's poetry suggests Beatrice's divine power over the poet, effecting in verse his conversion to a "new life."

In like manner, Epipsychidion is a conversion poem: the mystical union which the speaker wishes between himself and Emily is depicted repeatedly in a quasi-sexual religious fervor, employing both the emotional earnestness and what Schulze calls the "glorious imagination" of Dante's ascent to Paradiso in the Comedy (214). Shelley even borrows Dante's "dark wood" of Inferno as an autobiographical point of embarking upon his quest to find the ideal. Shelley's speaker goes forth, he says, "with hope and fear / And every gentle passion sick to death, / Into the wintry forest of our life" (246-48). The speaker's patterning himself after Dante results not only in the lack of detachment between persona who was and author who is but also in blurred distinctions between the Dante-persona and the speaker — Shelley's speaker is trying to "be" Dante, even to the point of adopting in the three major sections of Epipsychidion three "more or less archetypal modes of love poetry": lyric, confession, and pastoral (McConnell 111-12). However, the speaker is less than successful, and he comes to realize his failure, in disguising himself as a modern-day Dante. Though the speaker adopts a Dantesque ideal, embarks upon a Dantesque quest, uses Dantesque imagery and motifs, borrows Dantesque archetypes, and invokes a Dantesque awareness of language's limitations, he is not Dante. And herein lies the crux of the irony.

The conversion Shelley's speaker seeks, far from the transcendent glory of Dante, is a self-conscious annihilation of that part of himself which doubts the efficacy of his vision. As much as Shelley's speaker wishes to follow in the tracks of Dante, Shelley's pursuit of the ideal emphasizes the inherent separation, rather than unification, of quester and ideal: "I would have followed," Shelley's speaker says, "though the grave between / Yawned like a gulph whose spectres are unseen" (230-31). A voice tells the speaker soon after the vision has departed in the middle section that "The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest" (233); the speaker, unable to perceive within himself the presence of the vision, searches in a series of lovers for "one form resembling hers, / In which she might have masked herself from me" (254-55). The speaker makes clear in this section what his ideal encompasses; she is "the veiled Divinity" of "That world within this Chaos, mine and me" (244, 243). His awareness of the chaos within, encompassing "mine" and "me," is emblematic of the annihilation with which the poem concludes. According to Schulze, the speaker's identification with Dante, itself a division of self, is both a "self-love founded on terror" and "a necessary fall into a kind of false consciousness." Whereas Dante is able to sublimate his obsessions in the Vita Nuova, Shelley must undo his "deliverance" and acknowledge the chaotic self which his obsessive questing has disguised (214-15). In essence, he must somehow overpower the "mine," which Reiman defines as "the chaos of disparate, unorganized, and rebellious thoughts and passions," in favor of the "me," which is "an organized universe of values" (Shelley 107). As early as line 52 of the poem Shelley attempts to spurn the possessive case when he says, "I am not thine: I am a part of thee," an assertion clarified later in the poem after he has temporarily regained Emily:

To whatsoe'er of dull mortality
Is mine, remain a vestal sister still;
To the intense, the deep, the imperishable,
Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united
Even as a bride, delighting and delighted. (389-93, italics added)

Shelley requests that Emily, as the person embodying the ideal, remain a "vestal sister" to that portion of his psyche which is "dull mortality"; to his full deep and imperishable ego, he wishes she be united as a bride. Hence, he seeks their uniting to be not merely a mortal binding subject to change but a spiritual unification impervious to annihilation. In Dantesque terms, he seeks the timeless, ceaseless salvation of Paradiso, in which Dante will forever be united with Beatrice in divine love. But where Dante's conversion depended upon divine grace, Shelley's goal depends upon his own mental and psychic immutability: for Shelley, conversion becomes inversion.

And because he cannot ever adequately separate the possessive from the inherent, his quest is doomed to failure. The third major section of the poem, in which Shelley imaginatively embarks with Emily upon the voyage to the island paradise, drives toward relationship and life, but as Bloom suggests, it "is countered by an incestuous antimyth of despair, moving toward death." The poem alternates between two quests, Bloom says: "for an emanation and for a female counterpart of the spectral self" (The Visionary Company 329). The final movement of the poem struggles to capture in language some happy balance between all oppositions. The bark in which they will travel to this island is "as an albatross," the speaker says, between whose wings they will sit "while Night / And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight" (416-19). The isle itself, situated "'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea" (457), is an idyllic place populated by innocent yet bold natives, a "pastoral people" who "from the Elysian, clear, and golden air / Draw the last spirit of the age of gold" (427-28) but who are not old enough to remember the builders of the "lone dwelling" wherein the speaker will establish a home.

But in this careful balancing act, the speaker is unable, finally, to achieve a balance between an emanation and a mortal companion. In the closing lines of the poem, as the overt sexual imagery builds to a climax, the speaker depicts his own demise:

We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
'Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (573-91)

As in Byron's Manfred, and even using the same word — "expire" — to denote his demise, Shelley's speaker cannot sustain the momentary glimpse of the unveiled ideal. Shelley's quest, unlike that by Dante in the Comedy, cannot serve as an anticipatory viewing of the ideal in its full glory; for Shelley, it is an all or nothing affair. Unable to draw his quest to a successful close, the speaker of Epipsychidion elects death rather than failure, which would mean living without hope of ever achieving the ideal in its totality. His quest fails finally because, according to Schlegel, love is desire for permanence, "for being as opposed to becoming" (Mellor 87). Rather than face the unpalatable reality that love is fleeting, Shelley's speaker chooses an ironic reversal which criticizes even as it praises the efficacy of the quest.

In Prometheus Unbound, as we have seen, Shelley successfully balances the contradictory and often irreconcilable philosophies of Idealism and Skepticism. With Epipsychidion the balance shifts somewhat to emphasize more emphatically the darkness of the poetic quest. Thus, even as Shelley adopts greater amounts of Dante's comedic road to redemption, his subject matter gravitates more deeply into despair. Shelley's increasing injection of Dantesque exuberance into ever more pessimistic works draws attention to itself and is a primary irony in this adaptation. Particularly, Epipsychidion's irony is that peculiar brand of romantic irony because the irony is directed not outward to the reader but inward, both to the work and to its writer. And inherent in the work is the residue of a type of love poetry perfected as never again since in the works of Dante. By failing to match Dante's achievement, Shelley compliments the medieval poet, even as he posits that Dante's dogmatic view of the world is insufficient to characterize the present-day world.

Notes

1. In one place, a Spirit of the Hour quotes Dante's inscription over the gate of Hell, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" (III.iv.136). In Act IV, Panthea's vision of "Ten thousand orbs involving and involved" (241), according to Reiman and Powers, draws on Milton's descriptions of Angels in Paradise Lost (V.620-24) and of the Chariot of Paternal Deitie (VI.749ff.), which in turn echo visions in Ezekiel (chapters 1 and 10) and Purgatorio, canto 29 (Shelley's Poetry and Prose 201n). Back to text

2. Shelley rendered the first line in Italian as "Voi, ch' intendendo, il terzo ciel movete." Back to text

3. In Paradiso, for example, Dante alludes to the difficulty of language by saying "How speak trans-human change to human sense? / Let the example speak until God's grace / grants the pure spirit the experience" (1.70-72). Back to text

4. Beatrice reprimands Dante to confess his sins, "for the [Lethean] waters / have yet to purge sin from your memory" (Purgatorio 31.11-12). Back to text

5. It is worth noting that Virgil, though commissioned to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, can never himself participate in the divine salvation to which the Comedy is intended to be a prelude, for Virgil lived before Christianity. Back to text

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