Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude

"Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1815 and first published in 1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend, Thomas Love Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. It is considered to be one of the first of Shelley's major poems.

Peacock suggested the name Alastor which comes from Roman mythology. Peacock has defined Alastor as "evil genius." The name does not refer to the hero or Poet of the poem, however, but instead to the spirit who divinely animates the Poet's imagination.

ummary

In "Alastor" the speaker ostensibly recounts the life of a Poet who zealously pursues the most obscure part of nature in search of "strange truths in undiscovered lands." As the Poet wanders one night, he dreams of a veiled maid. This veiled vision brings with her an intimation of the supernatural world that lies beyond nature. This dream vision serves as a mediator between the natural and supernatural domains by being both spirit and an element of human love. As the Poet attempts to unite with the spirit, night's blackness swallows the vision and severs his dreamy link to the supernatural.

Once touched by the maddening hand of the supernatural, the Poet restlessly searches for a reconciliation with his lost vision. Though his imagination craves a reunion with the infinite, it too is ultimately anchored to the perceptions of the natural world.

Ruminating on thoughts of death as the possible next step beyond dream to the supernatural world he tasted, the Poet notices a small boat floating down a nearby river. Passively, he sits in the boat furiously being driven down the river by a smooth wave. Deeper and deeper into the very source of the natural world he rushes. Like the water's surface supports the boat, the supernatural world "cradles" the mutability both of nature and of man.

As his senses are literally dulled, his imagination helps him sense the spirit's supernatural presence. Instead of perceiving the vision through the senses, the Poet imaginatively observes her in the dying images of the passing objects of nature. The boat flows onward to an "immeasurable void" and the Poet finds himself ready to sink into the supernatural world and break through the threshold into death.

When the Poet reaches the "obscurest chasm," his last sight is of the moon. As that image fades from the Poet's mind, he has finally attained transcendence to the supernatural world. The journey to the very source of nature led, finally, to an immanence within nature's very structure and to a world free of decay and change.

Critical review

Critics have spent a great deal of effort attempting to identify the Poet. The most convincing possibility is William Wordsworth, since the poem is framed with direct quotations from Wordsworth's poetry, and Shelley had a deeply ambivalent reaction to Wordsworth's poetry, as witnessed in his sonnet "To Wordsworth."

In 1912, Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky wrote his symphonic poem "Alastor, Poème d'après Shelley" (Op. 14) based on Shelley's work.

External links

* [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4800 Project Gutenberg: complete works of Shelley, including Alastor]