Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

242Percy Bysshe ShelleyThe impulse of thy strength, only less freeThan thou, O uncontrollable! If evenI were as in my boyhood, and could beThe comrade of the wandering over Heaven,As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speedScarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have strivenAs thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.O! Lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowedOne too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.One prayer recognized as righteous by all faiths is “Lord, makeme as you are.” Shelley accepts his redemption as a natural, cyclicprocess, which must begin with annihilation. The spirit will redeemhim according to the customary operations of its own dispensation, soShelley petitions to enter the processes of nature, to be a fallen leaf inautumn, to be a polyp under the shallow Mediterranean, to be a drowsysummer day wakened suddenly into apprehension by “the locks ofthe approaching storm.” The same annihilation is present but understatedin Christianity, where being again means first dying. Shelleyhas no problem with the midstage. He welcomes annihilation. Hemakes it beautiful. It is as if he suddenly recognized what all the periland death and ruin upon Mont Blanc were for. The riven valleys andthe earthquakes and the freezing winter storms are invitations, opendoors, lintels to be passed under in pursuit of the sublime. Why am Iexhausted and decaying? Because the west wind, which is the presentbody of the spirit is about to lift me up, about to shatter me as it doesthe forests, is about to sow me into the earth as the seeds of a fairerworld. The sublime will take me into itself because I, by my own willand longing, have made myself almost indistinguishable from it.It is unlikely that the famous, and famously unsatisfying, concludingcouplet of this poem can be taken as purely rhetorical.O Wind,If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?