HAROLD BLOb 'M
With the unintermitted blood, which there
Quivers, (as in a fleece of snow-like air
The crimson pulse of living morn may quiver,)
Continuously prolonged, and ending never
lill they are lost, and in that Beauty furled
/Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness.
Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress
And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt,
Beyond the sense.
I don't recall that any actual cinema I've seen does much to make
the beauty of a woman a little hard to see. Shelley, unlike Milton, Blake
and W,ordsworth, both liked and desired women; the three older prophet–
poets desired women, but evaded the full portrayal of the total or spiritual
form of that desire. Shelley was, intellectually, a ruthless skeptic,
as tough-minded as you are, whoever you are. Rhetorically, he was,
all critical misrepresentation to the contrary, an urbane ironist, but
emotionally he was, to his eternal credit but personal sorrow, a
passionate idealist. As an intellectual skeptic, he knows, too well, the
narrow limits of both poetry and love; as an ironist he is too cul–
tivated to indulge in the vulgarity of constantly showing us that he
knows those limits. As an idealist, he merely keeps falling in love.
Put together the skepticism, the urbanity and the idealism, and you leave
little reason for any visible appearance to move this poet. Intellectually
he doubts that he can know its reality; rhetorically he doubts that it
can be expressed with any decorum; and emotionally he doubts that it can
satisfy a desire that will not settle for any outermost form whatsoever.
Set him the task of describing the visual beauty of his beloved, and
you get the extravagant and magnificent passage I've recited to you,
not so much a description of a human female as a fireworks display of
what Stevens called "lights astral and Shelleyan."
Yet a close inspection of the passage makes us dissatisfied, not with
it, but the ways we ordinarily describe a woman's beauty, and even more,
with the grossness of the motion picture camera, or its manipulator,
when an attempt is made to show us such beauty. "See where she
stands!" Shelley cries in exultation, and we try to see. But the glory of
her being is not visible in any ordinary sense. We cannot
see
a warmth
compounded of light and motion, nor can we see the aura of love sur–
rounding this beauty. And yet, as Shelley's poem knows and shows us,
