Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

The voice that tells the cautionary story of the Poet who gets lost in the opulence of his own imagination is a narrator introduced in the first two sections. He asserts that the “great Mother” (Line 2), by which he means nature itself, has “imbued” (Line 2) his soul with a passion for the world and its delights, that is has permeated his being. He hymns the wonders of nature, dewy mornings, the seasons, the rhythms and melodies of birds and insects. He cautions, however, that despite his intoxication with such delights, his emotional and psychological grounding in the expansive generosity of nature itself, he is content to admire it, be inspired by it, feel its kinetic bond without probing into its mysteries, without demanding nature reveal itself to him. That, he assures, would be ego. That voice defines a narrative frame as the narrator introduces in the third section his character, a young poet dead too soon. “There was a Poet whose untimely tomb / No human hands with pious reverence reared” (Lines 50-51). The narrator then relates the story of the Poet and his adventure to discover, to capture the mysterious essence of nature, a mission outrageous to the narrator.

The key to this voice-over who relates a tragedy that he understands could easily have been prevented is in the poem’s Latin epigraph. The line is taken from Book 3 of the Confessions of St. Augustine, one of the towering figures in Christian Catholic theology whose autobiographical Confessions shares his struggle to overcome the worst impulses and excesses of his lustful, carnal, fallen self on the way to a life of pious intent and religious dedication. Like Alastor, Confessions is a how-to-survive-a-misspent-youth protocol. Shelley takes that relationship of an older self now looking back on his prodigal youth and learning from it the dangers of excess, the toxin of egotism, and the threat from indulgence without limit. Translated, the epigraph says, “I was not yet in love, and I love to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving.” The voice, rich in irony and deep in earned wisdom, exposes that version of himself as morally corrupted, perpetually hungry, a committed wastrel, shallow and at risk, in love, really, with loving itself. Thus, the voice-over carefully recreates the Poet’s journey toward what he will never ultimately be able to capture without irony, without intrusive commentary or editorializing, allowing that figure to find his way to moral decay and a terrible and absolute solitude. The narrator, in the closing stanzas, admits to a “woe too deep for tears” (Line 713), witnessing how the Poet’s journey has ended in tragedy.

The narrator—whether Shelley himself addressing his own flawed youthful avatar or Shelley addressing the crowd of wannabe poets who sought his mentoring—alone survives to tell the story. Remove that voice, that frame, from Alastor and the poem is a tragedy of ambition and hubris. With the frame, Alastor is an earnest cautionary parable that seeks to at once elevate into poetry the lure and power of nature and to limit the reach of the vainglorious poet attempting to understand that power.