Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Curiously or perhaps appropriately, Alastor, the spirit that compels the Poet to pursue increasingly more subjective realms at the expense of the interaction with the real-time world and with real-time people, never makes much of an appearance. The Poet, allegorically within the grand cave fashioned by his full-throttle imagination, momentarily feels the urgent brush of a spirit that “seemed / To stand beside him—clothed in no bright robes / Of shadowy silver or enshrining light” (Lines 479-481), who compels the Poet to follow it deeper into the fantastic realm until for the Poet that coaxing spirit becomes his entire register of reference, “as if he and it / Were all that was” (Lines 487-488). The spirit beckons him, coaxes him, to follow him until all around the Poet the entirely symbolic and fantastic world of his imagining begins to decay into a wasteland and the Poet himself spirals into a “joyous madness” (Line 518). Calm, he keeps walking, pursuing something of which he is not sure.

Shelley, something of an autodidact in the mythologies of Antiquity, draws on the figure of Alastor, a terrifying presence in Greek mythology, a fearsome black horse reputed to be the one of the team of horses that drove the chariot when Hades kidnapped the innocent and beautiful Persephone, Zeus’s daughter, and took her into the grim emptiness of the dark empire of his underworld where she will become queen. Within that symbolic context, the Poet, innocent and sensitive, is the kidnapped victim, taken by Alastor into a grim world where all he has to sustain himself is himself, a kind of marooned monarch of the dark empire of his own underworld, perched there in magnificent solitude overlooking all, the king of nothing. The “Poet’s blood / That ever beat in mystic sympathy / With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still” (Lines 650-653). He is led by the merciless Alastor to a bleak end: “No sense, no motion, no divinity” (Line 665).

The boat that the Poet finds and then uses to cross the sea symbolizes the spiritual journey of the Poet to resist, or perhaps to catapult beyond and above the simple delight in the accessible and immediate world around him. The Poet, Shelley argues, must be willing to move out, to abandon the comforts and security of the conservative world (here the land where the Poet engages nature and then the rich wisdom of books and then exotic lovers) and risk the journey into self-discovery that is the fountainhead of great poetry. Ironic, given how Shelley himself would perish in a small and fragile sailing craft unfit for the stormy waters of the open sea. The poem uses the symbol of the Poet journeying on a small and fragile shallop to cross a tempestuous sea, including a fierce whirlpool, to suggest how the Poet, despite the intimidating agonies and ironies of the real-time world, can navigate safely into a realm of purest pleasure and aesthetic delight. The boat survives the sea. When the Poet happens upon the little shallop, “long abandoned” and its sides “gaped with many a rift” (Line 301), a “restless impulse” (Line 303) urges him to set sail. It is initially a heroic gesture. The Poet sitting grandly, quietly in the shallop does little to navigate the tiny craft. It is as if the boat were compelled by energies vaster than the Poet’s to secure the Poet’s journey from the vicissitudes and sufferings of the world to find, at last, the flower-strewn cover, the symbol of the spiritual, symbolic, and entirely subjective world of his own creation. That the Poet survives the torments and challenges of the real world, or the “open sea” (and Shelley’s obvious allegory invites the quote marks), gives his character the promise of tapping into the magnificent energy of the soul. That, in the end, the Poet rejects returning to the real-time world, abandons the “boat” and turns his back on the “sea,” and settles in the insulated, claustrophobic soft prison-world apart from that tempestuous and often stormy world whose joys and sorrows make the poet human marks his tragedy.