In Defence of Harriet Shelley - страница 7

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Exhibit D

“Evening. To Harriet

“O thou bright Sun! Beneath the dark blue line

Of western distance that sublime descendest,

And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline,

Thy million hues to every vapor lendest,

And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream

Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light,

Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright,

Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream;

What gazer now with astronomic eye

Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere?

Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly

The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear,

And turning senseless from thy warm caress

Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness.”

I cannot find the “rift”; still it may be there. What the poem seems to say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great, satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a “little rift which had seemed to be healed, or never to have gaped at all.” That is, “one detects” a little rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? How does one see the invisible? It is the fabulist’s secret; he knows how to detect what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not seeable; it is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet Shelley’s deep damage.

“As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley’s happiness it was no more than a speck”—meaning the one which one detects where “it may never have gaped at all”—“nor had Harriet cause for discontent.”

Shelley’s Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. “From a teacher he had now become a pupil.” Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no “cause for discontent.”

Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned. The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is dog-tired when he gets home, and he can’t teach his wife Latin; it would be unreasonable to expect it.

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