Shelley as a Prophet. Shelley has his place, says Prof. Elton, apart and secure among the English prophets, in the great line from King Alfred to Carlyle. “He has a clear and sublime vision of the hops of mankind. He wishes to see the world freed from all the enslavements of the brain, and from the sloth that besets the heart and imagination. He imagines an age of mental light, with the law of love and beauty for its principle. To this vision of a regenerate earth he comes by many paths. He is an artist as well as a prophet. He is more constantly a poet than any Englishman of the idealizing type, except possibly Spenser; and his teaching is rarer and more inspiring than Spenser’s while his style is not less instinctively right and lovely.” Liberty, equality, and the brother hood of man were the ideals which presented themselves to him as objects capable d attainment, and he set himself with fervour to denounce the existing order of things and assail the barriers which checked the free development of the human spirit. Animated by theories of William Godwin, he attacked government and religion kings and priests. He seriously wished to reform the world by replacing tyranny with love. On this point he was a fanatic, for he was completely obsessed by this idea. Like all intensely emotional people, he was often in extremes either of rapture or of despair—rapture at the glory of his ideals, or despair at the evil and corruption of the world. He abhorred all dogmatic rules of belief and morals in as much as they, according to him, cramp and warp the spiritual liberty and progress of man, which, he affirms, can be obtained only in a universe controlled by love. He spent his life in the quest of a perfection which he sometimes called freedom, sometimes beauty, sometimes love. To Shelley the three were synonymous. Perfect liberty is, according to him, impossible without perfect love and perfect beauty is the outcome of these two.
The prophetic tendency of Shelley is apparent everywhere in his poems. He longed to reform the world in his own ideal way. This prophetic tendency is prominent in the last stanza of the
Ode to the West Wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth,
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words amog mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! 0, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
