Varied imagery. Shelley deals less with actualities than does any other English poet. His imagery is that of a dream—world, peopled by ethereal forms. The world of spirits was more real to him than our world of hard facts. “So habitual and familiar, says Raleigh, “was Shelley’s converse with this spectral world that both in his thought and in his expression it held the place of what is commonly called the real world. The figures of his poetry illustrate what is strange by what is familiar, and it is the shadows and spirits that are familiar.” Even when he borrows imagery from Nature, it is from a nature heightened and rarefied by passage through his own temperament. The autumn leaves scurrying before the wind remind him of ‘ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’ (Ode to the West Wind.) The skylark in the heavens is ‘like a poet hidden in the light of thought.’ It is hard to imagine anything more remote than,
Shapes
Such as ghost dream dwell in the lampless deep.
All his imagery is thus dream-imagery. It is also a “dazzling shifting imagery.” He is at the other pole from Wordsworth’s homeliness and large acceptance of Nature as she is. Wordsworth’s imagery embodies; Shelley’s imagery disembodies, Hence an air of unreality rests over all of Shelley’s work, an unreality made more conspicuous by his unpractical theories of conduct and society.” No poet, ancient or modern,” says Courthope, “has equalled Shelley in the power of accumulating successions of sublime images in flowing verse ; no poet has ever exhibited such inexhaustible resources in finding words metrically suited to the subtle and intricate windings of spiritual thought.”
We find kaleidoscopic fertility of imagery in Shelley’s poetry. Some of the best examples of this quality are found in the first two stanzas of the Ode to the West Wind and the poem “When the lamp is shattered.” Shelley’s imagery is always shifting. Sometimes there are abrupt transitions. (vide The Flight of Love, stanza IV, and Ode to Night stanzas II and III, the transition of ‘her’ in line 11 to ‘his’ in line 19 with reference to ‘Day.’) This rapid transition of thought and imagery sometimes entails obscurity. Besides, his imagery, being mostly unreal, is vague. Many a time he is found describing a perfectly definite object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex abstract conception. Thus he would speak of the ‘dead leaves of trees’ being ‘driven before the West Wind, under the similitude of ‘ghosts before an Enchanter flying’.
Shelley’s similes and metaphors are very charming. To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind, for example, contain many fine similes and metaphors. Shelley usually illustrates the familiar and known by the unfamiliar and unknown. He has enriched English poetry with a new series of images and poetical expressions of thought. In this connection we many consider also what is known as the mythopoeic gift of Shelley. Shelley’s poetry is full of personifications, not the cold and frigid personifications of the eighteenth century poets, but personifications which are conceived with such intensity and power that they become a real spiritual presence inspiring awe and wonder. Such is the spirit of the West Wind and such are the spirits of the Hours in Prometheus.
“Shelley has created the wondrous myths and the cosmic scheme in which the elements, the planets, the clouds and the west wind, become quickened with their individual existence, and speak a language that we can understand.” This rnythopoeic faculty i.e. the faculty of making new myths means giving life, motion and human attributes to the forces of nature, or thinking of them in terms of human personalities. This faculty reveals Shelley’s Hellenism. Poems like The Cloud and Ode to the West Wind illustrate Shelley’s mythopoeic faculty. In them he personifies the forces of nature.
