Shelley's India of the Imagination

Shelley and the India of the Imagination
Author(s): KATHLEEN RAINE

Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1/2, PERCEIVING INDIA: INSIGHT
AND INQUIRY (SPRING-SUMMER 1993), pp. 33-50
Published by: India International Centre
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23003741 .
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KATHLEEN RAINE
Shelley and the India of the Imagination*
a poet, the 'real' India is what the Imagination has

created in her heritage of music, painting, architecture,
poetry, all the crafts and arts, together with her incom
parable heritage of thought. That heritage is the dis

To tilled essence of every civilization and outlasts time
and change.
I remember once, in conversation, the great novelist
philosopher, Raja Rao, made the claim for India that, whereas other
countries had their ethnic, geographical and historical identities,
India is a state of being;
and that, paradoxically, the knowledge
long jealously guarded by the Brahmins is nothing less than univer

sal truth, open to all who can attain it, the summit and goal of the
human pilgrimage. Shelley, who saw humankind as 'pilgrims of
eternity' surely came within

sight of that 'India of the Imagination',
in this sense. If India is other than the France, the Italy, the Greece
or the England of the Imagination, it is so because it is more
all-embracing and universal, and Shelley was a poet who ad

dressed himself to what in humanity is most universal:
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless.
But indeed we speak of the 'realms

when of gold', the many goodly
states and kingdoms of the Imagination, all are regions of the one
human kingdom of mind and soul, in which all are free to dwell.
Of all English poets it is Shelley whom India has most fully
taken to her heart—a recognition surely of that invisible citizen
ship. But to what extent was India known to Shelley, steeped as he

was in 'the learning of the Imagination', which is concerned not
*This was a paper read by Dr Kathleen Raine at the Nehru Centre, London, on
August 4,1992, the bi-centenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

34 / Shelley and the India of the Imagination
with facts but with thought, not with history but with values and
with beauty? Twenty years ago I would have done my best to
prepare a learned
paper on Shelley's known or possible sources of
knowledge of Indian literature, travellers' tales and works of art. I

shall not do so now—these things signify less than does the pursuit
of the inner realities themselves that Shelley has in common with
Indian philosophy and poetry. Doubtless Shelley had read the
Bhagavad Gita in Sir Charles Wilkins's translation, made under the
auspices of Sir William Jones and published in England in 1785.
Probably he was familiar with the Proceedings of the Calcutta Society,

and with Jones's translations of the Gita Govinda, those love-poems
of Radha and Lord Krishna—India's Cupid and Psyche; and of
Kalidasa's widely read at the time, and other material
Shakuntala,
from India's rich treasury. In Shelley's late writings—in Adonais,
his great elegy on the death of Keats, and in Hellas, we find what
seem to be veritable echoes of the Bhagavad Gita.
What is certain is that India exerted an attraction, implicit and
indeed explicit, in his great mythological poem Un Prometheus
bound. The poem is based on the Prometheus of Aeschylus, which
tells the story of the Titan, friend to man, who stole from heaven
the gift of fire which he conferred on humanity; for this in punish
ment, he was bound by the avenging Zeus to a rock in the
Caucasus, there to be tormented by the eagle, bird of Zeus, to the
end of time. Shelley, who tells of the freeing of the Titan, sets the
scene in 'A ravine of icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus.' Now the
Caucasus range is not in India, as Shelley must have known. The
location belongs not to the geography of the planet, but to the
'emblematic' geography of the Imagination: the region of
Prometheus' redemption is located on the border of 'the India of
the Imagination' for symbolic reason. True, Alexander the Great,
when he reached the frontiers of India, thought he had reached the
Caucasus, so in a sense
Shelley had his precedent;
but it was
symbolic necessity, not Greek history, that dictated the situation of

the action of his myth. The beloved of Prometheus, his shakti,
Shelley names 'Asia', as if he wished to say that the Promethean

Western mind needs for its completion the feminine soul of the
East. Asia can only be, in this context, India for the scene of the
reunion of the liberated Prometheus with Asia is 'in that far Indian
vale', 'A lovely vale in the Indian Caucasus'. The temple of
Prometheus was in former times built

KATHLEEN RAINE / 35
... beyond the peak

Of Bachhic Nysa, Maenad-haunted mountain
And beyond Indus with its tribute-rivers.
There, mirrored in a lake
Beside the windless and crystalline pool

Where ever lies on unerasing waves
The image of a temple built above,

Distinct with column, arch and architrave
It is deserted now, but once it bore
Thy name, Prometheus.
In Aeschylus' drama there is no feminine consort of

Prometheus—this is an invention of Shelley's own, and an inspired
one, since in his epic it is love that is the agent of liberation and the
restoration of the paradisal state. The Prometheus of Aeschylus is,
however, visited in his solitude by the beloved of Zeus, Io, in the
form of a cow and pursued by a gad-fly sent to torment her by
Zeus' jealous consort, Hera. Io in her wanderings travels as far as
India; and doubtless Shelley's lone is an echo of Io, who with
Panthea (the name simply means the 'all goddess') makes a trinity
of 'daughters of Ocean' with Asia. Shelley's 'far Indian vale' does
surely catch something of the fragrance of those Himalayan forests

of the Indian epics, where the gods and goddesses of India dwell.
Doubtless it would be possible to find 'sources' of Shelley's idea of
the forests of Kashmir; but no accuracy of description or inaccuracy
can account for the rich
imaginative landscape of symbolic
'correspondence' he has created:
... a cave
All with odorous
overgrown trailing plants
Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers
And paved with veined emerald; and a fountain
Leaps in the midst with an awaking sound.
From its carved roof, the mountain's tears
frozen
Like snow in silver of long diamond spires
Hung downward raining forth a doubtful light
And there is heard the ever-moving air
And bees; and all around are mossy seats,
And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass,
A simple dwelling that shall be our own.

Did not Rama and Sita dwell in a bower in those same woods
where all lovers dwell
in their paradisal dream? And is not the
poetry of India full of such lovely and luxurious descriptions of
incense-bearing trees and birds and lotus-lakes? For the poetry of

erotic love demands and itself creates those forest-glades of un
spoiled natural beauty where "The Champak odours fail/ Like

sweet thoughts in a dream" (Where had Shelley breathed that scent
of Champak flowers?)
sia—that is to say India—signified for Shelley the feminine
principle: India, where no god is without his shakti.

JL JL Shelley's poetry is, first and last, an eloquent affirmation
that erotic love is sacred, and of the soul. In this he was a child of
his time. Rousseau had, in his Confessions, first made his plea for
'free love', and
Mary Wollstonecraft, follower of Rousseau's, had
in her life put into practise
tragic Rousseau's ideas. Shelley's
second wife, Mary, was the daughter of this first feminist and of
Godwin, the political theorist whom she married, to die giving

birth to Shelley's Mary Shelley's other contemporary, Blake, had
known and much admired Mary Wollstonecraft, two of whose
books he had illustrated, and Blake's poem, Visions of the Daughters
of Albion, is an eloquent plea for free love, of which Shelley might

well have seen a copy in the house of Godwin. Blake could not have
failed to give a copy to Mary Wollstonecraft, who had inspired it.
Christianity, which exalts virginity and motherhood, in the Blessed
Virgin Mary never at any time allowed a place for the erotic. For
the first time, with Shelley, and indeed with Keats whom Shelley
so passionately admired, the erotic was to enter English poetry—
not as a secular but as a profoundly imaginative and numinous
reality.
Shelley was a mythological poet in the full sense, so well
defined by Yeats as the artist's instinct 'that teaches him to discover
immortal moods in mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our
trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual passion'. Yeats might have
been thinking of Shelley as the first and supreme English poet to
discover 'a divine love in sexual passion'. For Shelley the
'liberation' of women was not some sterile and unbeautiful quarrel
with men, but the glorification of erotic love. Take this passage from
Epipsychidion, in which Shelley is praising not a goddess, but a

KATHLEEN RAINE / 37
woman of flesh and blood in whom he had seen the divine beauty.
Emilia Viviani, to whom the poem is addressed, had taken the veil
as a nun. Shelley's passionate indignation arose from his vision of
the sacredness of the erotic, of which the Christian idealisation of
celibacy has been a violation throughout its history. He sees in the
particular woman the presence of the goddess:
... the brightness

Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven ofJune
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the moon
Burns inextinguishably beautiful:
And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full
Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,
Killing the sense with sweet as stops
passion,
Of planetary music, heard in trance.

In her mild light the starry spirits dance,
The sunbeams of those wells which ever leap
Under the lightnings of the soul—too deep
For the brieffathom-line of thought and sense.
The glory of her being, issuing thence
Stains the dead blank cold air with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made
By love.
This is no abstract divinity, but divinity sensuously present:
... and in that beauty furled

Which penetrates and and the world;
clasps fills
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness.
Warm fragrance seems tofall from her light dress,
And her loose hair, and where some trees
heavy
The air
of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint mind,
And in the soul a wild odour is felt,
Beyond the sense, likefairy dews that melt
Into the bosom of a frozen bud.
See where she stands! A mortal shape indeed
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion, which may change but cannot die,
An image of some bright eternity.

Where but in India, the land of Radha and Krishna, of

Kalidasa's Cloud-Messenger, of Rama and Sita, is comparable
poetry to be found in which the human and the divine aspects of
erotic love are so gloriously united? Such poetry challenged, not
only Shelley's hostile contemporaries, but a civilization which for

two thousand years had excluded the Goddess. And without Eros
the image of beauty is pale. Shelley is the supreme poet of beauty,
which is beheld only with the eyes of love.
are deeper affinitiesbetween Shelley and the India of

the Imagination, to which I shall later return. But meanwhile
There I would like to ask, how India has seen Shelley, who of all
the English poets continues to exercise, I would guess, the strongest
and most enduring hold on the India of the Imagination. Probably
the most thoughtful assessment of English poetry by an Indian
author is Sri Aurobindo'sThe Future Poetry, published in 1953, an
evaluation of English poetry from Chaucer to the Irish Renaissance.
Sri Aurobindo was educated in England, at St Paul's School, then
at King's College, Oxford and his command of the English lan
guage (in which he wrote his many works on philosophy) was
perfect, and his insight into poetry remarkable. Yet his was an
Indian mind and point of view, for all his appreciation of the vitality
of Shakespeare's genius,(working in tune with the life spirit itself),
of Milton's intellectual power, of the discovery of the inner worlds
of the soul by Romantic poets such as Keats, Wordsworth and
Shelley. One reads his book with the sense that he was looking for
some element in English poetry which he did not find; with a
certain disappointment. First, comes the
vitalitynatural of
Chaucer; Shakespeare's understanding of the natural man; then
Milton whose mythological vision was hampered by dogmatic
theology; then came the awakening of the inner worlds by the
Romantic poets. For a further dimension—the inspiration of
universal Spirit he looked in vain, but for occasional
pas flashes,
sages mainly in Shelley's poetry, as well as here and there in
Wordsworth's sublime nature-poetry. Aurobindo looked for a fur
ther evolution, which some would say has been realized in the
poetry of W.B. Yeats, who in the course of much deep thought and
study had reached the frontiers of the India of the Imagination—for

which the universal spirit is an ever-present reality of the higher

KATHLEEN RAINE / 39
worlds of consciousness. With his teacher, Sri Purohit Swamy, Yeats

made, in his last years, translations of the ten principal Upanishads,
and Swam/s translation of the Bhagavad Gita is dedicated to Yeats.
He had intended to follow Sri Purohit Swamy to India, but his
health no longer permitted him to make that journey otherwise
than in spirit. Yeat's two poetic 'masters' were Blake (of whose
Prophetic Books he was the first editor); and Shelley, whose presence
imbues all his writings.
That dimension for which Sri Aurobindo looked in vain in
English poetry was the inspiration of the mantra, fundamental in

the traditional Indian understanding of poetry; which he defines
as 'revealed verse of power, not of an ordinary but of a divine
inspiration and source; the highest intensity of the revelatory poetic

word.' Metre has been increasingly unfashionable in modern
poetry throughout this century; and it has been widely replaced by

'free verse' which at best has its own sad music, but at worst is not
really verse at all, but prose cut into convenient lengths by writers
with no ear for the inner music. As to the idea of 'inspiration', still
less divine inspiration, such an idea is not in accord with current
western news of reality. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that
metric verse is seldom used; and when it is, we find it in the work
of poets who reject materialism and adhere to a spiritual tradition:
Yeats and his friend the mystic and theosophist AE; the Welsh
poets, Vernon Watkins and Dylan Thomas, their inner ears attuned,
though both wrote in English, to the age-old poetic tradition of the

Welsh language; Edwin Muir, from the Orkneys—all of whom
adhered to the view of man as spiritual being. AE (George Russell)
has somewhere pointed out that to use metric verse for material
not belonging to the world of imaginative experience is in fact a
mere artificial imitation of forms which to the uplifted soul come
naturally.
Sri Aurobindo extends the use of the word mantra to 'all speech
that has a supreme or absolute power; the mantra is the word that
carries the godhead in it or the power of the godhead'. So it is that
Valmiki, poet of the Ramayana, was given by divine inspiration not
the subject-matter or the poem but the metre, by whose power he
transposed legend and observation of the natural world to the
order of poetry, raised the story of Rama into 'the India of the
Imagination'. Such is the immortalising power of all true poetry;

though by no means of much verse that goes by the name, and

seldom found in the poetry of the modern West or of the Western

ised modern world.
If the mantra be so defined,
Shelley is the supreme poet of
poetic form generating itself
from some living source which
precedes the words it informs, as iron-filings are arranged by an

invisible magnetic field. In his eloquence Shelley never flags, using
with equal ease the Spenserian stanza, blank verse, Dante's terza
rima, classical hexameters, and any number of subtle and delicate
lyric metres, the stanzas of The Cloud, the Ode to the West Wind and
To a Skylark. The choruses of Prometheus Unbound and of Hellas,
varied and powerful as these are, Shelley did not merely imitate
from the choruses of the Greek plays he knew so well: rather he
went to the source of rhapsody whence the music of language
flows.
We need only look at the pages of Shelley's manuscripts to see
this process taking place, literally before our eyes. For often whole
stanzas are blocked out, with only a few words
or a phrase here
and there, as if the poem as a whole preceded the parts, the form
preceded the words; or one might say the beauty preceded the
logical sense. Yeats had indeed a wonderful ear for the grandeur
of language, but he was
not a mantric poet. His verse seldom came
spontaneously, on the contrary, he worked and re-worked his early

drafts before they attained formal perfection. Shelley was one of
the most abundant of poets—too much so, Yeats has said. Much of
his output, like the early The Revolt of Islam, unflagging in the
energy of its verse, contains great stretches of rhetorical verbiage.

Be that as it may, Sri Aurobindo has written that Shelley comes the
nearest of all the English poets to the inspiration from the universal
spirit he calls 'supermind', the high source whence the mantra is

said to arise.
We need not share Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary theory of a
progression in English poetry from the vital, to the intellectual, to
the psychological to the spiritual inspiration in order to recognize
the truth of his identification of the 'levels' from which the inspira
tion of the poet may come. These
levels, four or 'worlds', are
recognized in every spiritual tradition, the Platonic, the Jewish
mystical tradition of Rabbalah, as well as the Indian. Thus Blake
(taking his terms from Swedenborg) writes of his own 'fourfold

vision',

KATHLEEN RAINE / 41
"fis fourfold in my supreme delight,

And threefoldin soft Beulah's night,
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision and Newton's sleep.
Unfortunately in a materialist world 'single vision and

Newton's sleep' has prevailed, and with the exclusion of higher
worlds of soul and spirit, poetry has ceased to be what it was for
Shelley and Blake, and again for Yeats, the highest mode of im
aginative thought, inspired prophetic vision of universal import.

Such it was for the Hebrew psalmists, for the author of the Book of
Job, for the Indian epics and Upanishads, for Rumi and the great
Islamic poets, as for all spiritual traditions.
century readers of Shelley, and some today,

oblivious of the metaphysical dimensions of his work
Nineteenth
admired or more recently condemned him as a nature
poet who wrote marvellous

Turneresque descriptions of clouds
and skies, meteors and
storms: reading his work not as the lan
guage of symbolic correspondence but as simple visual descrip

tion. The Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis for example, sees no
justification for the introduction of angels and maenads into what

he takes to be a piece of descriptive writing in the Ode to the West
Wind:
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion
Loose clouds, like earth's leaves are shed,

decaying
Shook the tangled
from boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair upliftedfrom the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm ...
Marvellously precise description, one might say, of the electri

cal phenomena of a thunderstorm, and Shelley, with his interest in
the science of electricity, was perfectly aware of these things. But
he is writing not of 'nature' but of inspiration. Whereas for the
materialist science of the modern West nature is an inanimate
object, for Shelley nature was, as for the Greeks, 'full of gods'. The

angels, and the maenads, are not, for Shelley, fanciful similes, but
living agents—rain and lightning, cloud and ocean, live with the
cosmic life of universal spirit. As in India's mythologies, there are,
for Shelley, whole heirarchies of nature-spirits. The Indian reader
of Shelley must feel very much at home in his world, for it goes
without saying for the oriental philosophy that spirit, not matter,
is the ground of the universe. Shelley's cloud, his west wind, his moon
and stars, his sensitive plant, his rivers Arethusa and Alphaeus, are
living presences. Where we

may ask of Wordsworth—or of other
English nature-poets—'what' he is describing, of Shelley we must ask

'who' they are—spirits, angels, living voices, elemental powers.
As with nature, so there are spirits of the mind. Angels in the
Christian world have for the most part ceased to be living realities
in the experience of the orthodox, who accused Shelley of'atheism';
who nevertheless was continually aware of spiritual presences,
living visitants of the human mind as in this chorus from
Prometheus Unbound:
From unremembered ages we
Gentle guides and guardians he
Of Heaven-oppressed Mortality,
And we breathe and sicken not
The atmosphere of human thought,

Be it dim or dank or gray
Like a storm-extinguished day
Travelled o'er by dyingglems
Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene.

As the birds within the wind,
As thefish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man's own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element.
Only perhaps by Yeats—by none among his contemporaries—

has Shelley been fully understood as not a fanciful dreamer but as
a poet-metaphysician who has expressed 'Thought's crowned
powers' as no other English poet before him unless Blake and none
since unless Yeats himself.

KATHLEEN RAINE / 43
to popular notions it is precisely the poets of

spiritual vision who are least personal and most universal
Contrary
in their message to their nation, or to humanity. Like the
Hebrew prophets, it was Blake and Shelley, the visionaries, who
spoke their unmistakeable message to their nation. Matthew Ar

nold, in calling Shelley an 'ineffectual angel' greatly mistook the
nature of angels, who as bearers of some divine message can never
be ineffectual. Rilke had better understood that nature who wrote
'every angel is terrible'. Blake had hailed the American and French
revolutions in his 'Prophetic' Europe, America
poems, and The
French Revolution. Shelley, younger by a generation, was a child of
that revolution. However we may judge the historic consequences,
the circle which included Blake and Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft
and Thomas Paine who played so activea part in the events both
of the American and the French revolutions, gave new meaning to
those inspiring words 'liberty, equality, fraternity', of which Shelley
and his wife Mary Shelley, daughter of Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft, were the inheritors. When
Shelley wrote that 'poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of tjie world' his words were
not merely rhetorical, for he was himself deeply committed to that
task of imaginative legislation—as had Blake been before him with
the intent that his words would in due course affect the politics of
history.
Rousseau had proclaimed the innate goodness of man, at
tributing all evils to systems, 'tyrants' and social injustice. This too
facile secular humanism was doomed to failure and Blake in the
sober reflection of his old age, wrote words that might have applied
to Shelley's own tragic life:
Many persons, such as Paine and Voltaire, with some of the ancient
Greeks, say, 'we will not converse concerning Good and Evil; we will
live in paradise and Liberty'. You may do so in spirit, but not in the
mortal body, as you pretend... While we are in the world of mortality,
we must suffer.
Shelley, however, had the Platonic philosophy behind his

belief in man's innate goodness. Plotinus held the soul to be
incorruptible, evil being compared to 'mire or clay7 which adheres

to a piece of gold, and have only to be washed away for the soul to
shine forth in its native purity. This concept comes closer to the

Vedantic concept of the incorruptible divine Self present in every
being, than to the Christian view of 'original sin'. And Shelley's

Prometheus Unbound is a supreme affirmation of the inextinguish
able aspiration of man to his highest nature, at a level that cannot
be quenched by the failure of natural life to attain it. Nor did Shelley
attribute, as more naive revolutionaries have done, all evil to
power-structures and
system; for The sensual and the dark rebel
in vain/ Slaves to their own compulsion', and 'All spirits are
enslaved that serve things evil'. The enslavement of humankind is
not external, but to ideas, beliefs, ideologies of our own creation,
and liberation also must be from within. In Prometheus Unbound it
is Asia, the soul, who penetrates the ultimate mystery to question
Demogorgon, the 'mighty darkness'; who tells her that
The deep truth is itnageless,

For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What, to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
Asia replies:
So much 1 asked before,and my heart gave

The response that thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to himself must be the oracle.
This it is that makes
Man the harmonious soul a soul

of many
Whose nature is its own divine control
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.
It is Shelley's understanding that, despite all, there is in

humankind an innate divinity that forbids despair. It lies in our
power
To sufferwoes, which Hope thinks infinite

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Flope ci-eates
From its own wreck the it
thing contemplates
Neither to nor nor
change, falter, repent

KATHLEEN RAINE / 45
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free.
Shelley held
(in the words of a later poet, Yeat's friend the
theosophist AE,) that 'the politics of time' should conform to the
'politics of eternity' and that the concern of the poet is to proclaim

'the politics of eternity'. Shelley's prophetic vision runs through all
his major poems; and that vision was to play its part in inspiring
Mahatma Gandhi's most practical application in this world's af
fairs of the politics of non-violence. Shelley's long early poem, The
Revolt of Islam, is a mythological work describing the powerful
transforming effect of two avatars from another world—a man and

a woman united in love (which Shelley held to be the all-powerful
redemptive force) in persuading a people to drop their weapons

and meet violence with non-resistance. This element in Shelley's
work—the power of non-violence—is not to be found in that of any
other poet among his contemporaries unless implicity in Blake. I
was happy to be able to confirm that Shelley did indeed influence
Gandhiji. The poem that had

inspired him was The Masque of
Anarchy—a much later, shorter
and explicitly political poem Shel
ley had been fired to write by the Peterloo riot in Manchester in
1819, in which the protesters were fired on and some killed.
In Mrs Shelley's note on the poem she writes that 'He looked
on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the
dearest privileges of our nature; the necessities of life when fairly
earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any
despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or
protected from want and ignorance, was intense'. W.B. Yeats, com
menting on a once-current view that Shelley's poetry was Godwin's
Political Justice put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude
revolutionist who believed that the overthrowing of kings and priests
would regenerate mankind understood that for Shelley liberty
was so much more than the liberty of Political Justice, that it was one
with Intellectual Beauty, and that the regeneration he foresaw was so
much more than the regeneration many political dreamers have
foreseen that it could not come into its perfection till the hours bore
Time to his grave in eternity'.
Yeats goes on to say that Shelley cries out to 'the spirit of
beaut/ to overturn all the tyrannies in the world because

It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again that orders all
things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its expressions in
thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken in all things that
are, a community with what we experience within ourselves'. 'We are
born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the
instant we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness.' We have 'a
soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise
which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap', and we labour to
see this soul in many mirrors, that we may possess it the more abun
dantly. He would hardly seek the progress of the world by any less
gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist evil itself. He bids the
reformers in The Philosophical Review of Reform.receive 'the onset of the
cavalry', if it be sent to disperse their meetings, 'with folded arms', and
'not because active resistance is not justifiable, but because temperance
and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive
victory;'and he gives them like advice in The Masque of Anarchy for
liberty, the poem cries, 'is love', and can make the rich man kiss its feet,
and, like those who followed Christ, give away his goods and follow
it throughout the world. He does not believe (Yeats continues) that the
reformation of society can bring this beauty, this divine order, among
men without the regeneration of the hearts of men ... and he foresees
a day when the spirit of nature—the spirit of beauty in his poems and
who has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human heart' will
have made men virtuous.
It is impossible to believe that Gandhi's world-transforming

vision of the power of non-violence could have been inspired by a
vision of man less profound.
for Shelley the Platonic trinityof the Good, the True and
the Beautiful were inseparably one. He can best be seen in
Thus the context of the Greek revival, whose extent and
import is
seldom fully understood academic critics. All know the
by
profound influence, especially on Keats, of the arrival of the friezes
of the Parthenon acquired by Lord Elgin and their housing in the
British Museum; all know of the Barberini vase—Keat's 'Grecian
Urn'—of which the Wedgwood potteries made fired by
replicas,
the enthusiasm of the sculptor whose
Flaxman, pottery in the
Greek style, and whose illustrations to Homer, are famous to this
day. Less well known, except to the few concerned with the Platonic
theology as an alternative to the triumphant materialism of the

Industrial Revolution, are the translations and commentaries of

KATHLEEN RAINE / 47
Thomas Taylor, the Platonist of the complete world of Plato and
Neoplatonic writers who succeeded him, down to Proclus, in the

fifth century AD. These, taken to America by Bronson Alcott and
Emerson, were to flower in the American transcendentalist school.
Shelley, himself a fine Greek scholar, had no need of Taylor's

translations, though he may have caught a breath of Taylor's
enthusiasm for 'the restoration of the Platonic theology7 which
Taylor—understood to be the true philosophy to which

humankind will always return; according to Plotinus' words,
'There is nothing higher than the truth'. And Platonism has ever
been the religion of the poets, as it was of the Florentine artists and
scholars of the fifteenth century. Shelley's friend Thomas Love
Peacock, the satirical novelist, was an enthusiastic follower of
Taylor; both Shelley and Taylor figure in his novels. Therefore, it is

not impossible that Shelley met Taylor. In any case these intercon
nections of lives serve to illustrate the living flow of ideas, not in a
void, but the meeting
through of people—Blake and Flaxman,
fellow-Swedenborgians and lifelong friends; Taylor gave his

course of lectures on the restoration of the Platonic Theology by the
Late Platonists at Flaxman's house. Blake too knew Taylor and no
doubt his many Neoplatonic themes and ideas came to him from
Taylor's writings—for example his belief in reincarnation and the
pre-existence of the soul, totally unacceptable in the Christian

church. To complete the circle, Mary Wollstonecraft was at one time
a lodger in Taylor's house, and called his study 'the abode of peace'.
Most of the metaphysical thought so congenial to Indian
readers Shelley, therefore, derived from the Platonic tradition,
which formed no part of the English mental world of his time, or
the following century until the Theosophical
movement brought a
new current of thought from the Orient. With it a revival of interest
also took place in the passionately anti-clerical writings of Taylor.
But in the Indian context there is nothing strange in many of
Shelley's themes so alien to his own

countrymen. Shelley is alone
among English Romantic poets (again with the exception of Blake)
in holding the belief common to the Hellenic world and to India in
reincarnation; as in the lines that his contemporaries would have
taken to be fanciful but which Shelley certainly held to be a truth:
Is it that some
from brighter sphere
We part with friends we meet with here,

Or do we see the future pass

Across the present's dusky glass?
Or what is it that makes us seem
To patch up fragments of a dream

Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart?
Again Plato's phrase—'for who knows whether to live be not

to die, and to die to live?', repeated from one to another poet and
philosopher of the Hellenic world underlies those magnificent

lines of Adonais—must resonate in the context of the India of the
Imagination:
The One remains, the many and

change pass,
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until death tramples it tofragments—Die
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Adonais was written in 1821, and within two years Shelley

himself had joined his fellow-poet in that region where, in his own
words,
The soul of Adonais like a star

Beacons from the abode where the eternals are.
Shelley's friend Byron, who never attained that height of

imaginative vision and metaphysical understanding at which
poetry becomes the speech of spiritual revelation, gave his support,
and his life, to the war of Greek Independence from the Turkish
empire. His
part in Greek history is commemorated to this day by
the black sash worn by sailors of the Greek navy.
Shelley wrote his
play, Hellas, in celebration of the same event, but the Greek revival
he celebrates is of another kind. He sees a rebirth of the legendary
golden age and echoing Virgil's great Eclogue, held by Christians

as prophetic of the birth of Christ, he writes of the end of the
Christian era:

KATHLEEN RAINE / 49
The world's great age begins anew
The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
In Shelley's drama, the figure of Ahasuerus, who represents,

one might say, the deathless Self, possesses, like the Lord Sri
Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, the wisdom of the cosmos:
... so old
He seems to have outlived the world's decay,
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he...

... But from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought that pierces
The present, and the past, and the future to come.
Mahmud, the world-ruler, wishes only to ask Ahasuerus the

outcome to the present war
of history; but Ahasuerus replies in
words that it is difficult to believe do not echo Indian thought, so
far do they surpass the Platonists themselves:
Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past:

But look on that which cannot the One,
change,
The unborn and the Earth and ocean,
undying.
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem

The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortalfire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds—this whole,
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision all that it inherits

Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight they have no being.
Nought is but that which feels itselfto be.

Shakespeare's Prospero, with whose words Shelley's

deliberately resonate, had said:
Our revels now are ended,
And like the baseless fabrick of this vision,

The clowd-capt Towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great Globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a wrack behind . ..
Prospero, the Renaissance Magus, personifies the Western

esoteric tradition that had, despite Church and State, preserved
certain elements of the perennial wisdom. But to what civilization,
unless it be India, custodian of that universal spiritual knowledge,
is Shelley's affirmation native—that appearances are a maya, and
universal spirit alone real? To me it seems beyond doubt certain
that Shelley knew the Bhagavad Gita, and that it is the words, not
of Plato or Plotinus, but of the Lord Sri Krishna, that resonate in
this and other of Shelley's
passages latest work But if he did not
know the Indian scriptures, no poet writing in the English language
and from within Western civilization has ever approached so near
to the sublime vision of the India of the Imagination.


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Shelley and the India of the Imagination

Author(s): KATHLEEN RAINE

This content downloaded from 198.91.36.79 on Tue, 17 Feb 2015 06:23:15 AM

Shelley and the India of the Imagination*

a poet, the 'real' India is what the Imagination has

parable heritage of thought. That heritage is the dis

long jealously guarded by the Brahmins is nothing less than univer

eternity' surely came within

all-embracing and universal, and Shelley was a poet who ad

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man

Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless.

But indeed we speak of the 'realms

ship. But to what extent was India known to Shelley, steeped as he

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knowledge of Indian literature, travellers' tales and works of art. I

Bhagavad Gita in Sir Charles Wilkins's translation, made under the

auspices of Sir William Jones and published in England in 1785.

Probably he was familiar with the Proceedings of the Calcutta Society,

symbolic necessity, not Greek history, that dictated the situation of

Shelley names 'Asia', as if he wished to say that the Promethean

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... beyond the peak

And beyond Indus with its tribute-rivers.

There, mirrored in a lake

Beside the windless and crystalline pool

The image of a temple built above,

It is deserted now, but once it bore

Thy name, Prometheus.

In Aeschylus' drama there is no feminine consort of

surely catch something of the fragrance of those Himalayan forests

'correspondence' he has created:

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poetry of India full of such lovely and luxurious descriptions of

incense-bearing trees and birds and lotus-lakes? For the poetry of

spoiled natural beauty where "The Champak odours fail/ Like

sia—that is to say India—signified for Shelley the feminine

principle: India, where no god is without his shakti.

Godwin, the political theorist whom she married, to die giving

of Albion, is an eloquent plea for free love, of which Shelley might

Christianity, which exalts virginity and motherhood, in the Blessed

Epipsychidion, in which Shelley is praising not a goddess, but a

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celibacy has been a violation throughout its history. He sees in the

particular woman the presence of the goddess:

... the brightness

Of planetary music, heard in trance.

This is no abstract divinity, but divinity sensuously present:

... and in that beauty furled

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Where but in India, the land of Radha and Krishna, of

only Shelley's hostile contemporaries, but a civilization which for

are deeper affinitiesbetween Shelley and the India of

guage (in which he wrote his many works on philosophy) was

study had reached the frontiers of the India of the Imagination—for

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worlds of consciousness. With his teacher, Sri Purohit Swamy, Yeats

English poetry was the inspiration of the mantra, fundamental in

inspiration and source; the highest intensity of the revelatory poetic

poetry throughout this century; and it has been widely replaced by

though both wrote in English, to the age-old poetic tradition of the

Imagination'. Such is the immortalising power of all true poetry;

This content downloaded from 198.91.36.79 on Tue, 17 Feb 2015 06:23:15 AM

seldom found in the poetry of the modern West or of the Western