Shelley's Ghost

In ‘The Triumph of Life’ Shelley is guided by the shade of the Swiss philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau, just as Dante in the Divine Comedy was guided through Hell and Purgatory by Virgil. Rousseau identifies some of the great figures of history that are chained to the car – Napoleon Bonaparte, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great – then tells him his own story. On this, the final page of his draft, Shelley asks Rousseau a question: ‘Then, what is life, I said’. Rousseau begins his answer, but here the manuscript breaks off. When Mary Shelley published The Triumph of Life in her edition of Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824), she ended, more dramatically, on Shelley's question as originally drafted: '“Then, what is life? I cried.” –'.

[As] They
Phantoms & men & &

Compelling them
With [reversed] beams curdling the shapeless mass
[So] distinct

   thus, on the way
Mask after mask fell from the countenance
And form of every pilgrim
    [long]
    So when
And form of all, and before the day

Was old the joy which waswaked like Heavensglance
Perished The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died
And mostsome grew weary of the ghastly dance

And sank fell, as I have fallen by the way side
Those soonest, from whose limbs the
      from whose forms most shadows past
And least of beautystrength & beauty did abide.

AndThen What is Life I criedsaid ... the cripple cast
His eye upon the distant car of beams
    car which now had rolled
Onward,   as if that look must be the last

And answered .... Happy [thou] for whom the fold
Of

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Percy Bysshe Shelley; (1822) Mary Shelley; (bequest, 1851) Sir Percy and Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1889) Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1899) John C.E. Shelley (later Sir John Shelley-Rolls); (gift, 1946) Bodleian.

Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, I (1986), ed. D.H. Reiman, esp. pp. 118, 129, 268-71, 314-5; Shelley’s Guitar, no. 155.

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