No More Learning

When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin's daughter in 1812 they
sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up
in his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him
a poet, he spoke of these voyages: 'I have sailed down mighty rivers
and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed
night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. '

He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave,
for from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing
through caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that
was of any length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor
passed in his boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time
he felt the presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when
he watched his image in a silent well; and when he died it was where
a river fell into 'an abysmal chasm'; and the Witch of Atlas in her
gladness, as he in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a
cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and
when Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the
vision that was life, it was where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and
the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met the evil beauty 'by a well under blue
nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore her child imprisoned in a great
cave beside 'a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned
leaped and boiled perpetually'; and her lover Laon was brought to
his prison in a high column through a cave where there was 'a putrid
pool,' and when he went to see the conquered city he dismounted beside
a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing thereby that
spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a regenerated
city from 'within a fountain in the public square'; and when Laon and
Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into Paradise
along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are to live
amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain 'leaps with an awakening
sound'; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain unhappy
lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one another;
and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her
lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually
as metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some
passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from
anything but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley
could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking
of Plato's cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well
have had Porphyry on 'the Cave of the Nymphs' in his mind. When I
compare Porphyry's description of the cave where the Phaeacian boat left
Odysseus, with Shelley's description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas,
to name but one of many, I find it hard to think otherwise. I quote
Taylor's translation, only putting Mr. Lang's prose for Taylor's bad
verse. 'What does Homer obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which
he describes in the following verses? "Now at the harbour's head is a
long-leaved olive tree, and hard by is a pleasant cave and shadowy,
sacred to the nymphs, that are called Naiads. And therein are mixing
bowls and jars of stone, and there moreover do bees hive. And there are
great looms of stone, whereon the nymphs weave raiment of purple stain,
a marvel to behold; and there are waters welling evermore. Two gates
there are to the cave, the one set towards the North wind, whereby men
may go down, but the portals towards the South pertain rather to the
gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the way of the immortals. "' He
goes on to argue that the cave was a temple before Homer wrote, and
that 'the ancients did not establish temples without fabulous symbols,'
and then begins to interpret Homer's description in all its detail.
The ancients, he says, 'consecrated a cave to the world' and held 'the
flowing waters' and the 'obscurity of the cavern' 'apt symbols of what
the world contains,' and he calls to witness Zoroaster's cave with
fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of 'all invisible
power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the essence of all
these powers is occult,' and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove
that nymphs living in caves fed men 'from intellectual fountains';
and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize generation, and
that the word nymph 'is commonly applied to all souls descending into
generation,' and that the two gates of Homer's cave are the gate of
generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods, the gate
of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he says,
causes life in the world, and heat causes life among the gods, and the
constellation of the Cup is set in the heavens near the sign Cancer,
because it is there that the souls descending from the Milky Way
receive their draught of the intoxicating cold drink of generation.
'The mixing bowls and jars of stone' are consecrated to the Naiads,
and are also, as it seems, symbolical of Bacchus, and are of stone
because of the rocky beds of the rivers. And 'the looms of stone' are
the symbols of the 'souls that descend into generation. ' 'For the
formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies
of animals resemble stones,' and also because 'the body is a garment'
not only about the soul, but about all essences that become visible,
for 'the heavens are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence of
being as it were the vestments of the celestial gods. ' The bees hive
in the mixing bowls and jars of stone, for so Porphyry understands
the passage, because honey was the symbol adopted by the ancients for
'pleasure arising from generation. ' The ancients, he says, called souls
not only Naiads but bees, 'as the efficient cause of sweetness'; but
not all souls 'proceeding into generation' are called bees, 'but those
who will live in it justly and who after having performed such things
as are acceptable to the gods will again return (to their kindred
stars). For this insect loves to return to the place from whence it
came and is eminently just and sober. ' I find all these details in the
cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley's
caves, except the two gates, and these have a far-off echo in her
summer journeys on her cavern river and in her winter sleep in 'an
inextinguishable well of crimson fire. ' We have for the mixing bowls,
and jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds
of air' 'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors clear and
sweet' 'in crystal vials,' and for the bees, visions 'each in his thin
sheath like a chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and 'raiment
of purple stain' the Witch's spinning and embroidering; and the Witch
herself is a Naiad, and was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay
in 'a chamber of grey rock' until she was changed by the sun's embrace
into a cloud.

When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain
one finds how close his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked upon
thought as a condition of life in generation and believed that the
reality beyond was something other than thought. He wrote in his
fragment 'On Life,' 'That the basis of all things cannot be, as the
popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as
far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that
experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;'
and in another passage he defines mind as existence. Water is his great
symbol of existence, and he continually meditates over its mysterious
source. In his prose he tells how 'thought can with difficulty visit
the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a
river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward. .