17 August 2012
I wrote this for an assignment in college. My love for Shelley was more than what it seems from these juvenile essay! This was written in 1966 and I found the crumbling papers inside an old notebook a few days ago.
SHELLEY'S CLOUD
Introduction
"The Cloud" is a romance of the sky which gives a new significance to a natural phenomenon. It is not mere fantasy; it is fact emotionally apprehended by the poet and rendered into music. It is one of the finest lyrics in English. In its perfect fusion of the object with the spirit of the observer, this poem has scarcely an equal. Long had Shelley taken imaginative and dreamy notice of the clouds; he had watched their changes and disappearances until their life had entered into harmony with his. Hence it is natural and not an artifice that the cloud speaks in his verse. To him the Cloud is one of the fugitive forms of the spirit of beauty ever disappearing from our gaze and returning to enchant us in a more wonderful birth. This is the idea elaborated in the poem with the rare poetic excellence of that effectual (if I may contradict Mathew Arnold) angel, Shelley.
Matter
The Cloud gives vivid pictures of its changing forms. It serves nature by bringing showers to the thirsty flowers. The swaying plants find protection under the shade provided by the Cloud. It covers the earth with white hail and finds pleasure in washing it away with its own shower. In such joyous moods, it laughs in peals of thunder. The Cloud sleeps on the top of the mountain peaks covered with snow. Lightnong is the pilot of the sky. The pilot disappears with the rainfall and the Cloud basks in the glorious light of the blue sky. The rising sun with its blood red colour makes the Cloud look all the more beautiful. At sunset, the Cloud sits like dove brooding with folded wings. It provides a fleecy floor for the moon to walk on. Across the sky it hangs like a bridge supported by the mountains. It marches triumphantly through the rainbow as if it is a conqueror. Though the shapes and forms of the Cloud change like this, the spirit remains unchanged. Of course, it disappears into the ocean and shores as water. But it rises again silently like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb and occupies, once again, its place in the clear blue sky.
Imagery
In "The Cloud", the imagery does not ornament or illustrate or overlay the theme. It is an inseparable part of the theme. It is the theme. Its richness and delicacy, its airy diaphanous texture and glancing sheen carry the who;e quality of the poem in themselves. It is often alleged that Shelley's style is not boldly graphic. It is true. Shelley is not a photographer, but a master painter. what we see in the Cloud are pictures, half painted, half suggested, and of an indescribable witchery of effect. Shelley's fine sense of the tenderness of colours is seen in this poem. Some of his colour effects in "The Cloud" stand quite apart - alone in their great beauty.
Music
Shelley stands alone among the singers of the ages. In "The Cloud" we are thrilled by the music, which he " swept from the wild harp of time". Here is that penetrating music, which has a power like the very mountain- voice, to shake the soul. the internal rhyming and alliterative systems brought about with an effortless ease, spring in a spontaneous strain of soaring music from the poet's heart. Even the choice of words and sounds constitute the ethereal beauty and the quintessential music of his verse.
Shelley's personality
Of none of the English poets can it be more truly said that his life and work are at one than of Shelley,. Shelley lived his poetry. If it was wild, passionate, defiant and utterly impractical, so was he too. When we read "The Cloud", we realise that the Cloud is but a ghost of Shelley himself. The Cloud has an individuality as he himself has; it dies as he does; but their spirits remain immortal.
Philosophy
Shelley's idea is not the crude nature worship of the savage nor the sublime pantheism of Wordsworth. He had an imaginative insight into nature as a world of events and processes. His imagination comes to life before the great cycles of interaction between sea, land and air. It is a gift such as might start with the insight of science, but in Shelley it has become that of an artist. This is why we find a real sense of the passage in "The Cloud", behind the concrete and emphatic structure of facts on the surface.
