I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
--Prometheus Unbound (I, 305) 1820
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) exhibited
a fascination with natural phenomena from early childhood. His biographer
Richard Holmes begins the story of Shelley's life with family stories about
a "Great Tortoise" and "Great Snake" that inhabited the pond and woods
at Field Place in Sussex. One of Shelley's teachers at Syon House Academy
was Dr. Adam Walker, an itinerant astronomer and inventor who lectured
on the possibility of life on other planets and on links between magnetism
and electricity. Shelley's cousin Tom Medwin described looking through
Walker's telescopes at the
rings
of Saturn and through his microscope at a fly's wing, cheese mites,
and "the vermicular animalculae in vinegar." Shelley was notorious as a
school boy for his scientific experiments, many of which resulted in destructive
explosions. His sister recalled "being placed hand-in-hand round the nursery
table to be electrified." By 1810, when Shelley left Eton for Oxford, he
had translated large sections of Pliny's Historia Naturalis ; he
had also experimented with electricity and magnetism as well as with gunpowder
and numerous chemical reactions. His rooms at University College Oxford
contained a wide range of scientific equipment: vials, crucibles, "philosophical
instruments," a solar microscope, a galvanic trough, an air pump, a telescope,
and an assortment of electrical devices. His friend Hogg noted that Shelley
was "passionately attached to the study of what used to be called the occult
sciences, conjointly with that of the new wonders, which chemistry and
natural philosophy [physical science] have displayed to us."
Shelley's notes to Queen Mab (1813) contain numerous references
to natural historians, ancient and modern: Lucretius, Plutarch, Pliny,
Cuvier,
d'Holbach. One of Shelley's early fictional characters, in the novel St.
Irvyne, possesses characteristics of his undergraduate creator (and
also of Mary Shelley's Victor
Frankenstein): "a desire of unveiling the latent mysteries of nature,
was the passion by which all the other emotions of my mind were intellectually
organized . . . Natural philosophy at last became the peculiar science
to which I directed my eager enquiries." A subsequent link between Shelley's
moral thinking and the natural philosophy of his time is evident in a passage
from his essay "On Love" (1818):
In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there
is then found a secret correspondence with out heart. There is eloquence
in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing of brooks and the rustling
of the reeds beside them which by their inconceivable relation to something
within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and
bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes . . .
Shelley's "Preface" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein refers to the
precise scientific speculations of Erasmus
Darwin and "the physiological writers of Germany." His "Mont Blanc"
expresses an understanding of geology and the fossil
record that will not be expressed so well poetically until Tennyson.
Poems as diverse as "To a Skylark," "The Cloud," "The
Sensitive Plant," "Ode to the West Wind," and Prometheus Unbound
offer images of interdependence between human and nonhuman realms, of the
cyclical and unalterable forces that link animate and inanimate nature.
The regenerate world of Prometheus Unbound, for example, presents
a picture that we might now call ecological: "Henceforth . . . all plants,
/ And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, / And birds, and beasts,
and fish, and human shapes, / . . . shall take / And interchange sweet
nutriment . . . (III, iii). Shelley's work also seeks to connect natural
laws to political and social systems. His metaphors regularly draw on physical
science and natural history, and his abstract literary sensibilities are
often balanced by a rigorous sense of a material and organic unity that
pervades all living things. (A.N.) |
