One task which occupies Percy Bysshe Shelley for the
duration of the fifty-five stanzas which constitute Adonais is the undoing of
Keats’ transcendentalism with, not exactly empiricism, but semi-empiricism. By
dousing the archetypal with the empirical— the facticity of Keats’ corpse, of
his having been reduced, materially, to waste— Shelley reveals that the
essential purpose of the poem, which is derived from the Odal Cycle, is to
denude the transcendental, and its music-world, of its glamour so that we may
see the nothingness levels of consciousness which constitute the greatest
threat to it. If I say Shelley is only semi-empirical, it is because whatever
one would like to call “Death’s pale court”— if not transcendentalist, some
kind of inversion of transcendentalist— not to mention the necrophilia
incidents with female “Splendors” (including Urania, and her gauche palimpsest
over Psyche’s delicate refinement)— creates a textual landscape which affirms
metaphysical, as well as physical, reality. Yet all the metaphysics cannot
conceal Shelley’s revelation of who the human race actually are, as destroyers
of archetypes, transcendentalism, music— wolves, ravens, reptiles, invulnerable
nothings. The energies Shelley is channeling have some Satanism in them— the perversity
of tearing away what is too pristine, to replace it with the vulgar which is
nonetheless more truth consonant, now that the angel (Keats) is fallen. The
Satanic impulse also guides Shelley to the place that Keats is subject to I-It
objectivity— his corpse, which may be all he is, is all that is left of him, so
he becomes a “thing,” just as death may constitute eternal nothingness (a
semi-empirical sensibility cannot tell).
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