The Sensitive Plant
9781465678768
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When Shelley wrote The Sensitive Plant he was drawing very near the end of his poetry. It was one of the poems belonging to the days at Pisa, whither the Shelleys had gone late in the January of 1820. In the next winter—a winter of many painful associations for him, and many discouragements and reminders of evil fortune—he wrote this mysterious song of beauty and death. The idea of it appears to have come to him from the flowers which Mrs. Shelley had collected round her in her own room at the house they occupied on the south side of the Arno. Their fragrance, as it exhaled on the wintry Italian sunshine, and the sense of their fading loveliness, added to certain graver influences of which we read,—the death of a dearly-loved child, the illness of a dear friend,—contributed, no doubt, to provide that “atmosphere of memorial dejection and very sorrowful delight,” of which an old Italian poet speaks, as being propitious for the working of the imagination. But a miracle is not less miraculous because we know the conditions under which it was worked, and something inexplicable remains about The Sensitive Plant after we have gathered together everything we can of its circumstances and the moods of its poet in the memorable Pisan days when it was written. All through this period, so far as we can gather, Shelley was extremely discouraged about his poetry and the reception it had attained hitherto. From Medwin and others we learn of the special resentment he felt at the continual hostilities of the powerful quarterly engines of critical opinion. In a letter to Ollier, he said, during 1820: “I doubt whether I shall write more. I could be content either with the hell or the paradise of poetry, but the torments of its purgatory vex me without exciting my powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation.” However, when a poet of Shelley’s plenary inspiration decides not to write, he is likely to be impelled most strongly by his dæmon to new flights. The “Ode to a Skylark,” the “Witch of Atlas,” the “Ode to Liberty,” among other poems, belong to this period; and with them we have the invincible declaration of the poet’s rights and inalienable liberties, to be found in his prose “Defence of Poetry.” One or two stanzas there are in the “Witch of Atlas,” and one or two passages in the “Defence,” which strike us as being more intimately connected with the occult imaginative origins of The Sensitive Plant than anything found elsewhere in his writings. Take the strange, melodious verses in which the radiant creature of the mountains is presented,—the lovely lady garmented in the light of her own beauty, to whom thecamelopard and the brindled lioness, the herdsmen and the mountain maidens came.
