Page 12 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
dwell also in the tragic Atacama Deserts and Loa Rivers of life, in the moribund favelas, conventillos and barrios 3⁄4 shanty towns 3⁄4 of the bloody knife and guns of days and nights, in the prayers of elders, and in the silence of guitars. “Poetry,” cries Shelley, reminiscent of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change” and “it subdues to union under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things.”14 Poetry thus becomes the “very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”15 Each particular, thus, to its corresponding form, elevated will be.
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And to whom these sublime, eternal forms shall sing? To the great poets, philosophers and historians of these times and all times. “Poets,” argues Shelley, “are philosophers, and great philosophers and historians are also poets.”17 Not too distant from the years of German and English Romanticism’s ‘storm and stress,’ Spanish poet Antonio Machado will express, in likeness to, and to deepen Shelley’s understanding, how “poets are failed metaphysicians” and “philosophers are poets that believe in the reality of their poems.”18 Just as Machado’s poet, Shelley’s poet in Adonais is “a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light” (Adonais, 374). Having embraced the spirit of Beauty that renews the world, he despairs after his lyric metaphysics departs. Having fallen from its sublime heights, where once he was “...made one with nature,” (Adonais, 370) he sails in melancholy towards a cavern to die always believing only in the reality of his poesy and of the solemn stars he once lovingly beheld and touched. And so in time, the dead poet’s soul becomes a light that dwells in the starry skies: “Like stars to their appointed height they climb/And death is a low mist which cannot blot the brightness it may
14 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 527 15 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 518
16 Photographs: first 2 are internet images of Brazilian favelas. The other two to the right are from the glorious collection of Andrés Barría Davison, Puerto Vallarta, México at andresbarriaphotography.com
17 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 518
18 Quote by Machado, Antonio.
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