Dear Unknown Friends:

With this TRO we conclude our serialization of Instinct: Beginning with Shelley, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on March 19, 1965. Here, he relates a famous but puzzling poem of Shelley to the essay that has been the text throughout the talk.

We find in this section an understanding of Shelley that is great, that is beautiful, that is unprecedented, that is true. What drove Shelley in the field of love—drove him superbly, yet also blunderingly, and painfully? And what is the relation of Shelley’s confusion, in all its grandeur and sinking, to what men and women are going through today?

Always, the World

“The purpose of love,” writes Eli Siegel in Self and World, “is to feel closely one with things as a whole.” He says about two people who represent all couples: “There is…a third partner to the relation of Edith and Jim. That partner is the world as a whole.” And later, in these sentences, the cause of so much turmoil and bitterness is explained:

Love and marriage, in the contemporary world, are attended often by desires to possess, desires to hate, giving of one’s body without the giving of one’s self, anger, shame, misery. It is all because that third partner in any relation of two people is not seen for what it is and not loved. One cannot really love a person without loving reality.

The deepest need of everyone, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world itself, in its comprehensiveness and immediacy. The trouble in love, the fights, the suspicion, come because two people have used each other to put aside that world. They have collaborated in having contempt for it, in making themselves superior to it. Yet each feels deeply rooked. Each feels—without being able to put it in words—taken away from his or her largest purpose. Each is ashamed, and angry with the other. That is because what we really want from another is encouragement to know the world that is not ourselves, see meaning in it, be resplendently just to it. If two people don’t get that encouragement from each other, they’ll feel resentful and empty, though they may go out in style on Saturday nights or be married for fifty years.

The desire of Percy Bysshe Shelley to like the world in its largeness was more encompassing, beautifully driving, and conscious than most persons’. Yet the elements of his turmoil are those of the turmoil felt now by a man in Omaha or a woman in Tallahassee.

For example, in an Aesthetic Realism lesson many years ago Mr. Siegel said this to a man whom I was seeing and who felt hurt by me:

What is your guess about the emotion Ms. Reiss is missing? In the same way as every painting and poem is true to all experience, that is how we want our feeling for a person to be. Ms. Reiss is displeased with herself because her care for you is not equivalent yet to her care for all reality and art. You get hurt because it seems she’s not entirely happy with you. But the relation between the representative and the complete is being sought.

“The representative” is a particular person, who comes from and stands for reality. “The complete” is the world itself, beauty, art. I felt richly understood as Mr. Siegel described my displeasure with myself and a person I was close to: we may go after praise from someone, comfort from someone, as a shortcut for esteeming ourselves in a world we dislike; but there is such a thing as the true self in everyone, which says, The one way I’ll like myself is through caring for the wide world into which I was born!

Closeness Is Not Understanding

At the end of the lecture, Mr. Siegel quotes a further passage from Shelley’s “On Love.” It is on the subject of Mr. Siegel’s own landmark essay “The Ordinary Doom”: the painful feeling people have that they’re not understood by others, including those closest to them—even though at the same time most people do not want to show themselves fully. Shelley writes fervently about his longing to be comprehended. It was a tremendous longing in him, and his writing is passionately sincere.

There is a relation between persons’ not wanting to understand each other in love, and their wanting to put aside the world. After all—a person we may select to love is part of the world; has to do with the world every minute; and has, Aesthetic Realism shows, the world’s structure in him or her, the oneness of opposites. Mr. Siegel, in his Preface to “The Ordinary Doom,” explains a situation that is causing daily grief and shame in millions of people, even though they may pretend to be at ease: the fact that so much amorous physical closeness is accompanied by such a lack of comprehension. And he explains it in some of the best prose in English letters:

Skin takes the place of brave, graceful desire….Our attitude to the world is still one of fear, one of contempt, and one of aloofness. This means that whomever we know, our attitude to that person will be one of fear, contempt, aloofness. Wrestling in bed does not annul this. Elaborate proximity of sections of body will not annul this.

The large inward catastrophe of today is: We let ourselves be pleased by and do what we can to please a person we still want to hide from, we still do not fully respect.

…To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.

Shelley, Speed, Liberty

In his classes and writing, Mr. Siegel spoke about Shelley often. He discussed such poems as Prometheus Unbound, “The Sensitive Plant,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Ozymandias,” “The Cloud,” “To a Skylark,” “To Night,” “Adonais,” “Epipsychidion,” “Arethusa,” “The Indian Serenade,” “Song to the Men of England,” and more, including—many times and always freshly—“Ode to the West Wind.” He spoke about the importance of Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry.” And he discussed critical writing on Shelley, including Matthew Arnold’s trouble and mistake in judging him.

As a prelude to the final section of Instinct: Beginning with Shelley, I am going to quote from an earlier lecture, in which Mr. Siegel spoke about another aspect of this writer and human being. In October 1951, he said:

Shelley’s mind happens to be one of the most important….It is historically important, it is important because of the necessity to understand mind in general, and it is important because it has some noteworthy and great beauty.

…One of the things about reality that it has taken a long time to feel is speed. Speed, to be sure, existed before Shelley. (He was born in 1792 and died in 1822.)…But speed…is to be found in Shelley in a great manner. That speed is along with light and along with space. There were no effects like some of the effects in Shelley’s poetry before he wrote….It is the source of these new effects that should be understood.

Speed is associated with liberty, and for a long time Shelley was seen as the poet of freedom or liberty, which he still is. There is still enough in him to alter the world….He has stood for freedom that was of geography, of politics, and also freedom of persons, particularly as to love. But freedom in that sense has a deeper attendance which has to be understood, too.

According to Aesthetic Realism, everybody is to a degree icebound, and crippled, and stuck, and jammed, and shut in, and clamped in, and riveted in, and just generally imprisoned and jailed….What is it for a person to be free?

…A person wants to feel there is nothing unnecessary holding him back, and he also, to be sure, wants to feel that he is accurate. This question Shelley met in a most pangful manner; he met it head-on, he met it magnificently… A person wants to be free and determined at the same time….I have said that it is the big thing in art: to feel that the utmost freedom is the utmost necessity. But Shelley has that all through his poems: in fact, it can be said to be as big a thing in his poems as any. [TRO 350]

In Eli Siegel, Shelley would have found that understanding of himself and humanity which he sought so ardently. It is here, in Aesthetic Realism, for us now. And part of its beauty is the fact that through study of Aesthetic Realism, the subject of the present lecture, love, can succeed in people’s lives at last.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Love: Impersonal & Personal

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has reached the 9th sentence of Shelley’s “On Love.”

Now I’ll read one of Shelley’s popular poems, because the second stanza has, in very good melody, what is in this essay. The first stanza is quite difficult—in fact, I don’t see it as very good. “To _____” is of 1821, and was published by Mrs. Shelley in her 1824 edition of her husband’s works. The poem begins “One word is too often profaned / For me to profane it.” This is the second stanza:

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not,—

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?

What Shelley is doing in that stanza is saying, really, there is no love of a person without some love of the world, or even of the unknown.

Shelley had suffered a great deal. Every relation he had with a particular person—Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Mary Shelley herself, Emilia Viviani, Maria Gisborne, Jane Williams—every specific relation he had he felt shattered by. That’s the meaning of the various poems titled “To _____.” What is said in them sounds very melodious, but it means that things didn’t go so well. And there is “To Constantia,” for instance; and “Lines” of 1822, with:

…When the lute is broken,

Sweet tones are remembered not;

When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon forgot….

“The lute is broken”—that doesn’t sound too bad. But when you look into it, and into “Loved accents are soon forgot,” it doesn’t seem so good. The last lines of that poem are:

From thy nest every rafter

Will rot, and thine eagle home

Leave thee naked to laughter,

When leaves fall and cold winds come.

That is Shelley: he’s in an “eagle home,” and he’s “naked to laughter.”

A Person & the World

Looking at the second stanza from “To _____”: “I can give not what men call love, / But wilt thou accept not /… / The devotion to something afar / From the sphere of our sorrow?”

What affected Shelley was a greater sense of the impersonal. It is in the poem of his that I mentioned on Wednesday, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” And he insisted on finding that in a person. The fact that the two—a person and the impersonal world—did not accord made for great pain.

He was the opposite, in a way, of Don Juan. Don Juan could meet a lady, show how good he was, and then say, There is more to seek, Elvira!—and go off to Seville or Granada. Shelley was the opposite: every time a lady failed him, he would feel the universe had toppled again. Perhaps he should have taken on some of the disposition of Don Juan, but then we wouldn’t have had his poems, because while Don Juan was a wonderful fellow, as a poet he is unheard of.

Shelley at the age of 29 or so saw that it was likely he would never get on with a person. “I can give not what men call love.” That is, as soon as another person was affecting him directly, the sense of something else in his mind would be present. So he says, Will you please accept my general feeling of love—won’t that do?:

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not,—

The English here is not too good, but the lines are very melodious. There’s a certain kind of love for the world as such—won’t that do? And to most English girls, it wouldn’t.

Then he compares himself. Shelley has some very sad comparisons. In another poem he compares himself to the moon wandering around the skies companionless. Here there is “The desire of the moth for the star.” Elsewhere he compares himself to a rifted lute.

“The desire of the moth for the star, / Of the night for the morrow.” Something dark looking for light is also in his poem “To Night.” “The devotion to something afar / From the sphere of our sorrow?”

There Were Hope & Despair

When we read the second stanza, we get some notion of what the first may be about. Here is the first stanza:

One word is too often profaned

For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it;

One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother,

And pity from thee more dear

Than that from another.

“One word is too often profaned”: the word, I feel sure, is love. The “feeling too falsely disdained” is a feeling Shelley might have. That is, Shelley is seen as too idealistic, and therefore not a comfortable lover. It would have been good if all the ladies whom Shelley knew had gotten their notes together. Even in his wife, Mary Shelley, you can get some idea of, well, incomplete comprehension. And how much she presented Shelley as Frankenstein is a question.

“One hope is too like despair / For prudence to smother.” That is: I have a hope; I had it maybe at 19, but now I’m 29 and it’s really almost the same as despair—you don’t have to worry about it.

Then two rather weak lines: “And pity from thee more dear / Than that from another.” —Meaning that you can still be of use to me. Then there follows that melodious second stanza:

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not,—

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?

As good a line as any, nearly, in Shelley’s work is “Of the night for the morrow.” That is, the dark is in love with the light. This going for light from a beginning of dark is a frequent thing in Shelley.

From a Letter

Another aspect of his desire to make the impersonal—the whole world—solid, present in a person, is in a letter to the philosopher William Godwin. Shelley did seem to have a feeling about Godwin that made Godwin an exemplar of the world as liked. He writes:

But when I consider the intellectual lustre with which you clothe this world, and how much the last generation of mankind may be benefited by that light flowing forth without the intervention of one shadow, I am elevated above all thoughts which tend to you or myself as an individual, and become by sympathy part of those distant and innumerable minds to whom your writings must be present.

This Is What We Want

Returning to the essay “On Love.” Here Shelley is putting in his own words some of the purport of “The Ordinary Doom”:

If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.

This brings up the question How much can the world meet the hopes of a person who can say “I”? —I will be talking of this matter some more.