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Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay
Criticism, Summer, 2000 by Michele Turner Sharp
There is nothing to compel the poet to compress his picture into a single moment. He may, if he so chooses, take up each action at its origin and pursue it through all possible variations to its end. Each variation which would cost the [visual] artist a separate work costs the poet but a single pen stroke; and if the result of this pen stroke, viewed by itself, should offend the hearer's imagination, it was either anticipated by what has preceded or is so softened and compensated by what follows that it loses its individual impression and in combination achieves the best effect in the world.(11)
Lessing is concerned with the differences between linguistic and visual representation. William Wordsworth makes much the same point in his discussion of the relative merits of poetry and prose. Poetry, as a metered and rhythmic use of language, is a better medium for representing painful subjects. Meter links idea to idea, image to image, in a way that strengthens the ability of language to model itself as temporal flow, and at the same time, softens what would otherwise be painful. "There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose," Wordsworth writes in his 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. Meter "[divests] language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and [throws] a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition" that tempers distress with pleasure.(12)
For Lessing, Wordsworth, and later for Sacks, language has its usefulness as a vehicle of consolation heightened to the extent that it shapes itself as temporal flow. When Freud discusses melancholia, the pathological other of normative mourning, notions of arrested development, of being stuck in time, riveted on death, loss, and on the self, predominate. The flow of time is halted, and the mourner's connection to a larger field of concern and participation is severed. The notion that poetic language embodies temporal flow, however, depends on our imagining that the words on a page emanate from, and as, a speaking or singing voice. Jacques Derrida has identified this imaginative maneuver as phonocentrism, the privileging of voice and of a living, breathing subject as the locus of an utterance to which the written word refers.(13) Derrida argues that this is a fiction, albeit a necessary one. Shelley's poem, however, calls lyric's bluff, and does so at a moment when the link between written words and speaking voices, between texts and writers, was placed under increased tension by cultural shifts and market forces.
Adonais is distinctive for how it marks Shelley's incursion onto the terrain of tradition as structured by reading and its unstable temporality When Shelley questions the efficacy of tears to raise the dead in the second line of his elegy, he does not merely accelerate the pace and energy with which he joins the tradition, but shifts the terms on which he joins it. He lets us see that the tradition, the laments of Bion and Moschus, the pastoral elegies of Spenser and Milton, are available to him in an eternal present. Moving in the space of two quick lines from the beginning of Bion's Lament to what the earlier poem can know only at the very end, Shelley's poem eclipses, foreshortens, and radically compresses the time of Bion's Lament in a way that collapses the fiction of voice, body, and breath within it. When Shelley inserts the word "yet" into his allusion to Milton's wat'ry deep, he does the same thing, compressing the flow of Milton's poem, the time it takes to get from beginning to end, into a single, compact moment. Like his precursors, Shelley uses the conventional motifs and strategies of elegy, but he inhabits them with a difference. Rather than appropriating or creatively refashioning the tradition, Shelley cites it. He refuses to indulge in or sustain the fictions that have secured its performative power and calls attention to the written dimensions by which it is available to him.
