Fancy’s Flight: “The Witch of Atlas”

ABSTRACT

Consciously fanciful and virtuosic, “The Witch of Atlas” has often drawn dissatisfied or dismissive responses. The present reading suggests that as well as enjoying the poem’s urbane humor, we should take seriously its exploration of how poetic form orients and expands readers’ thinking. Focusing on rhyme and allusions to Greek and Latin poetry, I argue that the poem shows Shelley fashioning a mode of response in which the poet’s idioms act as the grounds for a shared subjectivity.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the journal’s anonymous readers for their astute comments on a draft of this article.

Notes

1 All quotations from Shelley’s poetry and prose are taken from this edition.

2 For Scrivener, the Witch acts within a symbolic system, “as poem, as poet, as symbol of the imagination,” to subvert “arbitrary power, sexual repression, and egoism” (261); for Wood, the Witch is a “romantic ironist” because “the ironies that she perpetrates expose her own limitations as well as those of society” (79). Hogle similarly characterizes both Witch and poem as a “pathway of desire … attempting to make the fading coals of previous desires into figures of their own capacity for infinite reproduction” (353). Keach emphasizes the poem’s “self-delighting display of the imagination’s ability to project itself as other and to invest a fictional natural setting with its own reflexive operations” (111).

3 Sensitivity to this tension is already at work in Hunt’s discussion: following his remarks about “personification,” he claims that “the author cannot indulge himself long in that fairy region, without dreaming of mortal strife. If he is not in this world, he must have visions of it” (qtd. in P. B. Shelley, Poems 562).

4 For the phrasing, cf. Leigh Hunt, “Our Cottage” 117–18.

5 In a letter to Charles Ollier on 20 January 1821, Shelley describes “The Witch of Atlas” as “a fanciful poem, which, if its merit be measured by the labour which it cost, is worth nothing” (Letters 2: 257).

6 The persistent rhyming on “boat” typifies the former (lines 295–96, 319–20, 375–76); for the latter, see, for example, the rhyme of “way” with “Thamondocana” at lines 423–24.

7 Leighton’s discussion emphasizes this (Shelley and the Sublime 45–46).

8 Noting the inverse parallel with Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, Callaghan argues that “[i]f Wordsworth fights for and eventually finds hard-won affirmation despite his painful loss, Shelley ends the stanza with no such comfort” (186).

9 O’Neill observes that “the language at once glimpses and yields up the possibility of capturing ‘crystal silence’” (146).

10 Shelley may be consciously amplifying the similar effect created by Coleridge’s use of the same rhyme at “Kubla Khan” lines 46–48.

11 Crisman connects the episode to the “derisive distance” (138) from the world which she enacts at lines 479–80.

12 We might imagine her tears reflecting the “golden beams” cast around the cave by her “phials” (205–06).

13 Shelley nods to this intertextual articulation when he shows the Witch “Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity” (250): her activity momentarily echoes that of the reader prompted to pore over his Apollonius and Virgil by the reminiscences of the previous lines.

14 For such dynamics elsewhere, see lines 481–85, where the frequency, manner, and distance of the Witch’s voyaging put Arion’s to shame.

15 For discussion of poetry’s capacity to “live on” in readers’ lives through “the interanimation of poetry and reading,” see Wilson (142–65).

16 See especially Critique of Judgement: “Its peculiarity, however, consists in the fact that, although it has merely subjective validity, still it extends its claims to all subjects, as unreservedly as it would if it were an objective judgement, resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being proved by demonstration” (§33.115).

17 See further Schaper (377).