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The Proliferation of Duality inShelley's ALASTORT. S. Miller aa University of Notre DamePublished online: 17 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: T. S. Miller (2010) The Proliferation of Duality in Shelley'sALASTOR, The Explicator, 68:4, 219-222, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2010.535476

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The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 4, 219–222, 2010Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X onlineDOI: 10.1080/00144940.2010.535476

T. S. MILLER

University of Notre Dame

The Proliferation of Duality in Shelley’s ALASTOR

Keywords: Alastor, antithesis, binary structure, poetic pairings, Percy Shelley

Two poet figures, two pretty girls, sleep and death, birth and the grave, hopeand despair: Percy Shelley’s Alastor frames its primary narrative and casts its mostprominent images in this decidedly binary structure. At first, the poet’s depictionof such dualities seems to invite a kind of comparative exercise; that is, the readermust choose one member of the pair over the other, for example, the soundness ofthe narrator’s more naturalistic worldview contrasted with the poet’s glimpses oftranscendence, or the relative virtues of the Arab maiden over those of the hyp-nagogic dream girl. Yet Shelley’s sometimes slapdash catalogs of pairings growtoo dense to yield a reductive moral, becoming less cases of moralization thanpresentations of as yet unresolved—or seemingly irresolvable—tensions. DonnaRichardson has persuasively challenged the many readings of Alastor that empha-size Shelley’s “skepticism” and would finally declare “its major philosophical andmoral issues . . . unresolvedly ambiguous” (171); it is thus perhaps most fruitfulto consider the complexly dialectical progression of the poem as leading towardnot ultimate irresolution but rather an unceasing process of accumulation. In onesense Shelley seems drawn to the simplicity of the dialectic or the balanced pair-ing, but his exhaustive use of binary structure explores its own limits as well as itspotential for infinite expansion: “More dark / And dark the shades accumulate”(lines 430–31).

In Alastor we see a steady concatenation of paired ideas, with each new pairprogressively complicating the simplicity of their shared two-part structure: “Bysolemn vision, and bright silver dream, / His infancy was nurtured. Every sight /And sound from the vast earth and ambient air” (67–69). In these three lines, we seethree pairings, although here Shelley chooses to split one of them with enjambment,

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challenging binary structure even within his own use of it. Again, in spite ofthis common two-part arrangement, we can find few similarities among thesepairings; the poet has united two opposing senses and two opposing elements bylinking them with the conjunction “and,” but elsewhere he emphasizes the essentialdifference between the two given components, usually with the conjunction “or”:“all . . . / . . . which the sacred past / In truth or fable consecrates, he felt /And knew” (73–75). Truth, we see, may pair up with fiction in a way distinctfrom how feeling matches knowing, or earth corresponds to air. Furthermore, themore or less synonymous terms “vision” and “dream” comprise another pairingwe might first take as mere elegant variation, but their qualifiers differ such thatthe binary effect remains in the contrast of “bright silver” with the more soberepithet “solemn.” This multiplicity of potential in the use of duality points tothe tension between unity and contrast that underlies Shelley’s fascination withpairs.

Indeed, throughout the poem Shelley uses duality as a vehicle for antithe-sis in the rhetorical sense, as when he marks a contrast between nature and thepoet by describing what the latter seeks as “[Nature’s] cradle, and his sepulchre”(430). Some such pairings, ostensibly antithetical constructions intended to illus-trate contrasts, extend to the oxymoronic: “dark hope” (32), “mute music” (66),and “bright shadow” (233), perhaps the Romantic answer to Milton’s “darknessvisible” (Paradise Lost 1.62). We may in part account for these images as anotherattempt to describe the earth in terms of the sublime, or vice versa—a grasping atthat “incommunicable dream” that reveals nature’s immensity (39); the questionremains of what we should make of explicit pairings with less explicit points ofcontact. For instance, while the poem’s first line invokes “beloved brotherhood,”the arrival of fraternal personifications complicates this sentiment, as when “Ruincalls / His brother Death” (619–20). What does their dark brotherhood signify, es-pecially when Death has other siblings? Recalling Shelley’s invocation of “Deathand his brother sleep” from the second line of Queen Mab, it is clear that sucha classical pairing also persists in Alastor: “Sleep and death / Shall not divideus long!” (368–69). Yet more strange siblings appear in the poem: “Silence andTwilight here, twin-sisters” (455). Indeed, a contradiction arises if we understandthe “brotherhood” of line 1 to indicate duality, for immediately afterward comesa catalog of all the seasons, the comprehensive entirety of nature. Does, then, thedistinction between or the fruitful comparison of sleep and death diminish whenShelley adds ruin to this illustrious family? Does death exist in a pair with each ofits two siblings, or in some sort of trinity, or in an even larger unity? While Shelleyorganizes much of Alastor in deliberate dualities, his pairings weaken under theirown accumulation.

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The Proliferation of Duality in Shelley’s ALASTOR 221

Accordingly, at some points, the dualities in Alastor explode into largergroups dripping with conjunctive polysyndeton: “Athens, and Tyre, and Bal-bec, and the waste” (109). Another example involves a list internally arrangedin pairs—“Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud / Frantic withdizzying anguish” (230–31)—since the diametric elements, night/day and tem-pest/calm, give way to unpaired elements and thus a unity larger than their owndual natures. To that same effect, a few dualities dominate and even tend to clustertogether in groups throughout the poem, exemplified in a passage that includesthe oppositions of hope/despair, sleep/death, night/day, and sky/earth:

. . . Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,Lead only to a black and watery depth,While death’s blue vault with loathliest vapors hung,Where every shade which the foul grave exhalesHides its dead eye from the detested day,Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart;The insatiate hope which it awakened stungHis brain even like despair. (213–22)

Again the dualities play off one another, dense and synthesizing: one wonders whydeath’s vault should be blue, rather than black; one typically thinks of the “bluevault” of the heavens or the sky, not the roof of the grave. A subsequent pairing ofpairings also subverts expectations: “Hope and despair, / The torturers, slept; nomortal pain or fear / Marred his repose” (639–41). Still, we must further examinehow—or why—Shelley’s dualities function in conjunction.

The effect of this plethora of pairs is often a puzzling one: does the poet pairany two given things because they are similar, or because they are different, orbecause he simply enjoys pairing things? Is it more meaningful for Shelley to pairsleep with death due to how sleep mimics death, or due to how death differs inits finality? Shelley tends to explore both differences and similarities, in essencedoubling the duality, a technique that leads the poet to confront the conflict betweenthe binary pair and a much more all-embracing collective unity. The poem’s finallines demonstrate how the dualities culminate in just this fashion: “But pale despairand cold tranquillity, / Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, / Birth andthe grave, that are not as they were” (718–20). In the penultimate line, Shelleyuses an image of the cosmos, but in the final line he returns to a pairing. In otherwords, “Birth and the grave” remains the defining binary of human existence,yet the mutual invocation of dualities in Alastor by the narrator and the poet

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has rendered them no longer quite the simple pairing “as they were.” Dualityitself, then, has become an element of the final duality, the one between dualityand universalism—that duality that is itself necessarily all-encompassing, the tworecursive loops of (the symbol for) the infinite.

Works Cited

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Complete Poetry of John Milton. Ed. John Shawcross. New York:Doubleday, 1971. 249–517. Print.

Richardson, Donna. “An Anatomy of Solitude: Shelley’s Response to Radical Skepticism in Alastor.”Studies in Romanticism 31.2 (1992): 171–95. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Alastor. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 71–90.———. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton,

2002. Print.———. Queen Mab. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 15–71.

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