“Like Flowers or Creeping Worms”: The Poet as Phallic Symbol in Shelley’s Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude

Abstract

ABSTRACT Associated with renewed begetting, the phallus is a highly relevant concept with regard to the dying and resurgent god Dionysus. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writings are filled with Dionysian images that may suggest the archetypal concept of death-rebirth. Shelley’s Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815) presents a young visionary poet who becomes a Dionysian phallic symbol at the end of the poem only to rise himself anew in a posthumous transcendent garden sometime in a far future. Fleeing from the cold and cruel human society that denies him truth, Shelley’s hero undergoes a quest for finding truth, which appears to him in the form of female bodies of the veiled maiden and the earth mother. Whereas the former, dissolving his male subjectivity, catches him sexually and delusively, the latter devours him in order to provide him with the charmed circle of the mother. This article attempts to explore the modality of this quest and the hero’s transformation into a worm-like phallus in the light of the Jungian archetypes of anima and phallus.