“Only a Sense Remains of Them”: Latescence and Outwatch in Shelley’s Vigil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay treats Percy Bysshe Shelley as a poet of vigil. In a well-known lyric, Shelley revisits an unnamed impression of time that had haunted him for years: “Music, when soft voices die, / Vibrates in the memory.” The poem distills Shelley’s struggle to capture the vibratory existence of fleeting sensation into one moment of lyric latescence, or ongoing vanishing. But Shelley’s blighted attempts to aestheticize this sense-quickening evanescence as one that might be entreated to remain in “firm state” begin earlier, in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1817) and his fragmentary philosophical essays. As Shelley’s understanding of latescence evolves, he finds a way to reckon with the extinction that is this moment’s inevitable sequel through a complementary practice of outwatching, or watching an object or sensation until it disappears entirely, a vigilant poetics that he first fleetingly proposes in his “Hymn.” Only in Prometheus Unbound (1820) does Shelley reconcile the dilation and continuity of latescent sensation with the extinction of outwatch. In providing him a way to ransom creation from its own wreck, Shelley’s poetics of vigil alike affords a more productive means of imagining those moments in Shelley’s work so often described as mere evanescence, negation, or vanishing.