Abstract
The Fisher, The Spear, and the Fortunate Fish: Premature and Dissolving Endings in Shelley's Poetry
Highlights
Walter Benjamin famously observed that our interest in narrative is bound up with our interest in life, but, more tellingly, with our interest in death: we hope to learn something of the meaning of our own lives from the lives of fctional characters, but much of that meaning is revealed to us only through our witnessing the character’s death
The revelation of meaning through death, which Benjamin likens to catching the heat of a fame, is impossible without fction, since none of us survives our own death and, none can take part in the revelation unless it is at the expense of another: “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”1 But Benjamin’s observations go beyond the sphere of the novel; a curiosity about any narrative ending is a curiosity about death
Frank Kermode describes how poets attempt to answer the human “need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and an end.”2 But how can these temporal theories be reconciled with endings which look beyond death?
Summary
Walter Benjamin famously observed that our interest in narrative is bound up with our interest in life, but, more tellingly, with our interest in death: we hope to learn something of the meaning of our own lives from the lives of fctional characters, but much of that meaning is revealed to us only through our witnessing the character’s death. Starting with Shelley’s clearest narrative, the conversational poem “Julian and Maddalo,” moving through several short lyrics and, fnally, to his last poems, “Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici” and “The Triumph of Life,” this paper will establish a pattern of anticlimax in Shelley’s poetry, in which the narrator continually outlives the end of his poems.
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