A Dream of a Shadow

Whacked by a bug, I spent some quality time on the couch last night with Percy Shelley, via Ann Wroe's engrossing experiment, "Being Shelley." It's not your typical biography. Wroe recreates the mind of a poet, using his poems, his notebooks and his friend's impressions of him. She re-imagines a man's thoughts, feelings, emotions.

The book jumps around, much like you would imagine a poet's mind would too. The book is broken into sections: earth, wind, water and fire. It's a great read, although it has been very slow going for me. Partly because Shelley's poetry is dense, from another time and meter, and also because I've been sort of savoring each page.

Shelley is a lost type, one no longer to be found in this modern world. He had much time on his hands, living like a butterfly, floating, running; a mad prophet of liberty, atheism and revolution.

He was in love with LOVE, and with Plato's world of the ideal. He not only read the ancient texts, he translated them for himself. He was an idealist, unhappy with the world as it is. Nothing more forlorn (and maybe dangerous - at least to himself) than a disappointed idealist. This is one of his favorite passages from Pindar, a poet born a long, long time ago. It works for me too.

"Creatures of a day, what is anyone? What is anyone not? Man is but a dream of a shadow; but when a gleam of sunshine comes as a gift from heaven, a radiant light rests on men, and life is sweet." - Pindar

I think we live for that radiant light...