Despite Donald Reiman’s perspicacious explorations of how complex Shelley’s relationships with both the notion of God and the idea of Jesus Christ’s ministry were, much recent criticism seems to assert straightforwardly that Shelley was hostile to Christian belief. This apparent hostility emerges perhaps from surface readings of the provocatively-titled yet early ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ or later essays such as ‘On Christianity’, which both contain condemnations of a certain kind of institutional Christianity. Critics envisioning an anti-Christian Shelley encounter definitive hermeneutic problems in the case of ‘The Triumph of Life’, Shelley’s unfinished 1821 poem in terza rima. One unsurpassable difficulty lies in the form. Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia initiates the neat metrical and rhymic formulations of terza rima as a powerful means of exploring Catholic soteriology, whereas Francesco Petrarca puts it to related use in Trionfi D’Amor as a means of clarifying the vanity of romantic and worldly love in a manner that is intimately connected to Christian eschatology.
Forest Pyle – an implicit proponent of a hard-atheist Shelley – addresses how Shelley sees terza rima’s poetic associations by positing that Shelley’s use of terza rima is a conscious riposte to Dante. For Pyle, Shelley plays around with the form to create networks of convulsive imagery that he refers to as “radical aestheticism”. This includes theology, the symbolic codes of which Shelley deliberately manipulates for the grotesque potential of doing so. Pyle describes one stanza as creating a “sensory impossibility” and a “non-theological ‘shape of light’ that can exist only as an aesthetic effect.’” Vidyan Ravinthiran pretty much agrees. As he puts it, Shelley’s ‘Triumph’ acknowledges the superior majesty of Dante, though Shelley “uses form to disavow form” and submits himself to the “motivating force of the rhyme”. In Ravinthiran’s reading, Shelley’s terza rima is psychagogic and principally non-theological.
In avoidance of such readings, this essay will seek to show that, in the case of ‘Triumph’, Shelley finds a grounding in the metaphysical and theological foundations of terza rima. After an initial discussion in which I aim to emphasise that terza rima was configured by Dante to evince and embody the mystery of the Trinity, I will then introduce the concept of ‘perichōrēsis’ – a concept in both Christological and Trinitarian theology after its inception in Stoic thought – to my reading of ‘Triumph’. I will show that introducing theological terms helps form an understanding of the conceptual organisation that underpins a poem like Shelley’s ‘Triumph’, which is not outwardly concerned with the propagation of Catholic truth. The manner in which I will explore the intersection between early-nineteenth century theology and prosody will mirror the work of Michael Hurley, who analyses Shelley’s contemporary William Blake in light of this theme. Shelley might appear a less numinous poet, but he draws from an inseparable network of theology and philosophy, which this essay will allude to. This essay is also influenced heavily by the work of Reiman, who discusses astutely Shelley’s colossal debt to Scripture and theology.
Before discussing the terza rima of ‘Triumph’, it is worth acknowledging its inception as an Italian verse form, which will help to form an understanding of the inherent metaphysical principles Shelley was adapting. Prosaic accounts of this inception have long been made by linguists, who point out, for example, its similarities with the Provençal poetry of Arnaut Daniel. Provençal certainly influenced Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, the first poem in terza rima:
Mas quand m’albir cum es de pertz al som
mout m’en am mais car ans l’auzei voler,
C’aras sai ieu que mos cors e mos sens.
Within the vernacular ABBACDCE eight-line stanzas of Daniel’s poem ‘Si’m fos Amors de joi donar tan larga’ one finds the enjambment, hendecasyllabic lines and interlocking rhyme tercets which are all crucial features of the Commedia. Lines start with conjunctions and comparatives – for example, the first line quoted starts with ‘mas quand’. This is also a crucial feature of the Commedia. Linguistic precursors to the terza rima used in the Commedia are by no means insubstantial.
Despite this, Tibor Wlassics maintains that such analysis of the ‘Commedia’ misses the point. One must see the ‘Commedia’ not as a linguistic inevitability, but as a work of ‘coherent inspiration’:
E io, quando ‘l suo braccio a me distese,
Ficcaï li occhi per lo cotto aspetto,
Si che ‘l viso abbrusciato non difese
For Wlassics, each stanza involves the convergence of three autonomous spatiotemporal moments. An unknown figure extends his arm to the speaker and navigator of Dante’s Inferno (“’il suo braccio a me distese”). In two distinct moments, the speaker perceives the conflagrated figure (“ficcaï li occhi”) and affirms his enduring recognisability (“‘l viso abbrusciato non difese”). Despite the fact that the stanza’s separate lines “are indeed perceptible to our ear one by one”, there is an inherent paradox in that “each stanza adopts a clear modulation, with a formal iambic rhythm and a ternary vivacity.” Terza rima is not merely a linguistic term: each stanza in the form is an argumentative structure, a ‘dialectic’ or a ‘thesis’, comprising three contrapuntal statements impelled together within each interlocking rhyme stanza.. For Wlassics, “metrically, the Commedia Divina is a sequence (una teoria) of Trinitarian unities.” The poem is synonymous with the triune Godhead:
Quell’ uno e due e tre che sempre vive
E regna sempre in tre ‘n due e ‘n uno,
Non circunscritto, e tutto circumscrive,
The reader is given a description of the Trinity that is deliberately mystifying. Dante suggests that one cannot syllogistically write about the mystery (“circunscritto”), which nonetheless underwrites everything (“circumscrive”). One of the only gestures towards such a mystery is liturgy, which aims to perform something of that mystery:
La conoscenza süa al mio ‘ntelleto;
e chinando la mano a la sua faccia,
rispousi: “Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?”
Not only is each stanza an embodiment of the Trinity but the way the poem moves connotes also this mystery. The last line of each stanza is also the interpenetration of the final rhyme of the terzine and the argumentative structure of the tercet, suggesting interpenetrative Trinitarian movement. The recognisable character of Brunetto leaps from this interpenetration in a moment of suspense in evocation of sublunary ex nihilo creation – namely, the mystery of how something emerges from somewhere as bleak as Inferno. With such formal transitions, Dante uses what Wlassics terms the “inspirational constraints” of terza rima to create a systematised vertigo that experientially typifies the process (if it can be thus termed) of entering into the stupefying mystery of the triune God. The recourse to the term “interpenetration” is significant. In ‘A Defence of Poetry’, Shelley describes poetic composition as “interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own.” This connects Shelley with Wlassics’ Dante insofar as Shelley seems to imply that any poem must meticulously embody a carefully-ordered divinity.
For Dante, the mystery of what accords God unity and what unifies a well-ordered poem, as well as the mysteriously inevitable movement of both concepts, are presented as a single conundrum. Such inevitability can be addressed by the aforementioned Ancient Greek term ‘perichōrēsis’ (περιχώρησις). Addressing the need for such a term, and how exactly it possibly relates to terza rima, will require a brief discussion of early Christian theology. This discussion will provide a novel framework for understanding Shelley’s ‘Triumph’. Theologians in the early Christian church attacked Christological and Trinitarian heresies that denied that either God or Christ could be comprised of an unconfused mixture of particulars. Christological heresies in broadly the fourth through to the eighth century were particular rife. Many of these heresies would presumably go undetected by many modern Christians: monophysites believed that Jesus Christ had only one nature – a divine nature. On the other hand, the East Syrian “prosopic union”, which John of Damascus countered, upheld a unity of two distinct natures.
In response, syllogistic expressions of orthodoxy were used – among them, “hypostatic union” – yet a more figurative expression was deployed by the patristic theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. He uses the verb ‘perichōrēo’ (περιχώρέω) – to ‘move around’ or to ‘interpenetrate’ – to suggest something in line with Christological doctrine. This term was adapted from the Stoic philosopher Anaxagoras, who maintained the existence of a cosmic Mind that interpenetrated the cosmos and of a metaphysical reality comprised of ‘everything-in-everything’. Since Stoic mixture theory allowed that an incorporeal being could enter a corporeal being, many Stoic terms had obvious use for Christian theologians. Gregory reappropriates the term from the Stoics in a rather imprecise way to describe the interpenetration of the “names” of Christ. Gregory’s focus, for Ables, is not necessarily the systematisation of dogma: it is something almost Heraclitean that expresses the flux of the World and its confusing and convulsive relationship with God, contrasted with the unseeable stasis of Heaven. Indeed, Gregory’s reliance on imprecise analogy makes him almost resemble a pre-Socratic philosopher like Heraclitus:
Indeed, life and death, as they are called, apparently so different, interpenetrate (περιχώρει), perhaps even opposing, one another. But, what do we have? Both flux and corruption, undertaking change at one time or another.
The related noun ‘perichōrēsis’ (περιχώρησις) was then subsequently first used by Maximus the Confessor, who developed its use to discuss a “complete penetration” of the human and divine natures of Christ. Maximus makes heavy use of Latin apophatic theology such as Pseudo-Dionysius, transforming this perichōrēsis into a kind of stasis. Maximus created the term in recognition of a kind of analogical humility and with a reference to Platonic “ideals”. According to Ables, “Maximus indicates that the delivered ascends to God according to their faith, participating in and becoming the divine in a movement of ‘ever-active repose’.” For Maximus, the believer participates in the logos – springing forth ex nihilo – as the divine interpenetrates the wretchedness of humanity. . The convulsive percolation of the divine into the human sphere – an emphasis adapted from Gregory, who in turn is influenced by the Stoics – is emblematised by the Incarnation, a particular emphasis in Maximus.
Christological perichōrēsis was adapted by the seventh century theologian John of Damascus, who not only elaborated upon its Christological manifestation but also introduced it as a concept within Trinitarian theology. In the latter instance, John of Damascus uses the term ‘perichōrēsis’ to describe how the persons of the Trinity do not alter when they are bound together within its essential unity. Such ‘perichōrēsis’ occurs without any “blending” and is without any “division”. John also emphasises polemically how the Greek word ‘Θεο’ is related to the Greek word ‘Θεειν’, meaning ‘to run’ or ‘to move’, emphasising God’s polyvalent nature and the variety of manifestations that characterise God’s hypostatic union. John of Damascus borrows an emphasis on fluidity yet writes more carefully and more formulaically than the earlier exponents of ‘perichōrēsis’. Indeed, unlike Gregory of Nazianzus, John is clearly attempting to effect a certain clarity in his rhetorical style.
For John, the modern theologically orthodox idea of the triune God as three persons and one nature, is helpfully expressed by the term ‘perichōrēsis’. The way that Christ interacts with what is outside of Himself is described as Christ “pervad[ing] all substances without being defiled”. In other words, Jesus Christ did not lose his individuality or uniqueness when he ascended into Heaven and became One with the Father. He continues to pervade reality as Himself alone, his body received by Christians during the Eucharist, yet his action and participation in the world makes sense only in reference to the other persons of the Trinity. To fully elucidate these notions, John of Damascus discusses light analogically as a metaphor for the way in which the persons of the Trinity act through one another in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith:
It is just like the rays and brightness coming from the sun, for the sun is the source of its rays and the brightness is communicated to use through the rays, and that it is which lights us and is enjoyed by us. Neither do we say that the Son is of the Spirit, nor, most certainly, from the Spirit.
John describes the Son as the ‘emitter’ (Προβολεύς) of the Holy Spirit, implying one person of the Trinity infinitely suggests another person. In this case, when Christ becomes manifest, he scatters rays of illumination that diverts attention away from himself and on to the Godhead as a whole. By John of Damascus the term characterises movement within a Godhead comprised of three distinct parts forming a unified entity.
This discussion of early Christian thought may have seemed digressive. Its importance lies in the fact that it illustrates how closely philosophy and theology were linked in patristic thought, and how an idea like the Trinity as an illustration of divine operation in reality may not be solely the domain of theology, though its later formulation of Catholic dogma is clearly what appealed to Dante. Dante was clearly the predominant influence of Shelley’s ‘Triumph’, as reflected in the homage that he receives throughout ‘Triumph’: “Of him who from the lowest depths of Hell / Through every Paradise and through all glory / Love led serene, and who returned to tell.” Even so, Petrarch, from whom the poem derives its namesake, uses terza rima in the ‘Trionfi d’Amor’ to express the futility of carnal love, including the carnal love of Dante and Beatrice, in a manner that is by no means un-Catholic.
As I will show, Shelley’s terza rima does not depart from these examples in a metaphysical or theological sense, yet extends terza rima as a cosmological ordering-principle with a broader scope than simply theology. Shelley’s theological learning was definitely not insubstantial: he read Augustine, a theologian with a strong Platonic influence and a crucial early Trinitarian thinker, in the original Latin. In 1819, a few years before he wrote ‘Triumph’, Shelley was working not only on a commentary on Luke and reading Luke to his companions, but also an article about daemonology that referred intimately to the ideas of several theologians. Not only this, Shelley had drafted many lines that closely resemble ‘Triumph’ in the notebook he used to compose these. Shelley surely read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, who refers to Synesius of Cyrene, a poet and early Christian bishop who discussed the Trinity in a nearly-exclusively Platonic, cosmological way that Coleridge describes as pantheistic. Shelley was familiar with the translations of Thomas Taylor, who translated neo-Platonist philosophers like Iamblichus outside of the Christian tradition, which surely informed the way that he read both the Gospel of Luke and the work of Augustine.
Early nineteenth-century Christian thinkers generally avoided troublesome analysis of patristic theologians like Augustine, analysis that did not revive until shortly after Shelley’s death during the Oxford Movement. Christian groups in the early nineteenth century were largely more fixated on proving God’s existence rather than consulting challenging patristic sources. Surely in response to this, Shelley questions God can be as neatly explicated as the contemporary religious milieu might imagine. “Ask him who adores what is God”, Shelley asks in his essay ‘On Love’. Shelley is referring to the aforementioned Stoic philosophy of Mind when he asks of Mind in the same essay, “Is it said also to be the Cause?” It cannot, Shelley says: “it is said that the mind produces motion and it might as well have been said that motion produces mind”. Shelley’s chiasmus leaves it ambiguous what this ‘motion’ is – presumably some kind of cosmic ordering principle, but also the notion of some kind of Creator nervously lingers. Shelley is still awkward about “Religion”: clearly there is no full-fledged swing towards orthodox Christian doctrine.
Shelley’s lukewarm and unorthodox approach to Christianity makes Greek and Roman theologian-philosophers all the more useful in understanding the kind of God that might be half-emerging – or indeed, emerging – in Shelley’s work. One also readily identifies in Shelley’s late essay ‘On Life’ several statements that present a concern with the perfect co-existence of two elements, an aforementioned Christological problem. Shelley, for example, states, “the difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought that are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects.”
A ‘perichoretic’ form can be seen in the very first lines of the ‘Triumph’:
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened earth
The Latin word ‘persona’, used to describe the ‘persons’ of the Trinity, also means ‘mask’, giving Shelley’s enjambed phrase ‘mask of darkness’ a Trinitarian emphasis. This enjambment can be understood as a kind of ‘perichōrēsis’ –it is a convulsive flux within an established cosmological order. A sudden pneumatological motion or emergence is suggested by the choriamb of “Swift as a spi-”. The first line ‘swift as a spirit hastening to his task’ refers in some way to the procession of the Holy Spirit and the verb ‘hastening’ describes in turn its indwelling. In light of the quoted passage of John of Damascus in which he describes the Father analogically as the Sun, the use of the phrase ‘sprang forth’ – indicating creation ex nihilo – also could be feasibly be seen in some way as describing the Father’s unbegotten nature. This dynamic verb phrase also creates a complication or elaboration of the first line. By the third line this object has now acquired the facility of emotion or a body – “rejoicing in his splendour” – this suggests the Incarnation, or at least a relatedly systematic tripartite transformation of the divine into the human. By no means is the Trinity is not explicit in the poem. Yet a Trinitarian organisational principle – which organises a ‘spirit’ and a ‘Sun’ separately, and assigns the latter a dynamic verb – reigns over the stanza, and Shelley is clearly adapting terza rima from Dante with the consciousness that linguistic figures become organised in this way. This occurs also when one considers the characteristics of the persons of the Trinity, which are organised in a Trinitarian fashion by Shelley:
“Whither the conqueror hurries me still less.
But follow thou, and from spectator turn
Actor or victim in this wretchedness,
The idea of God permeating everything through a triune relationship with reality – shifting from an impersonal spectator or progenitor to a personal part of the created world during the Incarnation – is alluded to in the hendiatris of “spectator, actor or victim” in Rousseau’s enigmatic advice to the speaker in this passage. In an abstract but evident way, ‘Spectator’ represents a characteristic of the person of the Father, whereas ‘victim’ suggests the ‘Son’ and ‘Actor’ suggests the Holy Spirit. Hence, Shelley’s terza rima, which may lack the clear delineations of Inferno, Paradiso and Purgatorio that are found in Dante, nonetheless alludes to the trifold movement made by God in His interaction with the world. Shelley comments upon the linguistic pattern of thought that the metre necessarily initiates:
Of grassy paths, and wood lawns interpersed
With overarching elms and caverns cold
Shelley’s own word for this convulsive overlapping in this instance, or the flux of the created world itself – ‘interpersed’ – mirrors that of ‘perichōrēsis’. Indeed, the way in which terza rima causes people and natural objects to leap up as if from nowhere, the rhyme scheme constantly creating a sense of almost convulsive surprise, definitely mirrors for Shelley the imperfection of this world and yet the way in which it is constantly informed by the reality of a more divine existence. The juxtaposition of ‘grassy paths’ and ‘wood lawns’ with that of ‘overarching elms’ and ‘caverns cold’ is not automatic or unplanned, but made to seem that way to represent the cosmological imperfection that one is necessarily gradually pulled away from by some kind of divine matrix, or else the Stoic cosmic Mind penetrates. This linguistic structure is further dramatized:
Of all that is, has been or will be done.
So ill was the car guided, but it past
With solemn speed majestically on
The first line mirrors the temporal delineation of liturgical doxology – ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’ – although it shifts the emphasis from ‘being’ to ‘doing’. Such emphasis is appropriate seeing as the poem describes the ceaseless finitude of human action. The ‘car guided’ is also terza rima itself, which inevitably leads the compositor to tripartite patterns of thought. Shelley persistently uses adjectives and adverbs that suggest theology and liturgy – “solemn” and “majestically” – as if one can think neither of the poem nor the transmundane procession it relates as anything other than a religious procession. The liturgical character of the poem is affirmed by lines such as “Swinging their censers in the element / With orient incense lit by the new ray.” Shelley’s image is of flowers as thurifers, innately enacting a kind of liturgical, sacramental worship without human impetus. Since censers are pneumatological symbols in liturgical worship, Shelley refers to Trinitarian perichōrēsis with lines such as these, as the energy of the Father (“the new ray”) flows to the Spirit.
This careful use of liturgy and religious imagery cannot necessarily be to subvert. One continues to find throughout the poem many examples of preoccupations with how aetherial elements can be synthesised and yet retain their integrity, which is dramatized by formal ‘perichōrēsis’:
Till like two clouds into one vale impelled
That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle
And die in rain – the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps… ere the shock cease to tingle
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolation single,
With these two stanzas, one immediately thinks of Dante’s “in tre ‘n due e ‘n uno” and the aforementioned patristic Christology of perichōrēsis. Shelley describes an image of two clouds passing in to each other in spite of their contradictory nature in stanzas that recalls Luke 10:18 – “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”. Shelley is definitely talking about metaphysical, divine objects that influence reality rather than merely vaporous aerosols. These are clouds that “shake the mountains”. The final rhyme of the terzine – “single” – rhymes with “mingle” in a way that alludes to the problem of how objects with no physical reality may successfully interpenetrate one another.
Once the clouds have negated each other, a subsequent multiplication occurs – a plurality ex nihilo suggested by “nor is the desolation single”. One recalls Ables’ comment that, for Maximus the Confessor, God is “manifested and multiplied in all things.” Shelley is suggesting the concomitant violence and wonder of the sheer infinitude of creation while poetically performing a belief in the Trinity. Yet, in the same way as an early Monophysite, Shelley is almost suggesting that these two divine objects become one nature, and that two natures cannot co-exist or interpenetrate. Reflecting similarly on metaphysical admixture, earlier in the poem Shelley relates how “old age and youth, manhood and infancy / Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear.” . Later Shelley states that the processionary souls “Mix with each other in tempestuous measure / To savage music…” Clearly the sense is always as a violent but successful marrying of opposites, of what is distinct becoming apparently and convulsively indistinct while nonetheless preserving some kind of particularity.
The connections to early Christianity become more apparent when one thinks of how Shelley’s notion of the flux of creation and its relationship to the interpenetrating sublunary plane relate to early Christian thought. Such notions bear similarities to Gregory of Nazianzus and his notion of “ever-active repose” as well as his evocative oration describing the flux of created world. For this reason, for Ravinthiran to characterise Shelley’s “atheistic flight from “‘temperance’ to any authority” is fundamentally misleading: Shelley has confused his exegetes by using the term in his early work. Despite the inherent flux in the poem, it is clear that there is an attempt to order language philosophically and in a sustained fashion in accordance with the cosmological principles inherent within terza rima. The poem is not ‘atheistical’ if one maintains that a long poem in terza rima necessarily stipulates an evocation of a metaphysical ordering principle, which for Shelley can only really be a Triune God. This of course does not mean it is overtly ‘theistic’, but clearly many direct invocations of God are evident:
But a voice answered . . “Life” . . I turned and knew
(O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!)
In the surviving manuscript Shelley had originally written “God” after crossing it out and writing “Heaven”, which would have been a straightforward invocation of a creator-God. One interpretation of this is this decision is that Shelley realises that, since God is part of the flux that he is describing, He could not be called upon as the final stasis and the of Life. Yet calling upon Heaven is more useful, considering that Heaven is a genuine repose and fully external to the flux of the poem. God is mentioned directly in a later stanza:
And why God made irreconcilable
Good and the means of good, and for despair
I half disdained my eye’s desire to fill
With the spent vision of the times that were
And scarce have ceased to be . . . “Dost thou behold,”
Said then my guide, “those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire”
What Wlassics describes as a common occurrence of the Commedia occurs. A proper noun, “Voltaire”, emerges during the final tripartite rhyme in a moment of suspense. Wlassics uses this to state that, for Dante, every tripartite rhyme is precisely pre-meditated. The poet is not merely led astray by terza rima. In the second stanza, Voltaire, a recognisable figure, emerges from the metaphysical confusion. Thus, the cycles of familiarity and unfamiliarity that are found in both terza rima, as well as in a Triune conception of God, are made manifest. Shelley is almost mirroring this effect of tripartite suspense to convey a sense of the sheer futility and lethargy of all of the human figures who have fallen into time’s abyss. The next line is a long list of figures: “Frederic, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold”. Practically every stress in the line is occupied by a syllable within a proper noun. The vision of morality and God expressed seems to be a searing vision of God’s grandeur – that God is unrecognisable as a straightforward set of moral commands but is blindingly absolute and beyond anything that can be comprehended. These assertions recall a form of unorthodox Christianity, such as Gnosticism.
A role for the Trinity in the poem is further suggested by the role of Christ in the poem:
All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touched the world with living flame
Fled back like eagles to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one
Were there; for they of Athens and Jerusalem
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them
Socrates and Jesus share a precedence among humans– they are not the only members of the ‘sacred few’ but they are achieve precedence among their ranks, in a manner that can only be described as a form of shared divinity. Since the Holy Spirit is associated with tactile and ornithological metaphors, both Christ and Socrates are said to transmit spiritual energy directly to humankind. The implication is that Shelley clearly sees Christianity as a further expression of notions of divinity within Greek philosophy.
The sacredness of Christ and Socrates is made manifest not in their visible doctrines but their extra-human manifestation. This, then, is a definitively theological idea, especially since it relates to 2 Corinthians 14:1 – “.Now thanks be unto God, who always causeth us to triumph in Christ and who maketh manifest through us the savor of His knowledge in every place.” Using phrases like ‘mighty captives’, Shelley is clearly echoing Scripture in a way that is going beyond the intertextual connection with Petrarch’s ‘Trionfi d’Amor’. An earlier line, also echoing the Bible, states, “the night; behind me rose the day; the Deep / Was at my feet”, recalling Psalms 42, “deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts.” An image similar to this Psalm is found in the line, “Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose.”
One must certainly comment that the twin divinity of Socrates and Jesus is an unorthodox idea and an idea that syncretises a Greek philosopher into the divinity of Christ. In this, one might say, Shelley is exploiting the theological thought-process inculcated by terza rima to draw some interesting theological equations, albeit equations always based around Christian doctrine and language. Shelley allows the language of Scripture to become malleable as he points out its Greek derivation in a manner never losing a scriptural focus. Shelley’s terza rima stanzas are nothing like, for example, the interlocking stanzas of Arnaut Daniel. It is this that forces us to question Pyle’s notion of lines such as ‘A shape all light, which with one hand did fling” as explicitly non-theological. As I have shown, these apparently grotesque images are always occurring in the backdrop of the exploration of what must be interpreted as a genuine and perhaps at times subtle exploration of theological ideas.
Of course, such explorations of theology must never be interpreted as any gravitation towards institutional religion, and to posit that Shelley’s use of terza rima implies some affection for the Catholic Church would be mistake. In addition to the external evidence, plenty of internal evidence makes this explicit:
And Gregory and John and men divine
Who rose like shadows between Man and god
Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven,
Was worshipped by the world o’er which they strode
For the true Sun it quenched.-
Virtuous though figures such as Gregory and John may be or appear to be, the institutional, hierarchical church has distracted generations of worshippers from God, Shelley is saying. Within the oxymoronic ‘men divine’, it is hinted that Gregory and John are not necessarily malevolent, but the institutional apparatus that they are part of pervert humankind from legitimate worship. Such worship does not have to be sought outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Shelley must be suggesting, but one must look beyond external manifestations of this tradition if one is to discern a genuine cosmological ordering-principle.
Ravinthiran and Pyle’s arguments for a less ‘theological’ Shelley become stronger when the metre of the poem, as well as the circumstances of its composition, are considered. For Wlassics, it was the ordered iambic rhythm of the Commedia that gave Dante the proper means for entering into the mystery of the triune God. One must discount points in the manuscript in which Shelley did not manage to find a word that scanned but intended to, such as. “But icy cold, obscured with [ ] light”. Shelley’s own iambic pentametre can at times be very irregular, at times nearly whirling out of control in a convulsive spiral. Ellipses are scattered through the poem, almost as if feet are missing or as if the poem trails off into contemplation of itself:
“First who art thou?” . . . “Before thy memory
I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died,
The ellipsis in this instance marks a shift in speaker, yet also apparently a sequence of missing stressed syllables as the next line segways into a corollary of past participles, all either monosyllabic or trochaic. Clearly Shelley is a poet who wishes to scan, and the second line comes closer to scanning if one reads ‘loved, hated’ as an iamb with a beat placed on ‘hated’ but a slight stress placed on ‘loved’. One also has to effectively read ‘did’ as a single foot for the line to scan properly. Needless to say, it is formally striking and over-stressed. In addition, while ellipses often do mark a change in speaker, occasionally they allude to something outside of the poem, as if the sheer force of the vision cannot be contained in terza rima. Lines such as “To savage music . . . Wilder as it grows” and “Or fled before . . . Swift, fierce and obscene” bear testament to this. In each case, the ellipsis finishes an unstressed syllable and the next foot after the ellipsis is a trochee, as if the majesty of the procession is recovered only after the pause.
In line with my argument, then, Shelley is merely exploiting the perichoretic nature of terza rima with these lines. The fact that he returns to the regular pattern of iambic pentametre draws attention to how interpenetrative yet structured the cosmological ordering-principle that governs the vision of the procession is and how if he slackens linguistic control the foundations begin to crumble. The fact that Shelley submits to terza rima, not for the arbitrary challenge but for the way it organises ideas and figures, is still glaringly evident. Shelley is conveying a messier and less doctrinal transition into a model of divine perception, using a “sacred” form without ever wishing to tarnish its fundamental relationship to the Trinity, a relationship surely intuited about terza rima. The fact that the poem is in English rather than Italian is an obvious corollary to this point. As English contains less monosyllabic rhymes, it goes without saying that terza rima is much harder, and it is difficult to produce something at such length that does not belong to the sphere of nonsense poetry. It is clear that Shelley’s submission to the strictures of this form was intended to be a serious meditation on philosophical and theological themes. Indeed, this is supported by the fact that, in the unfinished manuscript in which it exists, Shelley’s ‘Triumph’ does not seem visually like a terza rima poem. At times Shelley, presumably in a state of frustration, begins writing different a poem, and the manuscript features entire pages of crossed-out stanzas. For Shelley, terza rima was a difficult but philosophically-necessary mode of thought.
When reading the ‘Triumph’ manuscript, one thinks immediately of Blake. Thinking of late Shelley in these terms – as an unorthodox prophetic poet operating exclusively in the Judeo-Christian tradition, albeit a poet with a greater use of poetic form – powerfully enhances any reading of a poem like ‘Triumph’. As critics agree, Blake was not really a ‘Christian’ as most people understand the term, and critics have found various terms to describe his unorthodox theology, such as ‘antinomial’. Considering what I have shown about Shelley – that he is knowingly acquiescing to a form that performs a central aspect of Christian doctrine – one should be able to engage in similar speculation about his theological standpoints beliefs and use similarly nuanced terms. It is not as wild as it might seem to think of Shelley as a kind of Gnostic, and as has been emphasised one can find parallels to the way he combines Greek philosophy and Scripture in the early history of Christianity. It is not wholly improbable to conjecture that, had he lived beyond 1822, Shelley would have written more visionary, eschatological verse. What remains clear, however, is that this particular example of Shelley’s late work shows that he was maturing into a more fixedly Judeo-Christian outlook.
Different studies would discern more expansively Shelley’s connections to patristic thought to illuminate readings of ‘Triumph’: such has been beyond the scope of this essay. The intertextuality between ‘Triumph’ and other terza rima poems, as well as its relationship to Shelley’s other terza rima poem ‘Ode to the West Wind, his singular translation of Dante’s Commedia and his earlier terza rima experiments, are also beyond the scope of this essay. Such observations would contribute to a broader critical enquiry into what use Shelley made of the integrated network of Scripture and his terza rima predecessors.