"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." (Shelley's Defense of Poetry)
Wow. This is writing at white heat. Top o' the world, mama. Apocalypse now. As rhetoric, this passage attempts to persuade us that poetry is of cosmic importance; it is engaged in some activity akin to Armageddon. This is writing that asks for belief, not analysis. So let's analyze. And here are the parts for analysis: sword/scabbard; lightning; and "consumes."
1. sword/scabbard:
Shelley's metaphor is martial, implying that poetry wages some sort of battle with some sort of foe. One source for this metaphor is Revelation in which Christ appears with a flaming sword in his mouth, an iconic bit that commentators have interpreted as Christ's power of word. The sword is neither a despoiler of the human body nor a ploughshare; it is word of mouth. To equate the word with the sword is to locate power in words rather than actions; words are deeds. The metaphor intends to convince us that poetry is powerful: sharp and bright and capable of enacting deeds of valour.
Like most swords, poetry comes with a scabbard, but Shelley's metaphor erases the scabbard even as it names it. What is the scabbard that finds itself erased or more accurately "consumed"? If the sword is that which does battle, then the scabbard is that which keeps the sword from doing battle. As Shelley says, it contains the sword. Containment means keeping in check, controlling, holding down, restraining, or preventing an enemy from advancing. The word "contain" is consistent with the martial and political implications in the evocation of a sword, although what Shelley does is to set sword and scabbard at odds. They are in an adversarial position here. Why? Well, if poetry is the power of the word, then the power of the word has the effect of challenging, waging war with, power of other kinds--say political or economic or social power. In other words, poetry is that which allows for the continual challenging of vested interests and entrenched systems. Nothing can contain it; all containment is an attempt at silencing the word. Poetry's function is radical, critical, and threatening to that which would contain it: that is political and economic and social vested interests. In short, the scabbard represents all those things that seek to place a quiescence on us; the sword seeks to break that quiescence. For Shelley, poetry has political impact.
Before I go on, I note that Shelley's rhetoric might manifest his very insecurity. He writes at a time when systems of patronage for the artist had pretty much broken down, and poetry was beginning to be shouldered to the periphery of the literary polysystem and of the social system generally. I mean, who takes poetry seriously today besides poets, professors of poetry, and those few apparently eccentric souls who spend time reading the odd poem and even taking courses in creative writing and critical appreciation? The audience for poetry today is tiny compared to what it was even in Shelley's day when it was beginning to shrink. In other words, Shelley's desire to convince his reader of the importance of poetry is frantic; it arises in part from his fear that poetry's importance is lessening in the face of a changing world. The poet now, remember, must assume a place in the market like any other hawker of goods. If the poet wishes to find buyers for his or her product, then convincing the buyer that poetry is a good buy is imperative. Poets are legislators, right? Shelley indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, but I confess that his wishful thinking convinces me. Would that everyone wished for what Shelley envisaged.
But let's go back to the sword and scabbard. Obviously the metaphor is martial, as I have said. But regarding Shelley's raised sword from the vantage point of the early 21st century, even assuming that the sword protrudes from the mouth, we cannot but think of Freud. Can we? We all know full well Freud's take on pointy or tubular objects. We all know about cigars or baseball bats or poles or pens or swords. Before I hear a ho-hum, I hasten to note two things about Shelley: 1) he is a poet of the erotic; like Blake he placed his faith in the liberatory effects of sex; and 2) his theory of poetry in the Defense insists on the relation of poetry to the body. Poetry and love are synonymous, and this explains why Shelley argues that "social corruption" has one aim--to destroy pleasure, erotic pleasure. The great poets are men who "celebrated the dominion of love" (524). Shelley is speaking of a sublime (implied in the sword metaphor) that is distinctly masculine, that conquers not with the force of arms, but with the force of words and words that tell of "erotic delicacy."
The phallic implications of Shelley's metaphor bring together phallus, sword, pen, and word. We have here what we have learned to call phallocentrism and logocentrism and phallogocentrism. In other words, Shelley lives in a world in which people like him can jettison traditional religion (Shelley was an avowed atheist), and yet maintain a belief in the power of the word to reveal truth. The "deep truth" may be "imageless" (Prometheus Unbound), but it is nevertheless existent and words in the form of poetry as erotic consummation can reveal it to us. Poetry is revelatory. In Blakean language, poetry is the Last Judgment.
But another echo deconstructs Shelley's metaphor. If poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes, then it reminds us (me, at least) of the flaming or covering cherub (see Ezekiel 28:16 and Genesis 3:24), that which bars the way back to Eden. This flame reveals not the deep truth, but rather the confinement of humanity in a fallen world, a world of woe and oppression, precisely the world Shelley so fiercely wants to topple. If we take Shelley's metaphor from this perspective, then poetry is, like all forms of language, that which keeps us from unity and perfection. Poetry is divisive, just as swords are divisive. That Shelley cannot escape this "abyme" is because he, like Wordsworth before him, cannot accept a theory of language that stipulates a logical and essential connection between the word and the thing, or what we have come to think of as signifier and signified. Because the deep truth is imageless, all words can do is continually slide between signified never fully knowing which one to take as a final resting spot. In fact, to find that final resting spot would be to stop the sliding and to stop the sliding is to stop living as we know it. I'll conclude this section with Keats's lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Addendum to this section: Feminist note:
The scabbard as that into which the sword slides is a vaginal metaphor. Male sword and female scabbard might set up a further binary of male poetry and female nature (or world). The scabbard as female or as world might lead to the scabbard as mother, that from which the sword emerges, that which gives birth to the sword. The connection is between mother--mater--matter. The body produces the sword, gives birth to it. Shelley, however, is rooted in the masculine sublime; according to his metaphor, the sword consumes the scabbard. In some bizarre sense, for Shelley the sword can do without the scabbard, and if this is so, then the sword can produce that which we might have thought the scabbard itself produced. In other words, the sword gives birth--delivers that golden world Sidney speaks about. (I'll return to this later.)
2. lightning:
Shelley's metaphor is, however, not single; it is double. Poetry is not only a sword, but it is also a sword of lightning. I guess I've alluded to this aspect of the metaphor above, but let's contemplate "lightning" a bit more. The most obvious thing to me is the notion of "light" here. Poetry brings us out of darkness, and as such it is a civilizing activity. Commentators have stated this for eons: we have seen this argument in Sidney, Vico, Pope, Blake, and Wordsworth. We could find it in any number of other writers. From the beginning of human society, poetry has been that which brings people together. The argument rests, in part, on the notion that poetry begins in an oral context. Pre-literate societies communicate important truths and information through poetry. It is also true that certain religions pass on certain mysteries and doctrines orally, refusing to allow these truths and doctrines to be inscribed because they are too precious for such hardening. Light can blind when it flashes willy-nilly without the guiding voice of the special person: priest, intercessor, swami, poet. In any case, the metaphor points to the notion of poetry as that which distinguishes the civilized society. Light brings with it relationship and love.
But of course, Shelley's metaphor speaks not simply of light, but of "lightning." Lightning has something to do with electricity, and the Shelley's interest in electricity will be familiar to any viewer of any of a number of "Frankenstein" films. For Shelley, the metaphor of lightning is both backward looking and forward looking: it looks back to the ancient sky bolts of Jove or Jupiter and forward to the new science of electricity emerging in Shelley's day. Poetry is both something that connects us with the past, and something that carries us into the future. I think here of Wordsworth's connection between Science and Poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
Lightning has yet another force here. In Shelley's day, as Frankenstein indicates, people considered electricity the life force. Electricity was that which animated organic activity. What I am getting at is a force of metaphor we still use today when we speak of two people having an "electric" attraction. In short, for Shelley electricity is of the body. I'm back at Shelley's insistent connection between poetry and the body. In Wordsworth's language, poetry is "felt along the blood" (see Tintern Abbey). What I am suggesting is that in these writers we have an incipient sense of what it means to write the body or to equate poetry with the body, with sexual pleasure, with jouissance. Or we might consider the generative effect of electricity; it is that which may give birth (as it does to Frankenstein's monster). In this sense, we are back to a reading of Shelley that marks him as essentially masculinist.
3. consumes:
The allusion here is to the biblical text that speaks of God as a consuming fire (Exodus 19:18; 24:17). To make this connection is to replace God with poetry, and to replace God with poetry is to install poetry in the place of religion, a move made more firmly in Mathew Arnold's writing later in the century. As traditional religion becomes more and more ungrounded through the "higher criticism" and the finding of science, the need for something to replace it emerges. That "something" is for many poetry. This is one reason why pious Victorian writers such as George MacDonald and Gerard Manly Hopkins could revere Shelley despite Shelley's claim to be an atheist. They simply did not believe him. In any case, we do see emerging in Shelley what we know of as "liberal humanism," a belief that through poetry the individual can gain spiritual strength and access to eternal truths about the human condition, truths that apply across racial, national, gender, class, age boundaries.
The metaphor here moves from notions of destroying and squandering and burning to the more obvious eating ("devouring" is a word sometimes used in the biblical text). To consume is to eat in large quantities. This means that poetry does not simply destroy that scabbard which seeks to contain it, but rather that it eats it. The metaphor of eating is interesting, especially if we keep in our minds the scriptural echoes in Shelley's prose. The disciples eat Jesus, just as Catholics continue to do so each time they partake of the sacrament. Eating in this sense is not destructive; rather it is empowering. For poetry to consume its scabbard, it assimilates it, absorbs it, surrounds it, takes it in, in short "contains it." This is imitation in a rather large sense: imitation as assimilation. If poetry can consume the scabbard, and if the scabbard is the world that in its own way tries to consume (take in, surround, contain) poetry, then what poetry does is transform the world through containment. The poet delivers a golden world, and this golden world is the Real world touched by the transforming blade of poetry. We can hear echoes of Plato filtered through Plotinus here.
"Consumes" also connects with "consummate," which my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary informs me means: "to make perfect"; "to make (marital union) complete by sexual intercourse." The marriage metaphor is one that recurs with great frequency in Romantic texts. You can find it in spectacular use in Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Usually it invokes the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb in Revelation, that apocalyptic moment in which time is no longer. Shelley too uses it this way in Prometheus Unbound. In other words, we are back to that notion of poetry as revelation I discussed earlier. And yet, we are still on this earth in the presence of a marriage that includes consummation as sexual intercourse. The body returns. Poetry and the body are inextricably connected. We have, in effect, an oxymoron: the body of poetry (a term used to describe both a single poet's oeuvre and the whole gathering of literature). I say oxymoron because poetry signals something unworldly, something of the non physical, and body signals something decidedly physical. Here is an attempt on the part of Shelley to bridge the phenomenal and the noumenal, flesh and spirit, physics and metaphysics. Here in a nutshell is Shelley's defense of poetry: poetry enacts the impossible communion of fact and fiction, flesh and spirit, time and eternity.
Do you believe all this?
