Galway Kinnell 시 "Shelley"

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Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart 에서 (4)

 

The poems in Galway Kinnell's late books often press down on uncomfortable personal truths. [시 "Shelley"에서 Kinnell은 Shelley에 대해서 잘 알지 못하고 그를 따랐던 자신의 젊은 시절의 과오를 반성한다. Rilke도 Shelley와 비슷한 비난을 받는다는 걸 전에 읽고서 나는 그걸 잊지 않는다.] 

 

Shelley

 

When I was twenty the one true

free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,

Shelley who wrote tracts advocating

atheism, free love, the emancipation

of women, and the abolition of wealth and class,

a lively version of Plato's Symposium,

lyrics on the bliss and brevity

of romantic love, and complex

poems on love's difficulties, Shelley

who, I learned later --- perhaps

almost too late --- remarried Harriet,

then pregnant with their second child,

and a few months later ran off with Mary,

already pregnant with their first, bringing

along Mary's stepsister Claire,

who very likely also became his lover,

 

and in this malaise à trois, which Selley

said would be a "paradise of exiles,"

they made their life, along with the spectres

of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine,

and of Mary's half-sister Fanny, who, fixated

on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits

of adored but neglected children

conceived almost incidentally

in the pursuit of Eros --- Harriet's

Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley

and sent out to foster parents, Mary's

Clara, dead at one, her Willmouse, dead at three,

Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely

Shelley's own, whom he "adopted" but then

left behind, dead at one and a half,

and Allegra, Claire's daughter by Byron,

whom Byron packed off to the convent

at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five ---

 

and in those days, before I knew

any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,

who thought he was following radiant desire.

 

(2004)

 

 

The ... poem recounts the wreckages of Shelley's life, the list of women and children that he loved and used up, discarded and destroyed, in his quest for art, his "pursuit of Eros,"

 

Kinnell works through to the conclusion that it's not simply the work, but the work in tandem with the life, that matters for the creative artist. He dramatically lays out an ethic for the artist's relationship to other people.