Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Discontent is the thematic center of the poem, or more specifically how to handle such yearning. For Shelley, the status quo is by definition suspicious: Contentment is the hobgoblin of little minds, and complacency the quiet annihilator of the soul. The poem explores the urgency of discontent, its rich rewards and its potential for damage.

The Poet in Alastor is a wanderer, his peripatetic life underscoring the deep-seated nature of his discontent. From the opening sections, the narrator emphasizes how the Poet yearns. It is a kind of free-floating urgency. He does not yearn for love or for material success or for the privilege of social standing, all typical yearnings of the typical middle class. The word origins of “yearn” indicates how Shelley uses the concept. The word fuses Latin and Germanic words for desire, on the one hand, and joy, on the other. This fusion captures the Poet’s emotional and spiritual condition. It is not that he lacks something specific or attainable. Rather, he relishes the hunger itself. Desire is self-justifying, self-sustaining, self-validating. To “yearn” is traditionally a transitive verb, that is the verb construct provides a direct object to complete its idea. A person yearns for something; here, the Poet simply, purely, absolutely, unironically yearns. Whether the intoxicating allure of a woman willing to serve his every carnal need or the limitless expanse of a rugged mountainous landscape or the hoary ruins of an ancient peoples, the Poet defines such distractions as the moral and spiritual decay implicit in complacency and contentment. When he voices his envy of the swan who has a home and a reliable mate and routine and everything the Poet does not, the narrator makes clear the envy is ironic. After all, the Poet boasts his life apart has gifted him with a greater, purer, grander voice, a “voice much sweeter than [her] dying notes” (Line 286).

Thus, the poem uses the journey itself as an allegory for yearning, the venture that is as much exhilarating as it is dangerous, as much rewarding as it is frustrating. In the tiny and fragile boat, the Poet himself seems extraordinarily helpless, the tiny boat appears to move by its own energy, a suggestion of the power of pure yearning. Restlessness alone provides the tonic hope of the horizon, the potent promise of experiencing something new, something unexpectedly grand. To look upon the Earth, that opens before the Poet its “mystery and majesty” (Line 677), is for him to “Gaze on empty scenes as vacantly / As the ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven” (Lines 200-201). In short, yearning renders the real-time a pale and tawdry reflection of something somehow grander, greater. Alastor is a poem of a poet in his youth, confident that yearning is both heroic and futile, or more exactly heroic because it is futile.