Wrought in a curious artistic congress,Shelley’s The Cloud does verily shepherd the very niche of our fancy to those inaccessible heights of the spatial sky wherefrom looking down everything looks mystic,as if nothing,less than nothing.True, Shelley is that romantic rebel who wants his readers,too,to transfigure themselves into Shelleys beyond count.And once that be,they would know how multi-faced is the Nature that rings them in variegated looks and colours,shapes and contours.
Next,Shelley’s cloud is as capricious as Shelley himself,too quick-paced for the eye to trek,too subtle- masked for the mind to ponder on.Sometimes it melts our hearts in pity for the underdogs of our society,sometimes it is just there to tickle our native wantonness,sometimes the cloud wants us to applaud its exploits over the mighty and the proud characters of Nature,while,at other times,it simply outwits us by its seeming swoon and re-awakening.So much speed is poured into the poem that no sooner have we concentrated on one one spectacle than another is pushed forward into our eye’s purvey.Added to this,is the poem’s dimension of sound,a fantastic symphony of the humble and the haughty,the flute and the bugle.
The cloud,in a typically maternal surge of love and affectionate concern,slakes the sun- parched leaves with dewy drinks borne from the seas and the streams.But, the very next moment,it assigns itself to the whimsy task of snow-painting the green carpet of Nature,which,then automically matures itself for a cleansed rain-wash.To every surprised eye the cloud’s annihilation is then marked in ear-deafening, groaning bursts of thunders.
All under the shroud of nocturnal blanket the cloud,next, crowns the mountain-tops with snows to the utter fright of the tall pines on guard-duty there.But it is there,again, it seeks its repose for the night with its snorings recorded in the sweep of the blasts.High atop the zenith of the sky,which is then its temporal refuge,the cloud chops and slices the sky with the perennial aid of its deputy,the ligtning in whose trail comes the blustering thunder,as if a Prometheus tearing the frail fetters of a slave-monger.The lightning torches the cloud’s penetrating probe of the seas and the streams,the rocks and the hills,the lakes and the plains.But even when immersed in reveries and dreams,be they in the height of the hills or the depths of the rivulets,the cloud maintains its original identity, though expressed sometimes in the smile of the blue ,sometimes in the tears of a downpour.
The cloud volunteers to be the eye-glaring sun’s courier in the latter’s aerial travel when the morning star heralds the advent of a fresh day in its dimmed brilliance.The latter looks as if a brown eagle perched on a rugged rock that has felt often the jerk and tremor of quakes.But when the glow of sundown makes room for the evening to unfurl its lightless spread over the earth,the cloud hangs itself in a state of mental abstraction,as if it were resembling that of a dove.
Meanwhile,the moon steeps the cloud with its silver and beckons the midnight breezes to blow across and lull the cloud,while the little angels of the heaven dance about it in the twinkling lightof the stars.The cloud enjoys the night’s feast of the eye in joyous wonder from its windy bivouac,as also the far-off view of the water-bodies of the earth striped in the chiaroscuro of a moon-beaming and star-peeping night.
The cloud girdles the sun with gold and the moon with silver.Adown,the gaping volcanoes look misty,while,above,the stars seem to reelingly keep themselves afloat on an air- foam suspension.It is then the cloud flutters its unconquerable flag of whirlwinds to telecast its undaunted supremacy over the seas and the capes and marches with its garrison of hurricanes and fires.At its feet,then,falls in suppliant knee the myriad-coloured rainbow overhead which the flaming sphere tranquilizes its grandiosity,while below,the Mother Earth unmasks herself in a beaming smile.
The cloud claims to receive its birth from the conjugality of the earth and the sea though in its upkeep the sky’s contribution appears simply unputdownable.It fathoms through the core of the ocean and the shore,both, to fatten and enlarge itself ultimately into that rain-bearing form which,when crushed,causes a watershed over the whole earth.Thereafter,when all prepare to heave a sigh of relief at the annihilation of the cloud and mentally prepare themselves to paint the sky in innocent blue,the cloud effects a dramatic resurrection in its usual diction of thunder and lightning and rains.The cloud defies death:it has been there in the uncalendered past,it is now at this moment and shall it be there in all to-morrows to issue forth out of the womb of Time.
- March 30, 2010 11:18 am
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