‘Who Lifteth the Veil of What Is to Come?’: Alastor (1816)

This chapter, focusing on the Alastor volume (1816), argues that in the space of three years (post-Queen Mab), Shelley’s thinking on death had undergone a fundamental shift. This chapter also argues that the Alastor volume is a work primarily characterised by its distinct scepticism, particularly towards death. Whereas, as the previous chapter demonstrated, in 1813, Shelley was assuredly espousing a mixture of Platonic dualism and French-Materialism-inflected Lucretian atomism, and by 1816, he is writing, with palpable reservation, of ‘this unfathomable world’ (‘Alastor’, l. 18, my emphasis). This chapter, in arguing that Shelley came to his fullest realisation of the enigmatic, nebulous and opaque qualities of death in his Alastor volume, also presents close readings of ‘The pale, the cold, and the moony smile’ and ‘A Summer-Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’.