‘And Is This Death?’: ‘Seeing’ the Unseen, and Visionary Experimentation (1816–20)

This chapter provides close readings of Laon and Cythna (1817), ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819), ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ (1820) and ‘The Witch of Atlas’ (1820) and argues for a vibrant experimentalism in Shelley’s thinking on death post-Alastor. It explores the idea of the deaths of the protagonists of Laon and Cythna as being wonderfully enabling: they inherit a permanent post-mortal paradise, the very opposite of ‘the unfruitful mansion[] of the dead’ (l. 6) of the early Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811), the like of which had, importantly, never been seen before, in such detailed dress, in Shelley’s poetry. The contrast between this vividly painted vision and the tentatively sketched ‘not-quite-ness’ of Alastor is quite remarkable, and it speaks strongly of a kind of intellectual renaissance for Shelley that also finds expression, as this chapter argues, in his other death-facing poems of the period.