ABSTRACT

In this essay, I use the notion of fertility to examine what is left of Erasmus Darwin’s influence on Percy Shelley in his last, unfinished poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’. My aim is to shed light on Shelley’s use of pageantry in this poem in a new way, bearing in mind Darwin’s frequent use of botanical pageants in The Loves of the Plants and in The Temple of Nature, that is, poems which notoriously influenced Shelley in Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s pageant in ‘The Triumph of Life’ is the enactment of the ‘mutiny within’ (l. 213), which is opposed to the dominion of love in Prometheus Unbound and to Darwin’s idea that good outbalances evil (The Temple of Nature, IV, 135–45). While on the surface Shelley ironically reverses the positive connotations of fertility which characterize the Darwinian botanical pageant, he nonetheless preserves this fertility metaphorically, resorting to the pageant as a metaphor generative of poetic wonders which can awaken the readers from Life’s deadening ‘mist of familiarity’. I conclude by arguing that what proves most fertile in this poem is ultimately Shelley’s reworking and revitalizing of a hackneyed metaphor – that of the pageant itself.

摘要

在这篇文章中，我使用生育力的概念来研究伊拉斯谟达尔文对珀西雪莱最后一首未完成的诗“生命的胜利”的影响。我的目的是以一种新的方式阐明雪莱在这首诗中对华丽的使用，同时牢记达尔文在植物之爱和自然神殿中频繁使用植物选美，即臭名昭著的影响雪莱的诗歌麦布女王和普罗米修斯解脱。雪莱在“生命的胜利”中的盛会是“内在叛变”（l. 213）的制定，这与普罗米修斯被释放的爱的统治以及达尔文善胜恶的思想相反（自然神殿, IV, 135–45). 虽然表面上雪莱讽刺地颠倒了达尔文植物盛会所特有的生育力的积极内涵，但他仍然隐喻地保留了这种生育力，将盛会作为产生诗意奇迹的隐喻，可以将读者从生活令人窒息的“熟悉的迷雾”中唤醒. 最后，我认为这首诗中最丰富的内容最终是雪莱对陈词滥调的比喻——选美比赛本身的改造和复兴。