' On the other hand, 'the many'
are the individuated minds which we call 'human beings': they 'change
and pass'--the body perishing, the mind which informed it being (in
whatever sense) reabsorbed into 'the Eternal.'
1. 2. _Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly._ This is in
strictness a physical descriptive image: in application, it means the
same as the preceding line.
11. 3-5. _Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white
radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments._ Perhaps a
more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any
poet, nor one that has a deeper or a more spacious meaning. Eternity is
figured as white light--light in its quintessence. Life, mundane life,
is as a dome of glass, which becomes many-coloured by its prismatic
diffraction of the white light: its various prisms reflect eternity at
different angles. Death ultimately tramples the glass dome into
fragments; each individual life is shattered, and the whole integer of
life, constituted of the many individual lives, is shattered. If
everything else written by Shelley were to perish, and only this
consummate image to remain--so vast in purport, so terse in form--he
would still rank as a poet of lofty imagination.
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