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Answering the Question: ‘What is Life?’

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Authors

Nabugodi, Mathelinda 

Abstract

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s final poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’—cut short by Shelley’s death by drowning on the 8th of July 1822—offers a series of dream visions in which life’s triumphal procession appears. Early on in the first vision, the poem’s narrator encounters the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who will come to serve as the narrator’s commentator and guide as they witness the progress of life’s chariot. The great and the many of European history are chained to this chariot, and thereby revealed as the captive victims of life. Yet neither Rousseau nor the narrator can fully comprehend what it is that they are witnessing. This confusion is arguably a consequence of the poem’s subject matter. ‘How can we have a “Triumph”, in the manner of Petrarch’s great series of poems, not of the usual subjects of love, fame or death, but a “Triumph” of life, the very element in which we move and have our being?’ Paul Hamilton asks, pointing to the impossible pretension at the heart of the poem—how could anyone living claim a comprehensive perspective on life. Accordingly, even though the poem’s title promises the triumph of life, the poem’s narrative is continually punctured by the question ‘What is Life?’—as if the poem does not know what it is trying to represent. The question appears in various formulations throughout the poem: it is first posed by the poem’s narrator when he sees the triumphal procession, and he later asks the same question of Rousseau, who in turn repeats it in his own dream vision of life’s triumph.

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Antae

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Journal ISSN

2523-2126

Volume Title

3

Publisher

University of Malta

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Publisher's own licence