et-place, foreshadowing
thereby that spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a
regenerated city from 'within a fountain in the public square'; and when
Laon and Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into
Paradise along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are
to live amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain 'leaps with an
awakening sound'; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain
unhappy lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one
another; and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and
her lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually as
metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some passing
scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from anything
but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley could hardly
have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking of Plato's cave
that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on
'the Cave of the Nymphs' in his mind. When I compare Porphyry's
description of the cave where the Phaeacian boat left Odysseus, with
Shelley's description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas, to name but one
of many, I find it hard to think otherwise. I quote Taylor's translation,
only putting Mr. Lang's prose for Taylor's bad verse. 'What does Homer
obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which he describes in the
following verses? "Now at the harbour's head is a long-leaved olive tree,
and hard by is a pleasant cave and shadowy, sacred to the nymphs, that are
called Naiads. And therein are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there
moreover do bees hive. And there are great looms of stone, whereon the
nymphs weave raiment of purple stain, a marvel to behold; and there are
waters welling ever more. Two gates there are to the cave, the one set
towards the North wind, whereby men may go down, but the portals toward
the South pertain rather to the gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the
way of the immortals."' He goes on to argue that the cave was a temple
before Homer wrote, and that 'the ancients did not establish temples
without fabulous symbols,' and then begins to interpret Homer's
description in all its detail. The ancients, he says, 'consecrated a cave
to the world' and held 'the flowing waters' and the 'obscurity of the
cavern' 'apt symbols