agle standing for the powerful oppressor, and the snake
for the oppressed.

"When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble
The Snake and Eagle meet--the world's foundations tremble."

This piece of symbolism became a sort of fixed language with him; "the
Snake" was a name by which it amused him to be known among his friends.
The clash of the two opposites is crudely and narrowly conceived, with
no suggestion yet of some more tremendous force behind both, such as
later on was to give depth to his view of the world conflict. The loves
and the virtues of Laon and Cythna, the gifted beings who overthrow the
tyrant and perish tragically in a counter-revolution, are too bright
against a background that is too black; but even so they were a good
opportunity for displaying the various phases through which humanitarian
passion may run--the first whispers of hope, the devotion of the
pioneer, the joy of freedom and love, in triumph exultation tempered by
clemency, in defeat despair ennobled by firmness. And although in this
extraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found himself, the
technical power displayed is great. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas,
and he manages the long breaking wave of that measure with sureness and
ease, imparting to it a rapidity of onset that is all his own. But there
are small blemishes such as, even when allowance is made for haste of
composition (it was written in a single summer), a naturally delicate
ear would never have passed; he apologises in the preface for one
alexandrine (the long last line which should exceed the rest by a foot)
left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there are some eight
places where obviously redundant syllables have crept in. A more serious
defect is the persistence, still unassimilated, of the element of the
romantic-horrible. When Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnaws
corpses, we feel that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightly
ridiculous, magnificent though his writing has become. It is hard,
again, not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of young
eleutherarchs have only to sound for the crouching slave to recover his
manhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn pale. The poet knows, as he
wrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission is "to apprehend minute
and remote distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions
which result from considering either the moral or the material universe
as a whole."