Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
A young man who has drunk deep of the fountains of knowledge and wandered among the ruins of Athens, Tyre and Balbec dreams of a veiled maid whose voice is like his own thought, and wakes to find the waking world blank. He follows her north and west up a river in a small shallop, through caverns and a whirlpool, into a forest of pines above a windless dell. Shelley's preface presents him as a warning to anyone who keeps only his own company, and the closing lines quote Wordsworth's Excursion while arguing against it.
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Attributes
Genre
Plot structure
Hero's Journey (Campbell)
Quest object (Greimas)
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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- 41% · 9 shared