The Triumph of Life
A sleepless watcher on an Apennine hillside sees a public way thronged with a great stream of people and, moving among them, a chariot lit by a cold blaze, its four-faced charioteer banded across the eyes, dragging captives chained behind it. A deformed shape rooted in the hillside turns out to be Rousseau, who offers to explain what life is on condition the questioner hears how he came to be in that state. Shelley was still at work on it in terza rima, after Dante and Petrarch's Trionfi, when he drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in July 1822.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Divine Comedy
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Closest analogues
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