‘That Path Where Flowers Never Grew’: Pageantry as Fertility Going Awry in ‘The Triumph of Life’

ABSTRACT In this essay, I use the notion of fertility to examine what is left of Erasmus Darwin’s influence on Percy Shelley in his last, unfinished poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’. My aim is to shed light on Shelley’s use of pageantry in this poem in a new way, bearing in mind Darwin’s frequent use of botanical pageants in The Loves of the Plants and in The Temple of Nature, that is, poems which notoriously influenced Shelley in Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s pageant in ‘The Triumph of Life’ is the enactment of the ‘mutiny within’ (l. 213), which is opposed to the dominion of love in Prometheus Unbound and to Darwin’s idea that good outbalances evil (The Temple of Nature, IV, 135–45). While on the surface Shelley ironically reverses the positive connotations of fertility which characterize the Darwinian botanical pageant, he nonetheless preserves this fertility metaphorically, resorting to the pageant as a metaphor generative of poetic wonders which can awaken the readers from Life’s deadening ‘mist of familiarity’. I conclude by arguing that what proves most fertile in this poem is ultimately Shelley’s reworking and revitalizing of a hackneyed metaphor – that of the pageant itself.