The Triumph of Life

Another literary device in The Triumph of Life is allegory. An allegory is a symbolic representation, often of a virtue or vice. Shelley’s “caves” (Line 272) allude to the Cave of Mammon in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Spenser’s long poem from the English Renaissance is famous for its allegories. Spenser’s characters represent virtues such as holiness, temperance, and chastity. Shelley, from the English Romantic era, is interested in the process of creating allegories and subverts the traditional use of them to tell a simple moral lesson. Shelley scholar Eric Schulze argues that the poet not only traces the formation of the allegory of life, but also “mounts an allegory against allegory in an attempt to reclaim whatever authority he can for the visionary imagination” (Schulze, Eric. “Allegory Against Allegory: ‘The Triumph of Life.’” JSTOR, 1988). Shelley prefers the visionary over the allegorical.

Shelley uses a large number of similes, or direct comparisons, in The Triumph of Life. For instance, the movement of the crowd circling around the chariot of life is compared to the clouds around the moon: “[O]thers made / Circles around it like the clouds that swim / Round the high moon in a bright sea of air” (Lines 453-55). The movements of the dancers are also described with a moth simile. The young dancers “glow / Like moths by light attracted and repelled, / Oft to new bright destruction come and go” (Lines 152-54). These kinds of direct comparisons help the reader see the wild dance of the processional. Similes not only help convey physical action, they also help describe psychological actions. When Rousseau drinks from the crystal glass that contains a drug of forgetting, he says his “brain became as sand” (Lines 405). This simile continues with the sand erasing the tracks of some animals in the desert. This develops the imagery of an internal state of forgetfulness. These are just a few examples—Shelley uses many similes throughout the poem. Similes and other comparisons are a way to describe actions and thoughts that are difficult to represent in another way.