“And he bought / With his voice and his soft eyes, Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay from wild men, / His rest and his food." - Alastor by Percy ShelleyIn Shelley's Alastor, the Poet is initially presented as a "first youth" who relies on his "sweet" words to obtain his nourishment. In an attempt to satisfy his appetite for the “deep mysteries” of Nature, the Poet travels across a vast desert and enthusiastically indulges in the many beautiful scenes that Nature has to offer “bloodless food,” revealing a vegetarian diet that enhances his harmonious relationship with Nature (129). Guided by a healthy appetite for Nature's innermost secrets, the Poet manages to nourish himself adequately normal time, he is permanently upset after a fascinating dream awakens in him an insatiable hunger for the impossible, a supernatural ideal. This dangerous corruption of hunger is what makes aesthetic abilities useless of the Poet and causes his passive and final surrender as an artist. In Alastor, the Poet's hunger works deceptively to drain his energy, manipulating his lifelong journey into a desperate pursuit of intellectual pursuit. beauty until the final surrender to death. The first misdeeds of the Poet's hunger are seen immediately after perceiving the visionary girl: after her fleeting but euphoric contact with the supernatural, the Poet is unable to find an adequate substitute to match the joy experienced in the dream world. In the desire for "sweet human love", the Poet eagerly contemplates suicide to achieve union with this ideal: "Does the dark door of death lead to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep?" (211-213). After a few more passages detailing his grim existence, the Poet flirts with death a second time, crying, “Vision and Love! I saw the path of your departure. Sleep and death will not long divide us!” (366-368). The constant state of misery experienced due to an endless dissatisfaction with the material world accelerates the Poet's acceptance of death as a favorable consequence: this reveals hunger as a drive that has become seriously unbalanced in the Poet. Hunger, in the biological sense, is a fundamental survival mechanism. In this regard, hunger is an exciting force: it signals the body to seek the source of nutrition essential for the organism's survival. Yet the Poet's natural sense of hunger changes for the worse: the Poet's hunger becomes enormously defective, leading him not to a period of satiety-inducing eating, but rather to an endless cycle of dissatisfaction. This hunger, now dysfunctional, does not serve him as advantageously as it should. Instead of acting as an awakening force for survival, hunger in Alastor's Poet acts as a malignant and degenerative force: his hungry gaze causes him to see death as a viable solution for: “He searched in Nature's dearest place, for some shore , his cradle, and his tomb." (429-430). Hunger has turned into a truly insidious force. The result of his insatiable appetite for “sweet human love” is that the Poet becomes dissatisfied with his once cherished images of Nature; hunger squanders his potential as an artist, once again acting to the detriment of the Poet. Willing to abandon everything in his unrealistic search for ideal beauty, the Poet is in effect sacrificing his lifeblood: the ability to perceive and appreciate the aesthetics of Nature. After witnessing the flight of a swan, the poet reflects: "And what am Ito linger here, / With a voice far sweeter than your dying notes, / Spirit wider than yours, structure more attuned / With beauty, wasting these extraordinary powers / In the deaf air, to the blind earth and sky / That Doesn't it echo my thoughts?” (286-290). The Poet laments his existence in the earthly realm, which reflects the irresistible visions of his dreams. Doomed to a lifelong dissatisfaction with the physical beauty presented to him, the poet cannot help but feel dysfunctional as an artist. While Shelley once describes early in the poem how Nature's “fountains of divine philosophy fled not from her thirsty lips,” the Poet, after the significant reversal of hunger, does not appear to be satisfied by the same source of sustenance (71). While once “every sight and sound from the wide earth and surrounding air sent to his heart its choicest impulses,” now nothing in the natural world can suffice (68-70). When he comes across a flowerbed, he has a sudden compulsion to “decorate his withered hair with their brilliant colors” (413-414). But once again, under the intense scrutiny of a newfound appetite, "loneliness returned to his heart, and he endured," what was once satisfying is now unworthy, and he resists the aesthetic value of the "yellow flowers" ( 414). -415). How can the artist (who once delighted so much in Nature) succeed in rejecting the sunny richness embodied in Shelley's yellow flowers? The youthful, vibrant energy of yellow flowers provides a striking counterpoint to the withered state of the Poet: the color is one of joy, stimulating the creative energies in an individual. All rationality and artistic drive are lost when possessed by an unbalanced hunger. The fact that the Poet is able to desist and “abstain” from the simple beauty that is placed before him speaks to the iron grip that hunger has on his desires (414). All previous joyful experiences fail: the Poet's natural taste for aesthetic cues, once touched by dreams, becomes irremediably unbalanced. Instead of pushing the Poet to assimilate the bounty of beautiful images found in his natural environment, the hunger for a beauty that matches the ethereal forms of his dreams forces him to reject the more familiar beauties placed before him. Without his art to pursue and derive joy from, the Poet no longer finds his sustainable diet. With his life's primary source of aesthetic joy ruined, the Poet sinks further into the loneliness that allows hunger to effectively divert his being into passivity and cause him to relinquish control. throughout his life. Recognizing death as the only solution to his ardent desire for beauty, the Poet could easily have put an end to his aimless and miserable wanderings. But the Poet, “obedient to the light that shone in his soul,” is convinced, or rather deceived, by his malevolent hunger to continue his fatal quest until he is sufficiently weakened (493-494). Just as a parasite must keep its host alive to sustain itself, the Poet's hunger cannot kill it immediately. Hunger nourishes the Poet, “like restless serpents, clothed / In rainbow and fire, these parasites” (438-439). The Poet is attracted by the light; here, hunger deceptively masquerades as a positive, shining “light” in his soul, when it is anything but. “In the night came the passion,” and the hunger is also described as “Like the fierce demon of a troubled dream, that shook him from his rest and led him on / Into the darkness,” giving an almost satanic quality to the force. of the hunger present in the Poet (224-227). Furthermore, the specific choice of the word "guided" emphasizes that this path into darkness (a metaphor foreshadowing death) is not a choice/30210143>