Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude

Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from 10 September to 14 December in 1815 in Bishopsgate, near Windsor Great Park and first published in 1816.

Ruminating on thoughts of death as the possible next step beyond dream to the supernatural world he tasted, the Poet notices a small boat ("little shallop") floating down a nearby river.

The boat flows onward to an "immeasurable void" and the Poet finds himself ready to sink into the supernatural world and break through the threshold into death.

Shelley also quotes from William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814) the lines, "The good die first,/ And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust / Burn to the socket!"

One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

John Gibson Lockhart of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine wrote the first major positive review in the November 1819 issue.

We should be utterly at a loss to convey any distinct idea of the plan or purpose of the poem.In The British Critic for May 1816, the reviewer dismissed the work as "the madness of a poetic mind."

Mary Shelley noted that the work "was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and softened by the recent anticipation of death."

Similarities in imagery to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan have been noted but Shelley is unlikely to have read that poem, still unpublished at the time of Alastor's composition.

In 1912, Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky wrote his symphonic poem Alastor, Poème d'après Shelley (Op.