As If That Look Must Be the Last
The final chapter reads the third-to-last line of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, “as if that look must be the last,” as an aside that asks what occurs after that last look. In a post-Waterloo poem that imagines a hallucinatory end-of-the-world scenario amidst several last things, including a kiss, Shelley explores the adjacencies opened up by his unfinished late piece. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, an illustration from that book by Nicolas Monsiau, and a photograph by Peter Hujar, Shelley’s poetic experiment is characterized as tacitly queer insofar as it refuses to endorse a normative politics of life, and imagines bodies and pleasures as scintillatingly regressive, inoperative, and disappearing.