They are also symptoms, marks of social weakness and woe which Shelley is anxious to erase, representing the alienating power which seems in Shelley to emanate both from the despot and from despotic capital. They are the fluids of the body and of the body politic, and they symbolise the corrosive fluid of language. They are part of the world of poison, and of language as poison, the gush from a traumatic wound in the symbolic order which Shelley desperately wants to suture with the counter-language of Ecotopia. Like the blood of the Alien in Ridley Scott's film, they appear to be more real than reality, corroding the tissue of signs which decorously protect the phallus of patriarchal power. Blood and Gold, and meat, are those marks which establish the social symbolic order as such, as an order of signification.
Meat is unnecessary and what is more it has to be cooked, and what is more, it has to be spiced.
The efflorescence of supplements of supplements is more than he can stomach. In 1812, the biographical analogue for this form of what Lacan would have called 'extimacy' would have been Shelley's panic about elephantiasis. He recoils against the notion of language as transubstantiation, in other words, as metaphor, as meat, as re-mark, or what William Keach skillfully calls 'incarnation'. So what he says about the vital metaphoricity of poetic language in A Defence of Poetry is as Hogle has shown more to do with transferential agility. This kind of redeemed metaphor does not punctuate the skin of fantasy, but gently glides along it, embodying it with the metonymic richness of an environment that is, in the ecological words of Queen Mab viii, 'habitable'.