by the reply. Such dissatisfaction can come primarily from the reader, who may not share the poet's orthodoxy and is therefore harder to convince, or from the text itself, which may offer a more disturbing version of the protest than the poet had intended.
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So this poem too can be read as a duck-rabbit. It is completely orthodox, but, if we read it while blinking at certain elements of familiarity, we can see it as subversive, leaving us with a malicious and tricky God, and silencing protest. The parallel with Abraham will, to the orthodox reader, remove all doubts; but to the skeptical or still grieving reader, it may suggest that the story of Abraham is yet another example of God's trickery.
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 | | William Shelley
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| | My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art notif a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine
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| | Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion.
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"Where art thou?" Shelley here addresses the question to which the Hemans and the Sigourney poems answer, "He is an angel." Angels are important in this connexion and will be discussed at length in the next chapter. For the moment, I remark that this child, who when alive was a bright spirit in a decaying robe, can be seen in either Christian or Platonist
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