In P.B. Shelley's poem "The Triumph of Life," explain the similes in lines 290-324.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Triumph of Life," there are
several similes used.

Around line 290, Shelley writes about
the Church rising "like shadows" between man and God. I take this to mean that Shelley
feels that instead of drawing mankind closer to God, the Church, specifically Pope
Gregory the Great, is acting more like an obstruction.

The
recurring theme here seems to speak to the conflicts organized religion (Christianity)
has created that separates mankind from God.

Then there is
a shift at approximately line 314: Shelley is describing the coming of spring; the
speaker notes he had fallen asleep under a mountain as the world outside comes to life.
He was in a "cavern deep," there for an immeasurable time,
and...

...from
it came a gentle rivulet / Whose water like clear air in its calm
sweep...

This simile draws
attention to the beauty of all that is natural, that surrounds him, but there is a sense
of the mystical: we find this in...

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I found myself
asleep

Under a mountain, which from unknown
time

Had yawned into a cavern high and
deep

We see it again with the
following:

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And from it came a gentle
rivulet

Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep
315

“Bent the soft grass and kept for ever wet
/

The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the
grove

With sound which all who hear must needs
forget...

The
sense of the "supernatural" (not in sense of ghosts, etc., but things beyond the
"natural world") would have been anything but unusual in the poetry of Shelley, one of
the three great second-generation Romantic poets in English
literature.

In this mystical place, Shelley describes the
water "like clear air," and sounds like an allusion to Greek Mythology and the the River
Lethe:

...it
was believed that the newly dead who drank from the River Lethe would lose all memory of
their past existence.

So that
the water in the poem, like the sweet air Shelley
describes:

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With sound which all who hear must
needs forget

“All pleasure and all pain, all
hate and love, Which they had known before that hour of rest:
320

A sleeping mother then would dream not
of

“The only child who died upon her breast At eventide, a
king would mourn no more

The crown of which his brow was
dispossest...

Shelley
describes that this water would remove all memory previous, and this included the memory
a mother would have of losing her only baby, but would also comfort the king who had
lost his crown and kingdom.