PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

I THE AWFUL shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,	5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,—	10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
II Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?	15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,	20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,—why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
III No voice from some sublimer world hath ever	25
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,	30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,	35
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
IV Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,	40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes—
Thou—that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!	45
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not—lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
V While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,	50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot	55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!	60
VI I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers	65
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night—
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,	70
That thou—O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
VII The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,	75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply	80
Its calm—to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

1) http://www.bartleby.com/236/71.html

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, the M.P. for New

Shoreham, was born at Field Place near Horsham, in 1792. Sir Timothy Shelley sat for a seat under the control of the Duke of Norfolk and supported his patron's policies of electoral reform and Catholic Emancipation.

Shelley was educated at Eton and Oxford University and it was assumed that when he was twenty-one he would inherit his father's seat in Parliament. As a young man he was taken to the House of Commons where he met Sir Francis Burdett, the Radical M.P. for Westminster. Shelley, who had developed a strong hatred of tyranny while at Eton, was impressed by Burdett, and in 1810 dedicated one of his first poems to him. At university Shelley began reading books by radical political writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin.

At university Shelley wrote articles defending Daniel Isaac Eaton, a bookseller charged with selling books by Tom Paine and the much persecuted Radical publisher, Richard Carlile. He also wrote The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet that attacked the idea of compulsory Christianity. Oxford University was shocked when they discovered what Shelley had written and on 25th March, 1811 he was expelled.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

Summary

The speaker says that the shadow of an invisible Power floats among human beings, occasionally visiting human hearts--manifested in summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of music, or anything that is precious for its mysterious grace. Addressing this Spirit of Beauty, the speaker asks where it has gone, and why it leaves the world so desolate when it goes--why human hearts can feel such hope and love when it is present, and such despair and hatred when it is gone. He asserts that religious and superstitious notions--"Demon, Ghost, and Heaven"--are nothing more than the attempts of mortal poets and wise men to explain and express their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which alone, the speaker says, can give "grace and truth to life's unquiet dream." Love, Hope, and Self-Esteem come and go at the whim of the Spirit, and if it would only stay in the human heart forever, instead of coming and going unpredictably, man would be "immortal and omnipotent." The Spirit inspires lovers and nourishes thought; and the speaker implores the spirit to remain even after his life has ended, fearing that without it death will be "a dark reality."

The speaker recalls that when he was a boy, he "sought for ghosts," and traveled through caves and forests looking for "the departed dead"; but only when the Spirit's shadow fell across him--as he mused "deeply on the lot / Of life" outdoors in the spring--did he experience transcendence. At that moment, he says, "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" He then vowed that he would dedicate his life to the Spirit of Beauty; now he asserts that he has kept his vow--every joy he has ever had has been linked to the hope that the "awful Loveliness" would free the world from slavery, and complete the articulation of his words.

3) http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pshelley.htm

The speaker observes that after noon the day becomes "more solemn and serene," and in autumn there is a "lustre in the sky" which cannot be found in summer. The speaker asks the Spirit, whose power descended upon his youth like that truth of nature, to supply "calm" to his "onward life"--the life of a man who worships the Spirit and every form that contains it, and who is bound by the spells of the Spirit to "fear himself, and love all humankind."

Form

Each of the seven long stanzas of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" follows the same, highly regular scheme. Each line has an iambic rhythm; the first four lines of each stanza are written in pentameter, the fifth line in hexameter, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh lines in tetrameter, and the twelfth line in pentameter. (The syllable pattern for each stanza, then, is 555564444445.) Each stanza is rhymed ABBAACCBDDEE.

4) http://www.answers.com/topic/percy-bysshe-shelley

Commentary

This lyric hymn, written in 1816, is Shelley's earliest focused attempt to incorporate the Romantic ideal of communion with nature into his own aesthetic philosophy. The "Intellectual Beauty" of the poem's title does not refer to the beauty of the mind or of the working intellect, but rather to the intellectual idea of beauty, abstracted in this poem to the "Spirit of Beauty," whose shadow comes and goes over human hearts. The poem is the poet's exploration both of the qualities of beauty (here it always resides in nature, for example), and of the qualities of the human being's response to it ("Love, Hope, and Self-esteem").

The poem's process is doubly figurative or associative, in that, once the poet abstracts the metaphor of the Spirit from the particulars of natural beauty, he then explains the workings of this Spirit by comparing it back to the very particulars of natural beauty from which it was abstracted in the first place: "Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven"; "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart..." This is an inspired technique, for it enables Shelley to illustrate the stunning experience of natural beauty time and again as the poem progresses, but to push the particulars into the background, so that the focus of the poem is always on the Spirit, the abstract intellectual ideal that the speaker claims to serve.

Of course Shelley's atheism is a famous part of his philosophical stance, so it may seem strange that he has written a hymn of any kind. He addresses that strangeness in the third stanza, when he declares that names such as "Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are merely the record of attempts by sages to explain the effect of the Spirit of Beauty--but that the effect has never been explained by any "voice from some sublimer world." The Spirit of Beauty that the poet worships is not supernatural, it is a part of the world. It is not an independent entity; it is a responsive capability within the poet's own mind.

If the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is not among Shelley's very greatest poems, it is only because its project falls short of the poet's extraordinary powers; simply drawing the abstract ideal of his own experience of beauty and declaring his fidelity to that ideal seems too simple a task for Shelley. His most important statements on natural beauty and on aesthetics will take into account a more complicated idea of his own connection to nature as an expressive artist and a poet, as we shall see in "To a Skylark" and "Ode to the West Wind." Nevertheless, the "Hymn" remains an important poem from the early period of Shelley's maturity. It shows him working to incorporate Wordsworthian ideas of nature, in some ways the most important theme of early Romanticism, into his own poetic project, and, by connecting his idea of beauty to his idea of human religion, making that theme explicitly his own.

5) http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRshelley.htm