Intellectual Beauty

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Lets find out if youre on the right track * * * Home SparkNotes Poetry Study Guides Shelleys Poetry sing to Intellectual Beauty contents * Context * Analysis * Themes, Motifs & Symbols * Summary and Analysis * sing to Intellectual Beauty * Ozymandias * England in 1819 * Ode to the West Wind * The Indian serenade * To a frolic * Study Questions * Further Reading * How to Cite This SparkNote sparknotes Shelleys Poetry Percy Bysshe Shelley Get this SparkNote to go lt Previous subsection Themes, Motifs & Symbols Next Section Ozymandias - Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Summary The verbaliser says that the shadow of an invisible Pow er floats among human beings, occasionally visiting human heartsmanifested in summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of music, or anything that is precious for its mysterious grace. Addressing this olfactory property of Beauty, the speaker asks where it has gone, and why it leaves the world so desolate when it goeswhy human hearts stack feel such hope and love when it is present, and such despair and hatred when it is gone.He asserts that religious and superstitious notionsDemon, Ghost, and Heavenare nothing more than the attempts of soulfulness poets and wise men to pardon and express their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which alone, the speaker says, can give grace and truth to lifes unquiet dream. Love, Hope, and Self-Esteem sum 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 implore s the spirit to remain even after his life has ended, tutelageing 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 only if only when the Spirits shadow fell across himas he mused deeply on the lot / Of life outdoors in the springdid 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 vowevery rejoice 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. 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 ilk that truth of nature, to supply cal m to his onward lifethe 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 circle the firstborn 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 physique for each stanza, then, is 555564444445. ) Each stanza is rhymed ABBAACCBDDEE. Commentary This lyric hymn, written in 1816, is Shelleys earliest focused attempt to incorporate the Romantic sample of conference with nature into his own aesthetic philosophy. The Intellectual Beauty of the poems title does not refer to the dish aerial of the mind or of the working intellect, but rather to the intellectual idea of bang, abstracted in th is poem to the Spirit of Beauty, whose shadow comes and goes over human hearts.The poem is the poets exploration both of the qualities of beauty (here it always resides in nature, for example), and of the qualities of the human beings response to it (Love, Hope, and Self-esteem). The poems process is doubly figurative or associative, in that, in one case 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 atural beauty from which it was abstracted in the first place Thy light alone, like mist oer 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 Shelleys 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 Beautybut 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 poets own mind.If the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is not among Shelleys very superior poems, it is only because its project falls short of the poets 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 closely important statements on natural beauty and on aesthetics will brin g 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 Shelleys 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. Previous Section Themes, Motifs & Symbols Next Section Ozymandias Become a fan on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Help Feedback More HelpAsk Miss Marm Help with grammar, writing, and your papers Shelleys Poetry Message Board Ask a question or post an answer. 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