Hymn To Intellectual Beauty - Analysis

Analysis

The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" was conceived and written during a boating excursion with Byron on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in June, 1816. The beauty of the lake and of the Swiss Alps is responsible for Shelley's elevating what he calls "Intellectual Beauty" to the ruling principle of the universe.

Alpine scenery was new to Shelley and unutterably beautiful. He was profoundly moved by it, and the poem, he wrote to Leigh Hunt, was "composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears." Thanks to the Alps, Shelley, who had given up Christianity, had at last found a deity which he could wholeheartedly adore. The worship of beauty is Shelley's new religion, and it is significant that he calls his poem a hymn, a term used almost exclusively for religious verse. Later, in August, 1817, Shelley read Plato's Symposium and his faith in beauty was no doubt strengthened by Plato's discussion of abstract beauty in that work and in the Phaedrus, which Shelley read in August, 1818. It was daily intercourse with stunning beauty, not Plato, however, that brought Shelley to his new faith. Joseph Barrell, in Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A Study in the History of Ideas, has shown that the "Hymn" is not Platonic.

The central idea of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is that there is a spiritual power that stands apart from both the physical world and the heart of man. This power is unknown to man and invisible, but its shadow visits "this various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower to flower" and it visits also "with inconstant glance / Each human heart and countenance." When it passes away it leaves "our state, / This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate." Shelley does not profess to know why Intellectual Beauty, which he calls "unknown and awful," is an inconstant visitor, but he is convinced that if it kept "with glorious train firm state" within man's heart, man would be "immortal and omnipotent." But since the Spirit of Beauty visits the world and man's heart with such irregularity, Shelley pleads with his deity rather than praises it. It remains remote and inaccessible. In the concluding stanza Shelley is a suppliant praying that the power of the Spirit of Beauty will continue to supply its calm "to one who worships thee, / And every form containing thee."

In Stanza V, Shelley confesses that in his youth, while he was searching for spiritual reality, chiefly by reading Gothic romances, the shadow of Intellectual Beauty suddenly fell on him. He shrieked and clasped his hands in ecstasy. As a consequence of this experience, he tells us in Stanza VI, he vowed that he would dedicate his "powers / To thee and thine," and he has kept his vow. The experience also left him with the hope that the Spirit of Beauty would free "this world from its dark slavery." In this stanza, Shelley combined two of the major interests of his life, love of beauty and love of freedom.

In regard to the "Intellectual Beauty" of the title, Barrell remarked that it implies an approach by means of the mental faculties but that Shelley meant to convey the idea that his concept of beauty was abstract rather than concrete. His approach is romantic and emotional. Shelley, however, thinks of his Spirit of Beauty as personal, like the God of Christianity. He addresses it, pleads with it, worships it, but is using only the rhetorical device of personification.