Hymn To Intellectual Beauty - Poem

Poem

"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is an 84-line ode that was influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel of sensibility Julie, or the New Heloise and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality". Although the theme of the ode, glory's departure, is shared with Wordsworth's ode, Shelley holds a differing view of nature:

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,

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance; (Lines 1–8)

The second stanza begins with the narrator addressing Intellectual Beauty:

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought or form, - where are thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? (Lines 13–17)

But he is not answered, as he reveals in stanza three:

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given -

Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour, (Lines 25–28)

The fourth stanza reveals three values:

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,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. (Lines 36–41)

Shelley replaces the third of the Christian values, faith, with self-esteem, which signifies respect for the human imagination. According to the narrator, we have only temporary access to these values and can only attain them through Intellectual Beauty:

Thou messenger of sympathies,

That wax and wane in lovers's eyes-

Thou - that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came,

Depart not - lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality. (Lines 42–48)

In stanza five, he reveals:

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. (Lines 49–52)

The words he speaks, possibly referring to Christian doctrines, brought him no response. It was not until he mused on life that he was able to experience a sort of religious awakening and learn of Intellectual Beauty:

Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstacy! (Lines 59–60)

Once he learns of Intellectual Beauty, he makes a vow, which begins stanza six:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine - have I not kept the vow?

Stanza seven continues with the vow:

Thus let thy power, which like the truth

Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

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. (Lines 78–84)

The narrator breaks from the Wordsworthian tradition by realizing that Intellectual Beauty, and not manifestations of it in nature, is what should be worshipped. The imagination, and not nature, is connected to truth, and the narrator realizes that he should revere his own imagination and the imagination of others.