Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy  Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

I have lately been reading a good deal of English poetry, and have found myself experiencing a kind of yearning for the profound grasp of beauty and insight that the poetic masters were able to attain. In the following poem, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes the sentiments of a soul seeking after the Spirit of Beauty but encountering difficulties in the pursuit. Beauty - of a spiritual sort and not merely sensible - is wont to pass to and fro before human vision, sometimes present and sometimes gone; and when gone, its absence fills life with a kind of gloominess. And yet the poet ever remains faithful to his pursuit and worship of Beauty, and entreats her to bestow upon him the joys which he cannot express in words.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY

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;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

                Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

                Like memory of music fled,

                Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

         With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

         Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

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,

                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?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

         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 utter'd charm might not avail to sever,

                From all we hear and all we see,

                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,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

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.

                Thou messenger of sympathies,

                That wax and wane in lovers' 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.

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.

I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

                I was not heard; I saw them not;

                When musing deeply on the lot

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 shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd 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 vision'd bowers

                Of studious zeal or love's delight

                Outwatch'd with me the envious night:

They know that never joy illum'd my brow

                Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free

                This world from its dark slavery,

                That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene

         When noon is past; there is a harmony

         In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

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

                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.