Question

The hymn to intellectual beauty analysis

Answer 1

The poem's title, 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,' reveals Shelley's spiritual connection to beauty through nature. A hymn generally carries a religious or spiritual connotation, and Shelly's poem reads like a prayer to the 'spirit of beauty,' whom Shelley calls upon as a deity:

'Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, or music by the night-wind sent, or moonlight on a midnight stream, gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream'

Shelley speaks of seeking a connection with the spiritual realm as a child, but receiving no answer:

'While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped…I call'd on poisonous names on which our youth is fed; I was not heard' (ll. 49 and 53-54).

For Shelley, an open atheist, such silence is traditionally interpreted as silence from the Christian god.

Ultimately, he concludes that the spirit or deity he wishes to worship is more abstract than a god or gods. Rather, it's the power of the human imagination, his own and those of others. Having reflected and pleaded with the spirit, Shelley reaches this moment of realization in the final lines of the poem:

'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' (ll. 78-84).

Here Shelley realizes that connecting with intellectual beauty through his imagination comes in moments of calm and openness. This recalls his first encounter with the so-called spirit in his 'passive youth,' or the open-mindedness of the child. He concludes that to 'worship' beauty, as he puts it, is to revel in the freedom of the imagination.