6 P B SHELLEY
Dr. Jaba Kusum Singh
5.0 The Upshot
5.1 Shelley at a Glance
5.2 Introduction
5.3 Biographic and Career Details
5.4 Shelley, the Poet
5.5 Shelley and His Critics
5.6 Shelley and his Poetic Technique
5.7 Some Interesting Facts
5.8 ‘Ode to the West Wind’: A Study
5.9 ‘Ode to a Skylark’: A Critique
5.10 ‘Hymn To Intellectual Beauty’: An Analysis
5.11 Important Excerpts from the Poems
5.12 Conclusion
5.0 The upshot
The present module discusses P.B. Shelley‟s „Ode to the West Wind‟, „Ode to Skylark‟ and „Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.‟ The study begins with a general introduction of romantic poetry. The contents prove Shelley‟s genius as a romantic poet. The unit includes exercises in the form of multiple choice questions and long questions to help the learner in knowing the poet and his poems. Some important quotes taken from the prescribed poems will help the scholars in understanding the very ethos of the era of romanticism. Bibliography shall act as a pinch of salt in food to enhance the knowledge of the learner about P.B. Shelley.
5.1 Shelley at a Glance
He also wrote a verse drama The Cenci (1819) and long, visionary poems like Queen Mab. The poems like Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, Prometheus Unbound, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama are some of his masterpieces. The Triumph of Life (1822) is his unfinished work.
5.2 Introduction:
P.B. Shelley, the English romantic, is a poet with a difference. Before going through Shelley and his poems, it becomes mandatory to know about Romantic Movement, which inspired the romantic poets. In NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms (1997), „Romantic Movement‟ means an association in art and literature, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which took birth in rebellion against the Neoclassicism of the last centuries. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel defined romantic literature as “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form” while Victor Hugo defined it as “liberalism in literature.” The American Scholar A. O. Lovejoy finds the word „romantic‟ contesting and thinks that it denotes so many things that, by itself, it means nothing at all. In The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, F.L. Lucas counted 11,396 definitions of „romanticism.‟
Cuddon in The Dictionary explains that the word romantic (ism) has an intricate and exciting history. In the Middle Ages ‘romance’ denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin – in contradistinction to Latin itself, which was the language of learning. Enromancier, romancar, romanz meant to compose or translate books in the vernacular. The work produced was romanz, roman, romanzo and romance. A roman or romant was an imaginative work and a „courtly romance.‟ Thus the early suggestions are that it was something fresh, diverse and at the same time opposing. Towards 17th century, in Britain and France, „romance‟ acquires the derogatory connotations of imaginary. It meant something out of the ordinary, larger-than-life, and fantastic. Cuddon further explains that in France a distinction was made between romanesque and romantique which meant „tender‟, „gentle‟, „sentimental‟ and „sad‟ whereas the former one had derogatory connotation. In Germany the word romantisch was used in the 17th century in the French sense of romanesque, and then, increasingly from the middle of the 18th century, in the English sense of gentle melancholy.
It is a common belief that the Romantic Movement really began in Britain. In the 18th century, there was a kind of shift in all art forms, in sensibility and feeling. No doubt, a new era of poetry began with the romantic poets who were quite vibrant and lively in language along with innovations in themes and ideas. Shelley in A Defence of Poetry writes that “’Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” The definition best explains the ethos of English Romantic poetry.
5.3 Biographic and Career Details:
Shelley is a romantic poet par excellence. His life and works illustrate „Romanticism‟ in extremes—extreme of ecstasy and extreme of despair. His poems like „Ode to the West Wind‟ and „The Masque of Anarchy‟ make him popular and loving. His long poems like Queen Mab and Alastor are equally significant contribution in the realm of romanticism.
A kind of restlessness is present in his poems. He rebels against authority. He becomes quite scientific in his treatment towards Nature who plays a major role in giving voice to his feelings and ideas. He becomes visionary and imagination begins to dance in the pursuit of ideal love. His untamed spirit remains in search of freedom. His poems reveal his life. No doubt, he left this world at the age of 29 but generation after generation will remember his works, which demonstrate romanticism, his rebellious spirit. His poems are his ideals, which he longed for to realize.
His upbringing inspired him to become a romantic poet. He becomes the mature poet while living in the village Broadbridge Heath, just outside of West Sussex. His father, Timothy Shelley, was a squire and Member of Parliament while his mother was Elizabeth When he was 10 years old, he left home for studying at Syon House Academy that was 50 miles north of Broadbridge and 10 miles west of Central London. After 2 years, he joined the Eton college where his classmates teased him mentally and physically so profoundly that he reacted and rebelled against them.
In the fall of 1810, Shelly entered University College, Oxford. He got an academic environment better than that of Eton. Soon the college authorities expelled him and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. They wrote a pamphlet, titled, The Necessity of Atheism, which challenged the existence of God. His parents were quite frustrated because of Shelley‟s actions. They asked him to forsake his beliefs, including vegetarianism, political radicalism and sexual freedom. He was a rebel by nature and so he left nothing. It made his parents angry. In August of 1811, he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a 16-year-old girl, whom his parents did not like. His love episodes are as interesting as his poems. His love for Harriet was a time bound affair. Later he became interested in Elizabeth Hitchener, a schoolteacher who became inspiration for his major poem, Queen Mab. On 28 July 1814, Shelley severed his ties with the pregnant Harriet and ran away to Switzerland with Mary. Mary was the daughter of his mentor Godwin.
Shelley was also associated with another romantic poet Lord Byron. Later this friendship became so mature that it influenced the output of his poetry. In a boating tour with Byron, he was inspired to compose „Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.‟ He was also in close touch with John Keats whose death in 1821 inspired him to compose Adonais. On 8 July 1822, a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia drowned him. Alas! He could not complete his 30th birthday.
5.4 Shelley: The Poet
Though Shelley shakes hands with contemporaries on the issues of themes and images, he has something special that differentiates him from other romantic poets. Symbols in his poems seem to float before the screen of the mind. He concretizes the abstract. The symbols and images reveal his visionary pursuit of the ideal. Ideals become his philosophy.
Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem is an outcome of Shelley‟s friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin. The poem reveals Godwin‟s freethinking socialist philosophy in a profound way. His stay in Italy and association with Byron proved to be fruitful as it resulted in worth reading poems, which made him a universal poet. The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) are his masterpieces. „Ode to the West Wind‟, „The Cloud‟, „To a Skylark‟, and „Ode to Liberty‟ are his supreme unmitigated lyrics. He penned his drama The Cenci that is replete with the Gothic scenario. The absence of moralistic political instruction makes the drama quite popular among the readers. He wrote A Defence of Poetry to justify poetry in his response to Peacock‟s essay, „The Four Ages of Poetry.‟ The Triumph of Life was his last long fragmented poem. Critics including T.S. Eliot who is not an admirer of Shelley consider The Triumph of Life as superior to all other writings as it shows a perfect fusion of style and vision.
5.5 Shelley and His Critic
Shelley is immensely celebrated and adequately criticized poet. During the Victorian era, the critics like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, Walter Bagehot, and Ralph Waldo Emerson belittled Shelley, whereas Samuel Clemens‟ intolerance for Shelley was a bit personal. He was never able to forgive Shelley for his treatment of Harriet.
Matthew Arnold described him as “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” On the other hand, intellectuals like Benjamin Disraeli created a Shelleyan protagonist in his novel Venetia (1837). Robert Browning in his early poem Pauline (1833) addressed Shelley as “Sun-treader.” Alfred Tennyson favoured Shelley to Byron while William Michael Rossetti edited Shelley‟s works and added a memoir.
William Butler Yeats reveals the influence of Shelley‟s visionary poetics and his symbol making in his poems. Bernard Shaw admires Shelley‟s extremism and vegetarianism. Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, George Lewes, and Thomas Hardy are some prominent authors who have been admirers of this great poet. The modern critics like T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis bitterly criticize him while the intellectuals like Newman Ivey White, Carlos Baker, Harold Bloom, Earl Wasserman, Kenneth Cameron, Donald Reiman, Stuart Curran, Timothy Webb, and many others find a source of inspiration in Shelley‟s works that offer social, political, philosophical perspectives. These intellectuals appreciate Shelley for his use of myth, language and cultural milieu.
5.6 Shelley and his Poetic Technique:
Shelley‟s use of symbols, visionary elements, and mythic sources makes his poems unique. His poems make the readers transcend into a fantastic world of emotions and imagination. For example, Shelley in the „Hymn to Intellectual Beauty‟ illustrates how his imagination and poetic feeling are shaped by nature, and more appreciably, by visitations from the shadowy power of intellectual beauty and how, in turn, he dedicates his poetic faculties to intellectual beauty.
Shelley is the finest lyricist among all the English romantic poets. „Ode to the West Wind‟ reveals Shelley‟s poetic talent at its best. He uses natural imagery and symbolism to presage not only a change in the physical but in the political climate. Writing in terza rima to suggest the vigor and velocity of the wind, he addresses the wind as a “Wild Spirit”, which is both “Destroyer and Preserver.” Abstract becomes significant in his poems, which show his zest for the beauties of the external world.
5.7 Some Interesting Facts:
Shelley attempted his hand at poetry when he was at Eton. But, the Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810) was his first publication. This novel reflects his unorthodox and aesthetic opinions.
His adventurous nature made him perform adventure after adventures. He went on may adventures with his second wife Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Besides composing long poems, he also attempted his hand in writing political pamphlets. He used to distribute the pamphlets by way of hot air balloons, glass bottles and paper boats.
The year 1812 was significant in his life as he met his icon William Godwin, the radical political philosopher and the author of Political Justice.
Now, Shelley‟s three poems, namely, „Ode to the West Wind‟, „Ode to a Skylark‟, and „Hymn to Intellectual Beauty‟ will be discussed in detail
5.8 “Ode to the West Wind’: A Study
„Ode to the West Wind‟ is an ode, written in 1819 near Florence, Italy. The publication year of the poem is 1820. There are numerous interpretations of this poem but the most obvious one is that in this poem, Shelley wants to spread his message of reform and revolution. The wind becomes the medium through which he spreads his revolutionary ideas. This poem proves very well how a poet can be a model in becoming the voice of change and revolution. It seems that when he composed this poem, he had the Peterloo massacre of August 1819 somewhere in his mind.
The poem is in terza rima. It has five sections. Each section consists of four tercets (aba, bcb, cdc, and ded) with a rhyming couplet (ee).The poem has iambic pentameter lines. The first three sections present the wind‟s effect upon earth, air, and ocean while the last two sections become a direct address of Shelley to the wind for power. He asks the wind to lift him like a leaf, a cloud, a wave and make him its companions in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world. He is sure that the youth will get inspiration from his ideas. The poet is hopeful and so ends the poem on an optimistic note: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind.”
The poem „Ode to the West Wind‟ is in two parts: the first three cantos are about the eminence of the „Wind‟ and each ends with the incantation „Oh hear!‟ while the last two cantos show an association between the „Wind‟ and the Speaker. The philosopher in Shelley visualizes wind as a destroyer, a preserver and again as a creator. It seems that his approach is near to the Indian Brahamanic philosophy that God is the creator, destroyer and preserver of this universe.
Similarly, the poem describes how the autumnal west wind sweeps along the leaves and “wingèd seeds.” The seeds remain dormant until spring. Then, the west wind sweeps along storm
clouds. It is the death song of the year. As soon as the night closes, rain, lightning and hail will welcome the year. He knows that there will be storms in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. What the poet wishes to reveal is that nature has the power—power of devastating, conserving and then re-constructing.
The poet requests the west wind to give him some of its power. He feels miserable and vulnerable. If he has some of the power of the west wind, he will be enthusiastic to pen poetry. He is sure that the readers shall read the poem. The poem shall spiritually renew the world. Winter will give way to spring. Winter symbolizes slumber and spring that of fresh beginning.
Shelley‟s description of autumn is very sinister. The wind is blowing the leaves along, but it is also performing a function. He feels that the wind is carrying seeds. The wind may seem to be an ominous thing with the dead things but there is some positivity. It is spreading the seeds, which will grow into plants in the springtime. No doubt, they seem to be corpses but they have life within. The poet states:
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth
He concludes the first stanza with the description of the wind that sweeps everything away. It gets the dead leaves off the trees. However, it is the preserver too because it helps them grow again in the springtime. When Shelley says: “O hear, O hear!” he wants to make man know the importance of nature. He ends his stanzas in a tone of suspense.
As he requests his readers to listen to him, he moves from the wind moving the leaves around to the wind moving the clouds around, which he calls „angels of rain and lightning.‟ It is a nice way to say that the harbinger of rain is far away residing somewhere in the sky, thus enriching the power of the wind. He is going from the ground to the sky. Clouds are bigger and more powerful. It creates a sense of omnipresence in nature.
He refers to the wind as the „dirge of the dying year.‟ To him the west wind is singing a funeral song that takes place at the end of the year when the year is dying. As he closes the stanza, he says that the wind moves the clouds so that “black rain, and fire, and hail will burst.” Like in the first stanza, he implores the wind to listen and re-awakens his readers, he says: “O hear!” The idea behind it is that the wind will carry his words. They are also, apparently, the “locks of the approaching storm,” and they remind the poet of the locks on the head of “some fierce Maenad.”
Shelley in this poem describes all elements of universe, first, about the leaves, which are earthy stuff, then the clouds, which are the sky stuff, and thirdly the water.
Didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
The wind moves the water, and this movement exposes old palaces and towers. The place Shelley is referring to, Baiae’s bay is actually a real place. They are ancient Roman ruins that sunk during an earthquake, although they are still partly detectable. It is a kind of a magical image. It creates the idea of Atlantis, another sunken city, which is a magical place.
Here is one more instance of beautiful image: For
whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave
themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil them: O hear!
Shelley describes the underwater life that follows the same cycle as the trees on land. It is going to die and the West Wind, again, signals the looming winter and the fear of death. In addition, again, he ends it by asking the wind to hear him; a magical symmetry is established. The effect of the west wind on the Atlantic is to cut it into gulches as with a huge-bladed weapon and to inspire fear in the seaweed growing on the bottom.
The following stanzas are simple and quite in contrast to the earlier ones. Here, Shelley talks about himself and succeeds beautifully by sheer accumulation of language. Critics are of the notion that Shelley has hypnotic power. The reader feels the breathless sweep of the violent wind. The language is quite justifiable. The rhetoric accumulates something that has the power of the wind. The sheer use of smooth, metaphorical language of the first three stanzas is inimitable. The west wind is a spiritual being, as it possesses great powers and for this reason, Shelley prays to it. He feels that he is deeply in need to plead. He falls “upon the thorns of life,” he bleeds; a “heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed” him. It was Shelley’s belief that poetry, by alluring to the mind’s eye, could rouse the reader to feat in a given direction. Shelley always fought for liberty and democracy and, thus, in his poem, the west wind is the symbol of freedom and, of course, equality that bestow upon all and one same amount of wrath and mirth as per the demand of the season.
In this poem, he wishes that if he had the power possessed by the west wind‟s mythical divinity, then freedom would prosper.
Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit
Be thou me, impetuous one!
. . . Scatter . . . my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!
The poet uses the device of myth successfully. He expresses his utmost desire of making the world aware of his thought and for this he choose the impulsive west wind who has the inborn quality and force to spread out everywhere his idealism. He knows that this world is in a slumber and so he appeals the west wind to help him to awaken the humanity.
He is able to indulge in wish thinking without seeming to and, at the same time, he can reinforce the virtue of hope in himself. The poem ends optimistically: “O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Freedom will grow, no matter what obstacles there may be, and Shelley’s words will help it grow. Shelley‟s „Ode to the West Wind‟ is the best example of Shelley’s poetic mind at work. He fills the poem with figures like similes and metaphors. His excessive fondness for metaphorical language makes him lyrical.
Thus, to conclude this poem is a finest example of Shelley‟s view about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration. They are surely the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity cast upon the present. He believes that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
5.9 ‘Ode to a Skylark’: A Critique
„Ode to a Skylark‟ is a poem, completed in late June 1820 and published accompanying Ode to the West Wind and his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound by Charles and James Collier in London. It draws its inspiration from an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley. Here he describes the appearance and song of a skylark. Mary Shelley described the event that inspired Shelley to write „To a Skylark‟:
In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn (Livorno) … It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the caroling of the skylark.
Some critics describe this poem “eccentric.” It is in five-line stanzas. All twenty-one stanzas follow the same pattern. The first four lines are in trochaic trimester while the fifth one is in iambic hexameter. The fifth line is an Alexandrine. The rhyming scheme of each stanza is ababb.
Scholars are of the view that if the West Wind is Shelley‟s first credible attempt to express an artistic philosophy through metaphors of nature, the skylark is his utmost natural metaphor for pure poetic idiom, the “harmonious madness” of pure motivation.
The central subject of concern of this song of skylark is a state of purified existence, quite nearer to Wordsworthian notion of complete unity with Heaven through nature. The skylark‟s song expresses the joy of that simple purity of being. It remains unadulterated with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is.
The skylark‟s unimpeded song rains down upon the world. Shelley uses inspiring metaphor and creates an atmosphere of make believe that the bird is not a mortal bird, but a “Spirit,” a “sprite,” a “poet hidden / In the light of thought.” Shelley‟s skylark is the twin to Keats‟s nightingale. Both the birds represent untainted expression through their songs and both of them are “…not born for death.”
However, the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible in the shadowy forest glades while the skylark is a bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright blue of the sky. The nightingale inspires Keats to feel “a drowsy numbness” of pleasure that is also like pain, and that makes him think of death while the skylark stirs Shelley with a frenetic, ecstatic joy that has no part of pain. Keats believes that human joy and sadness are inseparable while the skylark sings free of all human blunder and intricacy. While listening to the skylark‟s song, the poet feels free of those things, too.
„To a Skylark‟ is unique both structurally and linguistically. It has a strange form of stanza, with four compact lines and one very long line. The verses create “profuse strains of unpremeditated art” and it seems that the lines flow spontaneously and melodiously from the poet‟s mind.
Structurally, each stanza is apt and makes a single, quick point about the skylark. It makes the reader to look at it in a sudden, brief new light. The poem flows, and gradually advances the mini-narrative of the poet while creating an atmosphere of ecstasy and aestheticism.
It makes the reader feel oneness with the poet while reading the picturesque description of the movements of the skylark. The skylark flies higher and higher in the sky and pours heavenly music. The material world has no ear to listen to such heavenly music.
To Shelley the skylark is a “blithe Spirit” rather than a bird. It flies higher and higher, “like a cloud of fire” in the blue sky and sings as it as it flies. In the “golden lightning” of the sun, it floats and runs, like “an unbodied joy.” As it flies higher and higher, the poet loses sight of it. But he is still able to hear its “shrill delight,” which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the “white dawn.” The earth and air chime with the skylark‟s voice, just as Heaven floods with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind “a lonely cloud.”
Shelley says that the mortals are unknown to the significance of this unique heavenly creature. Even “rainbow clouds” do not rain as dazzlingly as the shower of sweet tune that pours from the skylark. The bird is “… like a poet hidden / In the light of thought.” It makes the world experience “sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
The poet makes use of various similes to describe the beauty of the song of skylark but all examples fall short to the incomparable beauty of the melodiousness of the bird‟s song. He compares it to a lonely maiden in a palace tower. This lonely maiden sings song to soothe her lovelorn soul. The skylark is like a golden glow-worm, which scatters light among the flowers and grass, the place where it hides. It is also as if a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is in the wind until the bees are faint with “too much sweet.” The skylark‟s song surpasses “…all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh” whether the rain falling on the “twinkling grass” or the flowers the rain awakens.
The poet addresses the skylark as “Sprite or Bird.” He asks it to tell him its “sweet thoughts,” for he has never heard anyone or anything call up “a flood of rapture so divine.”
Compared to the melody of the skylark, any music would seem lacking. He again questions what objects are “the fountains of thy happy strain?” Is it fields, waves, mountains, the sky, the plain, or “love of thine own kind” or “ignorance or pain”? Ache and laziness, the speaker says, “never came near” the skylark: it loves, but has never known “love‟s sad satiety.” The poet is sure that as the bird is immortal, it must know “things more true and deep” than mortals could dream. He enquires the reason behind it “…notes flow in such a crystal stream?”
The experience of sadness vaults the human experience of happiness inextricably. It depends on memories and hopes for the future. Men in this world “pine for what is not.” Their laughter is “fraught” with “some pain.” The poet uses a beautiful paradox and explains the human situation in this mortal world where “sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” He thinks that men in all ages ponder over the reason of their grief. Even then, they are never relieved from their suffering. They have no choice but to celebrate their sorrow for existence in this world is a matter of anguish. The poet says that even if men could “…scorn / Hate and pride and fear,” and were born without the ability to weep, he still does not know how they could ever come to the level of joy, expressed by the skylark.
Calling the bird a “scorner of the ground,” he says that its music is at par, it is the best among all music and all poetry. He pleads the bird to teach him “half the gladness / That thy brain must know.” Then he would overflow with “harmonious madness,” and his song would be so stunning and mesmerizing that the world would listen to him, even as he is now listening to the skylark. Shelley seems very close to Indian myth as in India too one maintains that music is heavenly as it possesses the power to transcend and transform.
5.10 „Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’: An Analysis
„Hymn to Intellectual Beauty‟ is a poem, written in 1816 and published in 1817. Shelley wrote this poem during the summer of that year while Percy and Mary Shelley stayed with Lord Byron near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
It is an 84-line ode; influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau‟s novel Julie or the New Heloise and William Wordsworth‟s „Ode: Imitations of Immortality.‟ Although the theme “glory‟s going away” which is in common with Wordsworth‟s „Ode‟, Shelley offers a contradictory view of nature.
Each of the seven long stanzas of the poem follows the same, highly regular scheme. Each line has an iambic rhythm. The first four lines of each stanza are in pentameter, the fifth line in hexameter, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh lines in tetrameter, and the twelfth line in pentameter. Each stanza is rhymed abbaaccbddee.
The central idea of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” is that there is a spiritual power, which 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.
In this poem again Shelley celebrates divine beauty or as he calls it, Intellectual Beauty. To him it remains “unknown and awful.” It is an unpredictable visitor, but he is certain that if it kept “with (its) glorious train firm state” within man‟s heart, man would be “immortal and omnipotent.” The poet believes that the shadow of an invisible power floats among human beings, occasionally visiting human heart in the form of summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of music, or anything that is precious for its mysterious grace.
Addressing this Spirit of Beauty, Shelley enquires where it has gone, and why it leaves the world so desolate when it goes. He is astonished that why human hearts can feel such hope, love when it is present, and such despair, and hatred when it is gone. He asserts that religious and superstitious notions like “Demon, Ghost, and Heaven” are nothing more than the attempts of mortal poets and wise men to explain and express their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which alone can give “grace and truth to life‟s unique dream.”
The Spirit inspires lovers and nourishes thought. The poet is of the view that the spirit shall remain even after his life has ended, fearing that without it death will be “a dark reality.” Recalling his childhood Shelley says that he “sought for ghosts,” and travelled through caves and forests looking for “the departed dead” but the Spirit‟s shadow fell across him only after he mused (here he is referring to Gothic Romances) “deeply on the lot / Of life” outdoors in the spring then did he experience transcendence. At that moment, he says, “I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!”
As an effect of this experience, he tells us in Stanza VI. He promises 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.
About the title “Intellectual Beauty”, Barrell is of the view that Shelley meant to convey the idea that his concept of beauty was intangible rather than tangible. (http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/shelley/section1.rhtml) He is romantic and emotional in his approach. His Spirit of Beauty is personal, like the God of Christianity. He speaks to it, implores it, adulates it, but he uses only the rhetorical device of personification.
The poem‟s process is doubly symbolic. Readers find that the poet abstracts the metaphor of the Spirit from the features of natural beauty. Later he expands the workings of this Spirit by comparing it back to the very characters of natural beauty from which it abstracts in the first place:
Thy light alone, like mist o‟er mountains driven;
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart…
This is a motivating technique, as it makes Shelley enlarge the spectacular experience of natural beauty repeatedly as the poem develops. This again enables him successfully to push the particulars into the background, so that the center of attention of the poem is always on the Spirit, which is the abstract intellectual ideal that he claims to serve.
Shelley is famous for atheism and thus it seems little weird that he talks of supernatural power. The Spirit of Beauty that the poet worships is magical. However, this Spirit is not out of the world rather it is a part of the world. It is a dependent entity. It is a receptive capability within the poet‟s own mind.
The idea of this poem sounds nearer to the Indian philosophy that believes in the omnipresence of the great being, in one and all beings of this universe. Human being is an ignorant lot and is unable to recognize the presence of the greatness lying deep within the mortal physique. He echoes similar ideals when he reciprocates the greatness of the Intellectual beauty saying: “Thy light…Gives grace and truth to life‟s unquiet dream.” Like Shelley great men in India have always in all ages confirmed that man is great because within him lies that illumined light that is all powerful, immortal and full of mirth.
This poem remains an important piece of art from the early period of Shelley‟s maturity. It shows his attempt to integrate Wordsworthian ideas of nature in some ways. He infuses the theme of early Romanticism and makes his own poetic development. His originality in theme lies in his successful linking of the idea of beauty to his idea of human religion.
5.11 Important Excerpts from The Poems :
From ‘Ode To The West Wind’
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed (I.1-6)
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! (V 1-6)
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (V 13-14)
From ‘Ode to the Skylark’
Teach us, Sprite of Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine (66-70)
We look before and after
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. (91-95)
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now. (106-110)
From ‘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; (1-7)
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. (37-41)
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. (69-72)
5.12 Conclusion:
Percy Byssche Shelley together with Byron and Keats symbolizes the free and soaring spirit of humankind. Even in the popular imagination, he is associated with the idea that one should not content oneself with the mundane but aspire to ever-loftier ideals of perfecting the self, and above all, with the idea of hope. The best salute to Shelley and his immortal verses are his verse only:
…by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (West Wind .v .9-12)
Shelley‟s ideas come to life in his verse, his prose, and his life. His ideas will remain a test to the mundane acceptance of power and a challenge to all to achieve the highest potential. His poetry will always inspire the reader to aspire higher goals for his „self‟ and for the society.
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Reference
- Barzun, Jacques. 1961.Classic, Romantic and Modern University of Chicago; Chicago, Phoenix Edition,1975.
- Cuddon, J.A. 1991.The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Third Ed. London: Penguin Books,
- Literature Notes – Homework Help – Study Guides – Test Prep – CliffsNotes”. Retrieved 23 September 2014
- Lucas F.L. 1963 The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal Cambridge University Press; Cambridge,1st edition.
- Morner, Kathleen and Ralph Rausch1997. NTC’s Dictionary of Literary
- Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. NY: Random House Vintage Classics, 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-47442-1
- ——-, ed. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Edward Moxon, 1839.
- Shelley. Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840).
- St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Wright, John W. Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1970.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Oncken_Lovejoy.
- http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/shelley/section6.rhtml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_the_West_Wind https://worksofenglishlit.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/4985/
- Percy Bysshe Shelley. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved 02:35, Jul 07,
- 2015,fromhttp://www.biography.com/people/percy-bysshe-shelley-9481527 www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng372/intro-h4.htm