The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

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! ("Hymn" 39-45)

Rather than depicting a "Satanic" impulse, the poem's central image associates the "nourishment" provided to "human thought" with "darkness to a dying flame": visitations of the Spirit of Beauty intensify the human imagination, making it appear to burn brighter. The singer has experienced such a visitation, and he proceeds from exordium to exposition with the hope for another.

Like Fry, Stuart Curran argues that "the major hymn of British Romanticism is, in fact, an ode" (63). In Curran's view, Shelley is following the same pattern of defiance in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" that he institutes in "Mont Blanc," that is, Shelley is attempting to establish a prophetic poetic voice from a myriad of dialectical pressures (62-63). The drive to extend the capacity of discernment and to figure that extension in a suitably unhindered poetic form characterizes the Romantic odist, Curran suggests, whereas the Romantic hymnist aims for complete absorption in his object of praise. The hymn "insists on the veritable existence of the being it calls upon," assumes that "the space between" singer and deity can close, and consequently sets up expectations of tidy containment and assured future grace, none of which, according to Curran, can be found in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (56-57). Curran does not conclude that the hymn is a fixed form. But he resolves that Shelley's poem is not a hymn because of the stylistic variation within its uniform stanzas. Furthermore, other dialectics in the "Hymn" collapse into union only briefly: singer and Spirit, inspiration and representation, and the temporal and the eternal. The reconciliation of these dialectics is deferred; only "unresolved tensions" endure (78). For Curran, the deferral of union in the "Hymn" figures Shelley's realization that "to be absorbed by pure beauty is to lose the capacity of discernment, to become one with the cause and unconscious of its effect" (62). Pulling back from this identification, Curran claims, Shelley takes up instead the "dialectical condition of humanity" that is played out in the Romantic ode, and therefore is "purely ironic in subverting the form he invokes" (63).

But if we see the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" as a dialogue with the classical hymn genre, our response will not be the same as if we saw it as a Christian hymn or an ode. The examples of Callimachus and Julian demonstrate that, for the most part, literal belief in the praised object passed with the Homeric Hymns. Moreover, the hymns of Callimachus, Cleanthes, and Julian are aimed at expanding both the inherited generic boundaries of hymn and the artistic and philosophical horizons of singer and listener. To be sure, Shelley's Spirit has aesthetic and philosophical aspects. But these aspects are deliberately vague and require particularly fine discernment on the part of both singer and reader, for unlike his predecessors, Shelley offers no supporting or code-breaking dogma.