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

The elaborate typography of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" suggests that it is a contained whole, its continuity fully in Shelley's control. He never veers from the poem's stanzaic uniformity. The twelve-line stanza of the "Hymn," which appears to be original with Shelley, employs three different line lengths, a distinct pattern of indentation, and a strict abbaaccbddee rhyme scheme.(8) For Shelley, it is a beneficial support. It offers a "proportioned space" in which to write and by which to order his experience by during composition (Fowler 31). The stanza also offers a challenge by enticing Shelley to transcend its boundaries stylistically. As stanza 6 illustrates, Shelley seems to show off the very form by which he intends to contain the Spirit of Beauty:

I vowed 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 visioned bowers

Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatched with me the envious night -

They know that never joy illumed my brow

Unlinked 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. (61-72)

Shelley uses a rigid pattern of indentation to exploit the contrary pulls of formal continuity and discontinuity. The first five lines emphasize regularity and containment. Indentation corresponds to rhyme. The first, fourth, and fifth lines are left-justified and rhyme; the second and third lines are indented identically and rhyme. Only the fifth line, a hexameter, varies from the pentameter norm. As the stanza develops, the symmetry of the initial lines is compromised by a sudden elasticity in line-length and indentation. Indentation for the last seven lines corresponds to meter, with tetrameter lines indented the farthest. The sixth, seventh, ninth, and tenth lines are tetrameters and rhyme. The eighth line rhymes with the second and third, and is likewise pentameter, but a string of intervening rhyming couplets enfeebles that correspondence. Structural symmetry is compromised as the stanza develops; in the lower half of each "Hymn" stanza, Shelley's lines expand and contract like a "beating heart" (63).

Looking at the mechanisms of prosody that operate within the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," one gains a broader view of how Shelley structures the genre-linked dialectic of containment and effusion. Since the classical hymn does not have a fixed form, Shelley need not adhere to a particular meter, rhyme scheme, or stanzaic arrangement. Nevertheless, he composes the poem in a demanding metrical and structural pattern. Shelley uses rhyme, varying line-length, repetition, and assonance to emphasize the poem's structural boundaries and to suggest visual and aural integrity. These devices help establish sublexical order in the poem, including a "uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound," which, for Shelley, is indispensable to any poetry capable of "communicating its influence" ("Defence" 484). At the same time, Shelley enfigures effusion by use of enjambments and caesurae (which disrupt the poem's syntax) and by use of what John Hollander calls the "bridging, associating, linking function" of rhyme and other prosodic devices (119). Linking words, lines, and stanzas, Shelley establishes an expanding chain of figures and sounds that often seems to extend and operate outside of poetic form. Shelley is thus able to approximate the passing of the migratory Spirit of Beauty. As Harold Bloom remarks, the "Hymn" communicates "a vision whose reality is, and can only be, embodied in a chain of metaphors"; a "single metaphor could not fit the evanescent nature of the phenomenon that is the poem's theme" (37). Shelley activates lexical and sublexical figures to produce this intricate chain.