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

Numerous enjambments and caesurae in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" offset the primary typographical metaphor of containment and magnify the impression of effusion, not through any linking function, but by jarring the poem's syntax and opening up alternative, short-lived syntactic strains. In their very abruptness, the structural impositions of enjambment and caesurae figure the sudden disappearance of the Spirit of Beauty from the grasp of the singer. Over a third of the poem's eighty-four lines are enjambed, producing periodic disjunctions between syntax and line boundaries. In nearly half of the "Hymn," caesurae break the syntax within line boundaries. An overview of this dispersion shows Shelley moving further away from uninterrupted syntax as the "Hymn" proceeds. Whereas stanza I contains only two caesurae within line boundaries, central stanza 4 and concluding stanza 7 contain nine syntactic interruptions apiece.

From the poem's opening lines, the dialectic of containment and effusion in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is apparent, structurally and stylistically:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen amongst us, - visiting

This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that drift from flower to flower. (1-4)

This is a power that transcends the tangible landscape, making its very materiality seem false (Watson 206). The power itself is thrice removed, an invisible shadow further distanced through simile. In the above quatrain, enjambment works to extend the separation between singer and Spirit to the verge of imperceptibility. Shelley stresses the transitory by cutting off his lines at "unseen Power" (1), "visiting" (2), and "inconstant wing" (3), and then leaving these already transitory terms to dissolve quickly into the empty space beyond each line. The linking function of rhyme here destabilizes the quatrain. Although "Power" and "flower" rhyme, the intervening and feebler "visiting" / "wing" rhyme, along with the repetition of "flower" in line 4, weaken the resonance of the envelope rhyme.

In the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," Shelley establishes a sense of stability in the first stanza by means of repetition, but it is immediately compromised because the repeated words, "unseen," "inconstant," and "visit," are not associated with stability (1-3, 6). He uses the word "like" five times in the first stanza, and each time it introduces a temporal simile. Summer winds, moonbeams, shades of evening, clouds, and memories of music come and go, like the Spirit of Beauty, without regard for human desire (5, 8-11). In this series of similies, as Bloom notes, instead of creating an impression of containment, "all of the natural citation is wavering" (37). In the stanza's last line, the singer stresses and repeats how "dear" the Spirit is to him, "Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery" ("Hymn" 12). But his use of the comparative suggests that the inscrutability of the Spirit is more precious than any of its temporary avatars. In addition to suggesting the Spirit's inscrutability, the final word in stanza 1, "mystery," leaves both reader and singer uncertain of their ability to apprehend the Spirit within the poetic trappings of the "Hymn."