The thing that I found interesting about Percy Bysshe Shelley is that he seems to use two opposing ideas to describe one common thing. For instance, in Ozymandias, he describes this great and powerful king who once ruled over all of Egypt, but now his only remains are this beaten up statue that doesn't even have a torso. In Ode to the West Wind, he also uses this idea of opposites describing the wind as a Destroyer and a Preserver.
I wanted to look more deeply at his usage of opposites in his poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, because we rarely see the beauty in intellectualism, we tend to separate the two as if they can never coincide and I like it that he identifies that these opposites can and do coexist. In the second stanza he asks the Spirit of Beauty, "Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?- Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;" (397). This quotation is Shelley's way of asking Beauty why it must leave, the sun doesn't always show beautiful rainbows, because the rainbows will always die and go away. He proceeds to discuss other opposites saying, "Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth," wondering why every goo dthing must have an opposite (397). He goes on to discuss how even the wisest sages and poets can't get rid of our human doubts of all these "bad" opposites, so we can see that these things must exist, like the wind that carries a tune or the moonlight on a stream (398).
His second to last stanza is his vow to use Intellectual Beauty in his poetry. I think what he means by Intellectual Beauty is this understanding that all things must have an opposite or some counter that allow us to know exactly what it is. There can't be good without bad or else we wouldn't know how good feels. There can't be beauty without ugly or else we wouldn't know what beauty looks like, and so on and so forth. When he calls "Loveliness" awful, and makes the statement that Intellectual Beauty will "free This world from its dark slavery," he's continuing this idea of opposites and the world is dark because it has yet to fiind his understanding of just how awful loveliness can be, simply becasue loveliness must always be coupled, to an extent, with awefulness (398).
In this way he's somewhat like William Blake, at least as far as the theme of having opposing ideas to describe one thing.
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Jalisa,
ReplyDeleteInteresting discussion of Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and an insightful connection to Blake at the end. I like the way you are working on specific passages, and speculating on the meaning of particular quotations. When he uses the term "intellectual Beauty," he means the ideal of Beauty against which we compare things to determine whether they are beautiful--in other words, when we call something beautiful, how do we know and what are we likening it to? One small suggestion: when you quote several lines of poetry, separate the lines with a slash (a /); if you quote more than four lines, reproduce the original line breaks. In this post you tend to run the lines together as if they were prose, even for a fairly lengthy passages. Keep up the good work in your subsequent posts!
Intellectual Beauty could mean how one view another beauty. It could be his/her intelligence, outer/inner appearances or personality. What I might view as Intellectual Beauty may be viewed in a different aspect in the eyes of others. I loved the way you connected the two poems together!
ReplyDeleteI never noticed Shelley's use of opposing objects before in Ozymandias. I always just read him for the story and the message at the end but didn't make that observation. It is probably there but it still escapes me. You make a really interesting point but you might just want to flesh it out more. However, I definitely see this theme in "Ode to the West Wind." Overall, really good post.
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