The romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, for all his earnest and ethereal musings, his Skylarks and his West Winds , is sometimes wonderfully funny. To read some of his poems, one would think he was satirizing himself and his age, only he writes—no, wafts, soars, swoops, descants—with such sensitivity and solemnity that I’m convinced of his fantastic genius and genuine fantasy.
He was practically a mystic. Take, for example, his ” Hymn to Intellectual Beauty .” Shelley sings to the “awful shadow of some unseen Power / . . . Spirit of BEAUTY, that doth consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon / Of human thought or form.” Intellectual beauty, he says, that Platonic ideal illuminating our darkened world, can redeem us. It’s a lovely thought, no doubt revealing something deep and true about divine grace and love. But Shelley has a different take transcendence:
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone—like mist oe’er the mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.Love, Hope, and Self-esteem , like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent . . .
It would be a brilliant parody of romantic religiosity— the autological virtues, these three remain —but I do believe he’s serious. Shelley is the almost-mystic, caught in the mirror of his mind.
