Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley's Poems
MEMORABLE TEXTS REVEAL SIGNIFICANT TRUTHS ABOUT OURSELVES AND OUR WORLD
Remarkable texts bring inextricably linked truths about humanity and its fundamental entities to the fore. The ontology of humans is one that manifests the desire to be motivated by the “unembodied” joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is. Neurotic, yet quintessential, poet of the late Romantic era, Percy Bysshe Shelley, explores the deeply ingrained yet paradoxical state of permanence and impermanent thought within and around humans as idealised in his poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “To a Skylark”. Both poems illustrate revelations of humanities transience in comparison to nature as well as the nexus of idealism and escapism, a thematic prose of the eccentric unworldliness of Romantic poets.
Shelley’s 1816 poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” encapsulates the disposition of a transcendental entity and its exhausting yet cardinal influence over humanities innate desire of self-actualisation. The spirit of Beauty, as Shelley exemplifies, elusively manifests human thought and form as “some unseen Power” * Awe-inspiring power of nature * Desolation and despair in a world devoid of this spirit of beauty * Makes man dwell on “scope for love and hate, despondency and hope”
Skylark * * Its message has the power to raise the political consciousness and promote the change that the poet desires * Freedom of thought/escapism but Shelley knows that freedom is not only physical and asks the Skylark to tell him its “sweet thoughts” for never has he heard anything with “a flood of rapture so divine”. The poet’s dilemma is how to transpose the idyllic tones of the Skylark’s theory into a plethora of practice. * Skylark = more optimistic = leaves reader with
Remarkable texts bring inextricably linked truths about humanity and its fundamental entities to the fore. The ontology of humans is one that manifests the desire to be motivated by the “unembodied” joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is. Neurotic, yet quintessential, poet of the late Romantic era, Percy Bysshe Shelley, explores the deeply ingrained yet paradoxical state of permanence and impermanent thought within and around humans as idealised in his poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “To a Skylark”. Both poems illustrate revelations of humanities transience in comparison to nature as well as the nexus of idealism and escapism, a thematic prose of the eccentric unworldliness of Romantic poets.
Shelley’s 1816 poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” encapsulates the disposition of a transcendental entity and its exhausting yet cardinal influence over humanities innate desire of self-actualisation. The spirit of Beauty, as Shelley exemplifies, elusively manifests human thought and form as “some unseen Power” * Awe-inspiring power of nature * Desolation and despair in a world devoid of this spirit of beauty * Makes man dwell on “scope for love and hate, despondency and hope”
Skylark * * Its message has the power to raise the political consciousness and promote the change that the poet desires * Freedom of thought/escapism but Shelley knows that freedom is not only physical and asks the Skylark to tell him its “sweet thoughts” for never has he heard anything with “a flood of rapture so divine”. The poet’s dilemma is how to transpose the idyllic tones of the Skylark’s theory into a plethora of practice. * Skylark = more optimistic = leaves reader with