Nineteenth-Century Poetry continues – (21)

from a manuscript in Shelley’s hand of his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816) (included in the Scrope Davies Notebook, belatedly discovered in 1976)

Allen Ginsberg on Shelley and the English Romantics continues from here

AG (to Tom Schwartz – sic): You went over the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty?  Do we have that text here?  Do you want to check it out?

Student:  Yeah, I know it’s in here.  It’s right before this one, I think.

AG:  Yeah, it’s on page six-eighty-eight in the Norton (anthology).  It’s called “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”  And I’d like to read that aloud one more time, because we’ve got the text.  And also there’s one scary ecstatic moment in it that can be vocalized.  “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”  It’s here.  Yes, yes.  If anybody (has) The Literature of England, Volume II  –  I loaned that to someone out there.  It’s page …

Peter Orlovsky:  Two thirty-nine.  Two thirty-nine.
AG (to Tom Schwartz):  Did you go over this in very much detail?
TS:…(as part of the) visionary experience..
AG:  Yeah.
TS:  … that actually..
AG:  Yeah, if we could go over that again.  Do you mind going over that again?
TS:  No.
Student(s):  No.

AG:  I’m interested in it.  I like this poem more and more the more I read it because it’s one of the few poems by Shelley that really riches a pitch of ecstasy in the actual vocalization of it and also has a lot of ideas and there aren’t that many poems in the English language able to get that high, actually.

“The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen among us – visiting/ This various world with as inconstant wing/As summer winds that creep from flower to flower-/ Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,/ It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance;/ Like hues and harmonies of evening -/Like clouds in starlight widely spread-/ Like memory of music fled..” – (He got the music out there).

What is that?  (Allen is momentarily distracted)
(There is music coming through the classroom’s windows. The Pearl Street pedestrian mall is right outside.The music is noticeably audible through the walls)

Peter Orlovsky:  Something on the mall.
AG:  Fantastic.  It sounds like some rich chorale.  But you’ve got it right with us,  like the “memory of music fled”.

“Like aught that for its grace may be/ Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.’

That’s a nice sequence of comparisons.  “The unseen power” is some sort of intellectual beauty or some spiritual ecstasy, compared with summer winds that creep from flower to flower, moonbeams that shower behind a piny mountain.

Peter Orlovsky:  Pinny, what’s a pinny?
AG:  Pine-ee.
Peter Orlovsky:  Pine-ee.
AG:  Pine.  Pine trees.

The colored pastel lights of sunsets –  “hues and harmonies of evening.” –  Then the best of them I like, “Like clouds in starlight widely spread.” – What is that?  Is that the stars widely spread or the clouds?  I guess that’s the thin clouds.  Thin clouds spread wide in bright starlight, which is a really vivid picture.  Almost everybody’s seen that?  Is that clear?  “Like clouds in starlight widely spread-/ Like memory of music fled.”  So that’s how many?  One, two, three, four, five different examples of transitory glory’.

to be continued

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-eight-and-half minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty two minutes in

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