The third meeting of the Keats-Shelley Synchronised Reading Group

The third meeting of the Keats-Shelley Synchronised Reading Group will take place at 2pm GMT on Thursday 16th April.

Please note the slight change of time and day.

This week, we are reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ - and would love you to join us, wherever and whenever in the world you are, for say 20 minutes. Normally, we say 15 - but this is Shelley in full flow!

If work, family or time zones make this difficult - John and George would have been four hours apart - read whenever you can. Ask a loved one to join you to make it properly synchronised. The important part is the reading.

Please tells us where in the world you are reading. If you want to send us a video or recording of your reading - or your thoughts and feelings - please do so. Get in touch on Twitter or Facebook. You can email us too: ksmafriends@hotmail.com.

The idea was inspired by John Keats who in December 1818 wrote this from London to his brother George and Georgiana Keats in Kentucky: ‘I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten oClock – you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.’

We hope a few minutes of reading, alone and together, might encourage some much needed unity, if only in the imagination.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY BY PB SHELLEY
 

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

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
         With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
         Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
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,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
                        Why fear and dream and death and birth
                        Cast on the daylight of this earth
                        Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

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 utter'd charm might not avail to sever,
                        From all we hear and all we see,
                        Doubt, chance and mutability.
Thy light alone like mist o'er 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.
         Man were immortal and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
                        Thou messenger of sympathies,
                        That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
                        Like darkness to a dying flame!
                        Depart not as thy shadow came,
                        Depart not—lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
         Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
         And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
                        I was not heard; I saw them not;
                        When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
                        All vital things that wake to bring
                        News of birds and blossoming,
                        Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
   I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers
         To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
         With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers
                        Of studious zeal or love's delight
                        Outwatch'd with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illum'd my brow
                        Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free
                        This world from its dark slavery,
                        That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
         When noon is past; there is a harmony
         In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
                        Thus let thy power, which like the truth
                        Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
                        Its calm, to one who worships thee,
                        And every form containing thee,
                        Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.