Shelly’s Imagery or Pictorial Quality
Shelly’s Imagery or Pictorial Quality: Shelley’s imagery is kaleidoscopic, i.e. he does not give one or two pictures at a time, but a whole series of them. In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty for instance, we have the pictures of summer winds creeping from flower to flower, moonbeams falling behind some piny mountain, hues and harmonies of evening, clouds in starlight widely spread, all these one after the other. No sooner do we visualize one image than another is presented to us. Again, as has been suggested above, many of his pictures are vague and abstract, not concrete. The dead leaves being driven away by the west wind are “like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.” Further, he prefers to depict the shifting and changeful phenomena of Nature like clouds, sunsets, sky, winds etc.