Shelley's fragment is a single idea said three times, each time in a bigger voice: what we look at long enough, we turn into. A violet gazes at the sky "until its hue grows like what it beholds." A gray mist over a mountain becomes "solid amethyst" in the sunset. A wind wrapped in a melody is turned into music. The last comparison lets go of landscape altogether and names the lesson: anything "dark, vain, and dull," if it basks "in what is beautiful," becomes "full of light and love." The title places the lines as a variation on a song of the Moon in *Prometheus Unbound*, Act 4. What survives here, though, works almost as a complete argument on its own.
The structure is the most interesting thing about it. Every comparison opens with "As," so the reader is held in suspense. A sentence that begins "As..." promises a "so" that explains what all the comparisons are for. That "so" never arrives. The poem ends on a dash after "love," and the final image does the work of the missing conclusion. Whether this is deliberate or simply how the lines come down to us, the effect is the same. The pattern of illustration is left open, as though the transformation it describes could keep going.
The sound of the poem helps carry that open feeling. The short lines, such as "Gazes on the azure sky," fall into a lilting, song-like rhythm, with a stress on the first syllable and a firm landing on the last. Then Shelley stretches the line. "Until its hue grows like what it beholds" and "Over the western mountain it enfolds" run to ten syllables, and the rhyme of "beholds" with "enfolds" closes the first image with a sense of being wrapped up. The two tiny lines that follow, "When the sunset sleeps / Upon its snow," are like a held breath. Their soft *s* sounds slow the poem to the hush of dusk, and "snow" rhymes with nothing around it, so it lingers. Near the end, "too" and "love" have no rhyming partners either. The rhyme scheme leaves the poem unfinished at exactly the points where it reaches for its biggest ideas.
The imagery moves from the visible to the audible to the moral. The violet is a flower and a colour at once, so when its "gentle eye" gazes at the "azure sky," the change it undergoes is already half-written into its name. The mist is described as "gray and empty," yet it "lies like solid amethyst." Shelley turns vapour into a jewel, so emptiness becomes weight and colour. The sunset that "sleeps" on the snow personifies light as something peaceful and unhurried. Then the senses cross over. A "strain of sweetest sound" wraps "itself the wind around," and the inverted word order makes the sentence wrap around its own object. The wind is "voiceless," and it ends up "music too." We have moved from colour to sound, which suggests that this kind of change is not limited to one sense or one kind of thing.
A few small words carry the philosophy. "Until" appears twice, and it makes transformation a gradual process, not a sudden event. Nothing in these lines is forced to change. The violet only "gazes," and the final subject is "basking," a lazy, sun-soaked word that suggests the change comes by being near beauty and has nothing to do with effort. Even the words used for the unlovely subject, "dark, vain, and dull," are the plainest in the poem, which makes the shift to "light and love" more striking. "Aught," meaning "anything," widens the claim as far as it can go. The idea is that any dull or self-absorbed thing can be changed by what it admires.
That generous, optimistic view is what makes the fragment worth reading. It treats beauty as an active force that changes whoever attends to it, rather than as decoration or something to be merely admired. Its argument also comes through image and music instead of statement. By the time the poem names its moral, we have already watched a flower, a mist and the wind show it to us. Because it breaks off on a dash, the poem leaves us in the middle of the very process it describes.