Shelley's poem is an English version of an ancient Greek hymn to the goddess of wisdom and war. The title calls her Minerva, the Roman name, while the verse prefers "Athenian Pallas" and mixes in the Roman "Jove" for Zeus. The title also credits Homer, in keeping with the tradition of attributing hymns like this to him. The subject is her birth, fully grown and armed, from the head of her father. The central idea is that her power is vast but not wild. It sets the universe trembling, and then it settles into order and her father's approval.
The poem's shape follows that idea. It opens with an invocation: "I sing the glorious Power with azure eyes." Then comes a string of epithets, "tameless, chaste, and wise," "town-preserving Maid," as if the singer were gathering her titles before telling the story. From "Whom Jove brought forth" onward, one long, breathless sentence carries the birth and its effects. The gods stare in "wonder strange," the goddess shakes her javelin, and the shock spreads outward in widening circles: Heaven moves, Earth "dreadfully resounded," the sea swells. Then the pace changes. The tide "Stood still," and the sun god's son, Hyperion's son, holds back his "swift steeds" for "long time." The whole cosmos pauses and waits until Pallas, "where she stood sublime," lays down "the arms divine." That gesture is the turning point. A war goddess who can take off her armour is more impressive than one who only crashes about in it, and "wise Jove rejoiced to view" tells us the display was never a rebellion.
The imagery is built from colour and motion. Athena's eyes are "azure" at the start and "Cerulean" in the middle, a repeated blue that frames the violence. Against it, the Shape in armour is "Golden, all radiant," and the sea rises "in purple billows." These are rich, almost jewelled colours, so even the upheaval looks splendid. The verbs matter just as much. "Rush," "shaken," "swelled," "checked" make the first half restless and then give way to the stillness of "stood" and "stood sublime." Sound does some work too, as in the heavy stresses of "Earth dreadfully resounded, far and wide."
The form is a run of rhymed couplets in a steady ten-syllable line: eyes/wise, dressed/possessed, time/sublime, threw/view. The rhymes give the hymn a ceremonial ring, like a chant. They also show the pressure of translation. "Maid" is paired with "head" in a slant rhyme, and "Jove" with "move" in a rhyme that works for the eye more than the ear. The syntax sometimes twists to land on a rhyme word, as in "wonder strange possessed / The everlasting Gods that Shape to see." The reader has to rearrange the words, and the result sounds stately and a little archaic. A lighter touch would make the poem easier to read, but this stiffness suits the sense of something very old being spoken aloud.
The ending is a short farewell, "hail to thee," and a promise that her praise "shall unremembered be" neither by the speaker nor by others. The double negative is knotty, but the meaning comes through: the hymn is a pledge to keep her memory alive. That fits a poem that begins with "I sing," because it reminds us that this form was made to be performed and not just read.
The poem is worth reading for what it shows about how a later poet carries an ancient voice into his own language. Shelley is an English Romantic poet, and the poem's fascination with awe and with nature responding to a mighty presence may remind a reader of that tradition. The word "sublime" in particular carries Romantic overtones, though that is an inference from the language and not something the poem states. Most of all, it offers a compact, vivid picture of power that is controlled, a goddess who shakes the world and then, with one gesture, puts it at rest.