Holding an unremitting interchange
40 With the clear universe of things around;3 One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
of Chamonix and is fed from above by the meltoff powers, and the limits of knowledge. 'All things
of the glacier, the Mer de Glace. exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to
In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock drafted in the percipient,' Shelley would later write in 'A
the same week as 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley had Defence of Poetry' (p. 837). In 'Mont Blanc' the
recalled that the count de Buffon, a French pio-priority that this statement gives to the mind over
neer of the science we now know as geology, had the external world is challenged by the sheer
proposed a 'sublime but gloomy theory?that this destructive power of the mountain.
globe which we inhabit will at some future period 2. I.e., not formed by humans.
be changed to a mass of frost.' This sense, which 3. This passage is remarkably parallel to a passage
Shelley takes from Buffon, of a Nature that is Shelley could not have read in The Prelude, first
utterly alien and indifferent to human beings (and published in 1850, in which Wordsworth discov
whose history takes shape on a timescale of incom-ers, in the landscape viewed from Mount Snow
prehensible immensity) is counterposed through-don, the 'type' or 'emblem' of the human mind in
out 'Mont Blanc' with Shelley's interest, fueled by its interchange with nature (see The Prelude
his reading of 1 8th-century skeptics such as David 14.63ft'., p. 386).
Hume, in questions about the human mind, its
.
76 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,4
45 Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!5
3
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
50 Visit the soul in sleep,?that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.?I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie
55 In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless0 gales! invisible
60 Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears,?still, snowy, and serene? Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
65 Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desart peopled by the storms alone, Save? when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, exceptAnd the wolf tracts0 her there?how hideously tracks
70 Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.0?Is this the scene splitWhere the old Earthquake-daemon6 taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire, envelope once this silent snow?
75 None can reply?all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith7 with nature reconciled;
so Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which8 the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
4. I.e., in the part of the mind that creates poetry. balance of possibilities, the landscape is equally 5. I.e., the thoughts (line 41) seek, in the poet's capable either of instilling such a Wordsworthian creative faculty, some shade, phantom, or image of faith (in the possibility of reconciling humans and the Ravine of the Arve; and when the breast, which nature, lines 78?79) or of producing the 'awful' has forgotten these images, recalls them again? (i.e., 'awesome') doubt (that nature is totally alien there, suddenly, the Arve exists. to human needs and values). For Wordsworth's 6. A supernatural being, halfway between mortals faith in the correspondence of Nature and human and the gods. Here it represents the force that thoughts and his conviction that 'Nature never did
makes earthquakes. Shelley views this landscape betray / The heart that loved her,' see 'Tintern as the product of violent geological upheavals in Abbey,' lines 122-23.
the past. 8. The reference is to 'voice,' line 80.
7. I.e., 'simply by holding such faith.' In Shelley's
.
MONT BLANC / 765
