Poet’s Corner: P.B. Shelley–Mont Blanc 3

15 August 2026

(13 November 2015) A hearty good day to all! We return to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” with the second half of the second stanza, rejoining the poet’s reflection on this wonder of nature as he continues to establish the mood:

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound–
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
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!

We move now, with the poet, from the external world–what he sees–to an internal, subconscious world, the “caverns echoing,” in response to the sounds of the rushing river. A change now occurs: the “Dizzy Ravine” hurls the poet into “a trance sublime.” We move into the second stage of the Romantic sublime as the poet’s reason attempts to make sense of what he sees and fails, for the beauty, wonder, and majesty of what he sees overwhelms his reason–we might say, the view becomes too much for understanding, and so the poet must resort to his imagination to try and fill the gap. The poet finds himself in “the still cave of the witch Poesy,” where he grasps at shadows and ghosts, trying to understand, trying to return to stasis and tranquility, but the thoughts continue to fragment, which is why this second stage of the sublime is called ‘fragmentation.’ When we return next time,, we will delve deeper into this fragmentation, seeing how the poet wrestles with these overwhelming sensations. Until then, good reading!