Poet’s Corner: P.B. Shelley–Mont Blanc 4

18 August 2026

(20 November 2015) We return with more of Shelley’s masterful poem, “Mont Blanc,” and remind our readers that last time, we saw how the view of this majestic mountain in the Alps overwhelms the poet’s senses; he retreats into his imagination in order to understand what he is seeing, for reason is not enough. We called this movement in the Romantic sublime, “fragmentation,” and in the first half of the third stanza, we see the poet still in this stage, struggling to make sense of what he sees:

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
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 unfurl’d
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
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 viewless gales!
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,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;

The poet now begins to speculate and to question, seeing some dreams as prophetic, or at least able to catch a glimpse of the underlying meaning in what he sees. He wonders if someone, or something, powerful has touched his dreams, giving him knowledge of what lies beyond the sensual world. These thoughts strip away the waking world–the “homeless cloud . . . that vanishes among viewless gales”–creating a kind of blindness that forces both mind and imagination back to the present moment; the mountain reappears, and he begins to see it as something supernatural, something transcendent, visible against the backdrop of an “infinite sky,” surrounded by what appear to him to be alien forms. The scene is almost surreal, colored as it is by his imagination. Next time, we will see the turning point, when this fragmented state becomes a euphoric state, as the poet moves into his sublime moment. Until then, good reading!