Poet’s Corner: P.B. Shelley–Mont Blanc 5

20 August 2026

(27 November 2015) Welcome all! We return to Shelley’s masterful “Mont Blanc”; here is the second half of the third stanza, and we remind our readers that the poet is in the phase of the sublime called fragmentation, a resort to one’s imagination in an attempt to fill the gaps when reason is overwhelmed by the wonders of the natural world:

A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
And the wolf tracks her there–how hideously
Its shapes are heap’d around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven.–Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
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 faith, with Nature reconcil’d;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

We remind our readers that the poet is still in his imagination, still trying to make sense of this ‘awe-full’ scene, and so when he mentions this ‘desert peopled by storms’, he refers to his place of thinking and writing: his senses supply him with impressions, the scarred and riven shapes, and out of these images, the imagination constructs, or perhaps, re-constructs, the scenes that have happened here on the mountain–the eagle and the wolf–but all he sees are the traces left behind. In a resort to old notions of elemental powers, he turns to the “earthquake mother” teaching her children how to destroy, of which all that remains are the fractured and broken stones torn from the mountain. In another favorite move by the Romantics, the poet juxtaposes fire and ice–other elemental powers–thinking of a war they could have had in the distant past. All these elemental forces are in balance now, and so the mountain appears tranquil and serene, in an eternal stasis, from the poet’s perspective. This stasis leads the poet from fragmentation to a stasis, in which he accepts that the mountain is beyond him, and that its ‘voice’ is what is giving his mind tranquility. Next time, we move into the sublime moment, now that tranquility has re-established itself; the moment of Romantic euphoria approaches. Until then, good reading!