Poet’s Corner: P.B. Shelley–Mont Blanc 6

22 August 2026

(4 December 2015) We return with another installment from Shelley’s masterpiece, “Mont Blanc,” moving from the stage of fragmentation into the euphoric stage, or sublime moment. Notice how the focus shifts from nature to man, and the realization that true power resides not with man but with nature. Here is the first half of stanza four:

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have pil’d: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

The poet sees the unending cycles of nature, constantly renewing itself, while men are born and die, leaving hardly a ripple on the surface of nature. What lies beneath the awesome grandeur of nature, the poet realizes, is a power inaccessible to fleeting man, that it was there before man, and it will be there long after man, and all his works, vanish like smoke on the wind. This is the sublime moment, or euphoric stage, when the poet recognizes the eternal power of nature, and the poet’s transient nature. He sees in the mountains, in the glaciers, a latent power that could be loosed at any moment, a power not only capable of creating the beauty he sees, but also capable of destroying all he sees. Notice again the juxtaposition of fire and ice–the Romantics loved to place opposing forces together, as above, to illustrate this latent power of nature that could act at any moment, destroying all we hold dear. The second half of this stanza continues this theme, commenting more on man’s mutability compared to nature’s permanence. More next week, until then. good reading!