Assessed Essay I

Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley (lines 1-48)

Chloe Todd-Fordham

In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley states:

[poetry] creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a
world to which the familiar world is a chaos [] it compels us to feel that which we
perceive, and to imagine that which we know. (954)
In 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley illustrates a vision of familiarity turned to chaos and creates
a landscape of dizzying wonder; (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock) an awful
scene (15) that terrifies with its immensity. Shelleys subject is a vast,
immeasurable, all-encompassing landscape; an everlasting universe of things. (1)
In 'Mont Blanc,' the reader is, at first, confronted with the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought (A Defence of Poetry 949) as Shelley
confuses imagery of enormity and confine, interior and exterior, permanence and
transience and separates the human mind from the natural world. To Shelley, the
mind is no more than a constant creative channel through which nature flows and
rolls its rapid waves. (2) It is the poetic imagination that unites this limitless
landscape with the miniature mind. In a trance sublime and strange, (35) Shelley
transforms perception into feeling and knowledge into poetry. The imagination turns
some unsculptured image confused by many-voiced sounds, and many-coloured
images, into one legion of wild thoughts; a unique sensibility exclusive to the
individual. For Shelley, the mind and the natural world are organically connected,
bound together by the imagination and expressed through the medium of poetry. In
exploiting the natural world, Shelley exposes the individual poetic mind.

'Mont Blanc' is a conclusive poem. Certainly it is primarily descriptive but as the

poem unfolds and the reader is exposed to more of Mont Blanc, an educative
narrative appears which culminates in Shelleys reasoned assertion in the final three
lines of the poem. 'Mont Blanc,' in its entirety, traces the transformation of the nave
and vulnerable poet into the controlled, rational rhetorician and this progression is
also apparent in the first two stanzas of 'Mont Blanc.' The first image of the poem is
not supported by the comfortable invocation of the subjective I as in Clares 'I am,'
or Keats 'Ode to a Nightingale'; instead the speaker of the poem is belittled by a
vast landscape, diminished by a terrifying permanence and lost in the everlasting
universe of things. (1) The casual yet precise use of the word things in the opening
line suggests that Shelleys natural world is neither specifically located nor easily
contained; instead, it is ubiquitous, sweeping and all-inclusive. In comparison, the
individual is tiny and alone. The speaker in 'Mont Blanc' is an absent presence. His

physicality is swallowed by the aggressive surroundings so that only the restless

voice of an overwhelmed mind remains in the poetry.

A clutter of inconsistent images characterises the poetic voice, reducing it to a mere

sound but half its own (6). In the first two lines alone, Shelley moves from the
colossal to the miniature, the exterior to the interior, and the panoramic to the
personal. In a tight, controlled, eleven line pentameter verse, the reader is exposed
to a slideshow of images which come into focus briefly and then dissolve each into
each. Permanent vocabulary ceaselessly, forever, everlasting follows
sporadic, fleeting, kinetic verbs; bursts, raves, leaps, passive mountains and
constant rocks are attacked by vast rivers, while darkness is usurped by light within
a single line. The rhythm and movement of lines such as:
Now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom
Now lending splendour (3-4)
imitate the constant fading and illumination of images. With the incessant repetition
of now, the line seemingly blinks between dark and light, and the concept of time is
lost to the imminent urgency of the word now. Until line 34, Shelleys landscape is
not exclusively his own; instead it is a collective experience, many-coloured and
many-voiced. The vision of 'Mont Blanc' is a dizzying wonder [] not unallied to
madness (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock 844). Thoughts are likened to
chainless winds, the senses are confused and mingled in lines such as to drink
their odours (23), dark transforms abruptly into light in the line; caverns sail / Fast
cloud-shadows and sunbeams (14-5), and the landscape is filled with this old
solemn harmony (24), a loud lone sound no other sound can tame (31). Nature is
both assuredly permanent and restlessly ephemeral. Shelley vividly describes an
awful scene (15); frightening, savage, destructive and devoid of human contact.
With these images, Shelley seeks to overwhelm his reader. Both the reader and the
poet are vulnerable and impressionable, their minds exposed to the terrifying force
of the natural world.

Paradoxically, fear and irrationality are conveyed in a rigid, formal structure. The
iambic pentameter becomes the heartbeat of the poem, driving it forward to a
conclusion. Like Mont Blanc, the regular pulse of the metre and the delicately placed
rhymes and half-rhymes make the poem an organic construct. Ironically, 'Mont
Blanc' is not some unsculptured image but is a carefully chiselled poem, from start
to finish. Shelleys oscillating images are seemingly spontaneous overflows,
(Preface to The Lyrical Ballads) wild thoughts that burst and rave but the elevated
blank verse suggests that, while Shelley seems forever searching for his own voice in
the many-voiced vale, it is, in fact, there from the beginning. The exclamatory
climax to Part II; thou art there! is forty-eight lines too late.

When the iambic pentameter does fall apart it is calculated. As the voices in the
desert fail, Shelley is subjected to a dialogue implicit in nature. Both the speaker
and the reader are made dizzy by a sickening of the senses and the continual
oscillation of imagery. In the following quotation, Shelley employs anaphora, caesura
and repetition to create an accumulation of replicated words, an intense build-up of
enduring imagery and a didactic, pulsating rhythm which climaxes with the
exclamation; Dizzy ravine!:
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame:
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound (31-3)
With the expletive Dizzy Ravine! there is sudden release and the overwhelmed
mind of both the poet and the reader is soothed by the comforting evocation of the
subjective I. Shelley has experienced in his own words the sublime. Dizzy
ravine! is an awful expression of fear, a temporary paralysis of language, a sudden
gasp which disrupts the natural rhythm of blank verse; indeed, the shape, movement
and pace of the poem in these lines imitates the sensation of the sublime.

With the introduction of the first-person, Shelley claims the language as his own and
asserts control. At last, specificity invades the terrifying collage of contradictions
cocooned within the mind of the poet, and trapped in the pentameter of Part I;
Shelley sees Mont Blanc with a cleansed perspective. As rationalist, Shelley takes
possession of the language, vocabulary and metre of the poem; the voices of the
desert meld into one unique voice and the oxymoronic images of dark and light,
sleep and unrest, interior and exterior are arrested in one legion of wild thoughts by
a formal, empirical - almost scientific and political - language:
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange (38-40)
Nature and the poetic mind become one and the same thing at this point in the
poem. The human mind is a microcosm of the natural world; it is both untamed and
tranquil. Just as the woods and winds contend[ing] in part I allegorise the divided
conscience and the secret springs act as a metaphor for the private, unfathomed
wealth of the imagination, the mingling of thou with the pronoun I in lines 34-5
confuses the subjectivity of the poem so that the natural world and the human mind
are bound together by the imagination. The human mind is constant and fixed - as is
Mont Blanc while nature is constantly changing and moving as is Mont Blancs
verdant decoration; the vast rivers and the wild woods. As Shelley states in a
Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock, nature and the mind inseparable:

one would think that Mont Blanc was a living being, and that the frozen blood
forever circulated through his stony veins (844)
Unlike the passive human mind, the imagination is active; it seeks among the
shadows, processes knowledge into art, sorts through the many coloured
perspectives of a terrifying world and arrives at one single unifying vision, unique to
the individual. The imagination is real, unlike the images it creates. Like the
material delusion that is poetry, like the artificial literary construct of the gothic that
Shelley alludes to in the following lines:
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image (46-7)
poetry, to Shelley, cannot be wholly authentic. Shelley cannot replicate reality as
Wordsworth sought to do in The Lyrical Ballads; instead, Mont Blanc is a faint image
of the natural world. Indeed, in 'Mont Blanc,' Shelleys vulnerable, frightened
speaker arrives at the conclusion that poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that
which it distorts. (A Defence of Poetry 947) The imagination is a means to control
the everlasting universe of things, to process thoughts and prompt the secret
springs of poetic expression; it compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to
imagine that which we know (954).
It is in the still cave of the witch Poesy, among the shadows, where the
imagination marries nature to the human mind. Here, the universe of things is no
longer alarmingly permanent, idealistic and everlasting; instead, it is definitive,
exact, clear. In contrast to the destructive, Power that bursts through these dark
mountains like the flame (19), the final image of Part II is one of softness and
tranquillity:
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
[] In the still cave of the witch Poesy. (42-4)
With the affirmative exclamation thou art there! Shelleys desperate search for
external stimuli has led him, not into the wilderness of the natural world, but inside
himself, into the still cave of the witch poesy, to the reality of his own poetic
imagination.