With Nature Reconciled
An Ecocritical Reading of Shelley‘s ―Mont Blanc‖
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Table of Contents
Introduction Page 2
Chapter 1: Section I Page 6 Chapter 2: Section II Page 10 Chapter 3: Section III Page 17 Chapter 4: Section IV Page 26 Chapter 5: Section V Page 34
Conclusion Page 39
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Introduction
―The Romantic period has an immediacy which others tend to lack. This is because so many of our values and preoccupations derive from it,‖ argues Duncan Wu in his Anthology of
Romanticism (Wu xxxi). This period in English literature comes at a time when many of the features of our modern landscape come into being: the enclosures and growth of large-scale agriculture, the growth of urban centres, and the emergence of factories. All these developments transformed the English landscape and the English people into a society that more closely resembles our own than at any time previously. Apart from these changes in the landscape of Britain, the political upheavals of the late 18th, early 19th centuries were also preludes to our modern systems of government, with the emergence of democracy in the United States, the overthrow of a divinely appointed monarch in France, and the establishment of a free press that could print not only for the upper classes, but for the factory worker as well, a fact exemplified Cobbett‘s Political Register in 1802.
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demonstrate that countryside and wilderness were the places where the poet could find his full expression.
In his essay ―Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For?‖ Robert Kern argues that ―all texts are literally or imaginatively situated in a place, and in the sense that their authors, consciously or not, in scribe within them a certain relation to their place‖ (Kern 259). The poem Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley not only literally conforms to this argument, as it is clearly a locodescriptive poem on the mountain, but also asserts a relationship between speaker and place that is a complex push and pull between the individual in nature, and the natural world that is present without humanity. Shelley develops this idea, among other places, in lines 60-75 of the poem, where the only human presence is ―some hunter‘s bone‖ (line 68) among the deserted glaciers of Mont Blanc‘s upper reaches, a place where the presence of the human is the exception rather than the rule. It was written while Shelley was visiting the Alps in 1816, a journey that was later published as the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, a collection of his letters to Lord Byron, Thomas Peacock, and Thomas Hogg.
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many places, under the influence of movements towards nature protection and conservation, academics began to add ‗place‘ as a new and important category of literary studies. Ecocriticism, emerging from a growing environmental consciousness, seeks ―to redefine the human subject not so much in relation to the human others that subjecthood had traditionally excluded as in relation to the nonhuman world‖ (Heise 507); it is an awareness that the human does not simply exist by itself, but is always rooted in a place, and always dependent on the natural world for its very survival. Symbiosis between humanity and nature and a deep concern over this connection lies at the heart of ecocriticism. While texts, whether they are literary or not, and secondary literary analysis usually foreground the human experience in a myriad of ways, it is the task of
ecocriticism to make the reader more environmentally aware through foregrounding both ‗place‘ and analysing the interaction of the human with the environment of that place. Because
ecocriticism comes out of the environmental movement, it allows for a critical reading that can and should question these interactions on the basis of principles of ecological sustainability and ‗green‘ thinking.
In recent years ―British Romantic poetry, because it often seeks to address perennial questions concerning the relationship between humankind and the natural world, has become one of the most important terrains for the development of ecological literary criticism‖ (McKusick 199). This thesis constitutes an attempt to do what Christopher Hitt suggests at the end of his essay on Mont Blanc, and attempt an ―[eco]critical approach which foregrounds its own evaluative
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(lines 77-79). The methodology used is that of close reading, as I believe that through a close examination of the text itself one can explore the poem through an ―earth-centered approach‖ (Glotfelty xviii) that explores the concept of the human within the wilderness, ―affecting it and affected by it‖ (Glotfelty xix). It constitutes a reading that foregrounds the interaction between man and nature, how one is affected by the other, and vice-versa.
Proceeding with an ecocricitical reading of Shelley‘s Mont Blanc comes with a set of limitations and parameters attached to it. The first is the decision not to engage in (new) historicist writing by involving, for example, the letters Shelley wrote to Thomas Peacock, or theoretical works such as his Defense of Poetry. This is done in order to separate Shelley‘s early 19th century thinking from such a modern reading as this; it would be a mistake to use our modern
perceptions and opinions on what constitutes the wilderness, nature, and the environment and attempt to impose them on the words of Shelley the poet. The second is not to engage with other poems by the same author, or even others of the same period, for the simple reason that it is beyond the scope of this thesis to attempt a comprehensive reading of either the complete works of one author, or indeed the literary period to which he belongs.
Section I
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implies that this has neither seen beginning nor end; it merely endures and exists as a force outside the human, whose presence only comes later in the first stanza, and whose contribution appears less than that of the universe itself as the ―imagery is quite explicit, however, in
attributing dominance to [it]‖ (Hall 207).
Its metaphoric representation as a river allows it to ―flow through the mind‖ and imparts a mostly visual effect on all it touches, creating both light and dark, gloom and splendour as it touches the human mind. Thus, the human mind is not a passive participant in the creation of images and form; the ―everlasting universe of things‖ does not create in this stanza, it merely informs and illuminates what is already present. It appears to be necessary for both the human mind and the universe to combine in order to create the visual space in which the imagination and the poem can take place, but the primacy of a greater universe that lives outside the human is assured by the fact that the mind merely ―brings a tribute / of waters – with a sound but half its own‖ (line 5-6) to the fast-flowing rivers that live outside it. What we as humans perceive of the universe, then, is only part of the whole and is even further limited by the fact that the ―sound but half its own‖ merely exists as part of the poem‘s larger use of the metaphor of sound, whereas the ―everlasting universe‖ is not only granted primacy of place within the metaphor of the visual, but also supplies the other half of the sounds of the poem. Thus, the contribution of the human is limited, centrally placing the ―everlasting universe‖ in its metaphor as a river in the second part of the first stanza.
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the sublime into ―a vast river‖ (line 10) when placed into a landscape that is wholly surrounded by the wilderness, which feeds its power in order to become much more than it was. Thus, the river that consists of the ―everlasting universe of things‖, aided by the tribute of human thought, is only fully realised, and granted far greater power, within the natural landscape, inferring that it is only within the wilderness that both human thought and the universe can become fully
realised. This realisation can be seen through the expansion of the river, which at first merely consisted of ―rapid waves‖ (line 2) has now become so powerful as to ―burst and rave‖ over the rocks of its alpine gorge.
Here we see an attempt by the speaker to ―reduce or nullify the distance between the
experiencing body and experienced environment‖ (Heise 512), as the experienced environment, that of the wild river ―among the mountains lone‖ (line 8), cannot be separated from the
experiencing mind. The human mind, both part of but only connected to the greater universe, becomes part of the experience of the environment. It not only experiences nature, but it also becomes part of it in two actions: the first one is the transition of the metaphorical river in the first five lines to the more literal glacier stream in the second part of the stanza, but it also ―reduces the distance‖ by taking the reader of the poem through these same steps. The metaphor of the river transforms itself from abstract nature of the idea world, through the human mind, into an experience of nature that is both more real and immediate. This immediacy comes from the fact that the imagery of the second stanza, where man and nature flow through the landscape together, refuses to fall into the picturesque which ―is underwritten by an asymmetrical
relationship between the perceiving I/eye and the perceived landscape‖ (Hitt, Ecocriticism 130). The poem joins the human and the universe together in a relationship that reverses that
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through its placement in line 1 of the poem and metaphorically through its primacy of place as argued above, as well as merging them together in the same flow of water as it moves from the philosophical to the real. It supports Cheryll Glotfelty‘s notion that ―human culture is connected to the physical world; affecting it and affected by it‖ (xix); as the ―feeble brook (line 7) becomes a raging torrent in the valley of Arve, it becomes impossible to separate the human mind from the universe; they both constitute and are caught up in the river.
The first stanza argues for a complex interaction between what is human, what is universal, and the place of nature within the whole. I would now like to turn to the ―implied or unconscious orientation towards the environment‖ (Kern 259). The natural world can be ambiguously perceived as part of the ―universe of things‖, but also as the place where the universe and the human come together to form a whole that strengthens within the presence of nature. If the first half of the stanza is mostly philosophical in nature and ultimately joins the universe and the human mind into a river, then it behoves a careful reader to pay attention to that stream. The ―feeble brook‖ of line seven, with both little visual and aural power, only gives tribute to a powerful ―vast river‖ (line 10) within the natural world and the landscape of the sublime. It is a mistake to assume that this is ―an analogy between the human mind and nature‖ (Hitt, Unwriting 145), the river is rather an analogy of ―everlasting universe‖ and the human mind merely pays it tribute; they are separate and certainly not equal.
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becomes a place where man can commune with nature, a notion that is further developed in the second stanza. Nature itself is differentiated from the ―everlasting universe‖ through the use of ―temporal contiguity‖ (Rieder 791) which describes the universe: ―now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom‖ (emphasis mine) as opposed to the use of spatial metaphor that guides the second half of the first stanza: ―In the wild wood, among the mountains lone / Where waterfalls ...‖ (lines 8-9). The sublime landscape is the conduit through which interaction between us and the universe takes place, and if the ―everlasting universe of things‖ becomes a ―vast river‖ within that space, then it is there that the speaker must go in the second stanza in order to immerse himself in it, and to come closer to the semi-divine ideal of ―the everlasting universe of things‖.
Section II
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Heaven, is girded, but not by the Divine and a throng of angels, but rather by the ―ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne‖ (line 17). ―Power in likeness of the Arve‖ is where the ―universe of things‖ comes through sublime nature towards humanity, but even nature is subordinate to this Power, but it fills ―the Ravine landscape [with] a sense of Nature‘s uncontrollable power‖ (Hall 209).
Thus, if ―Power‖ may be likened with the Christian deity, or at least a superhuman divine that is outside the reach of the speaker, it only becomes accessible through a devolution from the ―everlasting universe of things‖ atop the mountain into the realm of the sublime, in which the speaker may come as close as is possible to the divine. And, like the structures of Christianity, the poem suggests its own cathedral worshipping ―Power‖ in lines 14-34, but the stone and mortar of a church has been replaced by the natural, where the woods become the walls and the sky becomes the ceiling of nature‘s cathedral in order to demonstrate ―the grandeur of the natural scene in the imagery of religious worship‖ (Hall 209).
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full‖; full of faith and awe of the displaced divine. This reading is further strengthened by lines 25-27, where the ―aethereal waterfall‖ is like the curtains surrounding the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, which robe the ―unsculptured image‖, of which ―if anything at all can be known [...], it is only that it is hidden to human view and untouched by human activity‖ (Rieder 793). The fact that this image itself is ―unsculpted‖ is a clue that is connected to the ―Power‖, which is never given form itself, but merely given likeness as the Arve, like the unknown image of God, in whose likeness was created man.
The Ravine of Arve has transformed itself into a church devoted to the ―everlasting universe of things‖, where the river flows down the centre of the church, starting with the Holiest place, the altar at the back of the church, where the glaciers, the ―ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne‖ (line 17), divulge the river itself. If ones takes that place as the Altar, then the ―giant brood of pines‖ of line 20 become both its physical walls which cling to the river, thus giving it shelter, and also part of its worship together with the winds. These winds, through the ambiguity of ―whose‖ (line 21), can be seen as both devoted to the trees, but it may also refer to the Arve, which then makes nature itself part of the worship of the ―everlasting universe of things‖. Thus, the ―odours‖ (line 23) may be read not only as the scent of pines that is carried by the wind, but also as the incense wafting through a church, accompanied by the ―swinging‖ which, if one follows the larger metaphor, may also be read as ―singing‖ . Shelley portrays nature as a kind of church, where wind and trees come together in worship of the Power, and ―to hear an old and solemn harmony‖ which forms a natural jubilee.
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Mont Blanc through the valley towards the ―work and dwelling‖ (line 118) of man in the
penultimate stanza, where, like a God in traditional mythology is both its destroyer as a ―flood of ruin‖ (line 107), and the creator as the ―breath and blood of distant lands‖ (line 124).
The cathedral in worship of the Power is then constructed of the vale itself. It is provided with walls and a congregation in the form of the trees who sing its hymn. In short, ―the Ravine makes its obeisance‖ (Hall 208) to the Power that flows down from its secret throne. It is given further power by the winds that its roof and the altar of the unknowable Power lies in behind the veil of waterfalls and the ice-gulfs which guard access to it. The remarkable aspect of this suggested cathedral is that, while its construction may be natural, it is still open to visitors such as the speaker, who enters this place through abandoning the world of man and entering a sublime landscape. The natural world is then still separate from the human mind‘s imaginings, but it is still accessible to those who venture into nature, and can turn the visitor towards a ―trance sublime‖ (line 35) which can hold ―an unremitting interchange with the clear universe of things around‖ (line 39-40), which is a clear inversion of the first line of the poem. Another indicator of this enduring separation of the speaker and the ―everlasting universe of things‖ may be seen in the fact that the river is still referred to as ―thou‖ (line 43) and the ―legion of wild thoughts‖ (line 41) as ―that‖, but the ―clear universe of things around‖ cannot be part of those things which may enter into the cave of the ―witch Poesy‖ (line 44) and thus be described by the speaker.
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valley. This affirms the statement of the first stanza, where ―human thought‖ only brings a tribute to the ―everlasting universe of things‖ which can only passively flow down with the great river pouring down with the mountains. The power invested in the river Arve is still above the imaginings of the speakers, which only ―passively ... renders and receives fast influencings‖ (line 38) with the greater power that resides within the natural world. The only way in which the speaker can retain his place within this overwhelming landscape of nature‘s power is through an ―assertion of human identity, an identity grounded in the workings of the poetic imagination‖ (Hall 209).
The only way in which the human mind can assert itself in this landscape filled with the sublime Power that comes down from the mountain‘s peak is through a reduction of the natural landscape ―from precipitous commotion to a secure, almost womblike, silence‖ (Rieder 794) of the ―still cave of the witch Poesy‖ (line 44). Here the speaker seeks refuge from his status as the conduit for ―fast influencings‖ from the ―clear universe of things around‖ (line 38-40). The silence of this cave stands in opposition to the river of the first stanza, which ―ceaselessly bursts and raves‖ (line 11) – here the poet can access his own ―trance sublime‖ (line 35) in an effort to come to terms with the natural world, and even attempt to ―meet the Ravine of Arve in poetic
confrontation‖ (Hall 211). The problem with this attempt to relocate power over the scene back in the human mind is that the ―still cave‖ is only filled with ―ghosts of things that are‖ (line 46), mere reflections and shades of the Power that comes down in likeness of the Arve.
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absurdity by art‖ (Rieder 793). Further examples of this can be seen in the opposition of line 33: ―Thou art the path of that unresting sound‖, where the movement and noise of the natural world is juxtaposed with the situation of the cave, where the ―legion of wild thought‖ (line 41) is brought to stillness and rest. The fact that both ―thy darkness‖, the referent of ―that‖ in line 43, and the ―dizzy ravine‖ are welcome within the cave demonstrates the desire of the speaker to regain control over the overwhelming sublime impressions that the natural world has made so far and to rise above the ―unremitting interchange‖ that comes with the presence of the human within the sublime, where the frantic pace of impressions of the cathedral to nature have overwhelmed the poet, who now retreats to a shadow-world of lesser images in order to regain control and ―a self-conscious environment of the autonomy of the human mind‖ (Hall 211). The cost of this retreat into the ―cave of the witch Poesy‖, which allows both autonomy of the human mind and safe place from the ―clear universe of things around‖ (line 40), is the transformation of the Power of the natural world into mere ghost-like figures upon the wall, which are apparently the only things under the direct control of the speaker.
The second stanza moves from sublime nature to the intimately human; from the grand open spectacle of the river Arve thundering down the ravine, bringing with it a message of the Power that resides behind the ―ice-gulfs that gird [its] secret throne‖ (line 17), to the stillness of the cave where the speaker flees in order to regain control of the imagery and the poem itself. The
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(line 47) in the sole place of retreat of a speaker overwhelmed by the sublime. This is what becomes of the ―works and ways of man [...] / and that of him and all that his may be‖ (line 92) when confronted with the ―remote serene and inaccessible‖ (line 97) Power coming down the mountain. We see that the speaker, resigned to watching the shadows dance of the cave-wall, is forced to acknowledge ―that some aspects of the domain we call ‗nature‘ may well exceed out sociolinguistic constructions‖ (Economides 108).
Section III
The third stanza begins with a change of voice, from the speaker trapped with the shadows of the cave to the more nebulous ―some say‖ in order to create sufficient distance, so that the ―gleams of a remoter world‖ (line 49) may enter into the mind of the speaker independently. It is an attempt by the speaker to find ―an external authority that represents the prospective truth‖ (Hitt, Unwriting 146). Once again, the poem stays faithful to Plato‘s Cave and the Idea-world, where true forms can be seen in sleep; those forms guarded by the divine within the sanctum sanctorum placed behind the waterfall‘s veil in lines 26-29. These ―unsculptured images‖ (line 27), the perfect forms of the Idea-world, exist only in a place apart from the poet-speaker, who must succumb to sleep in order to catch a glimpse of their existence. These are logical extensions of the flight of the speaker away from the overwhelming visual impressions of the valley of Arve, a flight into the ―still cave‖ in order to regain composure and interact in silence with the ―shadows that pass by‖ (line 45).
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from it, and that within death, within the dream, it is possible for the spirit to gain access to the fullness of the ―remoter world‖. Here, Shelley once again exploits notions of traditional Christian mythology; both that death here on earth is but a slumber until the second coming of Christ and the Rapture along with the notion of Heaven as a place of perfection, where both life and form attain perfection. These first line are a mixture of both Platonic philosophy and traditional Christian theology, in which the notion of the perfect form, the ―remoter world‖, is inaccessible to those on earth ―who wake and live‖ (line 52).
The return to the ―I‖ form, which once again moves the gaze from the unnamed ―some say‖ to the speaker of the second stanza, affirms the notion that the divine is within nature, and
accessible through it. The return of the speaker is marked by his looking ―on high‖ (line 52), which either refers to the summit of Mont Blanc which holds the ―secret throne‖ (line 17), or indeed towards Heaven itself and the dwelling place of the divine. Since the top of the mountain has become the dwelling place of Power, in a vertical relationship that passes from the unseen Power, to the glaciers, to the river Arve, and finally out to sea, ―on high‖ turns the attention of the speaker upwards and the Power, still unknowable, becomes the ―unknown omnipotence‖ of line 53. This omnipotence then demonstrates its divine power which has ―unfurled the veil of life and death‖ (line 54), indicating that has dominion over life and death; if it can unfurl the veil that separates life and death, then conversely it too must have the power to draw it back once again. The Power that resides at the top of Mont Blanc is therefore granted even more authority and command over the scene of the poem.
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dreaming. If the speaker is still asleep, then the unfurling of ―the veil of life and death‖ is part of those ―gleams of a remoter world‖ (line 49), as only there one can have the ―possibility of knowing Power in its transcendence, [which is] always veiled and disguised by words, by language‖ (Abroon 163). The meditative question of ―do I lie in dream‖ of line 54 questions the vision granted by looking ―on high‖, which may have allowed a glimpse of the remoter world, but it is still a vision of the veil of life and death. As with the veil of the waterfall in the second stanza, the speaker ―sees the veil but not what it conceals; he confronts yet again a landscape immune to his questioning‖ (Rieder 794). The speaker, even in dream, is still limited from full knowledge of the ―Power‖, as it is guarded by the veil of water, either in form of the glaciers which ―gird his secret throne‖ (line 17), or the waterfall of the second stanza. The journey inwards is then no better than the journey outward of the first half of the second stanza; both afford ―gleams of a remoter world‖ (line 49), but neither allow the poet-speaker to fully understand or come to grips with it. The only certainty that can be known thus far is that the worship of it, the place where it is at its most powerful, is within the natural world.
It is not hard to wonder why the ―very spirit fails‖ (line 57) in sight of this rejection of intimate knowledge of the Power; it has driven the speaker ―back into crisis‖ (Rieder 794) as access to the nature of this Power, like the search for the true nature of God, is made clear to be one that cannot be resolved by ―those who wake and live‖ (line 52). It resembles an earlier failure of voice and knowledge, as the failure of the ―voices of the desert‖ (line 28) too fell silent against the ―deep eternity‖ of sleep. Here, at the moment of a crisis of faith, is where the speaker lets himself go, to dissolve into the simile of nature‘s ―homeless cloud‖ (line 58) in order to become closer to that which is impossible to know through the use of language or reasoning. The
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sacrifices the logical questioning process of the first lines of the third stanza and lets nature take over.
The ―homeless cloud‖ is carried by the winds towards the roof of suggested cathedral and beyond, as it is ―driven ... from steep to steep‖, only to vanish among the winds that form the choir of the mountain. In this way, the poet allows the self to vanish, to become one with sublime nature, to become one with the ―infinite sky‖ (line 60). In doing so ―the poet turns away from the present landscape to an ‗eternal‘ one in an attempt to find or create a sense of completion for the questioning process‖ (Pierce 110) that began at the start of the third stanza. This sacrifice of the self when faced with unanswerable questions regarding Power, the nature of life and death, and what lies beyond the veil of the sanctum sanctorum, allows the poet to go beyond the ―ice gulfs‖ (line 17) that prohibit the human from entering the higher domain of the Power atop the
mountain. Here we see, like the first stanza, the separation of the human mind, the ―everlasting universe of things‖, and the natural world which forms a conduit through which the first may approach the second.
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a place where the voices have become silent and the changing nature is brought to a stand-still. In a further contrast, nature in this place is not made of the easily recognisable forms of the forest and the valley, but rather filled with ―unearthly forms‖ (line 62), indicating that the poet has passed into a different world, one closer to the ―everlasting universe of things‖ as the forms in this passage, the glacier with its crevasses of ―unfathomable deeps‖ (line 64), attains a greater permanence than the valley below.
Second, it is important to see that the glaciers among which the poet now moves are part of the Mont Blanc massif, but not part of the mountain itself. The Power that dwells high above still cannot be ―known in any form or by any means, [it is] distinct separate, mute, and unknowable‖ (Abroon 164). The speaker still dwells among ―its subject mountains‖ (line 62) in which the only other life present is that of the eagle and the wolf; humanity‘s presence is reduced to ―some hunter‘s bone‖ (line 68). The word choice of ―hunter‖ here is significant: the dominion of humanity in the valleys and plains, demonstrated by a hunter‘s mastery over animals, is reversed here as his normal prey, the eagle and particularly the wolf, bring the remains to a place
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So, as the speaker has submitted to the natural world in order to transcend the limitations of the valley, it is little wonder that the faith in the natural world he has experienced so far needs its own religious code, a theme which forms the final part of the third stanza, from lines 71-83. In lines 71-74 there are two positions taken as to what shaped the landscape. The ―earthquake-daemon‖ (line 72) and her young become a new mythology that reaches back to either pre-Christian telling of the creation of the universe, or they are a new invention that stands much closer to the natural world in which the speaker now resides. By casting the daemon as one of the earth after a passage concerning its ―scarred, and riven‖ (line 71) shape, the speaker implies that there are forces at work which supersede the power of man and predate his arrival.
The other explanation also lies within the earth but uses the element of fire to describe its creation. In contrast to the scenes of quiet that now surround the speaker on the glacier, there is the chance that the scene was created by ―a sea / of fire‖ (line 73-74), a formation that stands in direct contrast to the way the glacier is now represented. Both the daemon and the lake of fire act through movement in order to create, and stand in contrast with the silent and still landscape now seen by the speaker. The ―sea of fire‖ too loses the personal element of the earthquake-deamon, which, though alien in nature, is at least recognisable as a figure, in favour of a creative myth that needs only the four elements in order to shape the universe. What the poem demonstrates with both the use of the daemon and the sea of fire is that it ―does not accept the
anthropomorphism present in religion in its orthodox and traditional form‖ (Abroon 168). It is important to note that these short answers are posed to the question of ―who made this
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Though his apprehensions are based in creation, the speaker remains unsure as to the precise nature of that creation in line 75, ―none can reply – all seems eternal now,‖ which reaffirms the distance that is still in play between the speaker ascendant and the Power itself. There is no easily forthcoming answer; the speaker can only speculate as to the myth of origin and uses earth and fire to do so. The pause ―emphasises the disjunction between the fact that none can reply to the poet‘s question and the belief that nature seems like an eternal entity in this silence‖ (Pierce 110), thereby separating the speaker from society and demonstrating that the natural world cannot simply give the answers to questions of faith, unlike the communion between God and Moses who gave him the tablets atop the mountain. Furthermore, the line stands in stark contrast to stanzas one and two, where the presence of nature is always accompanied by sound and
motion, whereas here silence and eternity answer the poet-speaker. Thus, while faith is created in the surrender to nature, it cannot answer the questions of the speaker, but only instil ―a faith so mild, / so solemn, so serene‖ (line 73-74).
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The ―mysterious voice‖ of the wilderness in line 76 is one that has already been heard by the speaker in the second stanza; it consists partly of the ―old and solemn harmony‖ (line 24) that rustles between trees and wind in the valley of Arve and echoes ―to the Argues commotion‖ (line 30). But while it can be heard in that cathedral within and to the natural world, it has taken the transcendence of the speaker in order to not only hears its voice, but to be able to act upon it so that ―large codes of fraud and woe‖ (line 81) can be repealed. This also partly explains why the myth of creation is not so easily resolved; the voice of the wilderness is still ―mysterious‖ and does not easily give answers, and the faith that it teaches is rather ―so mild, so solemn, so serene‖ that it does not need rigorous doctrine or explanation in order to be accepted. It is rather a faith that emanates from nature itself, a conduit towards that inaccessible Power that the poem continually seeks out, but that always remains hidden behind the natural world and delivers its faith and message through it. I disagree with John Rieder in his reading that this passage
concerns ―the poet‘s turn from doubt to a kind of faith‖ (Rieder 786), but would argue that faith is achieved through surrender to the natural world, rather than doubt.
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(which appears to turn upon them in the garden)‖ (Slater 116) by equalising the relationship between nature and humanity, so that there is no longer a desire for domination or an innate disjunction between the two. A reading that allows for a meaning of ―but‖ as ―except‖ can be used as an implied comment on the nature of Christianity, in which humanity must always be dominant over the natural world as God set man over the beasts in the field and the birds in sky, and where humanity is thus forever banned from achieving harmonious cooperation with what surrounds.
In the final lines of the third stanza, the speaker then turns what up to now have been an
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The third stanza is the crux of the poem. It uses the trinity of nature, man, and the unknowable Power to establish the place of man within nature, completes the basic structure of a religion based on the voice of the wilderness, and fixes the speaker-poet at the centre of all this as its high priest. In order to go beyond the normal visions of sublime nature as established in the second stanza, it is imperative that the speaker surrenders the self to gain access to the upper reaches of the glacier. In a poem partly dominated by the verticality of the valley of Arve up towards the summit of Mont Blanc, it has reached the peak of what is possible for the human mind to attain and the poem now begins to fall again towards ―the ocean waves‖ (line 125) at the end of the fourth stanza. The poem shares ecocriticism‘s ―fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it‖ (Glotfelty xix) in its most basic sense; the speaker here is not only connected to the physical world of the wilderness, but indeed has to succumb to it. In the act of writing, the speaker ―accepts, even embraces, the otherness of wilderness‖ (Hitt, Unwriting 140) and becomes the conduit through which the voice of the mountain is heard, affecting it and affected by it. The speaker diminishes in importance as the stanza progresses; the last mention of ―I‖ comes in line 55, and does not return until the final lines, where he is no longer an explicit ―I‖, but rather part of the larger ―great mountain‖, the self absorbed into the sublime wilderness.
Section IV
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the second stanza (lines 12-34) when confronted with the sound and motion of the Valley of Arve. It does this by returning sound and motion to the poem as it focuses on a meditation on the cycle of life and death that exists beneath the ―eternal‖ (line 75) snowy plains of the glacier. Humanity and nature appear to be equalised in this sense; they are both opposed to the ―everlasting universe of things‖ (line 1) through the necessity of death and rebirth that lies at their heart, and the speaker now expounds his vision of equality between man and nature, demonstrating that neither has power over the other, while pointing out the similarities that exist between them.
The first eight lines of this sonnet concern themselves with the cycle of the natural world and the elements. Images of water and earth: ―the fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams‖ (line 84) switch between humanity, which inhabits fields and forests, and the natural world which inhabits the water. Though there is a back-and-forth within this line, it is important to note that the
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The opposition of the fairly benign first line of ―the fields, the lakes, the forest, and the streams‖ to the more violent and destructive parts of nature - the ―lighting, and rain, earthquake, and fiery flood and hurricane‖ (lines 86-87) - are a harbinger of what is to be expounded later in this stanza: the idea of nature as both creator and destroyer, where the changing of the landscape is subject to these laws of nature. These lines serve as a reminder that the natural world still stands ―in scorn of mortal power‖ (line 103) and that any arrogance born of technological advancement is not enough to become superior to the natural world. They are followed by another feature of the natural world that is inescapable; the changing of the seasons as described in lines 88-91, where the sleeping seeds await the return of spring in order to come out of the ―detested trance‖ in order to bloom and grow, only to fall silent and repeat the same pattern over the unchanging nature of the seasons. Here, again, we see the trinity of man, nature, and the ―everlasting universe of things‖ (line 1); while man exists in nature, they are both subjected to the same timeless forces that govern them, which is demonstrated by the eternal cycle of the changing seasons.
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demonstrate the similarities, rather than the differences, between what is human and what belongs to the natural world; the poem seeks a ―return to more ecologically attuned ways of inhabiting nature‖ (Heise 504).
What binds nature and man together, and separates them from the ―everlasting universe of things‖ (line 1) and the ―Power‖ (line 16), is the fact that both of them are not everlasting, as is demonstrated in lines 94-95, which makes explicit the notions of death and rebirth explored above. This is emphasized by the contrasts placed within line 94; where the glacial planes are ―still, snowy, and serene‖ (line 60), and the busy natural world in the valley below moves and breathes ―with toil and sound‖, unlike the mountain‘s upper reaches, where its ―stillness‖ denotes both inaction and lack of sound. Instead, they both rely on change and rebirth, the antithesis of ―the everlasting universe of things‖, and the very quality that binds them together. Thus, these first twelve lines return to the separation of human thought, nature, and the ―everlasting universe‖ but re-examine the bond between nature and humanity after the speaker has
surrendered to the natural world and has found his place within it. These lines are an affirmation of what has been taught to the speaker; the surrender to the sublime wilderness has given him an insight into the notion that man and nature are inseparable from one another, where ―lighting, and rain, earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane‖ (line 87) are also part of a fully realised ecosphere of ―all living things that dwell within the Daedal earth‖ (line 86).
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inaccessible‖ (line 97). Still, even though the poet-speaker has acceded to a high priesthood of nature, the ―egalitarian sermon‖ (Rieder 795) delivered on the commonalities of nature and man does not extend to the highest peaks, and the Power that dwells there. Though the natural world and man are more intimately connected than ever before, they are still limited by the fact that human thought only brings ―a sound but half its own‖ (line 6); there exists no possibility of a full knowledge of the ―everlasting universe of things‖. Humanity, while present within a wilderness through which he can achieve a ―glean of a remoter world‖ (line 49), is incapable of
transcending further than the poet-speaker, as ―Power dwells apart‖ rather than within the same world in which nature and man reside and cannot be made ―known in any form or by any means, but [it is] kept distinct, separate, mute, and unknowable‖ (Abroon 164).
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people‖ (Rieder 787), as this is then the source of these decrees, rather an empty deictic gesture as Hitt would argue.
The remaining portion of the stanza is devoted to a larger exposition of the aspects of sublime nature that are aroused through terror in humanity. It is important to recall line 16‘s ―Power in likeness of the Arve comes down‖, as the glacier descends towards the valley, the subsequent destruction brought by it, and the river emanating from it. Here one has to separate Mont Blanc from the glacier and the river Arve that make up the ―emanated evil and the destructive elements of the mountain [which] are, in fact, not related to the mountain, which is the symbol of the inaccessible unknown Power‖ (Abroon 165). The Power, as always, remains ―remote, serene, and inaccessible‖ (line 96); it is not so much ―hostile [as] merely indifferent; if it destroys, it also creates – both with equal insensibility‖ (Hall 218). Thus, while Power remains inaccessible to the human, its ―likeness of the Arve‖ is an instrument of sublime nature that brings with it a beauty inspired by terror.
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feeling of dominance over the natural world, as given credence within Christian mythology, has no basis when confronted with the power of nature and the elements. This is reinforced by the metaphors present in lines 104-106, where it takes on shapes created by the human, such as ―dome, pyramid, and pinnacle‖ to create a ―city of death‖; architectural elements that are familiar to the human but, in this context, are twisted and used by nature. It is a negation of the human capacity to create and order a space for the organised self within the chaos of the natural world.
Out from the ―ice-gulfs that guard his secret throne‖ (line 17) comes the glacial river of Arve into the valley, and as the poem descends from the high Alpine glaciers towards the ―Ravine of Arve‖ (line 13) and towards the valley below, the power of nature to both create and destroy becomes more powerful. The imagery is that of overflowing banks and flash floods, where the Arve becomes the ―vast river [which] over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves‖ (lines 10-11) that has the power to breach the boundaries between the ―limits of the dead and living world‖ (line 113). This line should not be read as if nature has the power to negate ―the veil of life and death‖ (line 54), but as an exploration of the fact that that the boundaries constructed by
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That nature is also the redeemer is demonstrated in the last part of the stanza, where, after all the destruction it has wrought, the ―Power in likeness of the Arve‖ (line 16) changes to form ―the breath and blood of distant lands‖ in order to complete the cyclical timelessness of the natural world. Here, the river Arve changes its nature and demonstrates that what is a destructive force when it is just released from underneath the glacier, it becomes the more gentle river that nourishes the lower lying lands. The cycle of the natural world is then made complete when the river Arve, originally made up of molten snow and ice, hits the ―ocean waves [and] breathes its swift vapours to the circling air‖ (lines 125-126). The same air that forms the cloud that drops the snow, which builds the glacier, only to be released once again in the form of the river Arve; a neatly closed loop in which the natural world is the creator and the destroyer, the alpha and the omega of a ―faith so mild‖ (line 77), whose only demand is the reconciliation between man and nature. The proof of which is given in this stanza, in which nature has been demonstrated to be as powerful as the human and capable of destroying the artificial barriers set up between the two.
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of air-snow-water-air, have all been demonstrated to belong to the largest of all cycles, the one of creation and destruction, which forms the basis of that ―faith so mild‖, where Power remains ―remote, serene and inaccessible‖ (line 97).
This, I believe, is the basis on which the fourth stanza attempts to break down the walls between nature and humanity, because both have the same cycle at their base, a cycle governed by the unknown ―Power, known to the bodily eye only through its effects‖ (Hall 217) which can remain remote and serene because, like the ―everlasting universe of things‖ (line 1) it is subject neither to destruction or creation. Like the ascent and descent of the mountain in both language and place, the three middle stanzas of Mont Blanc suggest a division into the human, the natural, and the eternal, but has brought them closer together in order to demonstrate the interconnected nature of the whole, as everything that lives must die, and destruction is followed by creation. The only thing that still stands apart is the Power, which ―destroys [and] also creates - both with equal insensibility‖ (Hall 218), through which man and nature find themselves reconciled; they are both subject to the same cycle, and submission to the sublime, where the potential for
destruction and creation is greatest, is the way through which the poet-speaker has come to close to it, but can never fully grasp, its nature: a ―veil / robes some unsculpted image‖ (lines 26-27).
Section V
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nature, humanity, and Power still exists. That this power is imbued with the twin powers of creation and destruction is emphasised in the following lines, where its ―still and solemn power‖ is given power over ―many sights, and many sounds, and much of life and death‖ (lines 128-129); a reference to the forces of nature in the second and forth stanzas, where the natural world finds expression through the language of motion and sound. As demonstrated in the fourth stanza, life and death, the cycle of the natural and human worlds, is also within the domain of that which inhabits the top of Mont Blanc. This stanza is an examination of that Power and its relation to the human mind, which finds its culmination in the last lines of the poem.
Lines 130-139 concern themselves further with the ―eternal‖ (line 75) nature of the glacier plains and the mountain peak; there is no mention of either the seasonal changes, or the brute force of nature as in the fourth stanza. Instead, the poem chooses images that convey a sense of the eternal, where all is quiet and filled with snow. It is a timeless landscape dominated by descent of ―the snows‖ (line 131), which recalls the last lines of the fourth stanza, in order to fully
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This contrast between the valley of Arve and the Alpine glaciers is further marked in lines 133-139, where the controlling notion is the silence of the landscape, which speaks ―of the presence of a power that is not perceivable by the human senses‖ (Pierce 112). Unlike the valley of the river Arve, or the floodplains that run towards the ocean, ―the world of turbulent sounds and voices [stands] in contrast to the mountain‘s utter silence and solitude‖ (Abroon 160). The wind, which in the valley becomes part of ―an old and solemn harmony‖ (line 24), one that is perceived by the poet-speaker, is soundless as it rushes over the snows so close to the seat of Power. It is still ―rapid and strong‖ (line 136) but its presence is not marked by anything mutable, rather by a sense of the eternal: the snow will always fall here and be carried by the winds, and this high Alpine scene is not subject to the same cataclysmic changes inherent in the natural world below. It is still part of the natural world, but by robbing it of sound and motion, the scene does stand ―remote, serene, and inaccessible‖ (line 96). Through the removal of voice and sound, it comes close to that same place so close to the sanctum sanctorum of the second stanza, these lines portray a place where ―the voices of the desert fail‖ (line 28); only the desert is not of sand but of snows, and even lightning is made ―voiceless‖ (line 137). These contrasts between silence and sound, motion and stillness, serve to create a sphere apart from, but still connected to, the natural world below and give power to the idea that the glaciers beneath the mountain‘s summit are more closely connected to the Power that resides at the summit.
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The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! (lines 139-141)
Here, the speaker asserts that the human process of ―thought‖ is governed by the ―secret Strength of things‖, once again using a mid-phrase capitalisation that recalls both the ―Power‖ of line 16, and the ―Mountain‖ of line 132, in order to equate these images. Both the Power and the Strength inhabit the peak of Mont Blanc, where they dwell ―remote, serene and inaccessible‖ (line 97) from the cycle of creation and destruction below. Their dominance over both the natural world and human ―thought‖ is asserted by expanding its governance ―to the infinite dome of Heaven‖, which encompasses the whole of the scene placed below. The Power that inhabits the top of the mountain remains unknowable, but it has been granted dominance over ―thought‖, the process through which the poet-speaker has attempted to convey the image of the mountain in this poem through his ―human minds imaginings‖ (line 143).
If the previous three lines are read as an assertion of Power of human thought, then the last three lines, and the enigmatic question posed at the end of them, become a challenge to that Power, and a statement of the necessity of humanity‘s interaction not just with the natural world, but with the Power itself. The challenge lies in the question of:
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea If to the human mind‘s imaginings
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Here ―thou‖ refers to the Mountain, and the other images are also part of a more ―everlasting universe of things‖ (line 1) than the ever changing world of man and nature; the earth, stars, and sea are part of that eternal landscape that does not change with the seasons, but are part of the larger and immutable universe in which the natural world and humanity lives. This notion expands the question posed at the end not merely to include Mont Blanc, but the larger and inaccessible world inhabited by these permanent concepts. And it is at that moment that the poet-speaker asserts his own place within that scheme and demonstrates the necessity of human thought to these larger processes. Even though it is governed by the ―secret strength of things‖, it is still capable of nullifying all these large and unknowable forces through questioning their existence without the human mind – and the word adjective human ―bears a specific burden of humanistic assertion‖ (Hall 219) – to witness them. The ―silence and solitude‖ of the last line are part of the landscape of the glacier, as demonstrated above, and so the question becomes ―what would become of the glacier landscape, and the Power that dwells above it, if they were merely a ―vacancy‖ to the human mind? Their existence, while not reliant on the human mind in order to exist, would be unseen and unnoticed.
These last two lines portray the Power at the top of Mont Blanc and the poet-speaker in a balance that would not be possible before his ascendancy through the natural world. While the ―secret strength of things‖ has dominance over the human mind, so too does the human mind possess powers over it, through the existence of human imagination. The whole of this poem stands as a testament to that imagination, without which the Power may exist, but it is never given form or utterance. In these last lines, the Power and the poet come to terms with each other,
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with the nature of the Power that feeds the wilderness and humanity through the cycle of the seasons, creation, and destruction. In the end, the three strands identified in the first stanza - the human, the natural, and the eternal - are all demonstrated to be interlocking mechanisms, dependent on each other for their continued existence and survival. If anything, that should be the basis of that ―faith so mild‖ (line 77) that reconciles man and nature; a faith that accepts the creative and destructive processes inherent in the natural world for what they are, and
acknowledges the futility of humanity seeking dominance over the others, but rather preaches a harmonious co-existence.
Conclusion
―To write ecocritically means to make value judgments about the literature we study, value judgements based on a common concern about the exploitation and overconsumption of nature by certain human cultures‖ (Hitt, Ecocriticism 125). It is of course only after a full and close reading of the poem that one can come to any judgements about the way in which the natural world is treated within the poem. Through its intricate use of the connections between the human, the wilderness, and the Power that dwells apart, it demonstrates no ―profound
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of creation and destruction is part of both worlds, the poem shows that the destruction caused by nature, at the sight of which ―the race of man flies far in dread‖ (lines 117-118) becomes his salvation lower down the mountain. Thus, the natural world is neither enemy nor friend, simply something that exists alongside the human, affecting it and affected by it.
This then is that voice of the great mountain; the one that can ―repeal large codes of fraud and woe‖ (lines 80-81): it resides in the negation of an orthodox Christian mythology in which man is placed over the natural world and has been made master of it. By placing the human in a side by side relationship with the natural allows for an expansion of that notion into the realm of real socio-political consequences; for if nature is no longer a servant to the human, but part of our common experience, then the notion of social stratification is also in question. For if we can no longer lay claim to land, then at least some of the divisive barriers within human society can be overthrown, a thought not unknown to those who lived during the times of the American and French revolutions.
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―reflects what we might even be tempted to call, in hindsight, an incipient environmental ethic‖ (Hitt, Unwriting 158) that demonstrates the notion of equality between man and nature.
I believe that ecocritical scholarship deserves its place within the canon of literary studies, not only because it offers a mode of reading that complements current socio-political issues, but also because its very frame of reference exists all around us. The Romantic Period is full of writers and works that are easily suited to this type of reading; its fascination with nature and the role of the individual within it provide rich resources for any modern scholar, as exemplified by
Jonathan Bate‘s The Song of the Earth and Karl Kroeber‘s Ecological Literary Criticism:
Romantic Imaginings and the Biology of the Mind. The challenge, and I believe that it is one that can and should be met, is to expand its field beyond its traditional hunting grounds, including the Romantic period, and to explore periods and authors where the natural world does not have so obvious a presence. Perhaps the absence of nature within works centred in the city is in itself a statement about our attitude towards it, or one could read the cityscape as its own environment. I believe that the field of ecocriticism will go far in the coming decades, and will take up its place next to Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism as one of the main categories of important fields of literary studies.
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has allowed us to overcome and even destroy the natural world in which we live. The balance that Mont Blanc has sought to inform us about is being overturned, but if ―human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it‖ (Glotfelty xix) then does our destruction of the natural world also signal our own destruction? One can only hope that the growing global awareness of environmental issues prevents us from ever finding out the answer to that question.
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Works Cited
Abroon, Fazel. ―'Mont Blanc': Transcendence in Shelley's Relational System.‖ Literature & Theology 15.2 (2001): 159-173.
Blake, William. ―London .‖ Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology (3rd Edition). Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 200-201.
Economides, Louise. ―"Mont Blanc" and the Sublimity of Materiality" .‖ Cultural Critique 61 (2005): 87-114.
Erkelenz, Michael. ―Shelley's Draft of 'Mont Blanc' and the Conflict of 'Faith' .‖ The Review of English studies 40.157 (1989): 100-104.
Glotfelty, Cheryl. ―Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.‖ Ed. Fromm and Glotfelty. The Ecocriticism Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Xv-xxxvi.
Hall, Spencer. ―Shelley's "Mont Blanc" .‖ Studies in Philology 70.2 (1973): 199-221. Heise, Ursula. ―The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism" .‖ PMLA 121.2 (2006): 503-516. Hitt, Christopher. ―Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.‖ College Literature 31.3 (2004): 123-147.
—. ―Shelley's Unwriting of Mont Blanc.‖ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47.2 (2005): 141-166.
Kern, Robert. ―Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For? .‖ Ed. Branch and Slovic. The ISLE Reader, Ecocriticism 1993-2003. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 258-281.
McKusick, James C. ―Ecology.‖ Roe, Nicholas. Romanticism, an Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 199-210.
Pierce, John B. ―"Mont Blanc" and "Prometheus Unbound": Shelley's Use of the Rhetoric of Silence.‖ Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989): 103-126.
Rieder, John. ―Shelley's "Mont Blanc": Landscape and the Ideology of the Sacred Text.‖ ELH 48.4 (1981): 778-798.
Slater, Candace. ―Amazonia as Edenic Narrative.‖ Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground. n.d. 114-148.
