![]() ![]() In the lone glare of day, the snows descend In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, The still and solemn power of many sights,Īnd many sounds, and much of life and death. Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:-the power is there, Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,īreathes its swift vapours to the circling air. The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, ![]() Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,Īnd their place is not known. Of man flies far in dread his work and dwelling Their food and their retreat for ever gone, Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soilīranchless and shatter’d stand the rocks, drawn down Rolls its perpetual stream vast pines are strewing Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,įrost and the Sun in scorn of mortal powerĪ city of death, distinct with many a tower On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains The works and ways of man, their death and birth,Īll things that move and breathe with toil and soundĪre born and die revolve, subside, and swell.Īnd this, the naked countenance of earth, With which from that detested trance they leap Holds every future leaf and flower the bound Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Within the daedal earth lightning, and rain,Įarthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Large codes of fraud and woe not understoodīy all, but which the wise, and great, and good Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,īut for such faith, with Nature reconcil’d Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven.-Is this the scene Its shapes are heap’d around! rude, bare, and high, Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,Īnd the wolf tracks her there-how hideously Pile around it, ice and rock broad vales betweenīlue as the overhanging heaven, that spread Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Mont Blanc appears-still, snowy, and serene In dream, and does the mightier world of sleepĭriven like a homeless cloud from steep to steepįar, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Of those who wake and live.-I look on high Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,Īnd that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Some phantom, some faint image till the breastįrom which they fled recalls them, thou art there! Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, Now float above thy darkness, and now rest One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings With the clear universe of things around Now renders and receives fast influencings, I seem as in a trance sublime and strange Thou art the path of that unresting sound. Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,Ī loud, lone sound no other sound can tame Robes some unsculptur’d image the strange sleep Thine earthly rainbows stretch’d across the sweep To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging The chainless winds still come and ever came Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,Ĭhildren of elder time, in whose devotion Of lightning through the tempest -thou dost lie, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes downįrom the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,īursting through these dark mountains like the flame Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sailįast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine. Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, The source of human thought its tribute brings Now lending splendour, where from secret springs Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom. Shelley composed his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ during the summer of 1816, and it was first published in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which – beating Frankenstein by a year – was actually Mary’s first book.įlows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Percy Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is a classic example of Romantic poetry about the Sublime – an ode to nature as a powerful and beautiful force. The Romantics were greatly interested in a quality that Edmund Burke called ‘the Sublime’: that peculiar mixture of awe and terror we feel when confronted with great forces of nature. ![]()
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