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"Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni" is a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley composed between 22 July 1816 and 29 August 1816. It was first published in 1817 in History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, German and Holland by Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley.

Background

"Mont Blanc" was written when Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary Godwin's half-sister by marriage), were touring the Chamonix Valley and visited Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain, at the end of July 1816. Shelley finished a draft of the poem before September, and the poem was first published in 1817 along with History of a Six Weeks' Tour. The published edition was not printed from the first finished copy of Shelley's poem, but instead from a second created after Shelley lost. This edition, with many differences from the first published edition, was discovered in December 1976.

The setting of the poem and the place Shelley was inspired to write the poem is a bridge over the Arve River in the Valley of Chamonix in Savoy, near Geneva. Mary Shelley wrote that the poem "was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wilderness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feeling sprang".

Poem

"Mont Blanc" is a 144 line natural ode divided into five stanzas and marked with irregular rhyme. It serves as Shelley's response to William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and as a "defiant reaction" against the "religious certainties" oSamuel Taylor Coleridge's "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni", which "credits God for the sublime wonders of the landscape".

The narrator, when he looks upon Mont Blanc, is unable to agree with Wordsworth that nature is a benevolent force. Instead, Shelley believes that nature is a powerful force when he begins:

"The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters" - (Lines 1–5)

The narrator, in Stanza Two, turns to the Arve River as a representation of the conscious force in nature. The Arve River and the ravine surrounding the river increase the beauty of the other:

awful scene,

Where the Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;" (Lines 15–19)

When the narrator witnesses the power of the Arve River, he claims:

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate phantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding and unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around; (Lines 35–40)

He soon realizes that the river can serve as a symbol of a conscious power and a source for imaginative thought when he finishes the stanza, "thou art there!"

The third stanza introduces Mont Blanc and how the mountain is connected to the higher power:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears, - still, snowy, and seren -

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps; (Lines 60–66)

Although the power may seem removed from mankind, it can still serve as a teacher. By listening to the mountain, one can learn that nature is can be benevolent and malevolent, and good and evil comes from how our wills use nature:

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 reconciled;

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.(Lines 76–83)

Variations

The first published edition varies from both the copy found in the Scrope Davies Notebook copy of the poem and the original manuscript draft in terms of language and philosophical view. An important distinction between the text is in the first published edition's line "But for such faith", which reads "In such a faith" in the Scrope Davies edition, with the manuscript agreeing with the Scrope Davies edition. The critic Michael O'Neill emphasizes that the Scrope Davies's version "makes the more evident sense, though it possibly sacrifices some of the tension" while the first published edition's version "is cryptic and tortuous, and yet the fact remains that Shelley chose to print the poem with this reading in his lifetime."

Themes

The poem's main theme is the relationship of the human mind with the universe. There is a conscious force in the universe that the human mind connects to and is influenced by.

Critical response

Notes

1. ^ Reiman and Fraistat 2002 p. 96
2. ^ Wu 1998 p. 845, note 1.
3. ^ Bloom 1993 p. 293
4. ^ Bloom 1993 p. 294
5. ^ Bloom 1993 p. 295
6. O'Neill 2002 p. 618
7. O'Neill 2002 p. 619
8. Bloom 1993 p. 295

References

• Bloom, Harold. "Introduction" in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ed. Harold Bloom, 1–30. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.
• Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
• Jeffrey, Lloyd. "Cuvierian Catastrophism in Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Mont Blanc'." The South Central Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 1978) pp. 148–152.
• Kapstein, I. J. "The MEaning of Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'." PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec. 1947) pp. 1046–1060.
• O'Neill, Michael. "Shelley's Lyric Art" in Shelley's Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed., Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 616–626. New York: Norton and Co., 2002.
• Pite, Ralph. "Shelley in Italy." The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34 (2004) pp. 46–60.
• Reider, John. "Shelley's 'Mont Blanc': Landscape and the Ideology of the Sacred Text." ELH, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter, 1981) pp. 778–798.
• Reiman, Donald H. and Fraistat, Neil. "Mont Blanc" in Shelley's Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed., Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 96-97. New York: Norton and Co., 2002.
• Wu, Duncan. "Mont Blanc" in Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

External links

• Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 1816 poems