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Percy Bysshe Shelley was among the defining English Romantic poets, and among the shortest-lived.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley composed Mont Blanc during the summer of 1816, the same weeks at Lake Geneva that produced Hymn to ...

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  2. To A Skylark
  3. The Cloud
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  7. Hymn To Intellectual Beauty
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You are here: Home » British/American Poets » Percy Bysshe Shelley » Mont Blanc


Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mont Blanc

Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
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,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
Thou many-coloured, many-voicèd vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear—an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;—
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene—
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;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.—Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply—all seems eternal now.
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.
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 primaeval 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 piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
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Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Related poem Ode to the West Wind Related poem Far Away Lewis Carroll Explores similar themes
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  • George Gordon Byron — personal (Close friends and fellow second-generation Romantics; lived together in Switzerland and Italy, influencing each other's radical politics and poetic…
  • John Keats — contemporary (Fellow second-generation Romantic whose early death inspired Shelley's elegy Adonais; both pursued intense sensuous imagery against hostile cri…
  • William Wordsworth — movement (First-generation Romantic whose naturalism Shelley admired in youth but whose political conservatism he later rejected in the sonnet To Wordsworth)
  • William Blake — movement (Both visionary Romantic poets who fused political radicalism with mythological imagination, though they worked independently and never met)
  • Emily Dickinson — Thematic parallel in explorations of power
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More by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  1. Ode To The West Wind
  2. To A Skylark
  3. The Cloud
  4. The Sensitive Plant
  5. Ozymandias

Literary Commentary

Percy Bysshe Shelley composed Mont Blanc during the summer of 1816, the same weeks at Lake Geneva that produced Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and the early chapters of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Where the Hymn addresses an invisible, elusive power, Mont Blanc fixes on something brutally visible: a mountain that dwarfs every human claim to significance. The poem opens with a metaphor that equates the universe of things with a river flowing through the mind, then turns to the Ravine of Arve and the glacier-scarred peak above it, testing whether the mind merely receives the world or actively creates its meaning.

The five irregular sections trace a tightening argument. In the opening, thought and nature merge in a single current. By the second section, Shelley stands in the ravine and watches his own consciousness respond to the scene, observing how perception shuttles between the landscape and the mind's own fantasies. The third section raises the stakes: the mountain appears above the clouds, surrounded by desolation, and Shelley asks whether some unknown omnipotence has lifted the veil between life and death. His answer is not Coleridge's confident hymn to a creator God but a refusal to settle the question.

Section IV catalogs nature's destructive and creative power with relentless precision, tracing the glaciers that demolish forests, overthrow the limits of the living world, and drive human communities into flight. Yet the passage is not despair. Power, Shelley writes, dwells apart in its tranquillity, remote and inaccessible, a force that does not care whether it builds or ruins. The final section gathers these strands into a single closing question: if silence and solitude were vacancy to the human mind, what would the mountain be? The question is genuine, not rhetorical. Shelley refuses to answer it, leaving the reader suspended between two possibilities: that meaning is a gift of the mind or that the mountain's power exists independent of anyone watching.

Among the major Romantic meditations on landscape, Mont Blanc stands apart for its intellectual honesty. Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey resolves into faith; Coleridge's Hymn Before Sunrise resolves into praise. Shelley's poem resolves into a question that remains open two centuries later, and that resistance to closure is what keeps it alive.

Key themes

  • The sublime: nature's indifferent, overwhelming power and the human response to it
  • Epistemology: the relationship between the perceiving mind and the external world
  • Skepticism and the limits of human knowledge about ultimate causes
  • The poet as interpreter who mediates between nature and humanity
  • Destruction and creation as inseparable aspects of natural force

Notable craft elements

  • Irregular blank verse with variable rhyme, mirroring the untamed landscape Shelley describes
  • Extended water metaphor: thought as river, the Arve as conduit between mind and mountain
  • Long, enjambed sentences that enact the breathless accumulation of perception
  • Strategic rhetorical questions that shift the poem from description to philosophical inquiry

Reread prompt

On rereading, pay attention to the final two lines: does Shelley's question imply that silence and solitude are vacancy, or that the human mind prevents them from being so?

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