Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
SHELLEY'S POETICS
In his famous "A Defence of Poetry," Shelley argues that poetry is created in or immediately after moments of `visionary ascent to' (intuitions of) the eternal (the perfect, non-physical world). Poetry, he contended, is an attempt to render such intangible moments in words and images. As Perkins sums it up, the poet
only has the data of this world as expressive means, and using them he must attempt to convey something utterly different and ultimately quite ineffable. To the extent that he succeeds, he creates `Forms more real'-closer to ultimate reality-than the things we perceive in the world about us. But the forms art presents are only more real. Success is never complete. Words and images are only symbolic gestures pointing to something beyond . . . [which] may themselves only be symbolic of deeper symbols in a series that endlessly recedes towards the `deep truth' that remains `imageless'-that is beyond any real apprehension [by the human intellect]-and Shelley's poetry is shot through with despair not only of language but of the human mind. . . . The only way to surmount the inherent limitations of language is to use a . . . rapid series of images that, blending together, may suggest a whole of which each separately suggests only an element. (955-956)
The development of Shelley's poems is often characterised by an accumulation of images that occurs with almost breathless rapidity and results in an allusive and, thus, elusive complexity that is sometimes only with difficulty unravelled, not least in part because words in the physical world are inadequate to represent the non-physical realm.
Like Wordsworth or Coleridge, Shelley believed that social amelioration will not improve man: it is, rather, the other way around. The bettering of society will come about only in the wake of the regeneration of man. To accomplish this, the heart of each must be stirred to love and, thus, to do what is good and beautiful. (Plato's term in The Republic for the source of all life is the Good or the Beautiful--hence, the title of Shelley's poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.") To this end, art is the great instrument. As Perkins puts it, in a
rapt vision of the transcendent world, where alone man's aspirations can be finally satisfied, and sensitively responsive to all that is lovely in this world, an artist `redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' By thus calling the heart to an ideal, and by bringing about what Shelley . . . describes as `Transforming enlargements of the imagination,' artists and poets are `the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (956)
However, in order to encourage others to love what is good, as Plato claimed, one must first be able to know or identify what is the ultimate good. To know what goodness, beauty and, in short, perfection are, one must first be sure that man's knowledge is not limited to things of a purely physical nature (which are necessarily imperfect) and, thus, to that which is acquired via the senses (because the senses, as Plato argued, can mislead) but is capable, rather, of intuiting the non-physical, perfect world of which the physical world is merely an imperfect reflection. Hence, the importance of being sure of the existence of the spiritual world of Ideal Forms and the threat posed to Shelley's political aspirations (his evangelical yearning to change the world for the better) by the possibility that there is no such world beyond this imperfect one.
In short, Shelley quite adamantly proclaims in "A Defence of Poetry" a world view that, most critics agree, is decidedly Platonic. He claimed to intuit an eternal reality beyond the physical (what Plato would call the plane of Ideal Forms or essences) and of which the material world is merely an imperfect reflection. It is the poet's vocation, he asserts, to apprehend and represent this other, non-physical, ultimately better world in order to set an example, as it were, to other lesser mortals. However, the question arises: how can this optimistic viewpoint be reconciled with the atheistic Shelley who wrote tracts on the subject? Many critics are of the view that the contradiction derives from attempts by his widow to sanitise his reputation and to downplay his more radical views which, however, are difficult to overlook in many of his poems.
SHELLEY'S POETRY
In his poetry, Shelley seems to say (notwithstanding the occasional protestation to the contrary) that we can only glimpse that better world, however, whose existence can be surmised but never concretely and directly apprehended in the way that Wordsworth describes in "Ode to Immortality."
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":
Shelley points out here that physical evidence of the divine/the spiritual/the eternal is fleeting, unsubstantial and illusory. He yearns and prays to detect the presence of the divine in all natural phenomena but can never be sure. Indeed, there is an unresolved conflict or tension in the poem between its logical core (the assertion that Spirit can be detected in all things) and its local texture (his actual imagery which emphasises the fleeting and the intangible seems to contradict this contention). Hence, his allusions to the "shadow" (1) of "some unseen Power" (1) which "floats though unseen among us" (2). He describes this Power as "visiting / This various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower" (2-4). Repeatedly, the emphasis of his imagery is on the intangible and, thus, uncertain quality of evidence for the existence of the spiritual world: for example, note his comparison of the manifestation of God to a soft "light" (32) which is itself compared to "mist o'er mountains driven, / Or music by the night wind sent / Through strings of some still instrument, / Or moonlight on a midnight stream" (32-5).
Shelley's poetry is accordingly marked by a strikingly modern mixture of idealism, hope and faith, on the one hand, and skepticism, doubt, and despair, on the other. He oscillates between these two extremes, often seeming to conclude that in the final analysis all we can have is faith. "No voice," he writes, "from some sublimer world hath ever / To sage or poet these responses given . . . From all we hear and all we see, / Doubt, chance, and mutability" (25-31). As a result, he writes, "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart / And come, for some uncertain moments lent" (37-8). "Depart not," Shelley begs Power (one of his many synonyms for God/Spirit/the source of all life), "lest the grave should be, / Like life and fear, a dark reality" (47-8). This ambivalence of Shelley's can especially be noted, for example, in his description of "Power" (1), "Spirit of BEAUTY" (13), and "LOVELINESS" (71) as "awful" (1 and 71), that is, both awesome/awe-inspiring and terrifying/horrible. Shelley even makes two startling comparisons of God whom he likens to an inconstant lover ("Thou messenger of sympathies, / That wax and wane in lovers' eyes" [42-3]) and, bizarrely, to the darkness which consumes the light of a candle: "Thou-that to human thought art nourishment, / Like darkness to a dying flame!" (44-5), the latter being a strikingly different image of God who is compared by Wordsworth in the "Ode to Immortality" to something akin to a universal mind and to bright light. Moreover, candles are not traditionally assumed to feed on darkness--they are thought to dispel or do away with it. Shelley's diction is, in short, often characterised by a rather grotesque or unsettling quality.
"Mont Blanc":
Here, Shelley carefully scrutinises the same natural surroundings which Wordsworth does for evidence of the handiwork of Spirit or the manifestation of the divine. The sublime beauties of Nature both inspire and terrify precisely because he cannot view them with the same certitude concerning the existence of the immortal world of the spiritual with which Wordsworth does in poems like "Tintern Abbey," the Simplon Pass episode in Book VI of The Prelude where Wordsworth views Mont Blanc or the climbing of Mount Snowdon in Book XIII. Shelley begins "Mont Blanc" on an almost Lockean note, commenting that the "universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, / Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom-/ Now lending splendor, where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings of waters" (1-6). In other words, Shelley seems to say at this point of the poem that human consciousness (the mind, the self) is fashioned by its intercourse with everything external to it. By contrast to Coleridge, Shelley does not seem to think that human moods originate from within but are largely determined by circumstances originating from without. Later, Shelley sounds a much more Kantian note when he contends that the relationship of mind to reality is one of give and take. Looking on the rugged scenery before him prompts Shelley 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" (36-40). Shelley figures (or represents) the relationship between mind and reality by means of the metaphor of a noisy river or stream as a result of which he describes the human mind as having a "sound but half its own" (796).
(Significantly, Shelley never attains to that `egotistical sublime' which so many critics have remarked in Wordsworth, to be precise, the attitude exemplified by the Mount Snowdon episode at the climax of The Prelude when Wordsworth concludes on an almost entirely solipsistic note. Here, taking Kantian philosophy to an idealist extreme, he no longer speaks in terms of a mutual give and take between mind and external reality, preferring to see external nature, rather, as his own mind `writ large,' as it were: what he sees outside of himself is a projection of himself; the not-self has transmogrified into his self.)
Shelley's conceptualisation of the human mind is evidently prompted by his sight of the river Arve which originates high up in Mont Blanc but flows down through the Vale of Chamouny, as Wordsworth termed it, and ends up in Lake Geneva. The source of the river high up in the mountains and at a remote distance from the lowlands inhabited by men, becomes also an image of the distance between the physical/mortal and non-physical/immortal realms and of the abyss separating God from man (as opposed to the close proximity accepted unquestioningly by Wordsworth). Hence, Shelley's yearning from young, by his own admission, to discover "among the shadows that pass by / ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, / Some phantom, some faint image" (45-7). In other words, Shelley longs to discover some proof of the existence of the spiritual world of which objects in the physical world are alleged to be merely shadows. Shelley yearns to consider the river Arve as a symbol or "likeness" (16) of "Power"(16) or Spirit or God but all it affords him, by contrast to Wordworth, is a mixture of hope and despair: "The wilderness has a mysterious tongue / Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild" (77). The spectacle of Mont Blanc raises more questions, in short, than it answers. Indeed, Shelley's conclusions seem profoundly ambivalent by contrast to Wordsworth's firm optimism: "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 primeval mountains / Teach the adverting mind" (94-100). Shelley oscillates between triumphantly proclaiming that the "secret Strength of things / Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome / Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!" (139-141) and asking, almost with a shudder: "And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind's imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?" (142-4).
"Ode to the West Wind":
A similarly ambivalent mixture of hope and despair is also to be found in his other poems. For example, here, the wind is a symbol of Spirit (compare Coleridge's "intellectual breeze"). It is both "Destroyer and preserver" (14). Shelley compares his own self and consciousness to the leaves, the clouds, the waves and the lyre affected by the wind. The poem is also a prayer for relief (he prays to be uplifted like leaves etc. are blown by the wind) and a prayer for assistance in spreading his own radical political gospel--Shelley viewed poets as the `legislators' of this world.
Wordsworth's `Anxious Influence':
Clearly, the `anxiety' of Wordsworth's influence upon Shelley was a profound one, the latter `writing back to' or `abrogating and appropriating' the former. (Harold Bloom terms this process `misreading.') When Wordsworth `reads' the `book of Nature' he does not hesitate to find the meaning deposited there by its divine `author.' In Shelley, by contrast, the onus shifts from simply and unproblematically discovering evidence of or clues to its divine `author' and towards an acknowledgement of the role of the human `reader' who does not simply find but rather imposes whatever meaning on the `book of Nature' he wishes to. Wordsworth certainly sets the poetic and philosophical agenda or, to put this another way, he sets the terms of the debate which Shelley and others take up. However, what Wordsworth accepts so unquestioningly, Shelly simply cannot.
III. “Ode to the West Wind”: A Commentary by Ian Lancashire
In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley invokes Zephirus, the west wind, to free his "dead thoughts" and words, "as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks" (63, 66-67), in order to prophesy a renaissance among humanity, "to quicken a new birth" (64). This ode, one of a few personal lyrics published with his great verse drama, "Prometheus Unbound," identifies Shelley with his heroic, tormented Titan. By stealing fire from heaven, Prometheus enabled humanity to found civilization. In punishment, according to Hesiod's account, Zeus chained Prometheus on a mountain and gave him unending torment, as an eagle fed from his constantly restored liver. Shelley completed both his dramatic poem and "Ode to the West Wind" in autumn 1819 in Florence, home of the great Italian medieval poet, Dante. The autumn wind Shelley celebrates in this ode came on him, standing in the Arno forest near Florence, just as he was finishing "Prometheus Unbound." Dante's Divine Comedy had told an epic story of his ascent from Hell into Heaven to find his lost love Beatrice. Shelley's ode invokes a like ascent from death to life for his own spark-like, potentially firy thoughts and words. Like Prometheus, Shelley hopes that his fire, a free-thinking, reformist philosophy, will enlighten humanity and liberate it from intellectual and moral imprisonment. He writes about his hopes for the future.
A revolutionary, Shelley believed that poets exercise the same creative mental powers that make civilization itself. The close of his "Defence of Poetry" underlies the thought of "Ode to the West Wind":
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
The trumpeting poetic imagination, inspired by sources -- spirits -- unknown to the poet himself, actually reverses time. Poets prophesy, not by consciously extrapolating from past to present, and from present to future, with instrumental reason, but by capitulating to the mind's intuition, by freeing the imagination. Poets influence what the future will bring by unknowingly reflecting or "mirroring" future's "shadows" on the present. For Shelley, a living entity or spirit, not a mechanism, drives the world. By surrendering to the creative powers of the mind, the poet unites his spirit with the world's spirit across time. The west wind, Zephirus, represents that animate universe in Shelley's ode.
Shelley implores the West Wind to make him its "lyre" (57), that is, its wind-harp. "The Defence of Poetry" begins with this same metaphor: Shelley writes that "Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody" (§7). This is not just a pretty figure of speech from nature. We now recognize that poetic inspiration itself arises from a "wild," "uncontrollable," and "tameless" source like the wind, buffeting the mind's unconscious. Long before cognitive psychology taught us this fact, Shelley clearly saw that no one could watch her or his own language process as it worked. Like all procedural memories, it is recalled only in the doing. We are unconscious of its workings, what contributes both content and form, semantics and syntax, to our utterances. He writes that "the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure" (§285). This epic metaphor goes beyond the action of the wind on the lyre, the world on the mind. The wind's tumultuous "mighty harmonies" (59) imprint their power and patterns on the "leaves" they drive, both ones that fall from trees, and ones we call `pages,' the leaves on which poems are written. Inspiration gives the poet a melody, a sequence of simple notes, resembling the wind's "stream" (15), but his creative mind imposes a new harmony of this melody, by adding chords and by repeating and varying the main motifs. The human imagination actively works with this "wind" to impose "harmony" on its melody. The lyre "accomodate[s] its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre" (§8). In this way, the poet's mind and the inspiration it receives co-create the poem.
In "Ode on the West Wind," the `melody' delivered to Shelley is unconsciously expressed in the poem's epic metaphor, and the chords that his mind generates in response are, first, the repetitions and variations of that melody -- for example, the variation of the "leaves" metaphor -- and secondly, the formal order: the sonnet sequence imposed on terza rima, as if the tradition of Western sonneteering were imposed on Dante's transcendental vision. That Shelley echoes the metaphor-melody's points of comparison throughout "The Defence of Poetry" shows how deeply ingrained it was in his mind. To Shelley, metaphors like this, comparing a human being and the universe, characterize the prophetic powers of all poets. Their conscious, rational mind, in routine deliberation, observes and describes, taking care not to impose on the things under scrutiny anything from the observer, but comparisons, fusing different things, depart from observation. They impose on experience something that the mind supplies or that is in turn supplied to it by inspiration. In "The Defence of Poetry," Shelley explains that poets' "language is vitally metaphorical; that is it marks the before unapprehended relations of things" (§22). Shelley builds "Ode to the West Wind" on "unapprehended relations" between the poetic mind and the west wind. The experience in the Arno forest, presumably (why else would he have footnoted the incident?), awoke his mind to these relations.
If we believe that the unselfconscious mind is susceptible to the same chaotic forces as the weather, and if we trust those forces as fundamentally good, then Shelley's ode will ring true. Trusting instead in man-made categories like honour, fame, and friendship, Thomas Gray would have been bewildered by Shelley's faith. The country graveyard has spirits, to be sure, but they are ghosts of dead friends. No natural power inspires elegies or epitaphs. These writings reflect the traditional order by which melancholy, sentimental minds put order to nature. Gray quotes from many poets, as if asserting humanity's strength in numbers. Like Wordsworth's solitary reaper, Shelley stands alone, singing in a strange voice that inspires but perplexes traditional listeners. He cries out to a wind-storm, "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit!" Eighteenth-century poets like Pope would have laughed this audaciousness to scorn, but then they would never have had the courage to go out into the storm and, like Shakespeare's Lear in the mad scene, shout down the elements.
Even should we not empathize with Shelley, his ode has a good claim to being one of the very greatest works of art in the Romantic period. Its heroic grandeur attains a crescendo in the fifth and last part with a hope that English speakers everywhere for nearly two centuries have committed to memory and still utter, often unaware of its source: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Annotating editors have looked in vain for signs that Shelley resuscitated old phrases and other men's flowers in this ode. What he writes is his own. It emerges, not in Gray's often quoted end-stopped phrases, lines, and couplets, but in passionate, flowing sentences. The first part, all 14 lines, invokes the West Wind's attention in one magnificent sentence. Five lines in the first part, two of which come at the end of a stanza, enjamb with the following lines. Few poets have fused such diverging poetic forms as terza rima, built on triplets with interwoven rhymes, and the sonnet, contrived with couplets, quatrains, sestets, and octaves. Yet even this compelling utterance, unifying so much complexity in an onward rush, can be summarized and analyzed.
The opening three stanzas invoke the West Wind (in order) as a driving force over land, in the sky, and under the ocean, and beg it to "hear" the poet (14, 28, 42). In the first stanza, the wind as "Destroyer and preserver" (14) drives "dead leaves" and "winged seeds" to the former's burial and the latter's spring rebirth. The second and third stanzas extend the leaf image. The sky's clouds in the second stanza are like "earth's decaying leaves" (17) and "Angels of rain and lightning" (18), a phrase that fuses the guardian and the killer. In the third stanza, the wind penetrates to the Atlantic's depths and causes the sea flowers and "oozy woods" to "despoil themselves" (40, 42), that is, to shed the "sapless foliage of the ocean," sea-leaves. The forests implicit in the opening stanza, in this way, become "the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean" in the second, and "oozy woods" in the third. The last two stanzas shift from nature's forests to Shelley's. In the fourth stanza, he identifies himself with the leaves of the first three stanzas: "dead leaf," "swift cloud," and "wave." If the wind can lift these things into flight, why can it not also lift Shelley "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud" (43-45, 53)? The fifth stanza completes the metaphor by identifying Shelley's "falling" and "withered" leaves (58, 64) as his "dead thoughts" and "words" (63, 67). At last Shelley -- in longing to be the West Wind's lyre -- becomes one with "the forest" (57). The last two stanzas also bring Shelley's commands to the invoked West Wind to a climax. The fourth, transitional stanza converts the threefold command "hear" to "lift" (53), and the last multiplies the commands sixfold: "Make me thy lyre" (57), "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My Spirit" and "Be thou me" (61-62), "Drive my dead thoughts" (63), "Scatter ... / Ashes and sparks" (66), and "Be ... / The trumpet of a prophecy" (68).
Reading fine poems and listening attentively to classical music both give pleasure, but it comes for several reasons. We carry away a piece of music's theme or "melody," rehearse it silently, and recognize the piece from that brief tune. One or more lines from a poem give a like pleasure. Some are first lines: young lovers recall Elizabeth Barrett's "How do I love thee. Let me count the ways"; and older married couples her husband Robert Browning's "Grow old with me. / The best is yet to be" (from "Rabbi Ben Ezra"). Some are last lines: John Milton's "They also serve who only stand and wait," Dorothy Parker's "You might as well live," and Shelley's "If Winter comes ..." As often, lines from the middle of poems persist, detached: where do
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
"Home is the sailor, home from sea," and "Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed" come from? (Longfellow's "The Ladder of St. Augustine," Stevenson's "Requium," and Henley's "Invictus.") Yet a pleasure just as keen comes from appreciating how a piece of music or a poem harmonizes its melodies. The longer we read a poem, the more perfected become its variations of those lines that live in our memory. "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?", in this way, perfects what came before.
The West Wind is the breath of personified Autumn. When Shelley invokes this breath, "dirge" (21), and "voice" (41), he has in mind a fellow traveller, a "comrade" (49) like himself, no less a human being for being a season of the year, no less an individual than the "close bosom-friend" in Keats' "To Autumn." Two other figures recur to Shelley in the Arno forest that day. The stormy cirrus clouds driven by the wind remind him of the "bright hair" and "locks" of "some fierce Mænad" (20-23). He imagines the wind waking a male and dreaming "blue Mediterranean" (29-30). Like Shelley the boy, these minor fellow travellers help humanize Autumn and his speaking power. In the first section, Shelley characterizes him as "an enchanter" (3) and a charioteer (6) to make that personification vivid. Then, by repeatedly addressing the West Wind in the second person as "thou" and "thee," Shelley works towards achieving his purpose, his "sore need" (52). That would identify himself, not just with the leaves of the forest, the wind's victims, but as "One too like thee" (56), like Autumn, music maker, composer of "mighty harmonies." Shelley imagines himself first as Autumn's lyre but, made bolder by the moment, claims the composer's own voice with "Be thou me, impetuous one!" (62). He associates himself with Autumn, the "enchanter," in the phrase, "by the incantation of this verse" (65). "Ode to the West Wind," in Shelley's mind, possesses the wind's own driving power at its close.
Shelley's overreaching is not quite done. The Autumn wind does not create, but only destroys and preserves. It drives ghosts and "Pestilence-stricken multitudes" (5), causes "Angels of rain and lightning" (18) to fall from heaven, releases "Black rain, and fire, and hail" (28), and brings fear to the oceans. It is not enough to be "a wave, a leaf, a cloud," at the mercy of Autumn's means in the "dying year" (24). The last stanza disregards Autumn and its successor season, Winter, for the last of the poem's characters, Autumn's "azure sister of the spring" (9). Shelley anticipates that spring will "blow / Her clarion" (8-10) for a good reason. At the most poignant moment of recognition of the poem, in the last two lines we all remember and do not know why, Spring's life-giving clarion becomes "The trumpet of a prophecy" Shelley determines to blow. Though "dead" and "withered," though reduced to scattered "Ashes," he will return, his "lips" blowing the trumpet, like the voice of the Spring. In shifting from clarion to trumpet, he brings the poem's harmonies to a climax. "Ode to the West Wind" ends with faith in a poet's resurrection, not with a weather forecast.
IV. “Mont Blanc”: An Introduction. The relationship Between Humans and Nature in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc
There exists an unique phenomena about the natural world in that it possesses the ability to produce uncommon feelings and influence thoughts of an observer quite unlike anything else in human experience can. The poem Mont Blanc by Percy Shelley aims at providing an insight into what these feelings and thoughts are like which, for him, result from the particularly keen examination of a natural wonder, and suggests what we may be able to learn from nature and the mind as a result. Looking up at the glacier covered pinnacles of Mont Blanc from the Arve river valley, Shelley feels that this is "the still and solemn power of many sights," an unique sight where, owing to its extreme and imposing stature, the influential power of nature stands out in intensity. Since this particular sight affects his mind in a way that few others can, Shelley believes its significance warrants attention to each of the different parts that play a part in making it up, which hold great importance for him. In examining these aspects of the sight, Shelley, in Mont Blanc, gives us the conclusions he arrives at concerning the role they, and he himself as an observer, play in the general order of things and what the relationship between mankind and the natural world must be for this interaction to take place.
For Shelley the mountain is seen as having profound significance because it is a rare source of knowledge. It is his view that in the everyday world the mind can be considered at rest and unproductive in terms of being aware of any sort of transcendent truths about our existence, perhaps so overwhelmed and distracted by common concerns that it is unable to rise above the present situation. But "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." So it is sleep that enables us to transcend the constantly changing everyday world to attain, through superior thought, knowledge of fixed truths, being free of waking encumbrances. When pondering the mountain, however, Shelley remarks on how he feels a powerful sense of being in a sleep like state, writing, "when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange." Whether the mountain possesses the ability to "unfurle the veil of life and death" allowing him to receive the visions of sleep while awake, or whether it actually puts him in a dream state with "the mightier world of sleep spread[ing] far around and inaccessibly [in] its circles" he is uncertain. Whatever the case is, the all important result is that he still achieves a higher level of awareness. With this awareness, then, what is he able to learn from the natural world as embodied in the mountain?
Observing the natural processes taking place on and around Mont Blanc, Shelley feels that this is a living example of the cyclic process by which all reality comes into existence. He focuses on the way the process appears to begin with the glaciers at the top, looking "ghastly, scarred, and riven," a violent place devoid of any life. From them, through melting, small streams are constantly fed which eventually gather to form the river that, ironically, serves as the basic sustenance for all life in the valley. This river, then, after traversing vast distances, finally becomes lost as it dissipates into the ocean. The process returns to its starting point through evaporation which takes moisture from the ocean and with "winds contend silently there, and heap the snow with breath rapid and strong," thus replacing what was lost from the glacial peaks. The elaboration Shelley makes on the mountain's cycles and what is produced as a result is meant to bring to light the universal law of cause and effect. It must be taken as a necessary law of all existence by the observation that anything which exists exists only as a result of what conditions went before it. That the law plays a crucial governing role in anything a human may experience is clear, since, for in this particular instance, it is the river which makes possible what trees grow along its banks (which man depends upon for survival), and the glaciers which are responsible for there being a river are likewise dependent on moisture laden winds and so on. That humans themselves, who are parts of the process (though it may remain unclear to us exactly in what capacity, due to its extreme complexity), and their actions must also be subject to the law by necessity, makes the recognition of it of great significance.
However, a contradiction arises when we note that the human senses may not actually perceive the workings of this process taking place. We are unable, for example, to detect by simple observation such activities as evaporation happening, though we may infer it, or the exact origins of the mountain streams, which our common sense tells us nevertheless must come from the glaciers. Moreover, that two occurrences must be in some way in connection with one another rather than random or that a certain circumstance must necessarily always produce another is in no way a quality of nature given through experience. The former, which is a product of the latter, rests on the unprovable assumption that things will happen in the future just as they have happened in the past (since we have no knowledge of the future), so, though we may observe such processes taking place countless times, the evidence that it must necessarily be so is not to be found.
Therefore it must be the intellect which produces these concepts from observation by introducing an artificial link in the form of a law of cause and effect in an effort to better understand nature. But despite the fact that there is no supporting empirical evidence for this link, we still possess certainty that it is valid of necessity, since we observe that nature always conforms to it without fail. There must be, then, another guiding element in human knowledge other than experience that allows us to be aware of such laws.
We now arrive at what Shelley feels is the deeper significance of what the mountain represents—proof of an unperceived vital link the mind has with the natural world. The link rests in the mechanics behind existence in general, which Shelley illuminates by writing, "my own, my human mind, which passively now renders and receives fast influencings, holding an unremitting interchange with the clear universe of things around." He thus seems to indicate that not only is the mind a receptacle for exterior input, but also in some way plays a participatory role, passively influencing the universe while being influenced. But what would make it possible for such an unusual relationship to arise?
For him the natural world exists without and independently of us, but is something which we may never have knowledge of as it exists in itself. Only in this way can the opening lines "the everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves" make logical sense. The understanding, as limited and finite as it is, is altogether different from the infinite universe of which we are a part. All that we may be aware of, then, is what our understanding presents to us, so what we perceive is merely "ghosts of all things that are." So, being presented with such an infinitely complex environment, of which the mind may never by its very nature probe to its limitless depths in order to achieve a complete understanding, consciousness must order its perceptions according to something else which it has the ability to grasp. Thus, since it is beyond human scope to attempt to order our consciousness according to the workings of the universe, we must order the universe according to the structure of our consciousness.
That the mind functions in this way is by no means a superfluous condition of consciousness but a necessary activity in order for it to be at all. The universe just is in itself, requiring no appeal to anything else in order for it to exist. Consciousness, on the other hand, needs an object to be conscious of, regardless of what it is, for it to be; otherwise, we would have consciousness of nothing, which would be an unconscious. Therefore amidst any environment, even that of "silence and solitude" the mind must perceive something therein, unable by its nature to observe vacancy. The mind depends on the external things for its very existence and, by the way in which they must be perceived, the more that is learned about their particulars, the more is learned about the mind's structure itself.
That the universe is composed of actual things and that interaction occurs between them, we are not to doubt, but independently of human perception they are nothing to us, mere chaos as far as we are concerned, what alone has significance is the way in which the mind is made up that we may be aware of it. So it is no surprise that we observe the infinite universe displaying phenomena which occurs in a regular manner and following fixed laws, because if it did not, it could not be a part of a finite and orderly consciousness, and therefore not be an awareness in us. This is not a condition that nature must conform to so that we can know it, but the condition on which anything may become an awareness in the mind in the first place. Only by looking at things in this way can we account for the knowledge of such laws as that of cause and effect which arise through observation of the natural world, which leads to the conclusion that only through them may anything be an object of perception for us, since it is the basic form of understanding in general.
As a consequence of this take on existence, what Shelley seems to be particularly interested in exploring in Mont Blanc are the root origins of how exactly the things the mind has awareness of actually come about. Or, putting it another way, recognizing the law of cause and effect, what are we to make of the logical consequence of it, that is, the first cause?
An application of this concept to human experience may be found in the nature of thought. We know what the nature and results of our thoughts are. Consciousness, requiring an object, orders the universe accordingly to its structure spontaneously, thereby molding it to an object of possible experience for us. By examining our thoughts, then, we glean information about the universe in equal proportions with that of our own mind, but how does such a connection of extremely differing things take place, or, where does the thought come from originally? Is it in the objects of the universe themselves, or autonomously occurring in the mind? In the former case, we are at a loss to discover how this may be, since human understanding has no means to possess knowledge of the things in themselves. In the latter, the thought's foundation would be entirely subjective, having no relation to the object whatsoever, and thus would account for no concordance between several individual's thoughts concerning a single object, and should it arise, it need not be necessary. It is obvious that probing the origin of thoughts to this depth results in no concrete conclusions, yielding a moot point on either side. This is so because we have no other tool for discovering thought than thought itself, and so any attempt at an answer will in effect be aiming at stepping outside the bounds of thought to obtain a perspective on it, which is absurd.
As far as Shelly is concerned, the first cause which he terms `power', to us, is the unknowable and does not demand of us an understanding since it "dwells apart in its tranquillity, remote, serene, and inaccessible." All the while, though, instances of it occur on every level in the natural world, infinite reproductions to be observed in any process in experience. These examples of the first cause are inevitable consequences of anything which comes into being, since all in theory must follow the law of cause and effect. Though when it is observable by us it must be imperfect since, naturally, another cause will precede it (there being only one perfect first cause), but, as far as the human senses are concerned, we may find an appropriate example for the purpose of learning. While we may not understand the `power' which drives this process or how things originate, the examples in nature nevertheless let us observe it actually taking place, allowing an insight for us to conjecture about the nature behind it. In this way, thought not acting alone to discover its origins, something may be known about it by referring to the instances of first causes in general as they occur in nature.
What we find Shelley believes a profound clue to the origins of thought in Mont Blanc rests, again, in the mountain's processes, which are not only an example of the law of cause and effect but, more than that, a demonstration of precisely how thoughts come into being. Power, the mysterious force behind the first cause and the thing from which thoughts are born, "in the likeness of the Arve comes down from the ice-gulphs that gird his secret throne." The Arve river valley and our working imagination alike can be viewed as environments that humans inhabit and thrive in, but just as when we attempt to follow the course of the Arve, the valley's life source, to its beginnings in the mountain peaks we are at a loss since it is a place too violent to be understandable to us, where "the race of man flies far in dread," if we similarly try to trace a vein of thought to its obscure beginnings we become lost. So, in both cases what gives rise to man's environment is that which is formidable and inhuman. However, as the glaciers do not appear out of nowhere, relying on evaporation from below, so must the power behind thought be linked to the everyday world. What we must have then is a reciprocal activity taking pace, neither power or that which is presently in the world existing alone and independently, but each coming into being for and by the other.
Therefore, the phenomena of the natural world which has the ability to influence thoughts and feelings can be seen as a legitimate source of knowledge rather than incomprehensible mysticism. The trance-like state Shelley describes, then, on being presented with the spectacle of Mont Blanc serves as an indication that rare insights stand to be gained. By investigating the peculiarities of the sight, he obtains a clear picture of the workings of the natural world through witnessing the law cause and effect in action. It is the awareness of this law which exposes a seeming paradox inherent in existence of the first cause and origination of thought. Once in possession of these troubling notions, the mountain becomes an example for learning, so that they might be resolved. Consequently, we discover the vital link consciousness has with the universe of things. Finally, a conclusion is reached with the recognition of the reciprocal action between mankind and the universe whereby we find that, strictly speaking, the first cause must rely on something for its origination just as thought depends on the natural world. Only in this way, then, do we obtain an answer to the question of how such a learning process is possible in the first place.
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