Beyond the Lines: “Mont Blanc” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

By Adam Sedia

In his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley described a poem as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.” His sweeping poem “Mont Blanc” is perhaps one of the best examples of Shelley putting his poetic ideal into practice. Its sweeping, grandiose imagery captures the quintessence of the Romantic ideal of the sublime as beautiful, and renders the poem a perfect case study to observe clarity of expression even through a heavy surface layer of imagery.

The first stanza 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, . . .

Here Shelley brings the reader from the broadest possible topic, “the everlasting universe of things,” unconstrained by place or even time, and frames it as thought within the mind of the observer. It is the human mind alone that contains the universe entire. Then he introduces the first metaphor:

. . . where from secret springs
The source of h…