The Mountain as Altar: Shelleys and Mont Blanc

“I think,” I suggested hesitantly, “that that,” I gestured, “is Mont Blanc.” Me and my friend Ed had arrived in Chamonix on a train, having taken a break from The Pilgrimage in the Alps to visit the most iconic Alp of them all. We were sipping beers a few steps from the train station. The mountains loomed above us.

I was wrong. Depending on where you are in Chamonix, Mont Blanc does not always appear as the highest peak. I was seduced by a closer, smaller, rockier crop that due to an perspective error looked higher to me. In fact, Mont Blanc hunches on the horizon. It has a rounded, snow-capped peak that looks less threatening than those that surround it.

We looked at an information board which told us the names of the different peaks. There was Mont Blanc. Once I knew it, it did look more imposing. I could adjust for the perspective and it seemed very high indeed. I prepared myself for the moment of sublime ecstasy that Shelley’s famous poem describes. It did not arrive.

I have been excited by the poem ‘Mont Blanc: lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’ for a couple of years. I must admit, wondering if I should be embarrassed, I prefer it to the mountain. Chamonix is an undoubtedly beautiful place; I very much enjoyed being there. Its just that there was no burst of emotion, no ecstatic vision, no popping of imaginative sublimity. What was I doing wrong?

The funny this is, I feel as if I have had moments of sublime vision on the trip. I feel like over the past two months I have come to understand the Romantics more and more. I have experienced feelingly in ways that have physically and emotionally overcome me. But not in Chamonix.

I don’t actually think this matters. Let me tell you why. I will take the long road.

People generally think of the Romantics as definitively English, perhaps British. The Lake District is, after all, Wordsworth country. Its important to know, however, that they were also highly European, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron. They all travelled extensively across Europe throughout their life. One of the most popular destinations, made so by Rosseau, was Switzerland and, consequently the Alps.

Wordsworth had been to Chamonix and wrote about it in The Prelude.

From a bare ridge, we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.

I don’t want to go too much into this description but I do find it fascinating in relation to my own experience of seeing the Mount. Wordsworth ‘grieves’ at the sight of the mountain because the reality of the image is dead and soulless. He preferred, it seems, his idea of the place.

This is quite typically un-Wordsworthian in some ways. Usually he finds nourishment from his natural vision. The reason for this might lie in the fact that Mont Blanc is a superlative. It is the highest mountain of Europe. It is something of a fairytale. It is an icon of the natural world and you know what they say about meeting your heroes.

Anyway, that isn’t what I really want to talk about. Mont Blanc became something of a hotspot for poets and travellers of the time. It was something that lots of people went to see and lots of people wrote about. Coleridge, despite never actually having visited Chamonix, was one of them.

His poem is called ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’. It is heavily influenced, to the point of being a partial translation, of a poem by a German Poet called Friederike Brun.

The thing that the two poems have in common is the same question followed by an answer. “Who made you?” “God.”

Here is a section of Brun’s poem:

Wem tönt in schrecklichen Harmonieen,
Wilder Arveiron, dein Wogengetümmel?

Jehovah! Jehovah! kracht’s im berstenden Eis;
Lavinendonner rollen’s die Kluft hinab;

[Whose name, O wild Arve [the river], does thy din
Of waves sound out in dreadful harmonies?

“Jehovah!” crashes in the bursting ice;
Down through the gorge the rolling avalanche
Carries the word in thunder to the vales]

And here some of Coleridge’s:

Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!

So, both poems are concerned with the idea of creation and creation being beautiful and creation itself worshipping. Indeed, Coleridge wrote to William Southeby that he wanted to write in ‘the manner of the psalms’.

This matters a lot. King David, mythic author of the psalms, is the arch-troubadour. He stands at the very root of Western poetry. It is, of course, easy to spot in the poem that Coleridge is not merely exhorting creation to praise, but is also praising himself. He is participating in a kind of universal song.

It gets more complicated, though. What about when we start to look at the poem as a created thing? Who is its creator? In his Biographica Literaria Coleridge writes the phrase:

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

[For the purposes of this piece we can fairly confidently read ‘primary Imagination’ as poetry.]

Here, the I AM, refers to God’s reply to Moses in Exodus when he asks what he should say to the Israelites. We read: ‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.’

The consequences of Coleridge’s claim is nothing short of laying claim to a portion of divinity. The Poet attempts to become like God in the act of imaginative creation. This attempt is an act of mysticism.

Mont Blanc is a site of huge beauty; it is a place where it is easier to conceive of the idea of creation. It is, therefore, a place where the ideas of poetry and creation can more naturally collide. In this, the contemplation of idea of creation is a method by which to arrive at, or attempt union with, the Divine.

It is not, however, the only method; finally, we arrive at Shelley. You may already know that he was a famous atheist, having been kicked out of university for writing a pamphlet called ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. Later, however, in his long poem Queen Mab, he writes:

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

I don’t fully understand what this means but I think it is quite important to recognize that Shelley was not an atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety. His notion of the ‘Spirit co-eternal’ is beguiling in what it allows and disallows.

Unlike Coleridge, Shelley did visit Chamonix. He was on a tour with Mary Shelley and her sister. Indeed, it is important to recognize that Percy’s literary reputation almost entirely survives because of Mary. She was his editor and I think it is more than likely that she had more direct input into his work than is generally recognized.

I am more scared of Shelley’s poem than I am scared of the mountain. I am filled with a sort of reverence for it. It is explosively beautiful and I will do it no justice at all. Here is how it 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—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.

Those eleven lines are a single sentence. The subject remains ‘the everlasting universe of things’. He uses an extended metaphor to describe human thought. This is quite difficult to understand because the metaphor grows so vast that it is unwieldy. We’re trying to imagine intense human thought but we’re actually thinking about Mont Blanc.

The rhythm of this section is also frantic. It can be scanned into iambic pentameter quite well but a natural reading produces something altogether different. Two examples. The alliteration in the second line ‘rolls its rapid waves’ disrupts the iambic pattern and persuades us to lend vocal emphasis there. Then, the enjambement between lines five and six is particularly fun: ‘The source of human thought its tribute brings’. This line scans perfectly in iambs, perhaps we have returned to order? But then the phrase spills onto the next line, ‘Of waters’, completely disrupting institutional metre. The aural movement is like that of the imagined stream, rolling and rapid.

This rhythm distracts us. Can we think whilst existing in motion? Especially since we’re supposed to be thinking about thinking. It has a fascinating effect on the metaphor. It collapses under the pressure and the mind and the mountain become utterly and inescapably entangled.

He starts to talk about the Ravine of the Arve:
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

When tries to think about the mountain he instead starts thinking about thinking. The two tangle and wrangle. What is most interesting about both of these sections if Shelley’s obsession with the ‘universe’. He is standing here, in a very specific place, in front of a very specific mountain and he is thinking about everything in existence.

He is more than just thinking about the universe; he is ‘holding an unremitting interchange’. The experience sounds completely exhausting and quasi-sexual. It is, I think, an interaction with what he terms the ‘pervading Spirit’.

Finally, in the third section of the poem the mountain is mentioned by name:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;
[…]
how hideously
Its shapes are heap’d around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr’d, 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 arrival of the mountain is actually something of an anti-climax. The whole poem is supposed to be about Mont Blanc but has been obsessed with this consideration of the universe. Therefore, the appearance nominal subject feels a bit peculiar.

Shelley sort of nods to the idea of creation found in Brun and Coleridge. He does so in a deliberately non-Judeo-Christian way. He dismisses what he quantifies as petty questions, telling us there can be no answer.

Mont Blanc also appears in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It and the Alps are mentioned several times. Victor Frankenstein runs away to the mountains on discovering the creature’s crimes. He climbs a mountain and we read:

The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty.

At this point in the novel, the Creature appears. Frankenstein spurns him, to which he responds:

I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. […] Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

The root of the word ‘creature’ is ‘created thing’. And, indeed, Frankenstein is directly compared to God through the reference to both Adam and Lucifer. Why, though, does this encounter take place in the midst of the Alps, with Mont Blanc towering overhead? It is certainly dramatic, and this shouldn’t be underestimated: the Mountain is where dramatic changes can happen. It also deliberately stages the scene in a place of enormous natural power.

Throughout the novel runs a terrible tension between the natural and the unnatural. The Alps are both natural but inhospitable. Indeed, it is a theme of all of the poems that they are both dangerous and beautiful. The scene takes place near Mont Blanc partly because it is coherent with a narrative of struggling against nature.

Frankenstein is also a novel about the science of the 19^th century. It is about a kind of creation altogether different from Imaginative creation. Indeed, in his Defence of Poetry Shelley is very certain to subjugate Reason and Science below the Imagination. We return to divinity:

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.

It is with this in mind that I want to take a final look at his poem ‘Mont Blanc’. In the final few lines he makes an enormous claim on the power of human thought:

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?

In the first three lines of this excerpt, Shelley is a little mystical. He seems to be talking about his idea of the universal spirit once more. The tone is even comparable to the panegyric of Coleridge and Brun. However, then he makes his pivot and asks the devastating question: ‘what would you be if we were not there to fill you with meaning?’

But what we understand from the Defence is that this process of thought is itself what is divine. It is not less than the environment but at the very least co-equal with it. The construction of meaning is what constructs all good.

The Alps are the result of millions of years of collision between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates. They are a crumpling of land. They are also gorgeous to walk through: staggeringly, breath-takingly beautiful.

And so, we do fill them up with meaning. We fill Mont Blanc up particularly. It can become the crucible of our thought, the locus of imaginings.

Altars like this are useful because they allow something to act as cognitive storage. If we put certain feelings in them we can be more confident that there’ll be there when we come back. Sometimes this happens with objects much smaller than a mountain. Often, size matters: we often store specific meaning within smaller things.

Conversely, Mont Blanc and the Alps, in their size, allow us to think about the biggest ideas of them all. Through them we consider the idea of the universe itself; they act as a giant portal into gigantism. The Universe becomes accessible.

The interaction is, as Shelley describes, one of full-minded engagement. We commune with the river that flows in all directions through all spacetime.

And, indeed, the altar itself is not necessary. Just the idea of it.