Idleness and Vacancy in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”

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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” was first published at the back of the volume of travel memoirs he co-authored with Mary Shelley, the 1817 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Unannounced on the title page, though briefly described in the final paragraph of its preface, the poem is in some respects an odd presence in the volume. Its apparent immediacy, for instance, described in the preface as “an undisciplined overflowing of the soul” “composed under the immediate impression of … deep and powerful feelings,”¹ contrasts strongly with the retrospective calm of many of the volume’s prose narratives. Yet Percy Shelley’s contribution to the History other than “Mont Blanc,” his two long letters from Geneva and Chamonix, are characterized, in part, by a set of concerns to be found in the poem as well. When Shelley first encounters Mont Blanc, for example, the sheer force of the mountain’s presence generates a circularity of thought and a complexity of syntax that foreshadow the language of the poem:

—Mont Blanc was before us—the Alps, with their innumerable glaciers on high all around, closing in the complicated windings of the single vale—forests inexpressibly beautiful, but majestic in their beauty—intermingled beech and pine, and oak, overshadowed our road, or receded, whilst lawns of such verdure as I have never seen before occupied these openings, and gradually became darker in their recesses. Mont Blanc was before us, but it was covered with cloud; its base, furrowed with dreadful gaps, was seen above.

(History, pp. 150–1)

The repetition of the phrase “Mont Blanc was before us” here, containing within its bounds a kaleidoscopic impression of the scene’s “complicated windings,” recalls the form of the poem’s second section: “thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—/ Thou manycoloured, many voiced vale, … thou art there!”² Both descriptions are marked by a tension between the sheer solidity, volume, and stillness of the scene, and a simultaneous awareness of its intricacy and movement. Just a few pages on in the History, similarly, alongside further observations on the ceaseless movement of this scene’s “vast mass of ice” (“it breaks and bursts for ever”; “it is never the same”), we find Shelley toying with the possibility of personifying the mountain in much the same vein as the poem: “One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins” (History, p. 167). Importantly here, Shelley keeps this possibility at arm’s length; the phrase “One would think” stands at a considerable distance from the assertion that this is the case, that the mountain is in some sense alive, or god-like. Of course, the manner in which the poem both makes and backs down from this gesture has been thoroughly documented.³

In addition to these quite direct affinities between Shelley’s prose and verse accounts of his encounter with the Ravine of Arve, however, there is another, more tentative idea in his contribution to the History that can also be traced in “Mont Blanc,” and that opens up a way of reading the poem distinct from its recent critical appreciations. This idea, which emerges out of Shelley’s observations on the problematic tendencies of the idle mind, also allows “Mont Blanc” to be connected precisely to a tradition of thought, and to a subgenre of poetry, with which it is not normally discussed. This essay will seek to unpack Shelley’s thought on the idle mind—in the History and in “Mont Blanc”—and will thus read the poem as in sustained conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge’s most detailed investigations into the contemplative abilities and their attendant problems. The essay will argue for the poem’s clear and consistent generic consanguinity with a style of poetic inquiry that can be traced back to the “brown study” episode of William Cowper’s The Task of 1784. It will thus contend that “Mont Blanc”—in common with the “brown study,” and...