Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“Ode to the West Wind” 237Sudden, thy shadow fell on me:I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!I vowed that I would dedicate my powersTo thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?We should take him at his word, that this passage marks boththe beginning and the goal. Whereas other poets associated withsublimity, say Wordsworth or Coleridge, are content to accept thesublime moment when it comes, along the banks of the Wye or in theVale of Chamouni at sunrise, Shelley seeks and courts it, is homesickwhen he is not immersed in it, is inconsolable when it tarries afar.Depart not—lest the grave should beLike life and fear, a dark reality.When Shelley speaks of beauty or loveliness, he is speaking of theSublime, for beauty and loveliness seem not to be qualities naturallypossessed by the objects of Shelley’s appreciation, but visitations,sudden infusions of the divine into the material world. The coat is notbeautiful unless the sublime wearer is wearing it. Indeed, one might bebold to say that though there are innumerable things in Shelly’s work,flowers and odors and forests and crags, none of these objects is necessarilysensual—as they would be for Keats, or for that matter nearlyanybody else—but rather they are objects seized upon by the poet’s eyebecause they momentarily gleam with the sublime indwelling.Shelley writes “Mont Blanc” in the same year as “Hymn to IntellectualBeauty,” as apparently a sort of companion to that poem,or an investigation of its principles. That year, 1816, saw also thepremiere of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, worth citing as a calculating,sensual, wily, cultural bookend to the soaring sublimity ofShelley’s poem and to show how far afield Shelley worked fromthe popular conceptions of his day. Shelley’s ideas in “Mont Blanc”are not developed with technical precision. One looking to derivea systematic Shellyan philosophy from the poem will be frustrated.It is rather exploratory and speculative, and what it speculates on,basically, are the perilous qualities of the sublime. Approaching anydeity is fraught with danger, and sublimity is no exception. Scarcelyan image in the poem is not terrifying in some way. The terror of