Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

238Percy Bysshe Shelleythe sublime is payment for extended association with it, for one isat length sure to see that under every mountain is the fire of theunderworld, and every soul-filling storm wreaks havoc elsewhere.The powers of the mountain are “Now dark—now glittering—nowreflecting gloom—” and when there is finally a full-fledged personificationit is “Power in likeness of the Arve” come down “From theice gulfs that gird his secret throne.”Ruin, death, convulsion, and commotion are ubiquitous. Thoughnot even Shelley could think of these things as lovely or desirableon their own, they become so because of the dwelling in them ofthe power which is governing and creating the awful splendor of themountain. Like beauty, terror is fully transfigured when it becomes thegarment of the sublime. In the first two verse paragraphs of the poem,the poet ransacks the shattered evidence of nature unleashed for proofof its spiritual component, for proof of a governing soul, and finallyfinds it at line 45:Seeking among the shadows that pass by,Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,Some phantom, some faint image; till the breastFrom which they fled recalls them: thou art there!The clear implication is that without the sublime, without the inhabitingspirit of beauty, the Alps would be what they seem, a terrifying, ifpicturesque, wilderness of death and futile expense of energy. In stanzathree, Shelley is very direct:I look on high:Has some unknown omnipotence unfurledThe veil of life and death? Or do I lieIn dream, and does the mightier world of sleepSpread far around and inaccessiblyIts circles? For the very spirit fails,Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep . . .The final justification of the labor of cognition is the discovery, behindthe apparent terrible chaos of things, of a transcendent spirit. Thehorror and dread of succeeding lines, the earthquake demons and theeagles with the hunters’ bones in their claws, are mitigated by the hope