Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

240Percy Bysshe ShelleyShelley calls the round of earthly time a “detested trance,” a loathsome,mechanical repetition from which the sublime is set apart:Power dwells apart in tranquility,Remote, serene, and inaccessible.One might wonder how much comfort there is in the inaccessible, butShelley means inaccessible to any approach other than the ecstasy ofthe poet.The raceOf man flies far in dread: his work and dwellingVanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,And their place is not known.This biblical citation of human vanity is immediately contrasted tothe caverns through which rush the secret streams of the mountains,which, if barren and ruinous, are at least spectacular. The weary cyclesof men come to dust and exhaustion, but the circles of the naturalworld, so long as sublimity indwells, are vast climbing spirals, in theinvisible heights of which lies meaning, if the questing human imaginationwould but persevere. Some things are disgusting in violence;other things are magnificent.“Mont Blanc” possesses a curious resonance with that most un-Shelleyan poem, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” for both allow, throughfaith, a fullness of comfort not attested by the evidence. Tennysonclings to God through a thousand demonstrations of his randomcruelty. Shelley clings to the sublime through awful implications ofthe savage meaninglessness of material things. Why does he do so?The concluding lines of the poem suggest a wistful longing and a faithwhose main support is imagination:The secret Strength of things,Which governs thought, and to the infinity domeOf heaven is a law, inhabits thee!And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,If to the human mind’s imaginingsSilence and solitude were vacancy?