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Reply | Forward Message #178 of 240 |
 

  There is a remarkable poem by P.B. Shelley which is very much relevant to "Sense of Landscape; in this case a "sublime" landscape and the feelings aroused in the poets mind in the best romantic tradition. It  was written in 1816 and titled:

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.

 

  In Shelley's own words: "the poem was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang."

 

  The poem is remarkable not only for its poetical merits but not less by its philosophical implications.  The connections with Kant and  Gilles Deleuze are explored in-depth in an Essay by Robert Mitchell called Romanticism and the New Deleuze (link).

 

   Mitchell concludes (quotes):

"Yet what makes this a poem—rather than simply a poetic restatement of Deleuze's philosophy—is that in its very presentation, as verse, it is designed to isolate and expand in listeners their own capacities for sensation, and it accomplishes this through its peculiar rhyme scheme" …"Shelley's poem employs irregular forms of rhyming—imperfect rhyme" …"the poem nevertheless "feels" like it is somehow between rhyming and blank verse". .

 

 The following  lines, from the third stanza, are, it looks to me, a good illustration of  Shelley's sense of that landscape:

 

           Far, far above,  piercing the infinite sky,

           Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;

           Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

           Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

           Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

           Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

           And wind among the accumulated steeps;

           A desert peopled by the storms alone,

           Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

           And the wolf tracks her there--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-demon 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 wilderness has a mysterious tongue

           Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

           So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

            But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

           Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

           Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

           By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

           Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

 



Tue Jul 1, 2008 7:43 pm

eddington7
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There is a remarkable poem by P.B. Shelley which is very much relevant to "Sense of Landscape; in this case a "sublime" landscape and the feelings aroused in...
eddington7
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Jul 1, 2008
9:20 pm
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