Analysis of Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

I
     The everlasting universe of things
    Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
    Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
    Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
    The source of human thought its tribute brings
    Of waters--with a sound but half its own,
    Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
    In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
    Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
   Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
   Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
II

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine--
   Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,
   Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
   Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
   Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
   From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
   Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
   Of lightning through the tempest;--thou dost lie,
   Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
   Children of elder time, in whose devotion
   The chainless winds still come and ever came
   To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
   To hear--an old and solemn harmony;
   Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep
   Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil
   Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep
   Which when the voices of the desert fail
   Wraps all in its own deep eternity;
   Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,
   A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
   Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
   Thou art the path of that unresting sound--
   Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
   I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
   To muse on my own separate fantasy,
   My own, my human mind, which passively
   Now renders and receives fast influencings,
   Holding an unremitting interchange
   With the clear universe of things around;
   One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
   Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
   Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
   In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
   Seeking among the shadows that pass by
   Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
   Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
   From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
III

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
   Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
   And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
   Of those who wake and live.--I look on high;
   Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd
   The veil of life and death? or do I lie
   In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
   Spread far around and inaccessibly
   Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
   Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
   That vanishes among the viewless gales!
    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-daemon 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.
IV

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
   Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
   Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
   Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
   The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
   Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
   Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound
   With which from that detested trance they leap;
   The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
   And that of him and all that his may be;
   All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
   Are born and die; revolve, subs