By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
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…
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…
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Originally published in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Public domain.
Analysis
Shelley’s alpine meditation makes the sublime a problem of cognition. Do mountains impose meaning on us, or does the mind project order onto the torrent and the rock? The blank verse thinks aloud, switching from declarative confidence to dizzying questions, as if the cliff itself required a grammar that sways.
The poem’s final query is not skepticism but creation’s charter. If “silence and solitude” are not empty, it is because imagination renders them legible. Shelley neither conquers the mountain nor dissolves it into dream; he maps the traffic between world and thought, where power is shared and knowledge is provisional.