Percy Shelley's Mont Blanc

Poets associated with the romanticism movement Like Percy Shelley and William Wordsworth were able to change the western idea of wilderness from something terrible to something beautiful. In his poem “Mont Blanc” Percy Shelley was able to give the reader a glimpse at his view, “Thine earthly rainbows stretch 'd across the sweep / Of the aethereal waterfall”(25-26). Shelley was clearly inspired by the beauty of nature yet he he also understood the immense power it held, “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” (84-90). He refers to the earth as daedal. In Greek mythology Daedalus was the father of Icarus and a skillful craftsman and artist. This shows he has an appreciation for the intricacies of the natural world. He also shows his understanding of the raw destructive power that the wild holds while simultaneously holding the power

Wordsworth was a member of the Church of England which gave meaning the the world he observed. Like Shelley he views nature as sublime and eternal but this gave him comfort, “I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man” (Wordsworth 93-99). Instead of placing humanity and nature in opposition Wordsworth views them as complementary parts of a whole. He sees himself as a part of the natural world, it is not an unknown force he must struggle against it is a comforting entity that he is a part of. Wordsworth comforted himself with the belief that all things happened by the hand of