Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

“Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” written by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a 144-line lyric and ode consisting of five stanzas. The poem, written in iambic pentameter and no set rhyme scheme, gives the mental meanderings of an unnamed first-person speaker as they survey Mont Blanc and its surrounding landscape. Mont Blanc is the highest mountain peak of the Alps and rests in France, Italy, and Switzerland. A political and social rebel and historically controversial figure, Shelley wrote the poem in the summer of 1816 while he traveled to visit fellow Romantic poets George Gordon, Lord Byron with his then-lover (and future second wife) Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Godwin’s stepsister Jane “Claire” Clairmont. “Mont Blanc” was then published in 1817 in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, a collection of journal entries, letters, and other texts that Shelley and Mary Godwin wrote and then collected detailing their travels. The poem serves as a prime example of a text produced in the Romantic period of British literature with its focus on nature, the imagination, and the capabilities of the human mind. Traces of Shelley’s personal trials and tribulations can be read into the text as well, including the loss of his first child with Mary Godwin, his separation from his first wife, the passing of his grandfather, his financial woes, and the disconnect with his family and friends.