The Mountain That “Walks Abroad”
By Professor Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey
8 July 2022
There is a fragment by Percy Bysshe Shelley that begins with an address to Mary: “Listen, listen, Mary mine —” (1).[i] The poem’s date of composition, May 4, 1818, was added when the fragment was given a title “Passage of the Apennines” and included in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Mary Shelley and published in 1824.[ii] The scene of the poem is at a solitary inn where the Shelleys spent a night when crossing the Apennine and going from Bologna to Pisa. In the middle of the night, Shelley is whispering to Mary: “Listen, listen, Mary mine —” (1).[iii] A dash at the end of the line suggests that Shelley waits for her to be ready to hear what he is actually hearing or what he is hearing in (nightmarish) imagination: “the whisper of the Apennine —” (2). A repeated dash at the end of the second line heightens a feeling of tension in the listener of catching the faintest sound in nature. The following line, however, introduces a dramatic change from the “whisper” to the deafening “roar” of thunder and raging waves:
It bursts on the roof like the thunder’s roar
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow
By the captives pent in the cave below,
And raves up the stairs with a long shrill howl. (3-7)
The use of the third person singular “It” contributes to the materialization of the “whisper” as a gigantic life-form that “bursts” and “raves” (2, 3, 7). Its loud “whisper” is comparable to the raging wind or waves.
The sublime soundscape on a distant northern shore discontinues the mode of conversation poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” in which Coleridge directs the listeners’ attention to “[t]he owlet’s cry / [which] Came loud” and to the imaginary night scene of the neighboring area of “[s]ea, and hill, and wood, / With all the numberless goings on of life / Inaudible as dreams!” (2-3, 11-13). Instead, Shelley’s “whispering” of the imaginary scene brings us back to the Alps in 1816, tempting us to hear two faint echoes across time and space: Mary’s Frankenstein and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816).[iv]
“It” in the third line of “Listen, listen, Mary mine,” when going “up the stairs with a long shrill howl,” can be connected imaginarily to a possible return of the nameless being Victor Frankenstein created secretly in his room (3, 7). Immediately after it opened its eye, Victor “rushed out of the room” into his “bed-chamber” (Frankenstein 40). When his creature “held up the curtain of the bed” and tried to detain him, Victor “escaped, and rushed down stairs” to the court-yard, where “I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (Frankenstein 40).
Frankenstein, published probably on January 1, 1818,[v] was conceived when Byron, Polidori, Shelley, and Mary Godwin gathered at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. In the “Introduction” to the 1831 Frankenstein, Mary recalls that “a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house” (Frankenstein 176). They were reading some ghost stories translated from German to French, and Byron proposed that each of them should “write a ghost story” and “his proposition was acceded to” (177). Mary continues:
Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. (177-78)
It is generally agreed that the “one founded on the experiences of his early life” is an untitled fragment beginning with “A shovel of his ashes took” which immediately follows the fair copy of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (“Headnote to ‘A shovel of his ashes’” PS 1:518). Indeed, Shelley was not good at inventing “the machinery of a story,” but there is a passage “founded on the experiences of his early life” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: while “yet a boy,” he “sought for ghosts, and sped / Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, /And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing / Hopes of high talk with the departed dead” (49, 50-52). Shelley wrote two excellent poems on supernatural visitations of “Power” this summer: “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” in which Shelley wanted to hear a mysterious “voice” of the “great Mountain” (“Mont Blanc” 80).
There is no mention of a storm or thunder in Mary’s journal entry on May 4, 1818, nor in Shelley’s letter to Peacock written on June 5 that reports their journey across the Apennines to Pisa.[vi] If the strong wind had not been blowing at that night, we could hear across time and space a subtle echo in the “whisper of the Apennine” that “bursts” and “raves” from the opening of “Mont Blanc”: “a vast river / Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves” (10-11). The “mighty mountain” that “between the earth and sky doth lay[vii]” is an Italian counterpart of the “great Mountain” to which Shelley addressed and whose “voice” he wanted to understand (“Listen, listen, Mary mine” 9-10; “Mont Blanc” 80).
Michael O’Neill, who prepared the commentaries for the Scrope Davies Notebook in the third volume of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, mentions two detached draft fragments for lines 80-82. The second is a later version of the first on a loose single leaf, torn from Bod. MS.Shelley adds.e.16.
There is a voice not understood by all
Sent from these icy desert caves,: this solitude
Of endless pines [?w] / that to the lightest call
Of the wild winds responds, It is / It is the roar
Of the rent ice cliff which the sunbeams call
Plunge into the vale? it/s it the blast wind
Descending on the pines ?—the torrents [? pour]
is/t is a rock
yon
(CPPBS 3:499)[viii]
A voice from the Mountain may be heard in torrents issuing from icy caves, strong winds in the mountain, or thundering “roar” of avalanches. Shelley says in “Mont Blanc” that the mountain’s voice is “not understood / By all, but which the wise, and the great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel” (81-83). If it is not understood by all, who Shelley would have thought could understand or interpret or feel it with him? We wonder if he had asked Mary to listen to the mountain’s voice when they were at Pont Pellisier, looking toward the unseen summit of the mountain. In 1818, it is clearly written in the text whom Shelley wanted to listen to the voice of the mountain together.
According to Mary’s recollection, most of the conversations at Diodati were between Byron and Shelley, and Mary was “a devout but nearly silent listener” (“Introduction” to the 1831 Frankenstein,” Frankenstein 179). While writing and revising Frankenstein in collaboration with Shelley, however, Mary may have turned from a silent and passive listener to an active listener and participant. At the same time, Shelley may have also benefitted from Mary with whom he could share literary activities and intellectual climate. Charles E. Robinson, who edited The Frankenstein Notebooks, emphasizes the Shelleys’ “shared activities as creative artists” (lxvii).[ix] Fragmentary as it is, “Listen, listen, Mary mine” marks Shelley’s early attempt to write a ghost story in verse with Mary as an active listener/critic to whom he can confide his imaginings. Their shared activities on the gothic front culminate in “The Witch of Atlas.”
In “Listen, listen, Mary mine,” “the whisper of the Apennine” is first compared to “the thunder’s roar” by the use of “like” (2, 3). Then a more complex simile is introduced by the second use of “like,” taking us to “the sea on a northern shore” and making us hear the “raging ebb and flow” with “the captives pent in the caves below” (4, 5, 6). The expectations of hearing a frightening story of “the captives pent in the caves below” are raised but not developed, as the first word of the following line, “And,” is not placed within the second simile (7). What the coordinate conjugation connects is the verbs in the third and the seventh lines, “bursts” and “raves,” jumping over and ignoring the two similes (7, 3). Moreover, the first stanza ends at line 7, followed by the second and last stanza that begins with a new description of the Apennine, without explaining “a long shrill howl,” which sounds like an animal or a monster. (7).
The adjective “shrill” in “a long shrill howl” looks forward to another “shrill” sound that Shelley would hear in two years: “Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight” and “All the earth and air / With thy voice is loud” (“To a Sky-Lark” 20, 26-27). The second volume of The Poems of Shelley, based on Nbk 5,[x] presents the text of the fragment as consisting of two seven-line stanzas, omitting “Like” after the seventh line as an uncanceled false start and leaving a line space. On the other hand, the seventh volume of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley presents the fragment as continuous fifteen lines with the incomplete eighth line:
Listen, listen, Mary mine—
’Tis the whisper of the Apennine—
It bursts on the roof like thunder’s roar
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow
By the captive pent in the cave below
And raves up the stairs with a long shrill howl
Like [
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the Erath and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
In the dim starlight there is spread
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm
Shrouding
(CPPBS 7:115-16)
The CPPBS editors “think it begins a line intended to complete the couplet” and also point out that Shelley tried to introduce “like” in the third line[xi] and the tenth line[xii] (CPPBS 7:537-38). It follows from those canceled “like”s that Shelley may have wanted to use a series of similes introduced by “like.” In this line of argument, the “Like” after the seventh line is considered as a canceled attempt to introduce the third simile. Though aborted here, an attempt to introduce a series of similes to interpret the sounds of an unseen being is exactly what Shelley tries to do in “To a Sky-Lark.”
Mary writes in her “Note on the Poems Written in 1820”:
It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.[xiii]
“To a Sky-Lark” was written when Shelley, Mary, and Clare stayed at Casa Ricci, John and Maria Gisborne’s house, in Leghorn (Livorno). In the poem, there is a clear distinction between the first-person singular “I” (the narrating poet Shelley) and the first-person plural “we,” who broadly refers to humankind, including Shelley and Mary, but more narrowly to narrating Shelley and Mary who listens. It is not certain whether an evening walk that inspired Shelley to write “To a Sky-Lark” was solitary or accompanied by Mary, as she retrospectively recorded in the “Note on the Poems Written in 1820,” but it is possible to see the presence of Mary as an intended listener in the poem.
The first stanza of “Listen, listen, Mary mine” could have been developed to be a lyric like “To a Sky-Lark” by accumulating a series of similes catching characteristics of the “whisper of the Apennine.” As I have said, however, Shelley changes the tone dramatically after the false start after the seventh line, shifting his focus from the whisper of the Apennine to the mountain itself. The second stanza presents the Apennine “in the light of day” and the Apennine at night in stark contrast. The Apennine during the day is “a mighty mountain dim and grey” that lies “between the earth and sky” (“Listen, listen, Mary mine” 9, 10).
If the possible composition of the fragment may have been later, sometime after July up to early September, as is suggested by Crook (CPPBS 7:536), a “mighty mountain dim and grey” may reflect what Shelley observed when Shelley and Mary took a riding excursion to Prato fiorito (“Listen, listen, Mary mine” 9). Mary’s journal entry on June 30, 1818 reads: “Go with S. on horseback to il prato fiorito—a flowery meadow at the top of one of the high Apennines” (JMS 216). Shelley reports the trip at length in a letter to John and Maria Gisborne written on July 10:
We have ridden—Mary & I—once only to a place called Prato fiorito on the top of the mountains—the road winding thro forests, & over torrents, & on the verge of green ravines affords scenery magnificently fine….I take great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere here, & the growth of the thunder showers with which the noon is often overshadowed, & which break & fade away towards evening into flocks of delicate clouds. Our fireflies are fading away fast, but there is the planet Jupiter who rises majestically over the rift in the forest-covered mountains to the south, & the pale summer lightning which is spread out every night at intervals, that when the fire flies go out the low flying owl may see her way home.— (LPBS 2:20).
The “mighty mountain dim and grey” in the fragment may be influenced by the changing atmosphere of the high region observed by Shelley observed on Prato fiorito in June (“Listen, listen, Mary mine” 9).
The Apennine that “between the Earth and sky doth lay” during the day and “walks abroad” at night when a chaos dread / On the dim starlight then is spread” poses a question of how it is different from Mont Blanc (10, 11-12). In “Mont Blanc” the mountain “lie[s]” on the earth, “piercing the infinite sky” and having “a voice,” though it never answers Shelley’s questions (19, 60, 80). In his long journal letter to Peacock, Shelley wrote that he felt Mont Blanc as “a living being” whose “frozen blood forever circulated slowly thro’ his stony veins” (LPBS 1:500).[xiv] In contrast to the silent and cold Mont Blanc, the Apennines walks, and rocks among the mountains sing morning hymns to which the narrating poet listens in “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818”:
‘Mid the mountains Euganean
I stood listening to the paean
With which the legioned rocks did hail
The sun’s uprise majestical. (70-73)
At high noon, there is a momentary appearance of a personified mountain range in the south: “the line / Of the olive-sandalled Apennine / In the south dimly islanded” (305-7).[xv] The Apennine wears sandals and gets ready to walk. In the final section of the poem, the narrator wishfully thinks that “[o]ther flowering isles” in the “sea of life and agony” are “waiting” for “my bark” and hopes to see “the earth grow young again” (335, 336, 341, 373).
In August 1820, Shelley made a two-day solitary walking tour to Mountain San Pellegrino, a peak in the Apennine. Upon coming back, he set to write “The Witch of Atlas” and completed it within three days. The title of the dedicatory poem “To Mary (on her objecting to the following poem, upon the score of its containing no human interest)” and its opening address to “my dear Mary” suggest that Shelley may have shown the draft of the poem to Mary or have told the concept of the poem after he came back from his walking tour (1). Here, Mary was no longer “a devout but nearly silent listener” that she was at Diodati in 1816 (Frankenstein 179). Shelley and Mary’s literary dialogue, whether in actual conversations or written into the text, were behind the composition of “The Witch of Atlas.” The Apennine that “walks abroad” at night goes literally “abroad” to Africa, changing itself into Mount Atlas (“Listen, listen, Mary mine”14). According to Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who was ordered to support the heavens by Zeus. In Shelley’s poem, “one of the Atlantides,” a daughter of Atlas, was inseminated by the Sun’s kiss and transformed into “one of those mysterious stars / Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars” (“The Witch of Atlas” 57, 71-72).
A newly generated and immediately orphaned embryo in the shape of “a dewy splendor” is “hidden” in the “cave” of Mount Atlas (78). It is surprising that the embryo makes Atlas androgynous, transforming its “cave” into a womb. When “the Mother of the Months” bent her bows “[t]en times” and bade “the billows to indent / The sea-deserted sand,” “a dewy splendor” in the cave “[t]ook shape and motion: with the living form / Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm” (73, 75-76, 78, 79-80). The “enwombed rocks” in the Atlas mountains “brought forth so beautiful a birth,” and the Witch of Atlas creates “a fair Shape out of her hands” (126, 127, 325). The creation of the beautiful creature by the female Witch and her naming of it as “Hermaphroditus” are Shelley’s poetic response to Mary’s modern Prometheus, Victor, and his nameless monster (388).[xvi] The female protagonist molds the “repugnant mass” with “liquid love” (322, 323). The resultant being is born “sexless, but it grows to be androgynous (329):
It seemed to have developed no defect
Of either sex, yet all the grace of both—
In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked;
The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth— (330-33)
The androgynous mountain with the female Power who creates beautiful Hermaphroditus embodies a new type of Mount Glory that celebrates diversity.
The mountain in the second stanza of “Listen, listen, Mary mine,” which walks shrouded by the storm under “the dim starlight” obscured by “a chaos dread” (12, 11) , is personified as a male deity and considered as a Mountain Gloom.[xvii] We are not sure how “the olive-sandalled Apennine” that is seen far away in the south is gendered (“Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818” 306). What seems to be certain, however, is that between “Mont Blanc” and “The Witch of Atlas,” Shelleyan mountains are infused with a new life, going through a complex gendering. In that process Shelley may have asked Mary many times: “Listen, listen, Mary mine” in their conversations, in their texts, and in the imagination. “The Witch of Atlas” is a Shelleyan kind of ghost story in “a visionary verse,” which does contain human interest (Dedication “To Mary” 8).
Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey is a professor in the Department of Area Studies at the University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus. She is the author of Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Developments and Romantic Geography (U of Toronto P, 2009; 2020) and the editor/translator of Selected Poetry of Shelley: Bilingual Edition (Iwanami, 2013). She is currently working on a book manuscript on Poetics of Romantic Strangership.
Bibliography
Alvey, Nahoko Miyamoto. Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Development and Romantic Geography. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009.
Bari, Shahidha. “Lyrics and Love Poems: Poems to Sophia Stacy, Jane Williams, and Mary Shelley.” The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Michael O’Neill, et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 375-90.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. Eds. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004.
Crook, Nora. “Chronology of Life and Work.” The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley: Vol.1. Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus. Ed. Nora Crook. London: Pickering, 1996. lxxv-lxxxv.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “Romantic Context.” The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein. Ed. Andrew Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 41-55.
Mercer, Anna. The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. 1963. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997.
Robinson, Charles E. “Introduction.” The Frankenstein Notebooks: Part One Draft Notebook A. Ed Charles E. Robinson. New York: Garland, 1996. lvii-lxxv.
Shelley, Mary. Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
---. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley: Vol.1. Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus. Ed. Nora Crook. London: Pickering, 1996.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Eds. Donald H. Reiman, et all. Vols.1-3, 7 to date. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000-.
---. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964.
---. The Poems of Shelley. Ed. Geoffrey Matthews and et al. 4 vols. to date. London: Longman, 1989-.
---. Shelley: Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Corrected by G. M. Matthews. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.
[i] References to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry are to The Poems of Shelley, edited by Geoffrey Matthews et al. (abbreviated as PS). I am also very much indebted to The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Donald Reiman et al.(abbreviated as CPPBS). For a view of this work as “a sonnet, unusually split into septets of varying line length,” see Bari 387.
[ii] May 4, 1818 was the fourth anniversary of the first meeting of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin in 1814. Nora Crook, the volume editor of Volume 7 of CPPBS, considers the composition date can be extended to late August and early September (CPPBS 7:536).
[iii] Following Jerrod E. Hogle, I use “Shelley” for Percy Bysshe Shelley and “Mary” for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, née Godwin, because that is how Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley referred to Percy Bysshe Shelley and herself in her journal and letters (Hogle 41).
[iv] References to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus are to the first edition in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley: Vol.1. Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus, edited by Nora Crook and introduced by Betty T. Bennett (abbreviated as Frankenstein ).
[v] Nora Crook, “Chronology of Life and Work” (Frankenstein lxxvii). Mary wrote in her journal that “Fran[kens]tein comes” on December 31, 1817 (The Journal of Mary Shelley, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert [abbrfeviated as JMS], 189). This entry shows that the book was printed before December 31.
[vi] JMS, 208; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Frederick L. Jones (abbreviated as LPBS), 2:18.
[vii] Everest and Matthews note that “[s]till in 1818 an acceptable alternative for lie (LED Lay vii 43)” (PS 2: 352).
[viii] See also PS 1:533-34.
[ix] For the Shelleys’ collaborative activities, see Anna Mercer’s The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
[x] Bod.MS Shelley e.4: November 1817 through June 1817, f.41v rev. (PS 2:351).
[xi] “It bursts…roar: replaced “How it howls up the along the ruined stairs | Like.” (CPPBS 7: 537).
[xii] “Is: above Like a Bod BSM” (CPPBS 7: “Primary Collations” 116).
[xiii] Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews (abbreviated as SPW), 635.
[xiv] This part was written on July 25, 1816.
[xv] Everest and Matthews note: “The Apennine Mountain with olive-groves at their feet. Ancient Greek sandals had olive-wood soles” (PS 2:441).
[xvi] See also Alvey 145-80.
[xvii] For the definition and excellent discussion of mountain gloom and mountain glory, see Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory.