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,” (84-87).
Edmund Burke differentiates the sublime from beauty. The sublime is a combination of elements that invoke fear and simultaneously, wonder. One passage that exemplifies the sublime is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc. The key lines are located in the beginning of Stanza 4, “Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, / Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,” (86-87). In it, Shelley is demonstrating the power and magnitude of nature in the character’s setting. Things like “earthquake, and fiery flood” are things that clearly strike fear into people and threaten their self-preservation. At the same time, these are things that make people marvel at their greatness. In addition to Shelley pointing out the elements of nature, he even helps the reader to bridge this connection to the notion of the sublime by saying, “Within the daedal earth;” (86). Daedal is the key word that signifies something “skillfully or intricately wrought” according to the footnote on page 48. In this sense, not only are the elements of nature frightening and mighty, they are simultaneously put together intricately as if an artist or artisan had crafted them. Within the context of the poem, the speaker uses these elements of nature to compare them to the allure and mysteriousness of the mountain he is gazing upon. The mountain itself is sublime, in the sense that it is humungous and enigmatically difficult to describe, but in this passage, he is saying that his land should be even more sublime than that of the mountain depicted in the poem. The structured chaos of the lightning and earthquakes is what makes his land sublime in comparison to the mountain that is also sublime.
3 comments
Kevin,
Your analysis is well done; you clearly bring back my sense of respect for the natural appeal and raw power of earth’s features. I’m reminded by Mount Everest, where the world marvels at its greatness despite the accompanying fear of earthquakes, when I’m reading your post.
^ Nhan’s comment
Hey Kevin, I really like your reading of this stanza. What stood out to me the most about your post was when you made the connection between “daedal” and something that is “put together intricately as if an artist had crafted them”. It reminded me of William Wordsworth’s poem, “Elegiac Stanzas”, which is about his ekphrasis of a painting. In that poem, he essentially writes about the sublime nature of art. I think both Shelley and Wordsworth is saying that nature and art are one in the same in that they both can evoke great ardor and the sense of sublime.
-J.Lo