Title
Fancy Should go Forth: Conversations between Subject and World in "Mont Blanc" and Beachy Head
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
In both contemporary Ecocriticism and Romantic studies, the position of the human subject in relation to their world, and to the historical context of that world, has remained a contentious issue. Regarding Percy Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc, Frances Ferguson states that “critics seemed to have agreed on one thing… that it is a poem about the relationship between the human mind and the external world. After that, the debates begin” (172). These debates likely arise from the actual absence within the poem of any certain or unified way of thinking about the relationship between the human subject and the world they exist in. Using a kind of conversational form, the poem presents a single speaker musing on his observations of both the Ravine of Arve and Mont Blanc, sometimes reaching a sense of connection with his environment, but also wavering into uncertainty regarding his ability to understand these geographical formations. Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head similarly presents a speaker in conversation with their world, who through an attentive engagement with her environment recognizes human activity as part of a broader community. Yet even this sense of certainty is undercut by subtle anxieties, in part presented through Smith’s footnotes, regarding the speaker’s ability to understand the true nature and history of her surroundings. Ultimately, while both poems situate the human individual as always existing within a larger world, their form and content both evoke a sense of pervasive uncertainty regarding the possibility of understanding the human subject’s position within that world.