Death/Eternity

Percy Shelley’s reflection on human life and death unfolds amidst the backdrop of Mont Blanc. The majestic slope prompts recognition of the eons over which it has been formed. Over this period the speaker must acknowledge the brief flickering that is human life. This instills a recognition of the tiny nature of the human role in the universe.

This fatalism, or perhaps more aptly put, this reckoning with the vastness of eternity, is best expressed in the fourth stanza, where the speakers muses, “The works and ways of man, their death and birth, / And that of him and all that his may be; / All things that move and breathe with toil and sound / Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell” (92-95).

These lines situate the mere human trajectory within the perpetual flux of nature. Human life, despite how it typically appears to the...