St. Michael’s Mount, the harshly beautiful island of granite that studs the coast deep within western Cornwall, has a surreptitiously important place in the history of literature. When John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, wrote the famous elegy ‘Lycidas’ in memory of his drowned friend Edward King, he imagined King’s body swirling in the oceans around Britain, denied burial and mourning. Legend had it that the archangel Michael had appeared in a vision on ‘the guarded mount’ of St. Michael’s, and Milton poetically cried out to the supernatural figure to ‘look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth [pity] / And…waft the hapless youth’ back to his friends and family.
Right at the heart of English Literature therefore – in the middle of one of the most important poems of one of most important poets – we have St. Michael’s Mount, an angel, and Cornish fable.
You would imagine the severe grandeur of the Mount would have attracted the Romantics some 150 years after Milton, but despite the fact that John Keats’ family history was probably Cornish, and that Lord Byron visited Falmouth, there is little contact between the county and the most famous Romantics. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other fascinating minor poets of the era (both Cornish and non-Cornish) who are very much drawn to places like Land’s End, Carn Brea, the banks of the Tamar – and, of course, St. Michael’s Mount.
One of these is William Lisle Bowles. He is perhaps best known for being one of a set of ‘pre-Romantic’ poets who reinvigorated the English sonnet, which had fallen somewhat out of fashion. Yet I’m particularly interested in his longer 1798 work, simply and straightforwardly entitled ‘St. Michael’s Mount: A Poem’ – and his engagement with Cornish landscape.
Like so much Romantic verse it begins with a walk:
While Summer airs scarce breathe along the tide,
Oft panting, up the Mountain’s craggy side
We climb: – how beautiful, how still, how clear
The scenes that stretch around! – the rocks that rear
Their shapes, in rich fantastic colours drest
The hill-tops where the softest shadows rest;
The long-retiring bay; the level sand…
But Bowles knows that the rocky scene opening up as they ascend, however glorious, would not be to everybody’s taste in the eighteenth century: particularly if imagined under the very different aspect of a stormy day, dark and lonely, with squalls driving in and the coast ‘wet with the hoar spray of the flashing tide’.
Reflecting on those who only really enjoy a tranquil nature – sun-dappled, blue-skied, graceful and soft – he notes that St. Michael’s Mount is probably not for them: ‘No sunny meadows at thy feet are spread / No streamlets sparkle o’er their pebbly bed’. The granite is too stark, too brutal, and too associated with the danger and peril of Cornish mining, ‘sunk fathoms beneath the rolling brine’. Bowles’ poem is all about respecting the savagery of the Mount’s beauty.
Savage beauty had a particular name in the days when Bowles was writing: it wasn’t actually beauty at all, but ‘the sublime’. When appreciating anything from landscape to Greek sculpture, an educated eighteenth-century person would instinctively map their aesthetic responses on to these two opposed categories, which were formalised in dozens of essays and treatises. The beautiful was soft and graceful. The sublime was harsh and angular. The beautiful relaxed and soothed. The sublime exhilarated and shocked. Beautiful landscapes were verdant, lush and welcoming; sublime landscapes were bleak, remote and dangerous.
There is no doubt that Bowles’ poem on the Mount is full of classically sublime qualities and things, and privileges them over the beautiful. Better the lash of the wind than a calm sunset:
the howling hurricane, the dashing wave
More graceful, when the storm’s dark vapours frown,
Than when the summer suns in all their pomp go down!
The Mount is a ‘stern monument amidst the delug’d plain’; the castle that crowns its peak sits ‘in the dark terror of thy ancient reign’. It is best seen – and appreciated – on a stormy night, wreathed in moonlight or sharply lit up by lightening. The feelings of awe and even terror are all part of it.
One other typically sublime thing is great antiquity – anything old, be it an ancient stone-circle or the Egyptian pyramids – was invested with a certain breathtaking reverence. Bowles picks up on this in his poem too, imagining ‘the dim record of thy early days’ and imagining the long, sometimes bloody history of the Mount and the castle. That druidic rituals were carried out on the Mount in ancient times merely adds to the aura: ‘the shadowy Druid throng, the darksome wood, / And the hoar altar, wet with human blood’. Things take a gothic turn!
As Bowles lets his imagination run riot through the history of St. Michael’s Mount, he does one final, quite clever thing. He brings together nature and history. The raging seas that batter the Mount become – symbolically – the great surges and swells of time. The violence of storms stands for the violence of human conflicts and invasions. The Cornish landscape becomes something to read symbolically, to provoke reflection and meditation: ‘O might we thus from Heav’n’s bright battlements / Behold the scene Humanity presents’.
It’s not a coincidence that this poem was written by Bowles at the end of the 1790s: the decade of the French Revolution. The ‘seas’ of historical change were indeed surging – and not always peacefully. You can see why the poet might have history and violence on his mind. Yet Bowles draws something consoling from the way the Mount resists all the natural forces thrown at it: it still stands, ‘wearing graceful the grey tints of Time’ as the waves settle and murmur at its base. The Mount is indomitable, strong, and unchanging against the storms of nature. And you get the strong sense that, amidst the storms of history, Bowles wants the human spirit to be the same or – at least – to draw some inspiration from the savage beauty (that is, the sublimity) of Cornwall’s magnificent granite forms.