blind vacancy
The last word of Percy Bysshe
Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is vacancy. In that poem the
mountain is a "blank" slate upon which the mind writes the nature of
reality. The present scene, we must recall, takes place not in the hovel
attached to the De Lacey cottage, but rather in a hut above the Sea of Ice
on Mont Blanc. It is here, fittingly,
that the Creature, another blank slate, lives removed from humanity and
where he appeals to his creator for identity, to be written upon.
