pines
Although we have no guide to Mary
Shelley's thought processes as she wrote this passage, it is probable
that the stanza from Percy
Shelley's poetry she quotes at the end of the paragraph caused her to
think of another from the volume in which it was published (or the
causality might have been reversed, with that other passage first coming
to mind and prompting the remembrance of this stanza): whatever the case,
this description of mountain conifers strongly resembles the desolate
final scene, actually drawn from Shelley's experiences in Wales before he
met Mary, of his poem "Alastor"
(see lines 550-70). An early
sketch of this same subject is contained in a poem in the early notebook
known as the Esdaile Notebook, a poem Shelley wrote in 1811 and never published, called
after its first line "Dark spirit of the
desart rude." On the other hand, the scenery of Switzerland, far more sublime than that of
Wales, afforded ample opportunity for Mary Shelley to observe the
desolation that alpine storms and glacial movement could visit on the pine
forests of the mountains. There is a description of such shattered trees
in Letter 4 of A History
of Six Weeks' Tour. Byron offers
another such passage in the second scene of Manfred, I.ii.66-74 which, though begun later
than Frankenstein, indicates at many points a common conceptual
origin.
