a vast, dark and inscrutable sense

Here's another of Nan Shepherd's poems, taken from the pictured 1934 volume (as just reprinted for the first time in 2014) ...

... I'm now nearly completely through the whole of her recent biography, and was reminded of this poem by one of the chapter references:


Summit of Corrie Etchachan

But in the climbing ecstasy of thought,
Ere consummation, ere the final peak,
Come hours like this. Behind, the long defile,
The steep rock-path, alongside which, from under
Snow-caves, sharp-corniced, tumble the ice-cold waters.
And now, here, at the corrie’s summit, no peak,
No vision of the blue world, far, unattainable,
But this grey plateau, rock-strewn, vast, silent,
The dark loch, the toiling crags, the snow;
A mountain shut within itself, yet a world,
Immensity. So may the mind achieve,
Toiling, no vision of the infinite,
But a vast, dark and inscrutable sense
Of its own terror, its own glory and power.

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Nan Shepherd (1893-1981)

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