In 1757, Edmund Burke published a treatise called A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in which he described a concept that would come to fascinate Shelley's generation. The Poetry Foundation summarizes Burke's definition of the sublime as "the experience of the infinite, which is terrifying and thrilling because it threatens to overpower the perceived importance of human enterprise in the universe." For the Romantics, the sublime was intimately linked to their interest in nature and human emotion. Imagine standing before a vast, snow-capped mountain range as storm clouds rumble and lighting cuts across the dark sky—or consider an abject depression that seems inconsolable and infinite—and you have an idea of what the sublime feels like.
In Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples," the sublime manifests through both the magnificence of Naples' coast and the extent of the speaker's despair. During the first two stanzas, the speaker paints a vivid picture of the landscape: the waves before him dance, while the islands and snowy mountaintops in the distance shine beneath the warm, noontime sun. The air feels light as the sounds of the winds, birds, and the ocean murmur softly, like the gentle background noise of the city. We imagine the speaker at the epicenter of these landmarks, surrounded on all sides by marvels, both natural and man-made, of incalculable greatness.
Standing between a mountain range, a city, and the ocean, the speaker is dwarfed by his surroundings. However, by the end of stanza two, when the speaker feels a likeness with the turbulent water at his feet, we quickly realize that his depression mirrors the scale of the natural wonders around him. Although the atmosphere expressed in Naples’ coast is not necessarily terrifying, its modest grandeur makes the speaker feel small. By the end of the poem, it forces him to reconsider the scale of his emotions, and his reaction to them, when in the company of such honest, undemanding magnificence.
The speaker, no matter how alienated his sadness has made him, wants to be understood. He wants to experience the solitude the beach offers him without his misery imposing on its beauty. He wants to be part of this world, not apart from it. The knowledge that this day will “linger… like joy in memory” allows him to momentarily emerge from the depths of his despair.
Shelley’s use of the sublime in “Stanzas in Dejection, Near Naples” is an intimate, personal example of the idea in Romantic literature. Other examples include Wordsworth's “The Prelude,” Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished dream poem "Kubla Khan,” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.”
