25 Days Wild - V is for Verse

I am writing Day 25 from Chamonix, in the French Alps. My daughter and I agreed that on this day we would both spend some time reading a wild poem. 

Emma's favourite poem; one she likes to recite, is The Grass House by Shirley Hughes.

The grass house
Is my private place,
Nobody can see me
In the grass house.
Feathery Plumes
Meet over my head.
Down here, 
In the green, there are:
Seeds
Weeds
Stalks
Pods
And tiny little flowers.

Only the cat
And some busy, hurrying ants
Know where my grass house is.

I love this poem and I am grateful to the poet for really enthusing Emma and making her feel the magic of words. 

I thought it appropriate to choose an Alpine theme, given my surroundings and I have gone for one of the Romantics; Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc.

Not very imaginative I suppose, but it was written in the summer of 1816, when Shelley visited Chamonix. Although the poem is about a lot more than a mountain it speaks of the majesty and power of mountains; effectively bestowing them with a significance that we now take for granted.

Here is a short extract:

Power dwells apart in its tranquility
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, 
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, 
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.