The Unclimbed Mountain

Fate is the force that pushes the water
Down the valley, out of the glacier;
Life the contingency of the path it takes,
Now meandering through an alpine lake
Where many streams converge and divide,
Now carving channels steep as water slides,
Hurling themselves, contemptuous of safety,
With the roar of a lifetime’s worth of waiting
Over shelves and cliffs, forcing a passage
Of least resistance and greatest advantage,
Or diving, head-first, into whirling pools
To emerge and dissolve in a waterfall
In which every spring, every rainbowed spray,
Slows to a river the ice has turned grey
That rushes, now quicker the commotion,
Now surer the end, to its conclusion.

What are these but visions of Nature’s plan
For a world before the ascent of Man,
When deathless faces lined with veins of snow
Looked down though clouds from their sunlit thrones
At pine woods that brush the valley’s soft cheeks,
And pillows of grass growing under their feet
Embroidered with a million lives of flowers,
And cowbells tolling the immeasurable hours
For us, who wait to be born from the mountain
Like water from rock springs in a fountain,
Climbing upwards in the sun of morning,
Descending through the shadows of evening,
Dark beneath the stars that rise in the sky,
Black against the night that closes our eyes,
Before returning to the world below,
Closer to the flood, further from the flow.

And still they ask us why the working class
Drink and smoke like we can afford all this
With the wages of a lifetime’s resentment,
The shame in the blood of our inheritance,
Not the ski resort on the winter break
Or the summer chalet beside the lake,
But the silence of the family evening
To which we dreamed of never returning,
Unbroken by tales not related from
The adventures that we never went on,
And the only mountains we ever climbed
Were in the stories we walked in our mind,
Which were just as real, as within our reach,
As this Alpine playground for Europe’s elite.
Too late the joy, too rarefied the air
For we who were born and climbed elsewhere.

— July-November 2025

• • • • •

The mountain in my poem is the Jungfrau, which is one of several peaks in the Bernese Alps that, at 4,158 metres, rises high above the east side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, which we ascended on a hike from the village of Stechelberg at its southern end to the Tschingelhorn mountain guest house high on its west side. It has been claimed (for instance, in Martin Monsch’s Switzerland in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which was our guide through the Swiss Alps) that Lauterbrunnen was the inspiration for the fictional Rivendell or Imladris of J. R. R. Tolkien, who hiked the same path in 1911, and who painted a watercolour of its sheer sides, grass-capped heights and silver-grey river to illustrate The Hobbit (1937). This was its first appearance in what would become, in The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), the secondary world of Middle Earth, which shaped the imaginary mountains that were absent from my childhood. Having followed in Tolkien’s footsteps in the summer of 2025, I can confirm that, Elves aside, the Valley of Lauterbrunnen is as close to his depictions and descriptions of Rivendell as it is possible to be; and that even a hundred years of tourism have not managed to strip the place of its enchantment. Notwithstanding which, in an interview in 1968 Tolkien said that all human stories are about one thing — death, and so is my poem.