“Via Mala” [poem]
“Viamala” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—Ruskin lists this title, “Via Mala”, in his Plan for Continuation of the Account of a Tour on the Continent, which he worked out on the back endpapers of MS VIII. The positioning of this poem in the Plan (presumably as part of a projected composite section to be entitled “Via Mala”) reflects the influence of the poet, Samuel Rogers (1763–1855). Ruskinʼs borrowings from Rogersʼs Italy are especially prominent in treating the trope of mountain crossing. See, in the apparatus for the “Account”, The Influence of Rogersʼs Poetry on Ruskinʼs Planned Extension of the Composite‐Genre Travelogue to Italy and Switzerland; and see also the contextual glosses for “Passing the Alps”.
In Ruskinʼs Plan, the title “Via Mala” is the second in what can be interpreted as a definable cluster, which constructs the experience of crossing the Alps:
While Ruskin did not subdivide his Plan into clusters of titles, his intention is evident in his drafting poems, with titles corresponding to those in the Plan, as an identically ordered sequence in MS VIII. The poem corresponding to the first title in this conjectural cluster, “Passing the Alps”, was drafted elsewhere, in MS IA, g.2, probably prior to the drafts of the other poems in MS VIII; and Ruskin based this poem on Rogersʼs “The Alps” in Italy, applying themes and structure in Rogersʼs poem to his own cluster.


“Our faith is on the precipice / How far far down those waters hiss / That like an avalanche below / Whirl on a stream of foamy snow” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The Library Edition quotes from Praeterita: “It was again fortunate that we took the grandest pass into Italy,—that the first ravine of the main Alps I saw was the Via Mala” (Ruskin, Works, 35:116).
Ruskinʼs cousin, Mary Richardson, records that, after staying the night at Coire, the family rose early on 13 June 1833 to cross the Splügen, “one of the wildest and most beautiful passes of the Alps”, with the “Pass of Via Mala . . . the grandest of the whole” (Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 40). Similarly, in his 1838 guidebook to Switzerland, John Murray III taught British tourists to anticipate the Via Mala as, “without doubt or exaggeration the most sublime and tremendous defile in Switzerland” (Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 206).
Maryʼs account of the dayʼs journey is condensed, starting with where “the lower and higher Rhine unite” (i.e., the confluence of the Vorderrhein and Hinterrhein at Reichenau), “a little below Thusis”. From here, she continues, the “road goes along the side of the Rhine” (i.e, the Hinterrhein); and entering the gorge of the Via Mala, the passage leads between “immense high rocks [that] rise almost perpendicularly on each side of the Rhine (which is here a narrow stream) . . . covered in many parts to the very top with majestic pines”. Her next sentence remarks “houses surrounded by richly cultivated land”, and then she briefly describes Splügen Pass and the village of Splügen. The cultivated region beyond the Via Mala probably refers to the village of Andeer in the Schams Valley. Beyond its “beautiful rich vineyards”, Mary fails to mention the cataract in the Gorge of Rofla, where the river is confined into a torrent, but she does comment approvingly on the new Austrian road, “good as any road in Great Britain”, which led the family over the Splügen. Had they continued traveling along the Hinterrhein, they would have entered the Rheinwald Valley and crossed instead at the San Bernardino Pass, which descends to Lago Maggiore rather than to Lago di Como below the Splügen (Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 40–41).
Preferring the sublime over the beautiful cultivated places that catch his cousinʼs eye, Ruskin focuses his poem on the foaming of the swollen yet narrowly confined Rhine, “like an avalanche below”, which, as the traveler climbs the precipitous steep above the river, is gradually “softened” in its roar to “Murmuring up from the profound / Of distance dark where light of day / Pierced not” but “Whence the white foam looked up so clear”. Some of these details may have been prompted by William Brockedonʼs description in Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, which Ruskin received for his February 1834 birthday. For a span of four miles, Brockedon writes, “a deep ravine is formed by the bases of mountains, rising 6000 and even 8000 feet above the torrent of the Hinter-Rhin, which separates them”. He adds in a note: “In many places, where the road is carried 300 or 400 feet above the river, the sides of the ravine are not 50 feet apart. Such spots have been chosen for the construction of bridges, which it requires a firm head to look over steadily. The struggles of the torrent from that depth reach the ear only in murmurs; and when seen amidst the deep and dark abyss, its white foam appears to go up the ravine, from the eddy which its violence produces“ (vol. 2, “The Pass of the Bernardin”, p. 7). In his poem, Ruskin does not recoil from “looking oer the barrier”, and he reports what may be more unique to his memory of the vista, “A strange cold light through the yawning dread / Of the Abyssy gulph below”.
By 1838, John Murray III was moved to give the traveler a more expansive and dramatic description of the Via Mala than Brockedonʼs: “It is difficult to give, with any precision, the dimensions of this gorge, which has cleft the mountains through the chine. The precipices, which often rise perpendicularly on both sides of it, are certainly in some places 1600 ft. high, and, in many places, not more than 10 yards apart. The Rhine, compressed within this narrow, stony bed to the width of a pigmy rivulet, is barely audible as it rushes through the depths below the road. The rocks of slate and limestone, composing the walls of the ravine, are so hard that they appear to have suffered no disintegration from the weather; the fracture is so fresh and sharp that, were the convulsive force from below, which divided them, again called forth to unite them, it seems as though the gulf would close and leave no aperture behind. When the traveller enters the mouth of the defile”—“the peasants give it the name of the Lost Gulf (Trou perdu, Verlohrne Loch)”—“the sudden transition from the glare of sunshine, to the gloom of a chasm so narrow that it leaves but a strip of sky visible overhead, is exceedingly striking”. Murray urges the traveler to dismount from the carriage and make the journey on foot, as he describes the scenery from the three bridges that cross from side to side above the river (Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 206).
Brockedon, who was an inventor as well as an artist and writer, weights his description more on the side of engineering than of poetry, impressed by the feat of Napoleonʼs engineers in laying roads across the Simplon and Cenis passes, which he perceives as overcoming not only natural barriers but also the “prejudices of those nations who had opposed the making of such roads as would facilitate future communication”. Now that “national jealousies have been removed, and a more enlightened policy has extended commercial intercourse”, he believes, other “mule paths” across the Alps “have been superseded by carriage roads; and not only have the governments of Austria, Sardinia, and Switzerland, carefully preserved the routes in the great lines of communication which were made by Napoleon, for military or commerical purposes, but they have made other roads on their frontiers acros the Alps” (Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, vol. 2, “The Pass of the Bernardin”, pp. 1–2). Because of these efforts, the sublime experience of Alpine crossing had been rendered safe for travelers in the 1830s (albeit set back by disastrous floods of 1834)—a “surface . . . as good as any road in Great Britain”, Mary opined—and the guidebooks of the period celebrate the craft of the Italian engineer, Giulio Pocobelli (1766–1843) almost as much as they mythologize the ambition of Napoleon. (Credit properly belonged also to Pocobelliʼs assistant, Richard La Nicca [1794–1883].) For Murray, marveling about engineering could combine easily with admiration of the picturesque: Pocobelli having blasted a tunnel through the Verlohrne Loch, piercing a “projecting buttress of rock which had previously denied all access”, the resulting view “is very pleasing”, “looking back from this [tunnel passage], through the dark vista of black rock and the fringe of firs upon the ruined tower of Realt [Castle Hohen Rätien] and the sun‐lit valley of Domleschg” (Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 207; and see “Pfaffers” in List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account” (Table 2, Illustrations).