Charlene Mae Tupas BEEN3

   

Love's Philosophy

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

 

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

 

***

 

Obviously this can be read as simply a poem of seduction and it works perfectly well as one. I would suggest, however, having read some of Shelley's other poetry, that there is a subtext to all this. One of the main themes of Shelley's poetry is the search for the meaning of existence and many of his poems seem to be desperately searching for a sense of coherence in a world full of chaos. This sense of purpose and meaning is very rarely found. It seems to me that many of the analogies Shelley uses involve things that are immaterial - heaven, sunlight, moonbeams - none of them are solid, physical things and all are impossible to capture.  I believe the essence of the subtext is in the final two lines and the title.

The cynic's response to the final two lines would be that these 'kissings' do not really exist, just as the kiss between the speaker and their love does not exist, and that it is in fact simply the desperate thoughts of someone trying not to come to the conclusion that their love is truly unrequited. ='(

Upon reading his biography, I found out that Shelley's love affairs were not that successful or were just products of an impulsive young love. The title - "Love's Philosophy''- seems to me to add weight to this conclusion, suggesting cynically that this is the typical response of someone who is young and in love - they lose all sense of logic and reason and come to the wrong conclusions. 

 

An excerpt on the Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley 

Shelley, born the heir to rich estates and the son of an Member of Parliament, went to University College, Oxford in 1810, but in March of the following year he and a friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were both expelled for the suspected authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.

In 1811 he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook and, one year later, went with her and her older sister first to Dublin, then to Devon and North Wales, where they stayed for six months into 1813. However, by 1814, and with the birth of two children, their marriage had collapsed and Shelley eloped once again, this time with Mary Godwin.