Essay poem love philosophy Percy Bysshe Shelley

Amandine Vanel

 Essay 

“There is nothing philosophical about this poem”

Introduction :

For as long as society has existed, ever since it's dawning in ancient Greece, love has been a troublesome matter, that was described by Aristotle as “a single soul inhabiting two bodies”. But if philosophy has been used as a tool in trying to understand love, one may wonder about the nature of the relationship between those two very intricate notions.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a romantic British poet from the XIXth century, and as such his art revolved around such matters as the celebration of nature, of experience and of course of women, leading to his writing in 1819 of Love’s Philosophy, a poem whose philosophical dimensions make wonder.

If one may argue that “there is nothing philosophical about this poem”, this essay shall examine this claim, discussing on a first hand how it may indeed be seen as being solely romantic, and devoid of philosophical views, to then delve into a possible existing philosophical nature to this poem.

Plan :

I- A poem that is romantic at core

A- A focus on the writer’s personal thoughts rather than reason

        ⇒ rhetorical questions

B- A recourse to imagery rather than rethorics

        ⇒ natural world

II- The philosophical nature of the poem

        A- The planting of philosophical questions

                ⇒ nature of desire + possibility to find fulfillment

        B- A poem shaped to be philosophical by nature

                ⇒ Anacreontics + syllogism

I- A poem that is romantic at core :

To begin with, and as mentioned before, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a romantic poet, and as such, his writings reflect the values and themes of the said movement in literature. Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, that was characterized by a focus on emotion, imagination, and nature; and those thematics are central in the poem, emphasized by a focus on the writer’s personal thoughts, and a recurring recourse to imagery throughout the poem.

Firstly, the poem emphasizes the subjective experience of love, with the speaker describing his own emotions and feelings in vivid detail through the use of rhetorical questions such as “Why not I with thine? [...]  If thou kiss not me?”, that truly exposes how very painful the whole experience of love appears to be to Shelley, absolutely unreasonably in love. This focus on the individual experience of love rather than a meticulous analysis is a hallmark of Romantic literature.

Moreover, the sense of longing and desire that permeates the poem is also a common theme in Romantic literature : the speaker of the poem is trying to persuade her beloved to be with him rather than convince her, and the intensity of his emotions is conveyed through the use of very passionate language.

It then appears that the poem's focus on the emotional experience of love is not philosophical, as it deals more with the subjective experience of love than with objective questions about the nature of reality.

        Subsequently, and as the author describes his feelings all throughout the poem, he does so through an unequivocal recourse to imagery : he uses the natural world as a metaphor of the idea of love: Shelley argues that everything in nature is interconnected and that this interconnectedness is evidence of the fact that love is a universal force that binds all things together.

The emotional experience in Love's Philosophy is one of longing and desire by which the poet is trying to convince the object of his affection that they should be together, and he does so by using the natural world as a metaphor for the power of love : images of “the moon”, “the sea”, and other natural phenomena to create a sense of unity and harmony that reflects the Romantic ideal of the interconnectedness of all things, of the forces of nature but of him and his beloved alike.

        Overall, one may then argue that Love's Philosophy is but a romantic poem, reflecting the values and themes of the Romantic movement in literature rather than any real philosophical views or rhetorics.

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