Love’s Philosophy

Love’s Philosophy is an English Romanticism poem. This poem was written by a common English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822). It is contained by Percy Bysshe Shelly’s vision of love and the impact of love on his whole ideology. The themes of Love’s Philosophy are the union of love which is represented through the role of nature and the occurrence of unrequited love. Nature remains it is a divine power to convey the combination of everything in the world.

In the poem, nature plays a significant role to express love and compliance with natural rules. Shelly uses nature and their beauty which created a wonderful connection with each other to bring out his philosophy of love. Natural objects obey the law to pair up with one another. In the first stanza, “fountain” and “river”, “rivers” and “ocean” had made combination with the word “mingle” to generate natural beauty impressively. They are used to symbolize love as integration.

The elemental relationships in nature are strongly emphasized to compare to the fundamental relationships of love in the poem. The figurative language and natural imagery are used by Shelly. In the second stanza, the natural objects “mountains”, “waves”, “sunlight” and “moonbeams” love one another with deep feelings and imply there should not be bad emotions with others. Shelly also uses “sister-flower” and “its brother” to describe the innocence of love between the siblings.

Unfortunately, Shelly felt disappointed about his unrequited love. In the last line of both stanzas, “Why not I with thine?” and “ What is all this sweet work worth if thou kiss not me?” show the irony because Shelly thought after the things mingling perfectly, his beloved would come to his side but he was wrong because his partner did not follow the rules and mingle with him. Shelly considered love was a reciprocal thing, otherwise, it was meaningless.

Personification and visual imagery that Shelly has used such as “Fountains mingle with the river”, “Mountains kiss the high heaven”, “Waves clasp one another” “Moonbeams kiss the sea”. “mingling”, “clasping”, “kissing” are human acts and abilities, they are helped to describe the passion of love and tactile sensation. Simultaneously, The rhetorical questions have been stated to deepen the disappointment of his unrequited love. The bond of natural objects is metaphorical to annotate Shelly’s idea of love in the whole poem.

Nature is the most beautiful element in this world because their union of them builds greater things by following logical laws. They reflect the essence of love. Shelly’s love philosophy externalizes every people should have true emotion and stay with their beloved, if not, love will be worthless.