ART & ORGANISM
An intuition of universal duality?: What Shelley said about love
In this short sweet poem written in 1819, a couple of years before his death, Shelley muses on the unions that characterise and unify nature and why he cannot be united with his true love.
The duality implicit in Love’s Philosophy is eloquently developed in an unfinished essay he began in 1821: “A Defence of Poetry.” Read the A&O notes on “A Defense of Poetry,” excerpted and glossed
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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 is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?