Love's Philosophy

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a speaker's argument to persuade someone to kiss him. He points out that everything in nature joins with something else, so why won't she join with him?

Shelley wrote it in 1819. Like the other Romantic poets, he looked to nature for truth, and his own love life broke the rules of his time.

The poem has two eight-line stanzas with a regular ABAB rhyme. Each stanza builds a list of examples from nature, then ends with a rhetorical question to the woman.

The rhymes join neatly in pairs, just as he wants the two of them to join. But the second stanza's question is more desperate, and his last line is shorter than its rhyming partner: the poem never gets the answer it wants.

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?—

Nature is personified as a series of lovers: ‘See the mountains kiss high heaven / And the waves clasp one another’. The verbs grow more physical as the poem goes on.

He claims his argument is backed by ‘a law divine’, as if God wants them together. The sibilance and soft sounds of ‘meet and mingle’ make joining sound natural and easy.

The last question, ‘What is all this sweet work worth / If thou kiss not me?’, suggests nature itself is pointless without her kiss: flattering, but also pressuring.

Themes: romantic love and desire; nature; longing for someone who doesn't respond.

Compares well with:

• Sonnet 29: another poem of desire, built on images from nature.
• Porphyria's Lover: a man who wants to possess a woman, with a much darker result.
• When We Two Parted: love that ends in rejection and silence.