Love's Philosophy Shelley Analysis

In the poem, Love’s Philosophy, Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests through imagery, personification, speech act, and the structure of the poem that love completes meaning of life since everything in nature pairs, and that without love, everything is in vain. Shelley uses nature to demonstrate the complementary pairings. “The fountains mingle with the river/ And the rivers with the ocean” connect these flowing substances together. Without one of them, there will be a gap, a lay of land separating the bodies of water. It’s natural for one body of water to lead to another, and the speaker uses this natural phenomenon to explain the need of their lover to be “flowing”. One thing leads to another and it gets bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, like love.
A few other naturalistic qualities used to persuade the audience reside in the second stanza: “See the mountains kiss high heaven / And the waves clasp one another”, “And the sunlight clasps the earth/ And the moonbeams kiss the sea”. Shelley mixes heavenly qualities with earthly qualities creating a heavenly balance to show that his desired lover would add bring the majestic …show more content…
Back and forth, and always in motion, the clasping of the ocean can be calm lapses or heightened into powerful clashes during a storm. Like in love, there are different phases depending on the environment; a tender love, or a love of passion. Additionally, the types of love are demonstrated through the imagery of light. The sunlight clasping the earth embodies the earth with a radiant glow and warmth. Absorbing the light, the earth creates life, however, this relationship is one-sided as the earth only reacts to the sun’s light. In contrast, the moonlight and the sea shows a mutual relationship. The moon’s gentle illumination is reflected by the sea. All of these pairings show the different types of love in life, mostly between gentle kinds, and passionate