Love’s Philosophy: A Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A short poem that has much more to do with love than philosophy!

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is renowned as one of the greatest poets of the English Romantic movement and one of a trio of intense young men (the others being Keats and Byron) who led short and unconventional lives and expressed themselves with passion and openness. Shelley wrote a number of long poems and dramas that made his contemporary reputation but he is better known today for his shorter lyrical pieces such as “To a Skylark”, “Ode to the West Wind” and “Ozymandias”. “Love’s Philosophy” is one of these shorter poems.

This is a simple little love poem in two 8-line stanzas with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme. It is, at heart, a plea for his girlfriend to kiss him, but his persuasion takes the form of pointing to a range of natural and cosmic conjunctions that involve, on a “macro” scale, what he wishes to do on a “micro” one. The first stanza runs:

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another’s being mingle —
Why not I with thine?