Essay Questions

What is the poem’s philosophy about love?

Amidst all the imagery and metaphor, alliteration and assonance, personification and enjambment and all the other fancy poetic techniques and devices can be found a very simple declarative statement such as would be expected in a prose work. For those who dislike the way that poetry seems intent on disguising its meaning and message, Shelley’s work is pleasantly direct and explicit. The entire poem—all that imagery of rivers, mountains and moonbeams—is constructed around the direct revelation of the speaker’s formation of a philosophy about what constitutes love: “Nothing in the world is single.” Love is displayed in the natural world’s constant and pervasive evidence that coupling is the divine law of the universe.

How is the poem an example of a rhetorical argument?

Two question marks appear in the poem. Both bring their respective stanzas to a conclusion by asking a question which the speaker has already answered. Or, at least, has provided evidence to strongly suggest what the answer should be. The opening stanza asks why the speaker’s spirit should not meet and mingle with that of the object of his desire. The seconds stanza ends with the speaker asking his lover for a kiss by framing it as a question of what all this evidence of nature manifesting a divine law that nothing in the world is single exist for if she is just going to deny it by refusing a kiss. This is using a rhetorical question to provide a predetermined answer. The question is not intended to be answered by the speaker’s lover, it exists only as a component in constructing the evidence supporting his contention.

What is the controlling figurative literary device which drives the entire poem?

Beginning with the image of fountains mingling with the river all the way through to the end of the end of the fourth line of the opening stanza, the speaker settles on personification as his technique of choice to present the evidence supporting his rhetorical argument. Line four invests the mingling of fountains and rivers with the ocean and the winds mixing in heaven with concept of “sweet emotion” which endows these non-human entities with human attributes. The personification takes a break for the next four lines as the speaker is making clear his philosophy but then returns even robustly with the opening line of the second stanza where it will dominate every image except the final two lines. The rhetorical purpose of personification is clear enough: if divine law mandates that the natural non-human world reacts to an emotional pull to find connections and mix and mingle rather than remaining single, then surely two humans like the speaker and his lover should follow suit.