Epipsychidion

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Overview

Epipsychidion is a major poetical work published in 1821 by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The theme of the work is a meditation on the nature of ideal love. Shelley advocates free love, criticising conventional marriage, which he described as "the weariest and the longest journey". Epipsychidion opens with an invocation to Emilia as a spiritual sister of the speaker. He addresses her as a "captive bird" for whose nest his poem will be soft rose petals. He calls her an angel of light, the light of the moon seen through mortal clouds, a star beyond all storms. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780880038232
Publisher:	Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
Publication date:	07/22/2022
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	39
File size:	298 KB
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets.

Read an Excerpt

NOTES. The title of this Poem—Epipsychidion—is translated by Shelley himself in the line, "Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;" and the word Epipsychidion is coined by him to express the idea of that line. It might mean something which is placed on a soul as if to complete or crown it. It was probably intended by Shelley to be also a diminutive of endearment from epipsyche. There is no such Greek word as sTri-ifrvxtf. But epipsyche would mean "a soul upon a soul," just as epicycle, in the Ptolemaic astronomy, meant " a circle upon a circle." Such " a soul on a soul" might be paraphrased as a soul which is the complement of, and therefore responsive to, another soul like itself, but in higher place and of a higher order. The lower would then seek to be united with the higher, because ,in suchunion it would be made perfect, and the pre-established harmony between them be actually realised. This idea, many suggestions of which may be found in Plato, runs through a great part of Shelley's personal poetry, and the accomplishment of it is expressed near the end of Epipsychidion in the lines which begin " One passion in two hearts." But perhaps the best commentary on the whole of this conception is the passage which I here extract from Shelley's fragment On Love:— " Thou, demandest what is love ? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood ; if we imagine, we would that the airy children ofour brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, th...