Love's Philosophy — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Love's Philosophy
The poems
What you need to know
Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley: what it is about, its context, and how Shelley uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The fountains mingle with the river', 'Nothing in the world is single', 'In one another's being mingle', 'Why not I with thine?', 'See the mountains kiss high heaven', 'No sister-flower would be forgiven', 'What are all these kissings worth', 'If thou kiss not me?'.
Form: two eight-line stanzas, each building a list of images from nature to a rhetorical question, and the half-rhymes that hint at frustration.
Context: Shelley as a Romantic poet who saw love and nature as connected, and the poem as a persuasive argument.
Comparisons with Sonnet 29, Porphyria's Lover and Singh Song!
