Shelley has often been criticized regarding his love life. Every student of Shelley is familiar with his capricious and insensitive behavior toward the loves in his life. However, what many students may not realize is that he was an inevitable victim of illusions, and that the only alternative was to give up on lust for life. A passage from a letter he wrote to his friend T.J. Hogg in 1815 will help clarify exactly what I mean.

In the letter, he mused: “It excites my wonder to consider the perverted energies of the human mind. That so much benevolence and talent…should be wasted in such profitless endeavors, nor serve to any other end than to expose its possessor to perpetual disappointments. Yet who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive that Death is so near? One man there is, and he is a cold and calculating man, who knows better than to waste life; but who alas! cannot enjoy it.”

For Shelley, that psychological paradox was a recurrent experience with women – and everything else he fell in love with. Yet, he did not wish to give up all illusions for good. He saw the alternative as joyless rationality. The catch-22 is that pursuing phantoms and hunting after dreams is essential to happiness but can only bring disillusionment. As his letter shows, he could have a detached perspective toward the whole cycle. He could perceive that where change occurs is in the mind.

That’s what he meant when he wrote in the last two stanzas of “The Sensitive Plant”:

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
‘Tis we, ‘tis ours, are changed; not they;

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

That lady fair is a symbol of love, and that garden sweet is a symbol of the illusion that the mind created under the influence of love. At this point, I will elaborate further on what love meant to Shelley. Love was a layered metaphor to him. It meant infatuation with women. It meant yearnings for beauty. It meant love of truth. It meant passion for visionary projects. It meant the sensuous harmony of nature. It meant sex. Sex and romantic love or infaturation seem nearly always microcosmic for his macrocosmic visions. They are also inextricably interwoven with the energy of life and the spirit of nature. His poem “Love’s Philosophy” expresses that sense of love:

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 one spirit mix and mingle
Why not I with thine?

Love in that all-encompassing sense is one major theme of “The Sensitive Plant”. Specifically, the paradoxical dilemma that Shelley wrote of in his letter is symbolized by an extended metaphor with a twist at the end. The garden sweet and the lady fair are Platonic forms which have an eternal existence, even while, at the same time, they exist on earth only in the mind of the beholder. Thus, the garden of Part First and the lady of Part Second are at one and the same time beauty and love in their eternal forms, as well as illusions in the mind. The illusions can be anything from romantic love to a visionary project to an abstract ideal of justice. The death of the lady at the end of Part Third represents change in the perception of the disappointed mind.

At the conclusion, Shelley insists that love and beauty still exist and leaves the way open for the creation of more illusions, the pursuit of more phantoms, and infatuation with more ladies. There will be in the mind (and therefore on earth) more gardens sweet ruled by more ladies fair. There will also be more deaths of the ruling graces which maintain illusions. But the implication is that it isn’t as real as the reality behind the veil, the permanent forms of which love and disilllusionment are but transient creations of the mind. Beauty and love, after all, do not really die.