3 - Shelleyan Love

Summary

He who aspires to love rightly … would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty.

Plato, The Symposium, translated by Percy Shelley (1818)

In The Keepsake for 1829, Percy Shelley's essay ‘On Love’ appears along with two poems on the same topic: Frederic Mansel Reynolds's ‘The Test of Love’ and Mary Lamb's ‘What Is Love?’ The latter makes an especially interesting pairing with Shelley as its title seems to allude directly to the opening question of his essay: ‘What is Love?—Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God’ (SPP, p. 503). In her poem, Lamb answers this question with the conventional definition of love:

Love is the passion which endureth,

Which neither time nor absence cureth;

Which nought of earthly change can sever:

Love is the light which shines for ever.

Lamb follows the tradition of love as an enduring and eternal passion linked to the light of heaven. Love is stable and unchanging, and her poem acts as an affirmation for the conservative readers of The Keepsake. Reynolds's ‘The Test of Love’ is a similar yet more overtly didactic poem in which he asks ‘ladies’ to test themselves and their lovers to determine whether or not they are experiencing ‘true’ love. Reynolds somewhat facetiously claims that true love occurs when one is consistently ‘unhappy’, thinking of and fretting about his or her lover.

The poems of Reynolds and Lamb are not surprising in the conservative Keepsake, but the publication of Shelley's essay is. Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter explain that The Keepsake was ‘tailored to romantic fantasies of middle-class women in a prolific attempt to capitalize on the growing female audiences in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century’, and that the 1829 volume is ‘distinctive for its impressive collection of literary celebrities’, including Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and both Percy and Mary Shelley. Reynolds, the editor of the 1829 volume, even makes a point to acknowledge Shelley's essay in the Preface by thanking ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ for her generous ‘gift’ (p. iv). The previously unpublished essay is a centerpiece of the volume, one of the few works singled out for attention—despite the annual's reputation for conservatism.