By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle —
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain’d its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea —
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
Analysis
This brief lyric turns argument into charm. Shelley recruits the whole natural world as witness — fountains mingling, mountains kissing heaven — until refusal seems an affront to cosmic law. The rhymes are playful but insistent, a rhetoric of tenderness that borrows authority from stars and seas.
Beneath the sweetness lies a sophisticated conceit: unity as the ground of desire. The poem does not demand conquest but correspondence — a mutual mingling imagined as both natural and ethical. Persuasion here is a form of praise, seeing in the beloved the same order that binds rivers to the sea.