Fredrick L. Hildebrand believes the "wintry forest" in line 249 of the poem describes "the desolate state of the poet's adult life": "The ruined world is used as a conventional symbol to represent the desolate state of most people's adult lives. While the poet's internal universe images his spiritual history, he also participates in the external world. Confusion can result from Shelley's use of similar kinds of planet growth as metaphors to describe both the internal and the external worlds" (80).
As we know, romantic poets were known for treasuring the innocence of childhood and contrasting it with the unsavory aspects of adult living. Consider the second stanza of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," where the poet shares with the reader the peace and tranquility he receives by reflecting back on his childhood experiences with nature:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. (22-35)
G. Kim Blank believes that one of the differences between Wordsworth and Shelley is that Wordsworth acknowledges a temporal gap between adulthood and childhood, past and present and attempts to fill it through meditation, but Shelley attempts to deny that this gap exists, that the progress and effects of time can be resisted through the imagination. Blank makes this assertion while comparing "Tintern Abbey" to "To Harriet". Commenting on the lines 32-58 of "To Harriet," Blank writes:
Shelley’s words are clearly an adaptation of Wordsworth’s account of the process of retrospection and reconciliation, the process of absence triumphing over presence, or memory overriding direct experience. Moreover, these words offer a subtle challenge to Wordsworth’s version of this process. The point of contention is the sufficiency of recovery that can be achieved by commemoration. Wordsworth posits a temporal gap which is to be closed (in his own terms, to be restored, recompensed, healed); Shelley refuses to posit this gap because to do would be to admit a loss, because it would in some sense negate what is and what has been. (35)
I think we can apply these comments to a discussion on Epipsychidion, which is a determined attempt to deny a rupture between past and present. Yet, we still have self-conscious moments--or, as I like to call it, "exhaustive" moments--in which the poet acknowledges the impossibility of the task.
Blank, Kim G. Wordsworth's Influence on Shelley : A Study of Poetic Authority. New York: St. Martin's P, 1988.
Hildebrand, Fredrick L. "Epipsychidion's Cosmic Collision: A Controlling Metaphor." Keats-Shelley Journal 37: (1988): 75-90.