Frank D. McConnell argues that in lines 130-41 Shelley is using language
deliberately evocative of the tradition he is reshaping. The alternative visions of a paradisal retreat in the fields of immortality and of an impossibly complete union within earthly time are both images of an allegorical purity of will, but are both reduced, precisely by becoming conceptual alternatives rather than absolute projections--the twin improbable possibilities of a radically modern intellect. The final ambiguous image of the pure fountain of tears likewise is a fully traditional one, celebrated in any number of neocritical explications of metaphysical poetry. The metaphysical context of the image itself becomes ironic, though, as a defeated and intentionally straining compromise between the irreconcilable contraries of the high-Renaissance mode: a poetic placing that is also accurate and often-neglected literary history. (108-109)
McConnell, Frank D. "Shelleyan 'Allegory': Epipsychidion." Keats-Shelley Journal 20 (1971): 100-12.