Ghislaine McDayter, commenting on lines 232-38, writes:
Shelley's fantasy ideal is not offered as the replacement for something he once had and now desires since, as Ulmer notes, the "unity of Sheleyan lovers, are backward configurations of an inaugural harmony that cannot be retained because it never existed." Rather, this fantasy literally teaches him what to desire. His object of desire is not simply absent, it is absence itself. It signifies both a hoped for plentitude, even jouissance, that paradoxically becomes the signifier of lack itself. Thus the poet measures "[t]he world of fancies, seeking one like thee, / And find--alas! mine own infirmity" [...]. He cannot escape 'falling' into his own mortal and flawed subjectivity, even as he attempts to unite with his vision's perfection, and it is perhaps for this reason that Shelley has his feminine ideal reign in a space between paradise and our Satanic expulsion. She lives, after all, on an "isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea, / Cradled, and hung in clear tranquility; / Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer, / Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air" (ll. 457-60). This poem never lets us forget that buried within every Eden is the promise of its fall. (39-40)
The poet is not happy in his subjective state, and his fanciful Eden does not destroy his subjectivity. In fact, it acts simply like a stage through which he can act on a fantasy. Lines 232-38 clearly allude to the story of Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphosis.This fact seems to support McDayter's premise--that Emily and the lush "isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, earth and Sea" is a signifier of absence. Specifically, the island can signify the absence of poetic inspiration. Emily, after all, is a derivative of Emilia; the island is a simulacrum of Eden. Everything that is "new" relies on the "old." While the poem is about human passion, it is also about the absurdity of it, the fact that housed within the intense feeling is an awareness of the boredom and desire that will follow. The artist, dissatisfied with the generic nature of his creation, pictures himself as Narcissus, chasing a "soul out of his soul," which is a way of saying that what he wants does not exist: a true image of his essential self.
McDayter, Ghislaine. "O'er Leaping the Bounds:
The Sexing of the Creative Soul in Shelley's Epipsychidion." Keats-Shelley
Journal: 52: (2003): 21-49.