In her essay “Thinking About the Other in Romantic Love," Adella Pinch writes,
If Epipsychidion truly defines poetic language as (as it does at the end) the "flowers of thought" (l. 385), then one thing the poem may underscore is that thinking about the beloved, and knowing her, may be inversely or diametrically related. Desire wages war with the desire to know. What we might notice if we focused further on the role of thinking in Epipsychidion is that the poem seems worried about the possibility that thinking is a kind of zero-sum game or economy of scarcity whereby one person's thinking can only occur at the expense of another's. (par. 8)
The poet asks Emily not to “scorn” the “flowers of thought,” which represents his poetic composition. Keeping Pinch’s above remarks in mind, we could say that the poet is self-consciously aware of the imperfections of his thinking, which leads to an imperfect knowledge of Emily. Yet he is deterministic enough, as seen in the apostrophes addressed earlier in the poem, to name her and contextualize her as either a mythological or natural figure. This contextualization can be viewed as an imposition that the poet places her in, and, therefore, he is asking for her pardon. Shelley’s choice of metaphor—flowers—suggests that he regards his half-truths to be natural and beautiful, despite the imperfections. The self-consciousness the poet demonstrates throughout the poem is a result of his awareness of the impossibility of achieving poetic mimesis. Shelley’s concept of “legislation” (A Defence of Poetry) can be thought of also as an interpretation—an imperfect copy—of truth. From a pragmatist’s perspective, the inability to capture the essence of a Platonic truth is not a failure since there is no way of knowing whether or not the Platonic structure exists.
Pinch, Adela. "Romantic Passions: Thinking About the Other in Romantic Love." Romantic Circles Passions Series. 2001. 22 April 2004 <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/passions/pinch/pinch.html>.