I believe the following passage from Levinas can speak to a few of the thematic questions that Epipsychidion poses, such as: what is the function of love? In the section "Beyond the face" from Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes:
The metaphysical event of transcendence--the welcome of the Other, hospitality--Desire and language--is not accomplished as love. But the transcendence of discourse is bound to love. We shall show how in love transcendence goes both further and less far than language.
Has love no other term than a person? The person here enjoys a privilege--the loving intention goes unto the Other, unto the friend, the child, the brother, the beloved, the parents. But a thing, an abstraction, a book can likewise be objects of love. It is that by an essential aspect of love, which as transcendence goes unto the Other throws us back this side of immanence itself: it designates a movement by which a being seeks that to which it was bound before even having taken the initiative of the search and despite the exteriority in which it finds it. The supreme adventure is also a predestination, a choice of what had not been chosen. Love as a relation with the Other can be reduced to this fundamental immanence, be divested of all transcendence, seek but a connatural being, a sister soul, present itself as incest. (254)
Levinas never wrote on literature, but the above passage may help us understand the exact problem the poet/shelley is struggling with. Levinas is saying that the very concept of fate not only confirms transcendence, but it also confirms one's limitations. One cannot help but love a signifier of something else and feel that one is fated within a temporal frame to love superficially a particular being, "an abstraction" that "throws us back this side of immanence itself." When Levinas explains this "supreme adventure" to be "a predestination," he may be helping us to explain the final stanza of Epipsychidion:
Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet,
And say:--'We are the masters of thy slave;
What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?'
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave,
All singing loud: 'Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.'
So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet
Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest,
And bid them love each other and be blessed:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest,--for I am Love's. (592-604)
Shelley wishes he were more in control of his work, but he realizes the limitations and power of language, both of which inhibit his poetic intent. His command--"Weak Verses, go kneel at your Sovereign's feet"--is a futile one. When he asks his verses to "leave the troop which errs," he is asking for an inspiration that is not derived from experience but is, rather, from a divine muse. The irrationality of such an expectation is certainly not lost on Shelley, but while the hope is futile, the sincere performativity--the suspension of disbelief--creates a temporal space "'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea" (457) where the poet can create a poem that is both a response to his personal circumstances, a calling out for deliverance, an imaginative union of heaven and earth, and the "fall" from this "Paradise," the realization of that his survival and identity, which is ultimately more important, is dependent on love. I say "ultimately," but I am not sure I mean that: the poet is certainly vacillating between his egotistical desire to have an Apollonian control of his love for Emily and his Dionysian desire his annihilation of identity.
There is more, much more, to be said about this passage and this poem. Please e-mail me with your comments! And I am still trying to figure out exactly who Marina, Vanna, and Primus are. Any ideas?
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1961.