In "Thinking About the Other in Romantic Love," Adela Pinch--commenting on lines 15-17--makes the following remarks:
Why should the poem begin with the shattering of the beloved's thoughts? Perhaps the feminist argument we'd want to make here--that Shelley is part of a poetic tradition in which the masculine poetic subject must cast the feminine as shattered or scattered object in order to speak--can only be explained by a more basic point: that romantic love may always involve a struggle over who gets to think about whom.
For love poets in the Romantic tradition--say, poets of the generation after Shelley--these kinds of issues are specifically cast as ethical as well as formal dilemmas. My examples will be drawn from Victorian sonnet sequences by women. Rather than seeing these sonnet sequences as quaint confluences of the Pre-Raphalite revival of Dante and Petrarch with Victorian sentimentality and domesticity, I'd like to make some more ambitious claims about them. The sonnet is of course always about the problem of thinking, construing, hailing the other. In our understanding, the sonnet seems to be the very shape of thought: in its dense, patterned form it exteriorizes thought; and "I think" or "I thought" is the perfect iamb. Exteriorizing thought, the sonnet de-psychologizes it, materializes it, alienates it from the thinker as subject by placing any given sonnet about the beloved other in a symptomatic relation to all other thoughts about other beloved others. In so doing, it puts the problem of thinking about others into a realm other than that of psychology, or even epistemology, or skepticism about other minds. Victorian sonnet sequences seem particularly self-conscious about their own status as practices of meditation. They make use of both romantic love and Romantic aesthetics to work out the larger philosophical and political stakes of negotiating social relations. (par.3-4)
For Pinch, poets such as Shelley were precursors to Victorian sonnet writers who used aesthetics to think about ethical relations. Pinch refers to Levinas a lot in this essay. Derrida, in a critique of Levinas (Adieu), asserts that the Levinasian goal of hospitable submission to the demands of the other is unreasonable because of the unconscious influences one brings to an encounter with the other. He also views it as a violence done to one's self. For Levinas, one is not to "think" about the other in order to regard him or her in a particular way; instead, the method of welcoming the other with hospitality should be automatic and thoughtful only if the subject remembers to accept the other with hospitality. Derrida is critical of this Levinasian ethical principle and, furthermore, explains how ethics and politics cannot be divorced from one another. Pinch writes:
For Emmanuel Levinas, the erotic relation to the other often stands as the highest example of the search to establish a truly ethical relation: the relation that respects and responds to the other's absolute alterity [...]. On the one hand, Levinas takes care to distinguish his modern understanding of love from Romantic (capital R) ideas about romantic love: the notion that love is a commingling of two beings into one, is, he says, a "false romantic idea "(Ethique et infini, 58). Emphasizing the lovers' utter alterity to each other, Levinas' lovers' discourse defies the Platonism that is part of, say, Shelley's programmatic take on love, in Epipsychidion and elsewhere. But on the other hand, Levinas' writings on the ethics of eros harbor a by-now familiar ambivalence about thinking, as they strive to define a mode of mental attention, proximity, or being-for the other that does not authorize itself as knowledge. To be in love, in his view, is to be in a state of not-knowing in relation to the beloved; for knowledge of the other inevitably partakes of the logic of identity, a making-intelligible by making the same; it is thus a violation of the beloved's alterity. The condition of being-for the other is the condition for the emergence of the intentionality of thought (Totality and Infinity, 261); but at the center of Levinas' understanding of eros are the vicissitudes of a mental proximity that does not presume to know. This is the aporia or impossibility that in some sense founds the struggle for ethical relation. It is an impossibility that bossily demands that we totally reimagine what it would mean to think about the one we love, lest thinking itself threatens to become our own worst enemy. The thought that love may be akin to its opposites--agression, violation--is no surprise to anybody; it's the oldest idea in the book. But perhaps tracing this particular strain of Romantic love--and its literary formations--can help us understand the conditions under which thinking itself can come to seem scary. (par. 10)
Of course, this very knowing helps to explain Shelley's anti-monogamous attitudes on love. The fact that he was not faithful to his many lovers suggests that he viewed his lovers as figures of alterity that he "violated" through thought.
Works Cited
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>.