Commenting on lines 573-91 of the poem, Hugh Roberts, in Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry, argues that the annihilation "is the lover's contact with the other: his self is all too present in the claustrophobic confines of those four repetitions in the final line 'I...I...I...I...'. What should be the triumph of eros is reduced, at the moment of maximal achievement, to the monotonous iteration of the self: 'Love makes all things equal.' The promise of unity is revealed as a collapse into undifferentiated selfhood'" (155-56).
Let me add that I find the repetition of the "I" to be an indication of Shelley's desperation, a growing awareness that he is unable to transcend his mortal condition. The subject-object distinction is too prevalent in his mind, and his awareness of this fact is tortuous. Roberts further argues that the demoralizing tone of this passage that "this death is not a final escape from self but a dying into the self, a self without end" (15).
So the "one annihilation" could be interpreted as the annihilation of the union but not the annihilation of the poetic subject. During the romantic period there are numerous examples of poetic frustration which arise out of the poetic awareness of the disconnect between self and "other." Consider Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," which has its self-conscious moments when the poet realizes the futility of human longing for immortality. Keats opens the poem, for instance, by declaring "my heart aches." Like Shelley, Keats longs for a subjective transformation that is permanent, not temporary. The consolation, of course, is that there is at least a permanent biological relationship between the aesthetic object and the subject once aesthetic appreciation is established. Consider the following questions that Emmanuel Levinas poses as perhaps a consolatory answer to both Shelleyan and Keatsean disparagement:
Can objectivity and the universality of thought be founded on discourse? Is not universal thought of itself prior to discourse? Does not a mind in speaking evoke what the other mind already thinks, both of them participating in common ideas? But the community of thought ought to have made language as a relation between beings impossible. Coherent discourse is one. A universal thought dispenses with communication. A reason cannot be other for a reason How can a reason be an I or an other, since its very being consists in renouncing singularity? (Totality and Infinity 72)
Levinas gets some "getting used to," but what he is saying in this passage is applicable in a certain way to my study of Epipsychidion. Despite the deeply personal, esoteric meaning of the passage, understanding Shelley's struggle is certainly obtainable to a certain degree, thanks to his willingness to share with the reader his anxiety with the "other" (Emily). The anxiety and disparagement reveals the imperfection of language, but it also establishes a discourse with her; even the admittance that one's annihilation could be viewed as the ultimate plea for transcendence. Why, after all, does he not just remain silent? He is offering a "reason" or explanation for his deficiency when he writes,
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (588-91)
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1961.
Roberts, Hugh. Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.