Epipsychidion (1822) is one of Shelley's most problematic poems. A dream-like meditation on ideal love, it espouses Free Love, ridicules the chains of monogamy, and suggests that his lovers could be either female or male.
    Shelley's dedication reads: “Verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady, Emilia V————, now imprisoned in the convent of ————”. This refers to Countess Emilia Viviani, a young woman residing in the Convent of St. Anna, whom Shelley visited a few times and with whom he corresponded briefly. Although many lines of Epipsychidion appear to be addressed to “Emilia”, this may be a red herring. Despite the overactive imagination of Shelley's biographers, there is not the slightest reason to believe that he had an amorous interest in Emilia — never once did he visit her without being chaperoned by his wife and/or Claire Clairmont.
    Epipsychidion is a cryptic poem, a poèm à clef. Critics have exercised themselves by speculating whether Mary Shelley is symbolized by “moon”, Claire Clairmont by “comet”, and so on. Shelley makes it clear in his preface to the poem, labelled as an “Advertisement”, that he is posing puzzles and dealing in mystification. The poem's meaning will be “sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers”, but “incomprehensible” to others. Who are those intended readers? Shelley indicated in a letter to his publisher, Ollier, that he desired Epipsychidion to be circulated only to the sunetoi (the initiated, the cognoscenti, the enlightened, the “esoteric few” [Shelley's words]). That gay men might represent Shelley's “certain class of readers” or sunetoi is as reasonable as any other conjecture.
    After 406 cryptic lines, with occasional appeals to “Emilia”, the poem suddenly changes character with a line break and an appeal to “Emily”. The section that follows, addressed to “Emily” rather than “Emilia”, is almost two hundred lines of beautiful and erotic poetry. I suggest the possibility that “Emily” is not a variant of “Emilia”, but stands for Edward Ellerker Williams — Shelley's beloved companion — either as a code name for him or as his nickname. (The men in the Shelley-Byron circle did use feminine nicknames for each other, for example, “Polly” for Dr. John Polidori.) Shelley and Williams met in early January 1821, over a month before the Epipsychidion manuscript was sent to the printer.
    Alternatively, “Emily” may stand for some other male love of Shelley's, or even an imagined and idealized male love. Shelley may have had, and probably did have, love affairs about which we know nothing. This is to be expected: most people, who exercise a modicum of discretion, succeed in keeping their private love lives hidden. In Shelley's case, we should never forget the efforts of his widow Mary and his daughter-in-law Jane to create a myth, to turn him into “a Victorian angel suitable for enshrinement among the gods of respectability and convention.” [Robert Metcalf Smith, The Shelley Legend, 1945] Considering the massive destruction of letters, manuscripts, journal entries, etc. by Mary and Jane Shelley, the absence of evidence means nothing. We can only imagine what they destroyed.
    Throughout the final, “Emily” section of Epipsychidion are references to sailing, which Shelley and Williams enjoyed from the time they met until the time they died together, a year and a half later — references to the mutual attraction of equals — references to soul mates, the myth of Aristophanes. Despite the "lord/lady" terms, the concluding episode resonates with those qualities that are inherent in and peculiar to an all-male relationship.
    Some additional lines, which did not appear in print, were found and printed in 1903 by C.D. Locock; these were then included in the standard edition of Shelley's Poetical Works edited by Thomas Hutchinson. Some of these additional lines are merely rejects, but others are very fine and highly revealing. Shelley indicates that male love is at least a major theme of the poem; that he must “veil” the gender of his “friend”; that he is using trickery, concealment and camouflage. In light of these additional lines, gender cannot simply be assumed: “lady” may really mean “lord”, and “she” may mean “he”. Anything is possible.
    In four highly revealing lines Shelley declares that he has a friend who is also a lover, and that those who are too obtuse to recognize this might find a clue in Shakespeare's sonnets — in which an older man expresses his love for a beautiful younger man:


    The ending of Epipsychidion, beginning with “Emily / A ship is floating in the harbour now....”, makes perfect sense if it is addressed to Williams, his friend and sailing companion; it makes very little sense addressed to a young woman in a convent.
    Below are the following: 1) an excerpt from Shelley's “Advertisement” for Epipsychidion, 2) lines 408-591 of Epipsychidion, with footnote annotation to explicate homoerotic references, and 3) the “Passages of the poem, or connected therewith”, which were not printed with Epipsychidion, also with footnote annotation.





The Writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old building, and where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats....

 



        

 


Notes

1. Or Edward. In a fragment connected to Epipsychidion, Shelley indicates that he must veil the person to whom Epipsychidion is addressed: “What you are is a thing that I must veil.” [Shelley Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, Oxford UP 1970, p. 426.] If, as seems most likely from the context of these fragments, Shelley veiled the gender of his love object, then “Emily” could be read as “Edward” — his beloved companion, Edward Ellerker Williams.
    Shelley indicated in a letter to his publisher, Ollier, that he desired Epipsychidion to be circulated only to the sunetoi (the initiated, the cognoscenti, the enlightened, the “esoteric few” [Shelley's words]). He may also have circulated to his sunetoi, either through himself or through Ollier, a key to Epipsychidion, indicating that “Emily” should be read as “Edward”, and that masculine words should be substituted for feminine — for example, “heart's sister” should be read as “heart's brother”, “lady” as “lord”, and so on. In terms of metrics, the masculine words read just as well.
    Alternatively, “Emily” may be Edward's nickname. (Like many gay men, the men in the Shelley-Byron circle did use feminine nicknames for each other, for example, “Polly” for Dr. John Polidori.)

2. “Halcyon”. In Greek legend, a fabled bird with the power to calm the wind and waves while nesting at sea during the winter solstice. As adjective: calm and peaceful, prosperous, golden.

3. “heart's sister”. If gender is veiled, then “heart's sister” would really be “heart's brother”. This is one of many references to the “soul of my soul” or soul mate.

4. “Ionian”. Referring to “a Hellenic people of Mycenaean origin that inhabited Attica, the Peloponnesus along the Saronic Gulf.” [American Heritage Dictionary, hereafter AHD] Note that in Jeremy Bentham's circle, which overlapped the Shelley-Byron circle, “attic mode” was a code expression for gay, homosexual. (Louis Crompton. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England. Berkeley: U of California P. 1985)

5. Compare “Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!” — referring to John Keats in Shelley's poem Adonais.

6. “Elysian”. Referring to the Elysian Fields — in Greek mythology, the abode of the blessed.

7. “Aegean”. The Aegean Sea is “an arm of the Mediterranean Sea off southeast Europe between Greece and Turkey.” [AHD] Still another reference to Ancient Greece. Whether intentional or not, the iteration of Greek references, in a passage of erotic love poetry, inevitably suggests Greek Love, or love between males.

8. “a soul within the soul”. A possible translation of epipsychidion.

9. “Lucifer”. Once the fairest of the angels. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (Isaiah 14:12) Lucifer, the rebel or apostate angel, has long been a gay symbol. A gay bar in London is named The Fallen Angel.

10. “ere crime / Had been invented...” That is, before a taboo, derived from the Holiness Code of Leviticus, made male love into a sin and a crime.

11. “I have vow'd / Thee to be lady of the solitude.” There is a verbal ambiguity here. Either the line means 1) Shelley has vowed that “Emily” will be his “lady of the solitude”, or 2) Shelley has vowed that he, himself will be “lady of the solitude” to “Emily” (= Edward). If gender is veiled in Epipsychidion, then “lady” could be read as “lord”.

12. “to live again in looks, which dart / With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart”. A favorite theme of Shelley's: the eyes as conveyors of love, which he expressed in his poems, in his “Essay on Love”, and in Frankenstein. (John Lauritsen, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, Pagan Press 2007)

13. “We shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames” From here until the close of the poem, Shelley describes the union of soul mates, the coming-together of two halves of a primal whole, from the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. In Shelley's translation of the Symposium (or Banquet):


“One passion in twin-hearts”. Compare the the final line of the epitaph that Shelley composed for Edward Williams and himself: “For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.” For more on this epitaph click here.

14. “I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!” This is the “death which lovers love” (Boat on the Serchio) — orgasm!










Notes 

1. In my book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press 2007), I argue that Shelley uses friend as a code word for the male lover of another man. For a description of this book click here.

2. “a thing that I must veil”. Shelley here indicates that he must veil the person to whom Epipsychidion is dedicated. How veil? In the context of these lines — in which female is contrasted to male, mistress to friend — the most plausible interpretation is that Shelley veiled the gender of his friend.

3. “I never was attached to that great sect/ Whose doctrine is that each one should select/ Out of the world a mistress or a friend”. In this remarkable passage, Shelley declares both his bisexuality and his allegiance to Free Love, his opposition to obligatory monogamy.  Here mistress and friend are presented as erotic counterparts — and as the counterpart of mistress, friend can only be understood in an erotic sense.

4. “modern morals”. That is, Judeo-Christian morals (which condemn male love) as contrasted with the morals of Ancient Greece (which exalted male love).

5. “Free love....” A forthright affirmation of Free Love.

6. “commendation of this kind of love”. In context, what can “this kind of love” refer to, other than male love, or what Shelley might have called “Uranian Love”?

7. “the God in heaven above, / Who wrote a book called Nature”. Here Shelley rebuts the Roman Catholic dogma that sex between males is a sin against nature (peccatum contra naturam). Male love is part of nature, and therefore cannot be unnatural.

8. The simplest argument: love is good.

9. “Why, if you were a lady...”. The subjunctive implies that Shelley's friend, to whom Epipsychidion is covertly dedicated, is male.

10. “Hermaphrodite”. A mythical being that is both male and female. An old code word for a gay person.

11. “Shining within the dungeon and the tomb.” These and the preceding lines suggest forbidden love, sexual acts punished by imprisonment and death. During Shelley's entire lifetime, men and boys in England were hanged for having sex with each other.

12. “In one Elysium or one winding-sheet.” Shelley's wish that he and his friend be united, in happiness or in death. For a brief essay on this topic, “Shelley's Ashes”, click here.

13. In these four lines Shelley discloses that his friend is his lover. Shakespeare's sonnets, which express the love of an older for a younger man, are unmistakably a gay reference. Note Shelley's contempt for the “dull intelligence” of straight people.

14. These seven lines, beginning with “How Diotima ...”, refer to Plato's Symposium, which Shelley translated in 1818 as The Banquet. Male love is at the core of this dialogue; like Shakespeare's sonnets, the Symposium has for centuries been used by gay men as a coded reference.

15. “Paradise fruits are sweetest when forbidden.” Again the idea of forbidden love.

16. “would to God they were [faultless] / Who taunt me with your love!” Perhaps pure rhetoric; perhaps Shelley actually had been taunted for having a homosexual relationship.

17. “all those exiles from the dull insane” Gay men, who are exiles from the stifling and crazy taboos and conventions of normalcy.

18. “all that band of sister-spirits known / To one another by a voiceless tone”. Or brother-spirits. Gay men are able to identify each other by clues to which straight people are insensible; they have gaydar.

19. “And if life parts us — we will mix in death.” Again, Shelley's wish to be united with his lover in death. For a brief essay on this topic, “Shelley's Ashes”, click here.



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