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Shelley’s Quest for Persian Love

The Romantic period bears witness to a scene where the Romantic subject is capable of selflessness and loss of self in its interaction with an ideal visionary beloved. The Romantics pursue a sense of mystical oneness with the divine—God, Nature, or an ideal beloved—in a moment in which the Romantic subject seeks perfection through obliteration of its own self in the face of the idealised other conceived as a whole. The male subject’s search for an ideal female other and his desire to lose self in order to become one with her has connections with Sufism, where this loss of self is referred to as fanaa. In this article I intend to examine such moments of the Romantic subject’s selfloss in his beloved other, with special reference to Persian Sufi literature and the extent to which Shelley was inspired by and employed its motifs and images in his poetry. In order to gain insight into Shelley’s perspective on the idea of selfloss and how he was inspired by Persian literature to draw on this Sufi idea, I will look into the critical field in relation to Romanticism and GenderOrientalism. I will then discuss the eighteenthcentury Scottish philosophical position on the idea of selfloss in sympathy with the other. The article will go on to consider the range of Persian motifs that were drawn on by Shelley in his later poems such as “The Indian Girl’s Song” (1819), “Music” (“I pant for the music which is divine”) (1819), “To Jane: The Recollection” (1822), and “From the Arabic: An Imitation” (1820). I will look closely at the repeating motif of the love of the rose and the nightingale, the image of the poet as the nightingale, the wine cup and the cupbearer (saaqi) in Persian poetry as having been represented by Shelley in the abovementioned poems, along with his imitation of some poetic devices and measures of Persian poetry in composing those poems. The paper will then offer a comparison between Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude and the Persian poem Leili and Majnun in light of the loss of the subject’s self into and for the beloved other. To examine Shelley’s attitude toward self, let us first consider an example from “A Defence of Poetry” (written 1821, published 1840), in which he refers to selflessness as a sort of compassion: