This is confirmed by the ensuing statement--that 'a
light is past from the revolving year [a phrase repeated from stanza
18], and man and woman.' Next we are told that 'what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee [me] wither.' The _persons_ who
were more particularly dear to Shelley at this time must have been (not
to mention the two children Percy Florence Shelley and Allegra
Clairmont) his wife, Miss Clairmont, Emilia Viviani, and Lieutenant and
Mrs. Williams: Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Godwin, can hardly be in question.
No doubt Shelley's acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in
some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four
ladies here named: but the strong expressions which he uses as to
attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to
have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book.
Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not
to _persons_ who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more
general kind--such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas
31-34.
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