Love Without Reciprocity: A Rhetorical Criticism of Emotional Betrayal in Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy”

Abstract

Aims: This study examines how persuasion operates in Love’s Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, engaging current Romantic and rhetorical scholarship that has traditionally read the poem as a celebration of natural unity and mutual desire. Rather than treating the lyric as purely expressive, this study argues that it functions as ethical persuasion. It asks how analogy, repetition, and apostrophic address shape audience judgment and frame emotional non-reciprocity as betrayal rather than personal choice. Framed within a Philippine interpretive lens that values relational accountability and moral responsibility in intimate ties, the study highlights how cultural context influences ethical reading. Study Design: The research adopts a qualitative, text-based design grounded in rhetorical criticism, a method that treats literary texts as persuasive discourse rather than neutral expression. Methodology: The corpus is limited strictly to the full text of Love’s Philosophy. Through close textual analysis, the poem is examined as a persuasive argument. The study identifies appeals to logos (reason through natural analogy), pathos (emotional appeal), and ethos (speaker credibility), and applies constitutive rhetoric to explain how the speaker positions both the beloved and the reader within a moral framework. Results: The findings show that analogy presents reciprocity as natural law, repetition reinforces its inevitability, and apostrophic address transforms silence into moral evidence. These layered strategies gradually shift persuasion toward subtle coercion, constructing refusal as ethical failure. Conclusion: By situating the reading within existing Shelley criticism and articulating its cultural and theoretical positioning, the study demonstrates how Love’s Philosophy operates not only as a Romantic lyric but as an ethical argument. It contributes to current scholarship by revealing how intimate discourse can embed power, and it affirms rhetorical criticism as a method for examining moral judgment in poetry.