After reading and analyzing Shelley's The Sensitive Plant, my biggest take-aways concern the poet's observations on man and his relationship with death.
From the beginning of the first section, Shelley provides us with a curiously anthropomorphized garden. While the plants certainly have, shall we say, planty characteristics, their order seems more social than botanical, i.e., they have social relationships with each other reminiscent of human social structure.
From the first stanza, Shelley is idealistic, viz., the environment of all plants is peaceful and unadulterated (lines 3, 4). Note that it is Spring that awakes already made things, not the Christian God that creates from nothing. For me, this indicates that the Garden has existed before human consciousness for Shelley, a fact much suited to his well-publicized atheism. Upon awaking, each plant is described in detail, rich enough detail to bear similar potency to the kind found in 16th - 17th century blazons. For me, the onslaught of description isn't purely aesthetical, but serves to help delineate the idealized world of the plants for the reader, and cement the anthropomorphized nature of each plant. Shelley would have grown up knowing the literary values represented in plants, and his structuring of descriptive elements evokes similar ideas.
Shelley's uses the anthropomorphic descriptions to not only link the plants to human traits, but negate their negative toll in a kind of idealizing of man. Note that the narcissi's death while staring at their own loveliness is not presented in the negative. The hyacinth, well known as the plant which sprung from the body of a Greek boy killed during a discus match (Greek mythology), is presented as completely happy. The tragic Naiad also is carefree. Not only do these plants represent man in certain ways, they represent idealized man.
From among these, Shelley exalts the Sensitive Plant. For me, Shelley treats it as a kind of super-man or -- perhaps a better comparison -- a kind of Adam among the other plants, best exemplifying qualities Shelley finds best in man. I don't think the Sensitive Plant is Adam, but at points in the poem the plant certainly resembles the first Biblical man.
The plants are special in that they "shared joy in the light of the gentle sun." What links the plants in the garden are their unity with one another. Chief among these is the Sensitive Plant, who is thought of as most special among the plants, having the best inner qualities rather than external traits.
Shelley spends a vast amount of time building up an idealized world which he tears down rather quickly. Though plants are frozen and the hitherto unmentioned animals also die (273 - 275), they--most especially the Sensitive Plant--do not necessarily die. Shelley's acknowledgement of the death of the garden in section 3 is not a contradiction. Ideals, like the plants, live on. Shelley also notes that death is a human conception, viz., "tis we, tis ours, are changed, not they."
My take-away is Shelley's observation that humans process many things through a death-oriented value system. In his poem, however, Shelley does away with death by dismissing it as a factor of life and a construct of man's mind that does not have as much meaning as men ascribe to it. This solidifies why the plants appear to live on beyond the death they suffer in the perfect garden, viz., that each trait they represent goes on beyond their physical existence.
I was thinking the same thing about how Shelly notes that death is a human conception as well as the idea cannot die but the plant must. I kept thinking about how energy works and what it means to re use and transfer energy in reality as much as in poetry. Is the reason why we can't create energy and perfection in this word because it already exists we just have to see it with eyes fixed to look at the world as a garden?
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