Narratological Analysis of P. B. Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant”

Abstract

This paper offers a transgeneric narratological analysis of narrative voice, temporality, and metalepsis in P. B. Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant,” a poem whose narrative architecture remains insufficiently examined. Drawing chiefly on Genette’s and Stanzel’s frameworks, the analysis argues that the poem initially establishes a sensory garden-world through an overt, heterodiegetic narrator who employs leitmotifs and cyclical temporality. The concluding movement, however, introduces authorial intrusion and first-person epistemic hesitation that complicate the narrator’s reliability. A transformative metalepsis then reorients the reader from the phenomenal world of the garden toward a transcendent realm of ideal love and beauty. This structural rupture catalyses an evolution in narrative voice from descriptive apparent objectivity to a speculative, philosophical mode. By combining transgeneric narratology with a reader-oriented approach, the study clarifies the poem’s complex narrative framework and its philosophical implications.