Romantic poetry, sexuality, gender For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl 14) “This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment,” prophesies Blake’s devil Like Oothoon, Arla had imagined revolutionary possibilities for sensual enjoyment, but had been similarly betrayed by the oldest of male villainies Cristall restored the fallen Arla to paternal affection and “cherished reason” (p 341), and even followed Arla’s narrative of repentance with a separate “Song of Arla, Written During her Enthusiasm,” a first-person rhapsody that reaffirms the doomed vision that the omniscient narrator of “The Enthusiast” had chastened The corruption of seraphic love into seraphic frenzy did not eliminate from the Romantic period this ancient theme, and its potential intermingling of mystical marriage with older traditions of the loves of the sons of God for the daughters of man In visions of fallen sexuality redeemed or reversed we can often find hints of the intercession of fallen angels, from the “Eden Lucifer” suggestively glimpsed in the utopian eroticism of Shelley’s Epipsychidion, to his admirer Mary Ann Browne’s oblique vision of a new Eden in “The Remembrance of a Dream”: Yet we seemed from other mortals severed – We might have been in the world alone There were none to watch us, and none to chide us, No jealous fears, no curious eyes; Our love flowed on, the power to guide us, And ’neath its spell we were good and wise.46 A devout Christian, unlike Shelley and Byron, whom she admired, Browne similarly rejects God’s mutually exclusive opposition between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, seeing Eden instead through the Serpent’s eyes, as a paradise where Eve could be simultaneously “good and wise.” Like Coleridge, Tighe, and Robinson before her, Browne sets sexual knowledge at the heart of inspiration and intellectual liberation “The Remembrance of a Dream” is a dubious vision of paradise diffracted, like the fragment “Kubla Khan: A Vision,” through a series of formal prisms (memory, dream) that signal both the illusiveness and the intensity of her desire Waking from this dream of Eden reimagined, Browne’s poet may be addressing her predecessor Shelley (whose grave famously designated him cor cordium, heart of hearts) as her absent beloved: “thy heart of hearts is blending / Its vital stream of love with mine.” Shelley’s Epipsychidion had 173 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008