Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden,
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

In these lines Shelley invokes a remote, quasi-mythic antiquity (“Ere Babylon was dust”) to frame a visionary encounter: Zoroaster meets “his own image” walking in a garden. The scene suggests the uncanny experience of confronting the self as other—an externalized double that collapses boundaries between subject and object, life and death, reality and apparition. By calling Zoroaster “my dead child,” the speaker implies a creator–creation relation, as though the magus is an offspring of the poet’s imagination or of a prior spiritual lineage. The “sole of men” emphasis elevates the vision into a singular revelation, hinting at prophetic insight and the loneliness of exceptional perception.