Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s head there; tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, My Lord.
GEORGE HERBERT.
Herbert was a good Anglican. But in this poem—one of the finest he ever wrote and among the most moving, to my mind, in all our literature—he makes no parade of Christian theology. The voice that calls the poet back from the bars, back from his longing contemplation of the earthly paradise, is a voice from the depths of his own nature, not the voice of an institution or an abstract principle. There is no brandishing of posthumous threats, no ugly appeal to self-interest, no Pascalian betting on the improbable Outsider, with his one-in-a-million chance of being (how alarmingly!) the Winner. No; if Herbert replied, My Lord, and obediently turned his eyes away from the flowers and cordial fruits, it was not so much through fear of hell as from an intimate conviction that Cockayne was no place for him and that the Being which had summoned him was a projection of his most real, his essential self. That is why the poem still has such power to move us.
Self Torture
Une nuit que j’étais près d’une affreuse juive,
Comme au long d’un cadavre un cadavre étendu,
Je me pris à songer près de ce corps vendu
A la triste beauté dont mon désir se prive.
Je me représentai sa majesté naïve,
Son regard de vigueur et de grâces armé,
Ses cheveux qui lui font un casque parfumé
Et dont le souvenir pour l’amour me ravive.
Car j’eusse avec ferveur baisé ton noble corps,
Et depuis tes pieds frais jusqu’à tes noires tresses
Deroulé le trésor des profondes caresses,
Si, quelque soir, d’un pleur obtenu sans efforts
Tu pouvais seulement, ô reine des cruelles!
Obscurcir la splendeur de tes froides prunelles.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
Que les grandes beautés causent de grandes peines!
Quoiqu’on nomme l’Amour un mal délicieux,
Que leurs premiers attraits sont doux et gracieux!
Mais qu’on trouve à la fin leurs douceurs inhumaines!
Que d’aveugles désirs, de craintes incertaines,
De pensers criminels, de soins ambitieux,
Font sentir aux amants la colère des Cieux,
Et le malheureux sort des espérances vaines!
Je doute cependant si je voudrais guérir
De l’extrème bonheur dont je meurs sans mourir:
Tant l’objet est puissant qui m’a l’âme enchantée.
Je crois qu’enfin l’esclave est jaloux de ses fers,
Je crois que le vautour est doux à Prométhée,
Et que les Ixion se plaisent aux Enfers.
JEAN OGIER DE GOMBAULD.
There are tropes in Gombauld’s sonnet which make one think of Philinte’s in Le Misanthrope.
Je doute cependant si je voudrais guérir
De l’extrème bonheur dont je meurs sans mourir.
is reminiscent of
Belle Philis, on désespère
Alors qu’on espère toujours.
But, after all, why shouldn’t Gombauld remind one of Philinte? When all is said, Philinte was not such a very bad poet, nor Alceste such a very good critic. Alceste’s favourite poem, the old song, “Si le Roi m’avait donné Paris sa grand’ ville,” is doubtless charming in its freshness and spontaneity; but it is not remarkable for subtlety. Whereas Philinte is at least making an attempt (not a very successful one, it is true) to distinguish and analyse.
Listening not long ago, to Le Misanthrope at the Comédie Française, I suddenly found myself feeling something like horror of Molière’s good sense. It was so appallingly, so drearily sensible! I pined for a bit of madness. Or at least for a recognition that madness exists and has its rights. Could good sense ever have discovered that
. . . le vautour est doux à Prométhée,
Et que les Ixion se plaisent aux Enfers?
Or having discovered, ever have admitted this profound and terrible truth? And Baudelaire’s particular illustration of the truth—could le bon sens accept it as credible? Quite apart from feeling horror (and that Jewess is horrible), could the sensible man even bring himself to believe in the possibility of such a thing having happened? No. And yet such things do happen, and Prometheus loves his vulture and Ixion enjoys being in hell.
The Nature of Love
Now what is love, I pray thee tell?
It is that fountain and that well,
Where pleasure and repentance dwell.
It is perhaps the sauncing bell
That tolls us into heaven or hell,
And this is love, as I hear tell.
ANON.
Hear, ye ladies that despise,
What the mighty love has done:
Fear examples and be wise:
Fair Calisto was a nun:
Leda, sailing on the stream,
To deceive the hopes of man,
Love accounting but a dream,
Doted on a silver swan;
Danae in a brazen tower,
Where no love was, loved a shower.
Hear, ye ladies that are coy,
What the mighty love can do:
Fear the fierceness of the boy:
The chaste moon he makes to woo;
Vesta, kindling holy fires,
Circled round about with spies,
Never dreaming loose desires,
Doting on the altar dies;
Ilion, in a short hour, higher
He can build, and once more fire.
JOHN FLETCHER.
There are two births: the one when light
First strikes the new awakened sense;
The other when two souls unite,
And we must count our life from thence.
When you loved me and I loved you,
Then both of us were born anew.
WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT.
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so. But this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
JOHN DONNE.
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;
So, when affection yields discourse, it seems
The bottom is but shallow whence they come.
They that are rich in words, in words discover
That they are poor in that which makes a lover.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
Ametas and Thestylis making hay-ropes
Ametas
Think’st thou that this love can stand,
While thou still dost say me nay?
Love unpaid does soon disband:
Love binds love, as hay binds hay.
Thestylis
Think’st thou that this rope would twine,
If we both should turn one way?
Where both parties so combine,
Neither love will twist, nor hay.
Ametas
Thus you vain excuses find,
Which yourself and us delay;
And love ties a woman’s mind
Looser than with ropes of hay.
Thestylis
What you cannot constant hope
Must be taken as you may.
Ametas
Then let’s both lay by our rope
And go kiss within the hay.
ANDREW MARVELL.
If thou long’st so much to learn, sweet boy, what ’tis to love,
Do but fix thy thought on me, and thou shalt quickly prove.
Little suit at first shall win
Way to thy abashed desire;
But then will I hedge thee in,
Salamander-like, with fire!
THOMAS CAMPION.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof—and, proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Campion is right at least as often as Shakespeare. Possession sometimes begets contempt, sometimes infatuation. The successful lover may hate past reason, or else find himself “hedged in, salamander-like, with fire.” It depends on circumstances and, above all, on the temperaments of the parties concerned.
Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
virtù di carità, che fa volerne
sol quel ch’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta.
DANTE ALIGHIERI.
Piccarda speaks in Paradise; which only means, of course, that she is speaking of earthly love at its best. The quality of this highest love “quiets our will, makes us desire only that which we have, and gives us no other thirst.”
Loneliness
Siren Chorus
Troop home to silent grots and caves,
Troop home and mimic as you go
The mournful winding of the waves,
Which to their dark abysses flow.
At this sweet hour all things beside
In amorous pairs to covert creep;
The swans that brush the evening tide
Homewards in snowy couples keep.
In his green den the murmuring seal,
Close by his sleek companion lies,
While singly we to bedward steal,
And close in fruitless sleep our eyes.
In bowers of love men take their rest,
In loveless bowers we sigh alone;
With bosom-friends are others blest,
But we have none—but we have none.
GEORGE DARLEY.
Those seals are absurd, but they make the poem. We smile as we read; but we are enchanted—why? it is impossible to say. For of course we know quite well that seals don’t murmur, only bleat and bark and grunt. We know that they stink—so fearfully that Menelaus would have died of their ὀλοώτατος ὀδμή if the friendly nymph had not brought him ambrosia to sniff. (For “who,” asks Homer, “would choose to go to bed with a monster of the deep?” Only another monster.) And yet, in spite of all this, we are charmed and delighted. Those two sleek creatures in their connubial den make us feel for the poor lonely Sirens with an intensity of sympathy which the paired swans and the merely human couples would be, by themselves, incapable of arousing.
Δἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
κὰι Πληΐαδες, μἐσαι δέ
νὐκτες, πάρα δ’ἔρχετ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
SAPPHO.
“The moon has set, and the Pleiads; it is the middle of the night and time passes, time passes, and I lie alone.”
Not even the best of the Chinese could have said more in so small a compass. Night, and desire, the anguish of waiting and, with it, the duller, the deeper, the more hopelessly incurable pain of knowing that every light must set, that life and love are declining,
