“Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux!”—
lines which have for years haunted my memory with all the inveterate persistency of an old remorse.
Vamp
As in some countries far remote from hence,
The wretched creature destinèd to die,
Having the judgment due to his offence,
By surgeons begged, their art on him to try,
Which on the living work without remorse,
First make incision on each mastering vein,
Then staunch the bleeding, then transpierce the corse,
And with their balms recure the wounds again.
Then poison and with physic him restore;
Not that they fear the hopeless man to kill,
But their experience to increase the more:—
Even so my mistress works upon my ill,
By curing me and killing me each hour.
Only to show her beauty’s sovereign power.
MICHAEL DRAYTON.
One cannot perform a surgical operation when one is drunk. Those sirens who amuse themselves by vivisecting their lovers are generally of a frigid temperament, or if not frigid, are yet exasperatedly incapable of finding any entire, annihilating satisfaction. Sensuality never goes either to their heads or their hearts. Their victims are to be pitied; but so, even more, are they themselves. Chronic and unescapable sobriety is a most horrible affliction.
Right True End
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick:
Love is a bear-whelp born; if we o’er-lick
Our love and force it new strange shapes to take,
We err, and of a lump a monster make.
Were not a calf a monster that were grown
Faced like a man, though better than his own?
JOHN DONNE.
Answer to the Platonicks
So angels love; so let them love for me!
When I’m all soul, such shall my love too be.
Who nothing here but like a spirit would do
In a short time, believe ’t, will be one too.
But shall our love do what in beasts we see?
Even beasts eat too, but not so well as we;
And you as justly might in thirst refuse
The use of wine, because beasts water use.
They taste those pleasures as they do their food:
Undressed they take ’t, devour it raw and crude.
But to us men Love cooks it at his fire,
And adds the poignant sauce of sharp desire.
Beasts do the same, ’tis true; but ancient fame
Says gods themselves turned beasts to do the same.
The Thunderer who, without the female bed,
Could goddesses bring forth from out his head,
Chose rather mortals this way to create,
So much he esteemed his pleasure ’bove his state.
ABRAHAM COWLEY.
’Tis the Arabian bird alone
Lives chaste, because there is but one.
But had kind nature made them two,
They would like doves and sparrows do.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER.
Spenser is our only considerable platonizer. The other poets of importance agree at bottom with John Donne. Thus all Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines propose the right true end of love—a fact which I had reason, not long ago, to regret. For, writing about the future Utopia, I introduced a character who, alone in that happier world, had read Shakespeare. I wanted this person to be a platonic lover; but, reading through the plays, I realized to my dismay that platonic love is not a subject with which Shakespeare ever deals. Even the young romantic lovers, like Romeo and Troilus, make no attempt to o’erlick their love, which duly takes the old and thoroughly familiar shape. So does that of
our general mother who, with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreproved,
And meek surrender, half-embracing leaned
On our first father; half her swelling breast
Naked met his, under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid. He, in delight
Both of her beauty and submissive charms,
Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds
That shed May flowers.
“Nor turned, I ween,” adds Milton,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity, and place, and innocence.
Equally unmonstrous and as little platonic is the love so lyrically sung by Shelley, by Byron, with such raptures and cynicisms. Nor, generally, do Browning’s Men and Women go to sea for nothing but to make them sick.
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber should complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand for the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, resound
My echoing song; there worms shall try
That long preserved virginity;
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
ANDREW MARVELL.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence because it doth remove
Those things that elemented it.
But we, by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss.
JOHN DONNE.
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by despair
Upon impossibility.
Magnanimous despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive,
Where my extended soul is fixed;
But fate doth iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
Therefore the love which me doth bind,
But fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind
And opposition of the stars.
ANDREW MARVELL.
Absence makes for idealization—particularly when there is an exchange of letters. The writers of love letters are compelled to express and explain their feelings to an extent unknown to lovers who enjoy one another’s physical presence. (The desire to express and explain turns even unseparated lovers into letter writers.) The constant repetition of these generally exaggerated verbal affirmations acts as an auto-suggestion; absent, but letter-writing, lovers tend, therefore, to work themselves up into frenzies of love for an unrecognizably idealized object. If this process goes too far, meeting and consummation can hardly fail to be a horrible disappointment. One admires the wisdom of Dante who platonically loved a memory, while living with a perfectly solid and actual wife.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour and the size
(All which before was poor and scant)
Redoubles still and multiplies.
When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls. . . .
But O, alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They’re ours, though we’re not they; we are
The intelligences, they the sphere.
We owe them thanks because they thus
Did us to us at first convey;
Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
On man heaven’s influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
The subtle knot which makes us man:
So must pure lovers’ souls descend
To affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look;
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover such as we
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we’re to bodies gone.
JOHN DONNE.
Donne, like Dante, illustrates the danger of being too well educated. He brings philosophy and science into his lyrics—but the philosophy and science, unfortunately, of another age. These references to spheres and their intelligences, to blood and its animal spirits, are incomprehensible to the ordinary twentieth-century reader, who is forced to mug up the poet’s meaning in his editor’s notes. Luckily the main point of the poem is unobscured by references to superannuated science and mediaeval cosmology.
Some that have deeper digged love’s mine than I,
Say where his centric happiness doth lie.
I have loved, and got, and told;
But should I love, get, tell till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
O ’tis imposture all!
And as no chymic yet th’ elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
So lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer’s night.
Our ease, our thrift, our honour and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble’s shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that any man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom’s play?
That loving wretch that swears
’Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly that he hears
In that day’s rude, hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit,
