JOHN DONNE.
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs, the flaming hair;
But Desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found—
The lineaments of gratified desire.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
The sacred lowe of weel-placed love,
Luxuriously indulge it;
But never tempt th’ illicit rove,
Tho’ naething should divulge it:
I waive the quantum of the sin,
The hazard of concealing;
But och! it hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feeling.
ROBERT BURNS.
But from the first ’twas Peter’s drift
To be a kind of moral eunuch;
He touched the hem of Nature’s shift,
Felt faint—and never dared uplift
The closest, all-concealing tunic.
She laughed the while, with an arch smile,
And kissed him with a sister’s kiss,
And said—“My best Diogenes,
I love you well—but if you please,
Tempt not again my deepest bliss.
’Tis you are cold—for I, not coy,
Yield love for love, frank, warm and true;
And Burns, a Scottish peasant boy—
His errors prove it—knew my joy
More, learned friend, than you.
Bocca bacciata non perde ventura,
Anzi rinnuova come fa la luna:—
So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a
Male prude like you, from what you now endure, a
Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna.”
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
“He shall see small change when we’re to bodies gone.” But women “are but Mummy possesst.” At different moments the feelings of even the same man are flatly contradictory. There are occasions when abstinence sows sand all over the spirit, as well as the limbs—when it produces that “low-tide in soul” which Shelley detected in Peter Bell-Wordsworth. There are other occasions when not to abstain is as hideously desiccating. Incontinence is deplorable, says the humanistic moralist, not because it offends a hypothetical deity, but because it demonstrably “petrifies the feeling.”
Living is an art; and, to practise it well, men need, not only acquired skill, but also a native tact and taste.
To measure life learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heaven a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
But the art of measuring life cannot be learned in its entirety. Poeta nascitur, non fit. We are all poets of living—for the most part, alas, pretty bad poets.
Polygamy
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like the light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
Mind from its object differs most in this;
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
Let us hear the words of God Himself, the author of the law and the best interpreter of His own will.
2 Sam. xii. 8. I gave thee thy master’s wives into thy bosom . . . and if that had been too little. I would moreover have given thee such and such things. Here there can be no subterfuge. God gave him wives, he gave them to the man whom he loved, as one among a number of benefits; he would have given him more if these had not been enough . . . It appears to me sufficiently established by the above arguments that polygamy is allowed by the law of God. Lest, however, any doubt should remain, I will subjoin abundant examples of men whose holiness renders them fit patterns for imitation, and who are among the lights of our faith. Foremost I place Abraham . . . I say nothing of Solomon, notwithstanding his wisdom, because he seems to have exceeded due bounds; although it is not objected to him that he had taken many wives, but that he had married strange women. His son Rehoboam desired many wives, not in the time of his iniquity, but during the three years when he is said to have walked in the way of David.
JOHN MILTON.
Can that be love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weeping all the day,
To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary, dark,
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?
Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.
But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,
And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold.
I’ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play
In lovely copulation, bliss on bliss, with Theotormon:
Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam,
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud
Come in the heaven of generous love, nor selfish blightings bring.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
Here are three ways of asserting a predilection for polygamy. The differences between them are significant. Shelley’s way is the way of the revolutionary romantic. “I never was attached,” he says, “to that great sect whose doctrine is,” briefly, monogamy. It is a declaration of personal non-conformity to an unpleasant religious superstition—for that is what the word “sect” implies monogamy to be. A Superstition which no man of good sense and decent feeling can accept.
Shelley had read his encyclopaedists; Godwin was his master as well as his father-in-law. But Godwin’s disciple was also Lord Byron’s friend and equal. The rationalizing individualist was also the heir to a baronetcy and a poet—was at once an aristocrat and a man of commanding talents; and this at a time when birth still counted and when the German theory of the rights of genius was beginning to displace the French theory of the rights of man. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a man in Shelley’s position and with Shelley’s gifts did not feel bound to explain and rationalize his non-conformity. He merely affirmed his disagreement with the rest of the world and passed on.
Milton is at once much more and much less modest than Shelley. Shelley says, “I should like to be polygamous,” and leaves it at that. The desire is, in his eyes, its own justification. Not so in Milton’s. Milton does not dare to be unorthodox on his own responsibility. He feels it necessary to prove by irrefutable argument that he is right and that those who call themselves orthodox are wrong. Hence these texts from the Bible. For the Bible is, by definition, always right. Milton accepts its authority. In this the militant protestant of 1650 reveals himself more humble than the aristocratic revolutionary of 1800. But humility was never the strong point of the man who wrote: “Nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right.” Milton bows, indeed, to a higher authority, but exhibits in the act of bowing a pride which makes Shelley’s self-assurance seem profoundest modesty. For Shelley’s self-assurance is merely human and relative. Milton’s, thanks to the Bible, is absolute and superhuman.
Milton bows to the authority of the Bible, but only in order to prove that his own taste for polygamy is also Jehovah’s taste. He is never content, like Shelley, to assert his preferences; he must always believe and make other people believe that his desires and heaven’s are the same. Bored by his wife, he writes a book to demonstrate that God has no objection to divorce. The book is censured; Milton writes another to prove that God is on the side of free speech. Vox Miltonis, vox Dei.
Blake occupies an intermediate position between Milton and Shelley. He has not lost the habit of justifying personal predilections in terms of mythology. But whereas Milton has to do all his justifying in terms of existing myths, Blake feels himself free to invent new ones for himself. Milton’s desire for more than one woman at a time is legitimate because Solomon kept a barrackful of concubines; Blake’s, because Oothoon offers to provide her spouse with “girls of mild silver, or of furious gold.” The substitution of Golgonooza for Jerusalem is the substitution of a private for a public myth. Individualism and subjectivism have triumphed; the time is ripe for Shelley’s simple assertion of a personal preference. “I should like to have a number of women, not because Oothoon and Jehovah approve of polygamy, but simply because that happens to be my desire.”
That three of the most considerable of English poets should have wanted to be polygamous (Shelley was the only one of them who ever came near fulfilling his wishes)
