LOVE LITERALLY

A few years ago, I was asked to hold a distinguished lecture at the American University where I taught literature and language courses. The title was Love in English Language Literature. I shall cannibalise it a bit to give us a brief sketch. I shall drip drop little by little every day and follow a general timeline starting by touching the Medieval European concept of courtly love. This of course is just a peek into a vast literary universe. Today and tomorrow I shall limit my peeking to the 16^th and early 17^th centuries.

In essence, courtly love was a contradictory experience that hovered between erotic desire and spiritual attainment. Women were seen as an ennobling spiritual and moral force; a view that was in stark contrast with the teachings of the church of the time. Rather than labelling romantic and sexual love as sinful, the poets praised it as the highest good. Marriage had been declared a sacrament by the church at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and a Christian marriage had the only purpose of procreation. Any sexual activity beyond that purpose was deemed as non-pious. The ideal state of a Christian was celibacy, even in marriage.  The church channelled many of these energies into the cult of the virgin and it is not a coincidence that the cult of the virgin Mary began in the 12th century as a reaction to the secular courtly and lustful views of women. Francis of Assisi called poverty “his lady”.

During the Renaissance love was idealised and for the first time associated with the world of nature. I have chosen two poems to represent this period. Both link love to nature, the first by referring to the moon and the second to the hunt.

The date is 1591, the poet, Philip Sydney. Astrophel and Stella is a collection of sonnets in which Sydney celebrates his unfortunate love for Penelope Devereaux, the Stella of his title. Here the poet is addressing the moon as if it were a human being. He imagines it is a melancholic lover, suffering the same pains and sorrows he himself felt. This was the first example in English literature of an emotional relationship between nature and man, and their symbiotic suffering for love.

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!
Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Another poet who represents the new tradition of the love-sick sonneteer is Edmund Spenser, The Poet’s Poet. Amoretti is his 88 sonnet-cycle that celebrates the poet’s courtship for his love and future wife, Elizabeth Boyle. Here, once again, the poet looks to nature for emotional self-expression. In sonnet 67, written in 1595, the poet creates the extended metaphor of a huntsman who hunts a deer. When he has finally lost all hope of catching the dear, he stops to rest by the water and it is at that very moment that the dear walks over to him, letting itself be captured. With this extended metaphor Spencer obviously refers to his relentless and seemingly unsuccessful courtship of Elizabeth and her sudden and unexpected acceptance.

Like as a huntsman after weary chase,
Seeing the game from him escap'd away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer return'd the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won, with her own will beguil'd.

The Elizabethans adopted the subject of languishing love from the Italian poet Petrarch. Petrarch wrote sonnets about his eternal, pining and hopeless love for Laura. The Petrarchan tradition is characterised by self-pity, melancholy, affinity for the dark and total indifference to everything except the hopelessness and burden of love. These features are clearly seen in Shakespeare’s Romeo. I love the way Shakespeare creates a whimsical, poetic and lovesick man, like Romeo, in sharp contrast with a strong, pragmatic girl like Juliet. (I shall be writing about Shakespeare’s feminist sympathies in other future blogs.) Romeo was not really in love with his lady. He was in love with love itself.  When we first meet Romeo, he believes that he is in love with the Rosaline, not Juliet. His psychological state exemplifies the love of the Petrarchan tradition.

Love is a smoke made with fumes of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears;
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.

I suppose we would have to enter the mind and soul of the true Elizabethan to appreciate the fact that no sooner does Romeo see Juliet, he sends Rosaline packing to dote on his new-found love. This is a typical example of Romeo’s Petrarchan love, love for love’s sake, irrespective of the lover. The following extract from the play is the iconic moment Romeo sees Juliet. He is being teased by Mercutio, and says, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” Romeo’s point is that Mercutio can make jokes about the pain of love only because he has never felt such pain. Mercutio’s final remarks also sets the situation in this scene. Mercutio has said that Romeo will sit under a medlar tree and wish that Rosaline would drop into his lap like an over-ripe fruit of the medlar, and he is half right. Romeo is in an orchard, probably under a tree, hoping to catch sight of his love. Only that now, his love is Juliet, not the super-sexy Rosaline of Mercutio’s mockery, and Juliet doesn’t drop, she rises. Romeo looks up at the Capulet house, sees Juliet come to the window, and declares, “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks.” The rest is an ecstatic expression of Juliet’s shining beauty and of the longing it arouses in him.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

Here is the role reversal, as the male Petrarchan lover pines for his impossible love, while the female, who is also in love, has no time for pining and wants to get down to the brass tacks. Nothing will be an obstacle for her. The fact that Romeo is a Montague and therefore an arch enemy of the Capulets, is no problem. While Romeo pines, our more pragmatic Juliet declares, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...” She then leads the conversation to where she wants it to go. As Romeo smothers her with imaginative romance, she deals with the situation and organises her marriage. She doesn’t use the figurative language he does, she organises, “If that thy bent of love be honourable, Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow, By one that I'll procure to come to thee.”  Shakespeare’s women were tough, but I’ll get back to that with future blogs.

Tomorrow I shall write a little more about Shakespeare’s love sonnets and I shall also look at the different perspective of love through the Metaphysical poetry of John Donne