Love Sexually

Before I get to the physical and tangible, let me touch a pinhead of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The bard cannot be labelled. He is beyond courtly, Petrarchan or metaphysical. He is a universe, true only to himself. His love poetry spans over the sugary romantic, the cerebral, the comic, the erotic and so on and so forth. Love that goes from, “Shall I compare the to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate:”(18),  to “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red;  / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.” (130). 

To be sure, Shakespeare has written magnificent words on love. I think his most touching sonnet on the theme is sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

I shall, at a later stage on my daily visits, go through Shakespeare’s sonnets, one at a time, and reveal things that will amaze you.

But now to the Metaphysical poets. These poets spoke about love in a very different way. They were tired of the uncertainty of the post-medieval times. The refuge where people had taken shelter for centuries, under the umbrella of the omniscient Middle Age, was gone. They were left in world of uncertainty and disorientation. Everything was being questioned. New lands were being discovered. The world was not flat and there was no Godly anthropocentric creation. “The new Philosophy puts all in doubt” said John Donne.  Where did love stand in this situation of confusion and doubt? For the some poets, love had to became a physical certainty. These poets, known as the Metaphysical poets, disdained anything that was not real, tangible and concrete. Their figurative language also became concrete and real. Their metaphors and similes were realistic, at times even scientific. Love was compared to a pair of compasses, a flea or an atlas. There is no Petrarch here, no sugary romantic love. The incurable romantics among us will shudder to see love, not through Wordsworth’s ‘inward eye’, but through cerebral intellect. A case in point is the amusing, but brutal poem by John Donne, The Flea. Here the poet wants to have sex with his girlfriend, who is a virgin. He uses cerebral wit to convince her, telling her that she should not worry about having sex before marriage, because their strong relationship already makes them (almost) married. The extended metaphor he uses to justify this is that of a flea, which has sucked blood from both lovers and therefore symbolises their oneness, their unity in holy matrimony. When she squashes the flea and kills it, the poet (being witty, cerebral and not sentimental) turns the situation to his own advantage and tells her something to the effect of… "OK, now you've killed it and it’s squashed and dead. So what has changed? Nothing! In the same way, nothing will change, nothing will happen if you give yourself to me."  Crafty devil this Donne.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Tomorrow I shall try to uplift Donne’s image by discussing one of his more romantic poems, albeit in the typical cerebral metaphysical style.