Saturday, September 20, 2025

Andrew Marvell "The Definition of Love

Andrew Marvell was a contemporary and friend of John Milton. He probably saved Milton’s life after King Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660. He wrote a number of excellent poems, his most popular poem “To His Coy Mistress,” is a witty, carpe diem love-song in which the speaker argues that life is too short for her to put off enjoying sexual intimacy with him. Another interesting poem about love, is his “The Definition of Love.” Unlike “Coy Mistress,” this poem aches with the pain of unfulfilled love:

        The Definition of Love

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'r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where My extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.

For Fate with Eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick pow'r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere. 

As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in ever Angle greet:
But ours so truly Paralel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love with us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.

This interesting little poem immediately compels the reader by its title. We encounter the words “The Definition of Love” and wonder how Marvell will define this all-consuming human passion. The first three words lead us in that direction, with its linking verb “My Love is,” but instead of a specific image representing the emotion of love, he conjures a metaphor of love being born to a father, “despair” and a mother, “Impossibility.”

Marvell then states that “Magnanimous Despair alone / Could show me so divine a thing.” The ironic coupling of these words initially perplexes until we read the rest of the stanza. “Despair is “Magnanimous” in showing him a beauty “so divine,” but tauntingly cruel, since such a love will never be within his reach. To even hope for such a consummation is purely feeble and forever useless. In stanza 3, we see that it is not the lover who rejects him, as is the common theme in countless poems of unrequited love written during this literary period. He believes he “quickly might arrive / Where my extended Soul is fixt.” Spiritually, he and his beloved are united; physically, they remain apart: “But Fate does Iron wedges drive, / And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.

The Fate of stanza 3, with its “Iron wedges,” is impersonal and mechanical. In stanza 4, Fate assumes a human agency, which is not only jealous of the lovers but also jealous of her power to control their lives. The “union” of the lovers would “ruine” her and “depose” “her Tyrannick pow’r.” No less than “her Decrees of Steel” and a separation as great as the North and South poles between the lovers, will ensure Fate retains her power. Stanzas 3,4, and 5 convey Marvell’s feelings of resignation in the hands of Fate. Yet, one line intimates his resistance against Fate’s dictates: “(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel). The parentheses suggest an aside, a thought secondary to the sentiment presented in the stanza 5. But the meaning within the parenthesis seems to resist the absolute power Fate has exerted over the lovers. How might Fate control their lives if “Loves whole World” revolves around them?

Yet only a cosmic collapse—“Unless the giddy Heaven fall,” and an earthquake, “And Earth some new Convulsion tear”—could possibly bring the lovers together. But such events would reduce the sky and earth to a “Planisphere,” a two-dimensional representation which cannot adequately measure their perfect love. In the next stanza, the perfection of their love is measured in parallel lines, which “Though infinite can never meet.” At this point in the poem, it should become apparent that Marvell’s definition of love is more of a description than a definition, a description that is rendered in abstract images in which Fate is his personified adversary and geometric images represent their perfect love. The poem presents something of a summation: “Love…doth bind” the lovers; “Fate so enviously debarrs” the union of the lovers.” And the final two lines suggest two possible conclusions. The lovers will always have their spiritual love, but Fate will always stand in between them physically: “And Opposition of the Stars.” Or “The Love which us doth bind…” will not only conjoin their minds but also oppose the “Stars” and leaves the reader wondering whether the poem offers a definition or instead a paradox. 

Monday, July 14, 2025

Shelley's To A Skylark

 While walking one evening with his wife Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley heard a skylark’s singing above their heads. Years later, Mary recalled the incident: “In the spring (1819) we spent a week or two near Leghorn (Livorno, Italy) borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on journey to England. It was a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies, that we heard the caroling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.” This, of course, is the poem Shelley published in 1820, “To a Skylark.”

      To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.                                   5

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.               10

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.                         15

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,                      20

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.                                 25

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.       30

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.                          35

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:                        40

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:              45

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:  50

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves:  55

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.                    60

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard,
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.                               65

Chorus Hymenæal,
Or triumphal chaunt,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.                     70

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?                 75

With thy clear keen joyance
Langour cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.                                80

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?                  85

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.            90

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.                         95

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!                        100

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.                      105

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” And so, Shelley inaugurates his celebration of the skylark. The skylark’s “profuse stains of unpremeditated art” fire Shelley’s imagination to find words that furnish what he feels. As he listens, he watches the bird, but the skylark ascends higher and higher until it becomes “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun,” (15) which he hears but cannot see: “I hear thy shrill delight.” (20) Once the skylark is beyond his sight, Shelley plumbs his imagination for the means to translate the sublime effect of the bird’s song into words. His mind soars skyward, visualizing “a star of heaven, / In the broad day-light,” (18-19) “the arrows / Of that silver sphere,” (Venus) (21-22) and “when the moon rains out her beams.” (30) These comparisons seem not to satisfy Shelley: he ponders, “What thou art we know not;” and asks, “What is most like thee?” (31-32) He follows with four more comparisons (similes), to a poet, a maiden, a glow-worm, and to a rose, then crests his veneration of the skylark: “All that ever was / Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass,” (60) but this is a veneration that continues to strive to fathom the skylark’s sublimity, but simply cannot.

After these attempts to depict the sublime nature of the skylark’s song, Shelley instead directly beseeches the skylark asking it to “Teach us spite, or bird, / What sweet thoughts are thine.” And two stanzas later (stanza 15) he pursues a deeper knowledge that inspires the bird to sing his unsurpassable “music: “What objects… / What fields or waves or mountains? / What shapes of sky or plain? / What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?” In those last four words, Shelley begins to uncover the secret of the skylark’s infinite, unencumbered happiness, which he fully discovers in the next two stanzas (76-85):

With thy clear keen joyance
Langour cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

Present but untranslatable in the skylark’s song is profound knowledge human do not achieve, which frees the skylark from “Languor,” “annoyance,” “love’s sad satiety” and endows the bird with understanding of death “more true and deep / Than we mortals dream.” In the next stanza, Shelley shows how life foils and afflicts us:

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

In the penultimate stanza, Shelley praises the skylark’s music one more time: “Better than all measures / Of delightful sound, / Better than all treasures / That in books are found.” Nothing surpasses the beauty and inspiring power of the music that descends to him from the heavens. In the final stanza, he ends the poem with an appeal to the skylark to teach him “half the gladness / That thy brain must know,” empowering him to command the world’s attention so in turn humanity might listen and be uplifted by strains of sublime, poetic art.

Sunday, June 29, 2025

The Lotos Eaters: Choric Song

 In the previous post, I introduced Tennyson’s first five stanzas of “The Lotos-Eaters.” Here is the rest of the poem, which is a “Choric Song” of alternating stanzas sung by Ulysses’ men who ate the lotos flowers. Through the eight stanzas, the mariners contrast the sweet, serene and indolent existence the island offers them with the toils and troubles that would confront them if they were to continue their journey to Ithaca.

               Choric Song
I
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

II
Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
"There is no joy but calm!"
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

III
Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steeped at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

IV
Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

V
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other's whispered speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

VI
Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffered change:
For surely now our household hearths are cold,
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,
Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

VII
But, propped on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)
With half-dropped eyelid still,
Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—
To hear the dewy echoes calling
From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine—
To watch the emerald-coloured water falling
Through many a woven acanthus-wreath divine!
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,
Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.

VIII
The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll'd to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centered in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whispered—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

At the end of the “Choric Song” we are aware that the mariners choose to remain on the island in their soporific state. The question that Tennyson may be asking us is whether there is true value in striving through life’s obstacles and struggles. Is it better to be “climbing up the climbing wave” or “falling asleep in a half-dream…/Eating the Lotos day by day”? The world offers many means to benumb the mind and the body. We all need a reprieve from the workweek’s labor and responsibility. Indeed, some would prefer a drugged dream of leisure over struggles. But surrendering to a half-conscious existence may not be an answer. Nevertheless, many of us seem to endeavor toward a conscious reward but never reach that envisioned pinnacle, spinning relentlessly along an endlessly laborious path. Perhaps Robert Frost submitted an answer in his poem “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Or maybe the answer lies with Albert Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus” and along with Camus “imagine Sisyphus happy”.

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

No Finer Ear for Poetry

 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was English Poet Laureate during the reign of Queen Victoria. He is considered by many critics to be the greatest poet of that era and was easily the most popular poet writing in England. He had a particularly fine ear for musical rhythms and rhymes in his verse. T. S. Eliot said Tennyson had “the finest ear of any English poet since Milton (1608-1674). He tackled a variety of subjects in his poetry including classical mythology, religious issues, industrialization, mortality, etc. His most well-known and widely read poem is “Ulysses.” Another poem about the Greek hero, Ulysses, on one of his adventures, is “The Lotos Eaters.” Tennyson, who knew Homer’s epic The Odyssey by heart, took the short episode from Book IX. 82-97 in which Ulysses told King Alcinous about an encounter with the inhabitants on the island of the Lotos Eaters. Here is Homer’s episode, translated into prose by Samuel Butler (1900):

Monday, May 26, 2025

Dover Beach

Thursday, May 8, 2025

A Milton Sonnet

 In 1632, just past his twenty-third birthday, John Milton (1608-1674) seems to have had a touch of anxiety. Seven years earlier, he entered Christ College Cambridge and embarked on his studies. His intention was to take holy orders and become a Protestant minister. He worked his way through a Bachelor of Arts (1629) and a Master of Arts (1632). As he matured, Milton steeped himself in great literature. He read rapaciously and absorbed the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare, to name a few. His love of these great poets most certainly affected his thinking and inspired him to compose his early great poems “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.” It was during this period that the trajectory of his life seems to have swerved from the path of a religious career to one dedicated to poetry. Of course, as with so many young people, Milton looked toward the future and worried over the choice he would make. His father wondered why at twenty-three Milton had yet to begin his career as a minister, which increased his angst. Perhaps to rationalize his delay and restrain his anxiety Milton wrote his sonnet, “How soon hath Time”:

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Wordsworth's Lucy Poems