Love Poems through the Ages pre-1900

Introduction

There are two important contexts that we should be aware of as we read and discuss our love poems. These contexts are those of ‘courtly love’ and Petrarchism.

Courtly love can be described as a doctrine of love, a religion of love, between (as ‘courtly’ suggests)  aristocratic lovers. It developed in medieval Europe and was expressed and cultivated in poems and chivalric romances such as the Arthurian Romances and the various versions of the Tristan and Isolde story. In Southern France, poets called troubadours composed poems and songs which refer to the various conventions  of courtly love. The male lover idealises his beloved – she is usually married to a powerful lord. The erotic and physical aspects of the (potentially) adulterous affairs are ennobled and spiritualised, though there is often a degree of ambiguity in what one might call the general ‘mood music’ of courtly love. Is the affair one that will be sexually consummated or is it of a purely spiritual nature? One type of courtly love poem,  the aubade or alba,  implies a sexual consummation.   Aubade/alba means ‘dawn’ and in this type of poem the lovers have awakened at dawn and the man is expressing the necessity to part before it is fully day. Having slept together, one assumes that the lovers have had intercourse though this is not made explicit. In other poems the lady is exalted and worshipped as if she were a spiritual being. Perhaps she had to be exalted and spiritualised because the male lover had to worship her from a distance. He had to keep his distance  because she was confined by her role as wife to a powerful lord and so opportunities for intimate meetings, or ‘trysts’, were necessarily limited. Furthermore, the lady is often presented as treating her devoted lover in a  ‘cold’ or distant manner. As a result, he suffers for his love; his lady has the power to ‘kill’ him. He writes poems of ‘complaint’ expressing his sufferings.

The Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) — anglicised to Petrarch — inherited the courtly love tradition and wrote many poems (366 in his collection Canzoniere ) chiefly in sonnet form, to his beloved Laura.  In one of his sonnets (no. 3) he describes falling in love at first sight with Laura on Good Friday when they were in the same church in Avignon.  He presents himself as being unable to defend himself against her “lovely eyes”; he goes on to develop the idea of being helpless when he says that he has been struck by one of Cupid’s arrows. Unfortunately, as his sonnet also says, Cupid did not even show his bow to her!  In other words, she showed not even the slightest sign  of having been ‘struck’ by love. However, he was captured, helplessly bound by his love for Laura and inspired to write hundreds of sonnets expressing this love. She is physically, sensuously attractive to him — he writes of her “golden hair loosed in the breeze”; her complexion is a thing of “pearls and roses”  — at the same time, he sees her as a “celestial spirit”. Her body is a “veil to her soul”. The cataloguing of various aspects of Laura’s beauty was to become known by a French term, blazon.

Petrarch’s powerful unattainable love, both sensuous and spiritual, produces paradoxical feelings of pain and pleasure.  It is a “sweet torment”. He feels as though he “shivers in midsummer, burns in winter”; he burns and is “of ice”. She so exceeds all others that he must resort to hyperbole to describe her: she “sighs words/That would make mountains move, rivers stand still”.

After his death, Petrarch’s poems were read and translated throughout Europe. His type of love poetry was imitated by many and the style became known as Petrarchan or Petrarchism. In a Petrarchan poem we can expect to find the poet suffering from love whether unrequited or unattainable or simply impossible. She may be such an idealised, spiritual being  that she is beyond physical love; she may be deliberately cruel in the ways she maintains her distance.  The Petrarchan poet expresses feelings composed of conflicting extremes in images of fire and ice. He praises his lady in hyperbolic terms and his poems often include a blazon , that is, a cataloguing of the lady’s charms and beauties. All this often proves to be too much for the Petrarchan lover since the lady has the power to ‘kill’ him.   

The Petrarchan style also produced an Anti-Petrarchan style. I am sure you will see why it is called ‘anti’ when you read this example, Shakespeare’s

Sonnet 130:

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. 

I have seen roses damasked, red and white, 

But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 

And in some perfumes is there more delight 

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 

That music hath a far more pleasing sound; 

I grant I never saw a goddess go; 

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. 

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 

As any she belied with false compare.

Wyatt Whoso list to hunt

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503 – 1542.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, 

But as for me, hélas, I may no more. 

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, 

I am of them that farthest cometh behind. 

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind 

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore 

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, 

Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. 

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, 

As well as I may spend his time in vain. 

And graven with diamonds in letters plain 

There is written, her fair neck round about: 

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, 

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. 

“Whoso list to hunt…” to list: to wish, to desire

hind female deer

helas = alas

vain travail: futile effort

Draw from the deer: withdraw from

To faint can mean to lose heart or courage; to weaken and flag

Sithens = since

Noli me tangere: Latin, ‘do not touch me’.

This poem is a sonnet. A sonnet has fourteen rhyming lines. There are two types of sonnet, the Italian and the English. The Italian sonnet is also known as the Petrarchan – after Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). Its rhyme scheme is built around a division of the sonnet into two parts: the first eight lines, known as the octet, rhyme abbaaabba and the remaining six lines, known as the sestet, rhyme cdecde or cdcdcd. The English, or Shakespearean sonnet, divides into three units of four lines each — each group of four lines is known as a quatrain — and a final two line unit known as a couplet. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg.

Check this for yourself and you will see that the rhyme scheme of Wyatt’s sonnet follows the Petrarchan model except  for a cddcee variation in the sestet.

Wyatt was an important member of the Tudor court under Henry VIII and acted as his ambassador.  Assuming that Wyatt’s poem references the Tudor court, then the ‘Caesar’ of that world would be Henry VIII.  Some commentators have gone further and have speculated that the “hind” is a metaphor for Anne Boleyn. It seems that Wyatt had an affair with Anne Boleyn before she became Henry VIII’s second wife. However, whilst the aristocratic, courtly social context is relevant, I do not think giving specific identities to Caesar and the ‘hind’ adds to our appreciation of the poem.

Amongst the male Tudor aristocracy, deer hunting was a popular sport. In this sonnet, Wyatt is using the analogy of a deer hunt to describe his pursuit of a woman – the hind, a female deer, is a metaphor for the woman. In his opening lines he expresses a disillusionment with his ‘pursuit’ of the particular woman and with the quest for love and romance. He describes it as a “vain travail”. Travail is now, as the dictionaries say, an ‘archaic’ word, a word that is no longer commonly used. It means ‘work’ or ‘effort’ with a sense that the work or effort is of a laborious kind. Vain, here, can be taken in two ways: the pursuit is vain or futile because it does not achieve the desired result — to win the woman’s love; and it is also vain in that it is, in itself, devoid of real value.   

Yet, despite the disillusionment, he cannot free his “wearied mind” from the activity.  He continues the pursuit in a wearied, flagging (“fainting”) way. More or less in the same breath, he then declares with would-be finality, and in a striking image, that he will stop since the pursuit is completely futile: it is like trying to capture the wind in a net. So the first eight lines (the octet) present us with a divided self who is still drawn to something that he is determined to give up, although the determination to give up has the final say with a vivid image that seems to sum up the futility of the pursuit.

In the sonnet’s closing six lines (the sestet) he explains why the pursued woman could not be ‘won’ — neither by himself nor anybody else who cares to ‘hunt’. Here Noli me tangere calls for further explanation.

This sonnet is one of a group of sonnets by Wyatt which are translations of sonnets by Francesco Petrarch (Petrarca is the Italian version of his name). These translations vary in their degree of faithfulness  and “Whoso list to hunt” is one that does not follow its original closely. However, the original does use a female deer as a metaphor for the woman that the poet ‘follows’ — though Petrarch does not use the hunt analogy. The original also refers to an engraved message which includes  Noli me tangere, albeit in Italian (Nessun mi tocchi), and a reference to a powerful Caesar figure. As with Wyatt’s hunt, his ‘following’ ends in failure. “Wild for to hold, though I seem tame” does not have a direct equivalent in Petrarch.

Noli me tangere means do not touch me. It could be taken as quoting Jesus’s words as given in the Latin of St. John’s Gospel (John 20.17) from The New Testament. According to the account in St. John, when Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, he said to her, in the Latin translation of the Gospel,  Noli mi tangere. There is another very different source for the quote which is that of a third century AD Latin writer, Solinus, who wrote that many years after Julius Caesar’s death, stags were found with collars inscribed Noli me tangere. Caesaris sum (‘Do not touch me. I am Caesar’s’). Petrarch’s use of the quote probably draws on both sources. Given that he builds his sonnet around the idea of the deer as woman, the Solinus source suits his purpose since, according to Solinus,  the words are found on the collar of a deer. At the same time, he wants to allude to Christ in order to give a sacrosanct dimension to the deer woman.  Petrarch, in the original poem, writes that she is a “candida cerva” that is a ‘white deer’ and white can be a symbol of virginal purity. He also says that the ‘do not touch me’ message on the collar around her neck is engraven with diamonds and topazes which are symbols, respectively, of steadfastness and chastity. Furthermore, she enters the poem in a spiritualised, apparition-like way and disappears, in the end, in a similar way.  Petrarch’s woman is thus elevated into a higher realm beyond bodily contact. Commentators suggest that her ‘Caesar’ is God. Such an elevated, spiritual  deer woman is very unlike Wyatt’s.

How far do we read the poem as a voice that addresses the poet himself and how far does it address a circle of male peers who are keen to take part in the sport of sexual pursuit? It certainly begins with a voice that speaks, as it were, out loud to a group of male peers who may be inclined to ‘hunt’ the particular deer woman. The rhetorical flourish of “alas” in the second line helps to further the sense of a voice speaking out loud like that of a character in a drama. However, this seems to be a rhetorical device to begin what is essentially an inner reflection, an inner drama, which attempts to resolve his division between withdrawing and continuing.  The language is carefully contrived in its repetitions and echoes. The first line’s alliterative monosyllables “hunt” and “hind” echo each other. Alliteration follows alliteration in subsequent lines with “means” and “mind”, “draw” and “deer”, “Fainting” and “follow”. The sense of a dramatic voice trying to deal with an inner conflict is also achieved by the interplay between lines that are divided at mid-point by a comma or a full stop (such a break is known as a caesura)  and lines which are unimpeded by delay. The octet/sestet division is emphasised by the repetition at the beginning of the sestet with the octet’s opening, “Whoso list to hunt”. However, the identical words lead to a major difference in that in the octet they promise to show those who so desire where there is a promising ‘hind’ whilst in the sestet they lead to an  unequivocal warning, ‘If you join the hunt, you will be wasting your time!’

The poem’s last two lines further the sense of the poem as a dramatic performance since they introduce and quote another character, the poem’s deer woman. And her voice contains another voice, the voice either of Caesar or of Jesus  or of both Caesar and Jesus!  Each of her lines contain a caesura.  In the last line this creates a mischievously contrived pause before concluding with an arch look, “though I seem tame”. The declarative finality of the couplet is emphasised by the use of rhyme. Here we need to know that in Tudor pronunciation “am” and “tame” would make full rhymes.. The spiritualised woman of Petrarch’s poem has already been noted. The deer woman of this poem is very different. She tantalises and provokes desire in the very act of declaring herself unavailable. A wildness underneath an apparent ladylike gentility answer to a particular male erotic fantasy. Yet whilst she provokes, she also denies which is even more provocative. If we take her Noli me tangere to allude to Jesus, then her use of his words is potentially scandalous in that it puts them in a profane, sexual context. Furthermore, her wildness has another aspect in that any possible romantic involvement with her would put you in competition with Caesar himself.

To sum up:  Whoso list to Hunt  is a poem which begins with male desire, with the possibility of sexual conquest , — seen as a hunt in which the woman is the quarry. The desire is unfulfilled which leads to disillusionment. A lesson has been learnt: the male poet could never have caught this woman for she is untouchable since she is Caesar’s. Yet she is all the more provocative in the very act of repelling any possible suitors. The poet tells himself that he is wasting his time yet in the erotically charged   finality (“wild for to hold”) with which she repels, one feels that the male ‘hunter’ remains unable to “Draw from the deer”. The poet has conferred power on the woman, she has been given a defiant voice. Yet is that apparent autonomy a further aspect of the poet’s desire that transforms the woman into a male fantasy?

Shakespeare 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

1609 saw the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets – the quarto-sized book was entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It consisted of 154 sonnets and a long poem, A Lover’s Complaint. You may have picked up an edition of the sonnets and discovered that they are ‘difficult’, that their meaning seems to go ‘over your head’. It is true that many do not yield their meaning immediately; they have to be read and re-read — usually with the aid of the editor of one of the many excellent editions. However, some, such as sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and 116, are much more accessible. At the same time, they are rich in meaning and need to be read closely.

If you look back at the beginning of the discussion of Wyatt’s sonnet you will see that the Shakespearean sonnet took a different form to that of the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. The Shakespearean sonnet divides into three quatrains (a quatrain is a group of four lines) and a final couplet.  You will see that 116  consists of four sentences and that each sentence occupies one of our divisions.

What is being said in the first quatrain, the first four lines?  An impediment is something that gets in the way, that obstructs. When the poet says, “Let me not”, who is he addressing? Himself? Or is he, as Helen Vendler argues, replying to something said by the person he loves? The ‘something said’ being along the lines of, ‘Things have changed, various ‘impediments’ now get in the way of our love’. Read in this way, the sonnet becomes like a speech in a Shakespeare play which lacks the rest of the scene. The problem with such a reading is that with “Let me not …” he seems to present himself, and not another person, as the one who might admit impediments. However, we resolve that question, a possible paraphrase of the opening lines would be, ‘May I never admit that there is anything that could get in the way of the marriage of minds which are true to one another’. How literally should we take “marriage” here? A marriage of minds could include a literal husband and wife marriage but, by characterising the love as a marriage of minds as opposed to bodies, a distinction seems to be drawn between that kind of marriage and what is normally understood by marriage. If we take the use of ‘mind’ to be close in meaning to ‘soul’, it also seems to put the love on a more spiritual plane. The next sentence explains why such a marriage should not experience “impediments”.  ‘Love’ is not true love if it changes, (“alters”) when it experiences ‘alterations or changes in the other person. Nor is it true love if it ‘removes or leaves should the other person become a ‘remover’, a leaver. The claim is that a marriage of true minds, a unity of true love, is not susceptible to these changes, to these “impediments” – an ‘impediment’ is something that stands in the way of, that obstructs.

The use of “bends” in “bends to a remove” is rather puzzling. However, if we recall that ‘true’ can mean ‘straight’ — as in, ‘Make sure you keep the line dead true’ — then not being true to love could include the idea of bending or deviating from the true or straight course. At this point we may well notice that “bends” receives an echo in “bending” in line 10.

The first quatrain gave a negative definition of love: it does not alter, it does not remove. The second quatrain gives a positive definition: it is “an ever-fixed mark”. “Mark” could be taken to be a seamark, that is a column-like structure fixed to the sea-bed, or to a rock, and rising above the sea’s surface to a height that makes it clearly visible. It could also carry some form of beacon or light — though lighthouses were not invented until the late 17th century. Seamarks serve as navigation aids indicating rocks to avoid or rock-free channels to sail through. However, Helen Vendler in her work, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, writes that when Shakespeare means mark as a seamark he actually uses the term seamark rather than just ‘mark’. If you use the very useful on-line Shakespeare Concordance (OpenSourceShakespeare) to search all of Shakespeare’s work for ‘seamark’ , you will see that he does use the term twice (once in Coriolanus, once in Othello ). To  prove with certainty Helen Vendler’s point,  one would then need to go through all of Shakespeare’s uses of ‘mark’ by itself to see if any of them do refer to a ‘seamark’. However, the word  occurs over 400 times! I prefer to take the “ever-fixed mark”, not as a seamark but as the “ever-fixed” star of line 7. This, being “ever-fixed” and a navigational aid to shipping (“every wandering bark”) , must be  the North Star also known as the Pole Star or Polaris. Polaris maintains its position in the northern sky whilst the other stars wheel around it. Its fixed northern position is an aid to maritime navigation.

“Whose worth’s unknown” is rather ‘difficult’. I think we must take it to refer to the star not to the bark (Bark = boat). The comma after bark suggests that it is not the antecedent of “whose”. However, since “bark” goes immediately before “whose’ we may well think it refers to the bark before we decide that it refers to the star. This ambiguity — ‘ambiguity’ means being open to more than one interpretation — takes us into a complexity of meaning as we unpack the significance of “whose worth’s unknown”. Before doing so we should consider the use of “worth”. Our common understanding of worth — as in ‘what’s it worth?’ — makes it synonymous with cash value; however, we need to think instead of worth or value as an inherent quality which causes us to hold it in some esteem. The next step is to apply “whose worth’s unknown” to the star as symbol of love. So what is suggested by saying the worth of love is “unknown”? How can love, which is widely experienced, be “unknown”? Here, perhaps, we should read ‘not truly and fully known’ since it is of inestimable value. It is so ‘high’, so vast, that it can not be measured. It is, as the saying goes, ‘beyond price’. When we apply “whose worth’s unknown” to the star as star, we could think of a star as something so distant as to lie so far beyond our human means of calculation (particularly in the 1590s!) that we struggle to know it, to grasp its full worth beyond its known worth  as a compass point.

When we began unpacking the meaning of “whose worth’s unknown” we raised, for a moment the possibility that it could refer to the “bark” or boat. I take it that the bark stands for the couple whose love is being explored. If we take “wandering” in a metaphorical sense then it suggests that the couple, either one or both of them, could be losing their sense of the true course of their love. The ‘bark’, that is the couple, no longer seems to know the full worth of their love. However, if theirs is a true love, they will have the “ever-fixed mark” of the North Star that stands for their love, and this star can guide them back from a “wandering”, erring course to a true one.

The third quatrain returns to defining love by way of what it is not — except for the return to positive definition in line 12. It also personifies both love and time. Time here is Father Time, aka ‘The Grim Reaper’, who is traditionally seen as a robed and bearded old man carrying a timepiece and a sickle with which he will mow down in death those whose time is ‘up’.  To be Time’s fool is to act as his subservient jester, his fool. If Love was time’s fool, which, of course, the sonnet asserts it is not, the apparent lover would be subject to the changes that time makes in the other person’s appearance. When the rosy lips and cheeks of youth fade with time, when they are ‘mowed’ down under the curved (bent) sickle of time, then those who are Time’s fools lose their interest in the one they had loved. They ‘alter’; they ‘remove’. Unlike the first quatrain, which used “alters” and “alteration” in purely general terms, we are now provided with particulars of that which ‘alters’ and why the untrue lover alters — it is a matter of the ‘removal’ of physical, sensually attractive features, “rosy lips and cheeks”.  The  lover of the skin-deep has ‘removed’, has gone in search of or has found,  somebody else’s still unfaded rosy lips and cheeks.  True love, however, would not do this because it does not alter with time. One should also note the rather puzzling description of the sickle as “bending”. The sickle’s curved blade could be more obviously and visually described as ‘bent’ but to say that it is “bending” tells us what it does rather than what it looks like. So why use “bending”? One explanation would be that it fits the iambic metre (ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum…) whilst ‘bent’ would not. To unpack it further, we could say that  ‘bending’ applies to the mower as he mows  rather than to the sickle.  Seen in this way, the application of “bending” to the sickle is a form of ‘transferred epithet’ or ‘hypallage’. A transferred epithet (an epithet is an adjective used to describe a quality or attribute of a person or thing) is a figure of speech where the epithet that strictly speaking applies to one noun is applied to another closely associated noun. For example, when we talk of a blind dog we do not usually mean a dog that is blind but one that guides a blind person.

The quatrain ends with a return to positive definition, to what love does rather than what it is not. It has the inner strength to bear, to withstand, to endure, all the changes that time brings. It can do this until the end of time, to the doom which is doomsday, or until that personal doom which is one’s own death.  Love defined through the North Star image is a love so high that it can “look down on” tempests from its “ever-fixed”, “never shaken”, imperturbable, elevated position in the heavens. But the love that “bears it out” is one that has to bear things, that is to contend with earthly difficulties. A further point on the fourth quatrain concerns the use of “compass”. Its meaning in line 10  is close to ‘within its range, within its sphere of influence’. At the same time, it brings to mind a means of navigation which recalls the navigation images in the second quatrain.

In the closing couplet, “upon me proved” should be taken in the sense of ‘proved against me’. “Writ” is a no longer used past tense of ‘to write’. If we pick up on a legal or even court-room context suggested by “proved” and we bear in mind that a ‘writ’ — albeit as noun rather than verb — can also have a legal sense — as can “error” — then the closing couplet is a kind of swearing to the truth of what has been said. But what exactly is he saying? To paraphrase: ‘If my definition of love is false, then all that has been called love is not truly love and so no man has ever (truly) loved’. He also includes a rather playful  would-be logical ‘proof’ of the truth of his testimony: ‘if I am in error,  then I have never ‘writ’ but I have ‘writ’, therefore, it follows that what I have said is true!’     

As you know, AQA’s A-level English Literature syllabus B places particular emphasis on “the study of literature through the lens of historicism.” Historicism seeks to place literary texts into the cultural context in which they were written. This is, perhaps, obviously necessary when the text in question belongs to a historical period which has ideas that differ from ours. It could, however, also be necessary with some contemporary literature if it comes out of a cultural context unfamiliar to many readers. In the case of Sonnet 116, the particular cultural context that I want to draw attention to is that of the marriage ceremony as found in the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer is the Church of England’s prayer book. In its marriage ceremony the minister says to the couple:

I REQUIRE and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.

Clearly, given the sonnet’s marriage context, Shakespeare’s use of “impediments” has its source in the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage ceremony. We can also see that the marriage ceremony’s “dreadful day of judgement” finds an echo in the sonnet’s “to the edge of doom”. In the marriage ceremony “any impediment” is to be ‘confessed’ to; whilst the sonnet does not “Admit impediments” its use of admit can include to admit to, that is, to  confess to.

In addition to these verbal links and echoes between the sonnet and the religious context of Elizabethan England, there is broader cultural context that acts as a shaping influence of the idea of love in the sonnet. As we have seen, the sonnet defines true love as a steadfast feeling that is not dependent purely on physical attraction. It is a union of “true minds” and, as I have suggested, the use of “minds’ could be taken as synonymous with “spirits”. The star image suggests that true love has a heavenly quality and it has an eternal quality in that it is not subjected to time. As a result, the love is given a non-physical, spiritual quality. Given the Christian marriage context summoned up by the sonnet, a spiritual love is suggestive of the selfless love that is central to Christianity. The influence of Christian love is also felt in line 12’s echo of St. Paul’s words on love which occur in his First Letter to the Corinthians. There, in chapter 13, he says that love (some translations use ‘charity’ rather than ‘love’) “Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things”.

Having taken this historicist approach and noted these influences, it is important to emphasise that the point being made is not that the author is a mere copyist, mere putty in the ‘hands’ of these cultural influences. Nor, in this particular case, does it mean that he is declaring or promoting his Christian faith — nor does it mean that he is denying it! What he is doing is using the emotionally charged,  resonant language of the Book of Common Prayer and St Paul to explore his own idea of ‘marriage’. By contextualising we identify these influences to explore the original use that the author makes of them. We have explored that originality in the way the argument proceeds by way of negative and positive definitions; we have noted the maritime and navigational images and the complex interplay of verbal echoes.  If we take  — as I think we should —  “marriage” to be used in a figurative, non-literal sense, then the author as the user and shaper of influences can be seen in the way the sonnet, notwithstanding the religious influences, can be read as something of a challenge to conventional marriage.

The Flea

John Donne (1572-1631)

Before considering this poem we should be aware of the religious, specifically Christian, context that played a major role in the common life of England — and of Europe and beyond — for many centuries before our modern, secular age. For Donne, for Shakespeare and for many other authors, the Christian religion, regardless of their personal faith (or lack of it), was woven into the cultural context that they worked in. To help to appreciate these authors, we should have some awareness of that historical context. In particular, when considering Donne and Shakespeare, we need to have some grasp on the movement known as the Reformation. This movement is usually said to begin with a German priest and theologian called Martin Luther. In 1517 he nailed up his ninety five ‘theses’ on to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg. These theses raised various points, in a critical challenging way, concerning the practices of the Church – the Church being the Roman Catholic Church which had its centre, its headquarters, in Rome. The head of the Catholic Church is the Pope. The theses were just the beginning of Luther’s development of his religious ideas which formed an important part of what became known as the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church responded to these challenges in a variety of ways which became known as the Counter Reformation. Europe’s nations and regions came to identify themselves as either Catholic or Protestant. What began as a controversy over belief became a bloody conflict between Catholic and Protestant states in which religious elements were mixed with political and territorial disputes.

A brief, biographical sketch of Donne’s life

John Donne was born in London. On his mother’s side of the family there were connections with important Catholic families who had remained Catholics despite the Reformation. Two of his uncles became Jesuit priests and Donne and his siblings were brought up as Roman Catholics. He entered Oxford University at the age of 12 which was younger than the norm even for that time when boys (no girls allowed!) went to university in their early to mid-teens. There were only two universities in England, Oxford and Cambridge. Donne’s particularly early entry was probably designed by his Catholic family to avoid having to take the Oath of Supremacy which accepted the monarch, not the Pope,  as the head of the Church of England.  In 1593 he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in London. This was an institution where the students studied law. In 1593, Donne’s brother, Henry, was found guilty of harbouring a Catholic priest. Henry and the priest were both imprisoned where Henry died of the plague. The priest was hung drawn and quartered.

In 1596 Donne took part in a naval expedition against Catholic Spain led by the Earl of Essex. They successfully attacked Cadiz harbour. He took part in two further expeditions in 1597 neither of which was successful. He writes about these expeditions in two poems, ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Calm’.

In 1597 he was appointed as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, an important member of the Elizabethan government. By this time Donne was probably no longer a Catholic but a member of the Church of England.

In 1601 he married, secretly, Ann More (1584-1617), the niece of his employer, Sir Thomas Egerton. Her father strongly disapproved, and Sir Thomas Egerton had Donne dismissed from his post as secretary. He was even imprisoned for a time on the grounds that the marriage was not valid. Once Donne proved that the marriage was valid he was set free but he did not regain his post. There followed years of relative financial hardship during which Donne wrote many poems and lengthy prose works on religious issues. Ann Donne gave birth to 12 children and died shortly after giving birth to the twelfth, a stillbirth.

In 1615 Donne was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In 1621 he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wrote numerous sermons (at least 160)  which are highly valued for the quality of the writing. His poems were not published until 1633 — he died in 1631.

The Flea

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.

This poem by John Donne (1572-1631) can not be dated with confidence but it is thought to have been written in the early 1590’s. Donne did not meet Ann More, who was to be his wife, until the late 1590’s. Therefore, we must refer to  the woman addressed in the poem as his mistress. In doing so we are using an older sense of ‘mistress’, free of our modern sense of a woman with whom a married man conducts an affair. Our modern ‘girl-friend’ would be an equivalent. The male speaker of the poem is with his mistress and he is trying to persuade her to have sex with him. This may be based on an actual relationship that Donne had or it may be purely fictional, an exercise in developing a witty argument. Always remember that the poet has not necessarily experienced what occurs in a poem and that the ‘I’ of a poem is not necessarily the poet — though it could be!

As readers of the poem we become an audience watching a courtship drama in three acts; each stanza being one act of the drama. We ‘watch’, so to speak,  the stage of the page as the speaker addresses his mistress. Although there is only one speaker, at various points we can imagine gestures and actions taking place and, at one point, through indirect speech (“and say’st that thou”), we can give her some lines of her own. From several hints within the poem we can also construct a  larger drama behind the ‘little’ drama within the poem. Line 14’s  “Though parents grudge”  suggests that their (or is just her ?)  parents do not approve of the relationship. This could mean that a situation that allows their present physical intimacy has been carefully designed to take place secretly. He refers to “loss of maidenhead” which implies that she is a virgin and his references to marriage suggest (though this could just be a seducer’s ploy)  that theirs could be a true and lasting love.  His references to loss of virginity as sin and shame are based on the traditional Christian ban on pre-marital sex.    

He uses the example of the flea which has ‘enjoyed’ both of their bodies as he attempts to persuade her, after her initial refusal, to have sex. Given our distaste for fleas, and given what we know about fleas as transmitters of the plague, it is surprising to us to discover that Donne was not alone in using the flea in a love poem. Other Renaissance poets had done so though their poems usually addressed the flea rather than the lady. These poems  expressed envy of the flea since it had been able to roam over parts of the lady’s body that were denied to the poet. Another type of poem that  Donne’s ‘The Flea’ has affinities with is the carpe diem poem. This Latin phrase means ‘seize the day” (the Latin poet Horace used it in one of his odes — Odes I. xi ) . In other words, make the best of the present moment. This advice has been used by poets (only male poets?) to persuade their partners into enjoying sexual pleasure whilst it is possible. You have probably heard another version of this ‘advice’ in the form of ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. (There is a Christian version which uses carpe diem to encourage people to be virtuous now  ‘for you do not know  when you will die’.)

Having had his sexual advances denied, the man mounts an argument that draws a parallel between the couple and the flea. To understand the argument we need to appreciate that in Donne’s time, knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was in many ways very different from ours.   So it was thought that both male and female produced semen and that intercourse led to a mingling of the male and female semen. It was also thought that semen was produced from the body’s blood. So, in effect, intercourse led to a mingling of bloods. Donne draws a parallel between the flea after it has ‘sucked’ blood from both of them and human conception. The flea has undergone a form of  conception. It has mingled bloods as in human intercourse but without sexual intercourse: there was “no sin nor shame nor loss of maidenhead” involved, yet it is ‘pregnant’ since it “swells with one blood made of two”. This mixing of bloods is more than “we would do”. What are we to make of this? Do we read that “we” as a marker of reciprocity so that they have both agreed not to have intercourse?  In which case we have swiftly moved from  ‘I wanted to but “thou deny’st”  me’,  as seen in line 2, to one where he presents the restraint as mutually agreed. This move to “we’ could be tactical, a way of reducing any possible conflict between them. One can imagine that her possible response to what amounts to this conception in the flea would be to say, “And mixing of bloods  without  loss of maidenhead is certainly more than we could do!” As such she is, as one might expect, unpersuaded, though perhaps entertained, by the flea analogy.

Such a response would be in keeping with the action that we are to assume is threatened between stanza one and two, namely the act of squashing the flea. His “Oh stay” and the plea to “spare” in line 10 both show what she threatened to do. He now argues that the flea should be spared because it amounts to three lives: that of the flea and, in the form of mixed bloods, the lives of the man and woman. Furthermore, this mixing is not casual sex it is a holy thing, a marriage. The couple, in the form of their mingled blood, are ‘married’ in the flea; indeed, they are more than simply ‘married’ in that their unity has been sexually consummated and the flea, insofar as it “swells”,  is pregnant with their “one blood”.  The poet develops further the idea of their presence in the flea.   As they lie together in the flea, it forms a marriage bed and its surrounding body is their “marriage-temple”.

He extends the marriage parallel even further in his plea to spare the flea. Parents may not like their union and she, too, has her misgivings, but, the poet asserts, the deed is done in the flea: they have met together and are now, extending the temple analogy, “cloistered” in the jet-black body of the flea. “Cloisters” are a covered walk running along the walls of a cathedral or church. They are particularly associated with monasteries. To be ‘cloistered’ is to be enclosed in a sacred space. Such a space should be treated with reverence, should be sacrosanct. However, in line 16, he asserts that she is prepared to kill him. This line needs to be unpacked. — to do so we should be aware that “use” here means ‘habit’ or ‘accustomed practice’. So the iine says that by habit she is inclined to kill a flea and, in this case, since he, by virtue of his life-giving blood,  is in the flea,  that would amount to killing “me”. Furthermore, , the second stanza strongly asserts that “This flea is you and I”. Therefore to kill it would be to commit three sins: murder, for he is in the flea; suicide for she also is in the flea; and  it  would also be a sinful sacrilegious act  since the body of the flea is now a “marriage-temple”, a sacred “cloistered” space. One could add a Petrarchan dimension of meaning to this otherwise very  non-Petrarchan poem. Line sixteen’s “use” could be taken to refer to the way in which she is accustomed to reject his advances, to “kill” them and so, in Petrarchan hyperbole, to “kill me”. To read it in this way could imply that line 2’s “that which thou deny’st me” is that which you habitually “deny’st me” and so this is not the first time he has made and she has rejected his advances.

The opening exclamatory words (“Cruel and sudden!”) of the third stanza show that in the space/time between the second and the third stanza, she has killed the flea. He is full of mock indignation when he asks, in effect, ’What  harm did  that flea do to you — apart from taking a little of your blood?” However, the implicit point of her action is to reject his claim that the flea is a triple being made up of he, she and the flea itself as sacred temple. In effect, she has rejected his argument for the significance of the flea. The flea is dead but no harm has come to either of them. They have not lost their lives. There has been no murder or suicide. Having defeated his argument, she has triumphed. Never at a loss for an answer, he then concedes that she is right but then uses that to produce another argument to persuade her. She has demonstrated that the deaths that he  feared would happen have not occurred: not only have they not died, they have not even been weakened. Given that she has proved that his fears were false he now claims that fears in general are “false”. In passing we note, as she must have noted, that this is not a logically sound argument: you can not prove a general case by a particular example: to say that a particular A is B, that is, the fear of committing three sins is false,  does not prove that all  A’s are B, that is, that all fears are false. Undeterred, he continues: since fears are false so is your fear that loss of your maidenhead means loss of your honour. Just as the flea’s death did not take life from her,  so loss of her maidenhead will not take away her honour.

I take it that it is highly unlikely that she would be persuaded that loss of her maidenhead would amount to little more than the death of a flea. When she kills the flea with a triumphant flourish, she shows that she has the strength of character and confidence to counter his arguments. If we read line sixteen as implying that this is not the first time she has turned him down, it is hard to see that his final logically unsound argument will persuade her. The fact that he felt the need to refer to their union in the flea as a marriage and a sacred space, seems to show that he realises how important marriage is to her. Also the reference to sin and shame in line 6 implies that to her these, and the associated “honour”, are important and not to be lightly dismissed.  I imagine her response would  be, “John, that was very entertaining. You are as witty as ever, but the answer is still, No!”

A final closing point refers more to the poem’s form than to its content. You may well have noticed the way the poem does things in threes. Most obviously we have three stanzas. Within each stanza the first six lines consist of three rhyming couplets (pairs of rhyming lines) and each stanza ends in a rhyming tercet (three rhyming lines). This aspect of the poem’s form mirrors the poem’s content with the three fears of sin, shame and “loss of maidenhead”; the “three lives in one flea”; and the three sins of murder, suicide and sacrilege. Two further points on the poem’s form. If you have been counting syllables you wlll have noticed the way lines alternate between those of eight syllables and those of ten with the last two lines of each stanza having ten syllables. As for the rhythm, notice the pattern of stresses, for the most part, is one of unstressed syllable followed by stressed – though there are exceptions, particularly in the first two syllables of a line which may begin with a stressed syllable, for example, line 19 begins ‘PURpled with BLOOD”.  This predominant pattern of instressed, stressed syllables is known as iambic – a stressed/unstressed pattern is known as trochaic. This iambic pattern can be heard and felt in this line — I have marked the stressed syllables with upper-case letters:

And CLOIS/ter’d IN/ these LI/ving WALLS/ of JET

When a line has a repeated rhythmic pattern, each unit that shows that pattern is called a foot. When a line has five feet per line it is a pentameter (penta= five) and when those feet are iambic, it is an iambic pentameter. Stressed, unstressed ‘feet’ are called trochaic. When an otherwise iambic line begins with a trochaic foot – something which often occurs for emphatic effect with  run-on lines, as with lines 19 and 20 – it is referred to as a reversed first foot.

To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

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 would 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 to 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 wingèd 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, shall sound

My echoing song; then 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.

The discussion of Donne’s ‘The Flea’ included a definition of the Latin saying carpe diem. This Latin phrase means ‘seize the day” (the Latin poet Horace used it in one of his odes — Odes I. xi ) . In other words, make the best of the present moment. This advice has been used by poets (only male poets?) to persuade their partners to enjoy sexual pleasure whilst they can. Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is probably the most famous carpe diem poem in English Literature.

Marvell’s poem begins after something that had already started since  “This coyness” in line 2 of Marvell’s poem refers to the mistress’s  behaviour  immediately before the beginning of the poem.  You will recall that Donne’s ‘The Flea’ also began in, as it were, the middle of something — the flea had already bitten the couple. This beginning in the middle (not exactly the middle but after something has started) is often described by the Latin phrase in medias res.  “This coyness” tells us that she has turned down his sexual advances. ‘Coy’ means shy, reserved, quiet and so rather timid when faced by sexual advances. It can also be used to suggest that a girl is putting on an act of being shy and reserved as a tactic to make herself all the more alluring. Her rejection of his advances prompts him to try to persuade her to change her mind. The argument is set out in logical stages, each stanza marking a stage in his argument. First stage: if we were not limited by space and time, this is what we would do; second stage,  but we do not have the luxury of unlimited space and time; third stage, the logical conclusion, therefore we must make love now.

This hypothetical state of being free from spatial and temporal limits would allow her to sit by the River Ganges in India, enjoying the exotic luxury of  finding precious rubies whilst he would sit by the waters of the unexotic River Humber and “complain” because she is so far away. (Given the context of separated lovers, “complain” is an ironic allusion to the courtly love tradition of writing poems of ‘complaint’ whilst suffering a separation from the beloved). Just as, given the unlimited space of “world enough”, he could imagine a separation that spans the distance from the River Humber to India’s River Ganges, so, given unlimited time, he could imagine going  back across vast stretches of time to  before the Biblical flood (see the story of Noah in Genesis). And, adding a touch of humour since these possibilities are based upon the impossible, why not go back for an extra ten years before the flood! Then, projecting into the future, he could continue to complain until the “conversion of the Jews” — something that was once thought to happen at the end of time. In this hypothetical situation of having so much time, Marvell is deliberately presenting an exaggerated or hyperbolic picture of the possibilities. In doing so, he is both imitating the excesses of Petrarchan poets and going far beyond for satirical, ironic effect.

His surprising description of his love as a “vegetable love”, given the earthy associations of ‘vegetable’,  contrasts with the exalted, spiritualised love of the courtly love and Petrarchan traditions. But what else is suggested by having a “vegetable” quality? Quite literally, it is a form of plant life which has a capacity for growth, in this case, for a slow, vast growth.  However, ‘vegetable’, as adjective can also have a figurative sense when it suggests an uneventful, dull life, the life of a mere  vegetable. We also use it in this figurative sense when, using it in a verbal form, we talk of ‘vegetating’, living a dull life without achieving anything. Merely vegetating. Notwithstanding its potential size, a “vegetable love” does not seem particularly desirable! It makes a marked contrast with the exalted spiritual love associated with the courtly love and Petrarchan traditions.

You will recall that the typical Petrarchan poem includes a blazon, in which they  praise their ladies in extravagant and overblown ways.  We can see a blazon in lines 13 to 18 of this poem. However, we can also see Marvell playing with the blazon for humorous effect. This can be seen in the amounts of time dedicated to praising the mistress’s features. The simple, orderly doubling from one hundred to two hundred maintains, as it were, a well-behaved degree of hyperbole and conforms to what we might expect from a conventional blazon. The features praised are also conventional — eyes and breasts. The next step, however, makes a quantum leap to “thirty thousand” years! This wildly hyperbolic multiplication is made particularly amusing by what is now being praised, namely, “the rest” — which, of course, implies the more intimate parts of the body.

Lines 17/18 sum up and conclude the (mock) blazon of praises, though now the time frame shifts from the wildly hyperbolic (“thirty thousand”) to the relatively sober and dignified “an age”. This shift in tone is appropriate since at this point he refers to her feelings: “And the last age should show your heart”.   This must be said in the expectation that the ages of his praising will conclude with a revelation of her feelings, a ‘showing’ of her heart.  What began with her “coyness” and her “refuse” (line 9), he now seems to assume will end with her revealing her warm feelings towards him — and perhaps also, “the rest”.

The second stanza makes it clear that, in reality,  there can be no opportunities for the kind of leisurely courtship unrestricted by time and place. Time, in fact, flies. Marvell’s version of the Latin saying tempus fugit  (time flies) gives time a “winged chariot” to fly in. The vast grand sounding empires of the first stanza are transformed in the second stanza into “Deserts of vast eternity”. That vast, lifeless prospect then gives way to the “marble vault” of the tomb containing her corpse. There, “worms shall try” her virginity. Try, as used here has a range of meanings – some of them no longer in common usage. It once meant to take or get out, to extract but also ‘to put into’. That meaning presents us with a macabre phallic image with the worm entering her. In doing so, the worm searches and examines (another obsolete sense of ‘to try’) her virginity and, in doing so (back with the still current sense of try), tries it out, tests the value of her honour and virginity.

The second stanza ends with a wittily ironic couplet. Verbal irony involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant. So with this couplet, we do not take at face value his statement that the grave is a “fine” and admirably “private place”. On the contrary, it is a place of dust and ashes and flesh-eating worms and its ‘privacy’ is a state of absolute isolation. The “I think” qualification subtly adds to the ironic manner since it appears to humbly suggest the absence of loving contact though, of course, he is in no doubt that the grave will be without embraces.   

Having ‘proved’ that time is flying, the third stanza moves on to what, “therefore”, needs to be done — urgently! The urgency and the opportunity provided by the present moment is emphasised by the repetition of “now”. The conditional mood of the verbs in the first stanza (“would sit”, “should refuse”, “would love”) is now replaced by the imperative mood of verbs that urgently encourage shared actions now : “let us… let us”. The stanza’s repeated “us” and “our” and “we” emphasise the presumed mutuality of their passion; a mutuality that culminates in the unity of “one ball”.  The coy mistress of the first stanza is transformed into a very “willing” (or, so he would like to imagine?) mistress. Either he has successfully persuaded her to come out from behind her shyness,  (perhaps her coyness was an artful ploy after all?). His “lust” (line 30) is, if anything, exceeded by the “instant fires” of passion that breathe out or radiate from (“transpires”) her “every pore” — though it is from every pore of her “soul”.

The imagined love-making combines the sweet and the savage, the tenderly loving and the physically rough. They are like “amorous birds” but they are “amorous birds of prey” (my italics)  which suggests a clawing of talons , a pecking of beaks, more than gentle billing and cooing — though, being “amorous birds”, they remain  loving. Time the devourer (according to the Latin saying tempus edax rerum ‘time the devourer of things’) is to be vigorously countered by the couple devouring their time. The energetic physicality of their intercourse is combined with the sweetness of mutual affection as, with “rough strife”, their copulating “ball” takes them through the “iron gates of life”. “Chapped” in Time’s “slow-chapped power” calls for comment. This is not ‘chapped’ as in chapped or cracked lips but ‘chapped’ formed from ‘chap’ which can mean jaw. With this meaning in mind, we can see the link between Time as a devourer and possessing chaps or jaws. “Slow-chapped” seems somewhat at odds with the speed of its “winged chariot” (and with tempus fugit ) but slow here is relative to and contrasts with the urgent immediacy with which the couple can devour their time’s present moments. However, although they can ‘steal a march’ on time, do a bit of their own devouring, the relentless, unyielding action suggested by “slow-chapped”  acknowledges that their action is only a temporary stay against Time’s devouring action. Incidentally, notice the cluster of stresses that deviate from the line’s iambic metre: Than LANguish IN his SLOW-CHAPPED POWer. If we read the line in this  way, we slow it down and so we ‘enact’ the meaning. Yet the poem’s last word is with the couple countering Time. To do this they need to combine their powers into “one ball” that will have the force to take them through the “iron gates of life”. The gates image seems to play upon  the traditional image of the “gates of death”; their action, contrary to the traditional image, defies the tradition and takes them through the “gates of life”. These gates are entry into life since their intercourse brings them into the enhanced life of loving unity and because it could reproduce life.  They are of “iron” because life is hard as the second stanza’s emphasises in its  contemplation of the brevity of life and beauty and of the processes of decomposition in the grave.  However, through their defiant energy they can tear through the gates. With that same energy, even though they can not stop the sun (here acting as an embodiment of Time’s ceaseless motion),  their action can make it run to keep up with them.

The Scrutiny (old spelling Scrutinie)

Richard Lovelace ( 1618-1657)

I

Why should you sweare I am forsworn,

Since thine I vow’d to be?

Lady it is already Morn,

And ’twas last night I swore to thee

That fond impossibility.

II

Have I not lov’d thee much and long,

A tedious twelve houres space?

I must all other Beauties wrong,

And rob thee of a new imbrace;

Could I still dote upon thy Face.

III

Not, but all joy in thy browne haire,

By others may be found;

But I must search the blank and faire

Like skilfull Minerallist’s that sound

For Treasure in un-plow’d-up ground.

IV

Then, if when I have lov’d my round,

Thou prov’st the pleasant she;

With spoyles of meaner Beauties crown’d,

I laden will returne to thee,

Ev’n sated with Varietie.

Lovelace was born into an aristocratic military family. He was a committed Royalist and participated in the military conflict in the North of England in the years 1638-1640 when the forces of Charles I were fighting against the Scots. Although he did not take part in the major battles of the ensuing Civil War, he was an active Royalist and was imprisoned twice in the 1640’s. Some of his poems refer to that period of imprisonment. You may have come across these famous lines from one of his prison poems: “Stone walls do not a prison make, /Nor iron bars a cage:/ Minds innocent and quiet take/ That for an hermitage.” (from ‘To Althea from Prison’). The historical period of Charles I’s reign is referred to as Caroline (the period of Charles II’s reign is referred to as the Restoration). Lovelace and some of his contemporaries are usually referred to as Cavalier poets.

A cavalier (literally a horseman) is an aristocratically attired horse soldier. We think of them as holding to the aristocratic, knightly code of honour known as chivalry . A less high-minded ‘noble’ side of what we have come to think of as the cavalier ethos is represented by Frans Hals’ famous portrait of ‘The Laughing Cavalier’. This is a portrait of a seated man dressed in the finest silk clothes with elaborate lace cuffs and collar, a wide-brimmed hat and an upturned moustache. With his expensive fashionable clothes, his smile (he smiles rather than laughs), his rather corpulent figure he looks like a man who frequently enjoys all the pleasures of life. To such a type it became common to refer to him as a ‘libertine’, meaning someone who felt free to act without conventional moral restraints.

To make a scrutiny is to carry out an examination or inspection of someone or something; it is often seen paired with ‘close’ as in a ‘close scrutiny’ or with ‘exact’ as in an ‘exact scrutiny’. As the adjectives suggest, a scrutiny usually involves a critical inspection with a keen eye out for faults and failings as well as good points. To forswear means to abandon an oath or vow and so to be “forsworn” means that you have abandoned a vow.  Today we would call a “mineralist”, a mineralogist, that is, an expert in the uses and properties of minerals and ores. “Spoyles” (modern spelling spoils), amongst its other meanings, can  refer to the material goods taken from a defeated enemy. It is used in the phrase ‘the spoils of war’.

As we read over this poem we see that it  resembles the aubade (see earlier section on Courtly Love) though, in his eagerness to leave, this male lover  lacks all the usual  expressions of love and sorrow at parting. As we begin this poem we realise that (as with previous poems) we find ourselves in medias res : the Lady the man has spent the night with has found that he is no longer ‘hers’, despite his vow to be true to her. He can therefore be charged with being “forsworn”.  He argues that, now that it is morning,  he is not bound by the vow he made last night.  In fact, for him, the very making of a vow of true love is a “fond impossibility” At this point, we are probably wondering what Lovelace is up to. Is he speaking in his own person and expressing what he said to a Lady? Is he playing a game in which he presents an outrageously cheeky argument (which is probably not to be taken too seriously) in favour of male sexual liberty whose cool ‘logic’  and matter-of-fact ‘honesty’  makes it both shocking and amusing ?  Or has he created a persona, a character whose unethical sexual behaviour is being satirised? Is he allowing the sexually promiscuous young man to condemn himself out of his own mouth when he offers what he feels is a perfectly reasonable justification for his behaviour? These possibilities need to be kept in mind as we read on.

The man thinks he should be appreciated for having loved her for twelve hours, especially since his final verdict on those hours is that they were “tedious”. This  claim to unselfish behaviour continues when he says that to remain attached to this current Lady would be to do wrong to other “Beauties” since (presumably)  they would lose the opportunity to be with him. He also claims that he is being   fair to her since he is giving her the freedom to enjoy a “new imbrace” (embrace).

He tries to reassure her that she remains attractive. He does not deny that she is beautiful but he wants other men to enjoy her beauty whilst he is obliged (“I must search”) to find beauty in the pale skinned and fair haired. He tries to dignify his search by likening it to a scientific investigation carried out by a “Mineralist” searching for “Treasure in un-plowed ground”. In doing so, his ploughing image also reveals the way he reduces virginal women (and the image has rapacious connotations)  to the status of “un-plow’d up ground”.   

Stanza Four’s “Then” marks a final stage in his quest by presenting  a would be perfectly logical and potentially flattering conclusion to his argument. Once he has made his tour of other women, he will know if his current (though  about-to-be- abandoned) Lady proves to be the most pleasant and beautiful of all. He may then return to her and crown her with the spoils which are the lesser beauties that he has conquered and, in the end, found wanting when compared with her.

What are we to make of the poem’s title?   The first line’s report on her reaction to him could suggest that she is engaged in a form of inspection of his behaviour. However, we are told that she has ‘sworn’ that he has broken his vow.  To use a form of the verb ‘to swear” suggests a strongly emotional reaction rather than the cool critical survey implied by scrutiny. The idea of a scrutiny in this context is far more applicable to his proposed critical inspection of other women. Yet the title could also suggest that the poet is taking an ironic and critical scrutiny of the poem’s sexually promiscuous persona with his outrageous argument for male sexual liberty.

Absent from Thee

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 1647-1680

John Wilmot, or Rochester as he is often known, was an aristocratic Royalist. Educated at Oxford and after travels in Europe and service in a number of naval campaigns he went on to become a courtier in the court of Charles II. He led a ‘colourful’ life in which alcohol and the pursuit of sexual pleasure played a major part. He was, as they used to say in his time, ‘a libertine’. Along with ‘wine, women and song’ he was also a poet, a playwright and an avowed atheist. He died at the age of 33. His death is said to have been caused by syphilis. According to one account, he experienced a death-bed conversion and expressed sorrow for his sins.

Absent from Thee

Absent from thee I languish still;

Then ask me not, When I return?

The straying Fool 'twill plainly kill,

To wish all Day, all Night to mourn.

Dear; from thine Arms then let me flie,

That my fantastick Mind may prove

The Torments it deserves to try,

That tears my fix'd Heart from my Love.

In this poem Rochester is addressing the woman he says he loves. He is explaining to her why he is “absent’  and , whilst praising her for her virtues and reassuring her of his love, he is asking her to give him the freedom to remain absent.

The first stanza presents a paradoxical state: he is unhappy to be apart from his beloved – he ‘languishes’ – yet he can not commit himself to saying  when he will return. He describes himself as a “straying fool” and develops  the languishing condition into a far more serious one whose degree of longing (for “thee”) and mourning (the ‘death’ of their love, their separation) has the power to “kill”.  In ‘The Scrutiny’, the speaker gave a calm, logical argument for absenting himself; Rochester, as he develops his thoughts in the second stanza, presents a seemingly irrational position: he wants to be free to “prove”, that is, to test out all his fantasies,   which he feels entitled (“deserves”) to try; at the same time, he views these experiences as “torments” which tear his “fixed heart” from his love. Whilst confessing to this perverse compulsion to torment himself (not to mention his beloved and other sexual partners!), he pleads with his love, addressing her as “Dear”, to give him permission to “flie” to other women.

Despite his failure to commit to a time for his return, in the third stanza  he does imagine, “Once weary’d with a world of woe”,  a return to “thy safe bosom” where he will find “love and peace and truth” . He hopes to stay there, or as he puts it, “May I contented there expire”. “Expire” could suggest an “Unto death us do part” commitment, but just as ‘to die’ could be used as  a term for sexual orgasm so too could its synonym ‘to expire’. Read in this way, his hope is that he would remain contented with his beloved as a sexual partner and so not stray after other women. However, if he is not “contented”, there is always the possibility that he may be faithless and wander away from her and “find some base heart unblest”; that is, find a sexual partner, or partners, lacking in all the virtues. In doing so, he too would surely be another “base heart unblest” though he has only explicitly confessed to the lesser sounding fault of being  a “straying fool”!

We not discover much about the woman. We know she has asked him when he will return, but we do not know the manner in which she put the question. Given his behaviour, it is hard to think that this was a mild inquiry! However, the way he presents her as flowing with “love and peace and truth” runs contrary to imagining her as being bitter and angry. Yet in  the last stanza,  when he refers to the possibility of ‘falling’ on “some base heart”, he sees that he could  end up being “unforgiven”  and so lose his “everlasting Rest”.  This last phrase has a religious ring to it. “Everlasting” is often used in hymns: God is seen as the source of “everlasting love”, the soul seeks solace in God’s “everlasting arms”, Jesus is the “everlasting Word” – there are many other examples. Together with the religious connotations of this phrase, we can add the woman’s virtuous nature which, like God, is full of “Love and Peace and Truth”. These suggestions of religion and virtue can be seen as Rochester’s way of easing his own troubled mind as they provide a form of psychological corrective to his infidelities.

William Blake

(1757– 1827)

‘The Garden of Love’

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Blake was an unconventional Protestant Christian of a type called a dissenter or a non-conformist. Dissenters did not conform to the requirements of the Church of England, they ‘dissented’, and were often politically ‘radical’ and critical of the established monarchical system of government. His poem, ‘The Garden of Love’ belongs to a series of poems called Songs of Experience which were collected in a volume called Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). Most of the poems in Songs of Experience have a parallel in Songs of Innocence. One can see the speaker who goes to the Garden of Love as having walked out of one of the Songs of Innocence and entered the ‘dark’ world of ‘Experience’.

Blake’s use of the word “Chapel” (a place of Christian worship) and his implicit allusion to the Biblical Ten Commandments, eight of which begin with “Thou shalt not”, show that he has Christianity in mind.  Since non-conformist religious ministers did not refer to themselves as priests, the presence of “Priests in black gowns” could suggest that Blake is thinking of the Church of England, though many of their clergy would not call themselves priests  (though some would),  but vicars or parsons or ministers. Priests would more obviously suggest the Roman Catholic church, but in Blake’s time the Catholic church was not a strong presence in England.  Furthermore, being severely repressive of the natural joys and desires symbolised by the garden and its flowers suggests the Puritan tradition amongst English dissenters. But to puzzle over the poem in a quest for the actual persons, places and events referred to is to misread it. Actual persons, places and events may have had a formative influence, and the poem implicitly makes a radical critique of elements within the practices of various English church traditions, but Blake has transposed actuality into the figurative. The “Garden of Love” is not an actual place but an idyllic place that belongs to myth rather than historical reality. The Chapel imposing itself destructively on the garden is a symbolic event; the shut gates that both confine and exclude symbolise the oppressive regime; the priests patrolling the area like jailers and their “binding with briars” all “joys and desires” is symbolic of a punitive life-denying spirit. The mythic dimension of the garden reaches into one of Christianity’s central beliefs. This is the idea of the first humans known as Adam and Eve living in a God-given, ideal garden known as the Garden of Eden. Their story of God excluding them from Eden as punishment for sin of disobedience is told in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis in The Bible – this banishment for sin is usually known as ‘The Fall’.  The poem contains an allusion to the myth of Eden in the poem’s presentation of the loss of a garden paradise.   However, Blake’s poem challenges the orthodox idea of ‘The Fall’:  the persona in Blake’s poem loses the garden not because of his sin but because of the imposition on the Garden of a deathly religion. On his return to the garden, he seems to anticipate a renewal of the childhood innocence implied in “Where I used to play on the green”, but the Chapel has excluded the innocence and freshness symbolised by  “green”. The Garden of Love that was once a place of freedom and innocent joys where nature, including human nature, was free to flourish, is now ruled by the negativity of “Thou shalt not”. The priests are the sinister guardians of a religion of death since graves and tombstones have replaced flowers.  The poem concludes with the priests firmly in control.  The repeated ‘Ands’ of the final stanza mount an emphatic, cumulative force to this conclusion. The last two lines expand into a succession of ten syllable lines and the regularity of the priestly patrols is enacted in the smooth regularity of the iambs and anapaests:

        And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

        And binding with briars, my joys and desires.

What kind of love flourished in the garden? The poem does not specify, but I suggest that Blake’s use of the capitalised “Love” unites all forms of love: romantic and sexual love, family love, love of one’s neighbour, love of life and love of God.  (Blake was often sharply critical of Christians and Christianity, but he was a fervent believer in God.)

Ae Fond Kiss

Robert (often known as, Rabbie) Burns (1759-1796)

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; 

Ae fareweel, and then forever! 

Deep in heart-wrung tears   I'll pledge thee, 

4. Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee. 

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him, 

While the star of hope she leaves him? 

Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me; 

8. Dark despair around benights me. 

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy, 

Naething could resist my Nancy; 

But to see her was to love her; 

12. Love but her, and love forever.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 

Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 

Never met—or never parted— 

16. We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest! 

Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest! 

Thine be ilka joy and treasure, 

20. Peace. enjoyment, love, and pleasure! 

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; 

Ae fareweel, alas, forever! 

Deep in heart-wrung tears   I'll pledge thee, 

24. Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee! 

  Ae = one

Pledge can have a number of related meanings. Its meaning here is to give an assurance of fidelity often done in the act of raising a glass of wine and drinking as a sign of pledging yourself to someone or something.

Wage used as a verb can be synonymous with ‘pledge’; it can also mean to pay wages to someone: he will ‘pay’ honour to their love with his sighs and groans.
“Ae Fond Kiss” presents us with a mini drama with two characters, two speeches and one inner monologue. In the first stanza the lover appears to be addressing his Nancy directly as if she is actually with him as he speaks. However, in the second stanza he speaks of  (rather than to ) her as “my Nancy” and he refers to her in the third person (“to see her was to love her).  The direct address to a present Nancy is resumed in the third stanza. The drama, then, lies in its mix of the direct address to Nancy in the first and third stanzas and the inner monologue of the second stanza as he reflects on Nancy’s irresistible attractiveness, the power of their love and the possibility of avoiding heart-break.

The lover recognises that they must part and his use of “sever”, with its suggestion of something forceful and irreversible, acknowledges the finality and the hurtful nature of their parting. The parting will leave him in a state of “Dark despair”. “Dark” combined with “despair” could be something of a cliché but Burns gives it a subtle quality through its link with the “star of hope” of line 6 and its absent “twinkle” in line 7, an absence which leaves the lover ‘benighted’ in “Dark despair”. Whilst recognising that they must part, he also wants to remain with her, albeit briefly, as he celebrates and honours their love with a “pledge” and savours their love with one final “fond kiss”.  This contradictory mix of letting go and holding on, albeit briefly, is one example of his complex feelings. In the second stanza he explores these feelings further but before considering that stanza, the figurative use of “pledge” calls for some comment. Pledging yourself to someone or something  is often done as you raise and drink a glass of wine. The lover, however, uses the water of his tears to make his pledge and so he can be seen as turning the water of his tears into the rich ‘wine’ of their love. Water into wine is also a resonant transformation in the context of a loving couple  since it makes a link with the wedding feast at Cana. A feast during which Jesus turned water into wine – as told in St. John’s Gospel.

In the second stanza, lines 9 to 12 present love as a force that has an irresistible power. He was not drawn to her because of his own “partial fancy”. On the contrary, she was an irresistible, overwhelming force. To see  Nancy was to love her and, furthermore, it was to love her “forever”.  Lines 13 to 16, with their accumulating repetitions, conclude with the thought that if they had never met, then they would not have to suffer the pain of parting. However, in lines 13 and 14, in the process of heading for the never-having-met possibility, he evokes the passionate strength of their love. The parallelism (shortly to be defined!) of lines 13 to 14 helps to emphasise the intensity of their love. and its passionate nature is very effectively conveyed through the combination of “kindly” and “blindly”.  These two words are usually antithetical to each other: that which is done blindly is not usually done kindly. However, their combination in this context suggests the lovers’ paradoxical combination of single-minded (blind to all else) passionate intensity and gentle consideration. The repetition of “never”, five times in four lines, seems designed to add cumulative force to the ‘never meeting’ possibility. However, never does contain a contrary word and that is ‘ever’. It may seem fanciful to say this, but the sound of ‘ever’ does re-sound through the poem, It is there in the repeated key words “sever” and “forever”.  These verbal echoes enact the lovers’ distress being caught between the poles of a future when they will never meet and a love that was to be [for]ever. As we read or hear the second stanza with its  emphatic repetitions, its acknowledgement of the inescapable power of love, its striking combination of “kindly” and “blindly”, its play on the presence of ever in never, one anticipates a different conclusion in line 16. That conclusion being, ‘If we had never met, we would never have experienced such passionate, irresistible, eternal (“forever”) love’. They would have avoided heart-break, but the strength of this love is such that it does not lend itself to a careful, rational  weighing up of costs and benefits. Tennyson’s famous lines on love and loss are, “'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all”. This is too neatly proverbial for the complex state of Burns’s lover, yet in an indirect and more emotionally anguished way, lines 13 to 16  do suggest  something similar. Furthermore, in line 15, the never having met possibility is immediately qualified, after a slight hesitation – as if reconsidering the never having met possibility – by being placed alongside the far more desirable state of never having  to part. The third stanza sees him make a form of farewell speech. The first two stanzas tended to focus on his heart-broken condition but the third pays more attention to Nancy and to her new life after the parting. Whilst he imagined facing a benighted future  without Nancy,  he generously wishes “ilka joy and treasure” for her.

Burns wrote ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ as a song to be set to music and certain features of its style are shaped to fit lines of a song. One such feature is the use of end-stopped lines.   In “Ae Fond Kiss”  each line delivers a complete unit of sense. Lines where we can complete the sense are said to be end-stopped. This contrasts with lines of verse where the completion of a phrase or clause or sentence is held over to the following line. Take for example the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s seminal poem, ‘The Waste Land’:

                       

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The answers to what April is breeding/mixing/stirring  are held over, or run-over, to the next line.  Another term for run-over lines is enjambment (literally ‘striding over’ from French enjamber  to stride over). With end-stopped lines, the reader can afford to pause for a moment at the end of each line. Burns’s use of rhyming couplets, lines which rhyme with the preceding line, adds  a further momentary pause as the reader dwells on the lines as a pair.

Another feature of Burns’s lines has already been alluded to and it is their use of repetition and parallelism. The examples of repetition are obvious enough,  but to take some examples: line 1 is repeated at line 21 and line 2 is repeated with a slight, but expressive, difference at line 22. Another example is the repetition of love/lov’d in the second stanza.   Parallelism is itself a form of repetition which involves two or more similarly constructed clauses, sentences or verse lines. You may recall these lines of Richard’s from Richard II :

              

I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,

My figured goblets for a dish of wood.

Here you can see that ‘my something something for a something’ is repeated in such  a way that the lines are in parallel with each other. Lines 17 and 18 from Burns’s poem provide a clear example of parallelism. In this case the parallel structures “Fare thee weel thou x and y’ are identical in structure though there is a change in superlative adjectives as “first and fairest!” become “best and dearest!”.  An equally clear example, though with a more subtle verbal variation, can be seen in lines 13 and 14. That variation being the change in the line-ending adverb from “kindly” to “blindly”,  a change that has already been analysed. Repetition and its use of parallelism is also significant to the poem’s nature as a song lyric.  The repeated pairs of lines, 1 and 2 and 17 and 18, approximate to a refrain or a chorus albeit that they do not occur, as refrains usually do, at the end of stanzas. The paired lines 3 and 4 and 23 and 24, also take on a refrain-like quality, especially since 23 and 24 do occur at the end of the last stanza.   

The poem’s rhythm follows a regular metrical pattern with its use of trochaic tetrameter. To explain this term we need to introduce a little more terminology.  A metrical foot consists of a stressed syllable plus a number of unstressed syllables, typically either one or two. A trochee is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. A tetrameter is a line of verse consisting of four metrical feet.  A trochaic tetrameter is a line of verse consisting of four trochees. For example, “Nó-thing coúld re-síst my Nán-cy”. When a line of verse ends with an unstressed syllable the line is said to be in ‘falling’ rhythm’ and when it ends in a stressed syllable, it is said to be in ‘rising rhythm’. You will notice that all the lines end with an unstressed syllable. This falling rhythm, avoiding the firm assertion of a stressed syllable, suits the mood of loss, of grief. The lines have a sad ‘dying fall’.

She Walks in Beauty

Lord Byron (1788-1824)

She walks in beauty, like the night 

Of cloudless climes and starry skies; 

And all that’s best of dark and bright 

Meet in her aspect and her eyes; 

Thus mellowed to that tender light 

Which heaven to gaudy day denies. 

One shade the more, one ray the less, 

Had half impaired the nameless grace 

Which waves in every raven tress, 

Or softly lightens o’er her face; 

Where thoughts serenely sweet express, 

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. 

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, 

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, 

The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 

But tell of days in goodness spent, 

A mind at peace with all below, 

A heart whose love is innocent!

If you look back on the opening section which briefly summarised Petrarch and Petrarchism, you will see that the love poems, chiefly sonnets, written by Petrarch expressed his love for Laura. Laura is presented as a model of perfection both in her physical beauty and in her “celestial” character. His love for Laura, however, is not returned and he suffers what he calls, paradoxically, “sweet torments”. As you can see from Byron’s poem, the lady he praises, like Petrarch’s Laura, is someone of peerless beauty and of ideal character. Of course, Byron’s poem is only Petrarchan to a degree since it is not a sonnet and there is no question of the poet suffering as a result of his unrequited love. Is it, in fact, a love poem? It is certainly a poem of praise and admiration but it is not certain that he is in love with her. It -would not be surprising if he was, but the poem itself does not directly express his love for her.

Byron’s ‘She’ is said to “walk in beauty” (my italic emphasis). Which suggests that she draws beauty to her and she is surrounded by an aura of beauty. How do, we read the simile in lines 1 and 2? Is it the way she “walks in beauty” that is likened to the night sky or is it the beauty itself? Perhaps it is better to think in terms of ‘both…and’ rather than an either/or resolution. However,  as the simile is developed, the features of the sky are used to parallel her beauty rather than the way she walks.  Her beauty is likened to a cloudless star-filled night sky since it is a beauty that blends darkness and light in a finely-tuned harmony. A little more or less of light and shading would impair her subtle beauty. The comma punctuated caesura (a caesura being a pause in a line) between “more” and “one” enacts the balanced harmony of dark and light. The comma acts as a kind of fulcrum balancing the two halves of the line with their parallel constructions (“one shade the more, one ray the less”). The poem’s figurative language on the sky goes through a development. In the first instance, in the form of the night sky, it provides a simile for the lady’s beauty. However, at the end of the stanza the sky, now called “heaven”, denies to day the lady’s beauty. Which is to say that day can not match her beauty. The sky has moved beyond its role as a simile and has been personified and given a power to deny. With this development in mind, we can look back on the star-filled night sky and, thinking of it as heaven, see it not just as being like the lady’s beauty but as the very source of that beauty. “Heaven”, of course, is a highly charged word. It can simply be the sky (usually in the form of ‘the heavens’)  but it can not escape its other sense as a divine realm. The overall effect of this figurative language is to see the lady as a heavenly, celestial being. Other elements in the poem are in tune with this: “grace”, as in “nameless grace”, is used here in its primary sense as having a refined elegance but, as with “heaven”, the word has divine associations – for Christians, God grants “grace” to the human soul. The lady’s virtuous qualities, her “innocent” love and her days “spent” in “goodness”, are also in keeping with her  celestial nature

As the poem develops, its focus moves from her visible beauty to her ‘inner’ beauty. However, this is developed in such a way as to avoid a binary ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ duality. Her “serenely sweet thoughts” express the “pure”, “dear’ quality of “their dwelling place”: inner thought and outer “dwelling place” form a unity, a harmony.  That which is to be seen is also that which is inwardly present. The “nameless grace” that waves in “every raven tress” is an outward elegance that also expresses ‘grace’ in a spiritual sense. Such “nameless grace” is not commonly encountered and so it is not known and, as a result, it is “nameless”.  In the third stanza her facial features reveal her inner state, they are “calm”; they have an inner, mental capacity, they ‘speak’, they are “eloquent”. Her smiles and her glowing “tints” tell of her “goodness” and reveal her peaceful mind and her innocent, loving “heart”.

The poem follows a metrical form known as iambic tetrameter. Iambic describes a particular pattern in the syllables in a metrical foot. A foot is a group of syllables that contains one stressed syllable and (usually) one or two unstressed syllables. The different types of feet are known by names taken from a system used in Ancient Greek poetry. An iambic foot has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:

The cúr /-few tólls/ the knéll/ of pár/-ting dáy.

(Thomas Grey, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)

A trochaic foot has a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: (notice that this trochaic line from Blake’s poem does not add a final unstressed syllable to the foot that ends the line):

Tí – ger / tí – ger /búrn-ing/bríght.

(William Blake, “The Tiger”)

An anapaestic foot has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed:

The As-sÿr/-ian came dówn/ like a wólf/on the fóld.

(Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”)

A dactylic foot has a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables:

Cán-non to/ríght of them

Cán-non to/left of them

(Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”).

A spondaic foot has two stressed syllables as in the last two syllables of Hopkins’s poem (notice his mix of anapest, iamb and spondee):

All things cóun/-ter, o-ríg/-i-nál, /spáre, stránge

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”)

The nouns from iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, dactylic and spondaic are iamb, trochee, dactyl, spondee.

Lines of poetry are known by the number of metric feet they have. Starting with one foot and moving on to six feet, they are known as: monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter. So Byron’s poem in iambic tetrameter is a poem that has four iambic feet in each line – though you will notice that the first foot of line four is a trochee: Méet in/her ás/-pect ánd/her éyes – a departure from the norm that gives a touch of emphasis to the idea of the combination of dark and light qualities, an emphasis which is further achieved by the enjambment between lines 3 and 4: “And all that’s best of dark and light/Meet in her aspect and her eyes”. Notwithstanding this departure from the norm, the meter is regularly maintained which is appropriate since the poem’s subject is the order and harmony of the woman’s beauty.

As we read the poem out loud, we hear the carefully orchestrated nature of its sounds. To take a few examples. There is the consonance (repetition of consonants in neighbouring words) of ‘v’ sounds in “Which waves in every raven tress” and in the repeated ‘t’ sound in lines 1 to 4. There is assonance (repetition of vowel sounds in neighbouring words) as in the ‘a’ sounds of “One shade the more, one ray the less”. Alliteration is the repetition of the same initial sound, usually involving a consonant, at the beginning of neighbouring words and that is clearly heard in “Of cloudless climes and starry skies”. Sibilance involves the repetition of sibilants or ‘hissing’ sounds, usually a matter of frequent ‘s’ sounds as in lines 9 to 11:

Which waves in every raven tress

Or softly lightens o’er her face

Where thoughts serenely sweet express.

Remember

Christina Rossetti(1830-1894)

Remember me when I am gone away, 

Gone far away into the silent land; 

When you can no more hold me by the hand, 

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. 

Remember me when no more day by day 

You tell me of our future that you plann'd: 

Only remember me; you understand 

It will be late to counsel then or pray. 

Yet if you should forget me for a while 

And afterwards remember, do not grieve: 

For if the darkness and corruption leave 

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, 

Better by far you should forget and smile 

Than that you should remember and be sad.

‘Remember’ is a Petrarchan sonnet. When we describe a sonnet as Petrarchan we are referring to its form but we could also be referring to a particular treatment of love, one in which the male poet is praising the exalted beauty of the woman he loves. By describing ‘Remember’ as Petrarchan, I mean that it follows the form of the Petrarchan sonnet rather than the typical Petrarchan version of love. As for its form, the Petrarchan sonnet can be divided into two parts, known as the octet, lines 1 to 8, and the sestet, lines 9 to 14. With the ninth line there is often a volta which means a ‘turn’, that is a ‘turn’ or a new development in the ‘argument’ or mood (in Italian, volta usually means ‘time’, la prima volta = ‘the first time’, but it can also mean ‘turn’, as in ‘it is your turn’, È tua volta ).

In this Petrarchan sonnet, the speaker, the ‘I’, calls upon another person, the ‘you’,  to remember him or her. We do not know the gender of either speaker nor the nature of the relationship.  Are they members of the same family? Are they close friends? Are they lovers? The references to holding each other by the hand, planning a future together and an intimacy of tone combine to suggest that they are lovers. Furthermore, the choice of form, the Petrarchan sonnet, is closely associated with love poetry even if not necessarily love treated in the original Petrarchan manner. The speaker begins by imagining their separation when she will have “gone away”. The farawayness of “away” is emphasised as the “gone away” of the first line is repeated in the second line with the addition of “far”, “Gone far away”. Death is not named as the far away ‘place’ or state but  it is implied by  a “silent land”. “Darkness and corruption”in line 11 confirm that she is speaking of death. There is a parallelism between lines 1-4 and 5-8 in that they both begin with “Remember me when” and go on to refer to the fond things that they did together, the hand holding, the unwillingness to make even a temporary parting, the plans for their future. However, lines 7-8 add a more sombre note: remembering her will be the only thing to do since she is in the “silent land’ and so is beyond all human communication. Advice or “counsel” will be pointless and clearly she has no faith in prayers for the dead. Here we should note that Christina Rossetti is regarded as a religious poet. She was a member of the Anglican Church and favoured what is known as High Anglicanism, a movement in the nineteenth century Church of England that was formed by what is known as the Oxford Movement. However, in this poem there is no consoling after life. None of the sentimental images that we associate with eternal life in heaven. The “silent land” seems more bleakly realistic than consolatory and euphemistic. Death’s “darkness and corruption” is certainly not evaded  in line 11. And, as we will see, she shows a humane, psychological realism when she introduces the idea that her love  may well have periods of forgetting her. The repeated “remember” has a pathos as it suggests that she  is gently pleading with him as if she anticipates the possible forgetting which she introduces with the volta, or turn, in the sestet (lines 9-14). The “Only” of line 7 has some ambiguity: in addition to ,“Only remember me, as there is nothing else you can do for me”, it could be read as a colloquial way of adding further emphasis to the plea, if we take it as, “Only do remember me, don’t forget me”.

With the ‘turn’ or volta, announced by “Yet”, she anticipates, with a refreshing realism,  that he may forget her, albeit only “for a while”. She counsels him not to feel guilty as a result of such a lapse into forgetfulness. She then gives her reasoning behind this advice. If death leaves a “vestige of the thoughts” she once had, it would be better if he “should forget and smile” rather than “remember and be sad”. Although she faces the thought of losing him through death and (she hopes) brief episodes of forgetfulness, she generously wants to see him being happy even if he is without her. She hopes that rather than remembering her and being sad, her thoughts would have left such a deep impression on him that they would be an influence, even if unconsciously so, and of such a nature as to make him smile. Judging by ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and ‘Remembrance’, this generous desire that the beloved should find happiness in life after a leave-taking, whether the parting be by death or circumstances, is something of a feature of this type of love poetry.

The Ruined Maid

Thomas Hardy

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.


— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.


— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.


— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.


— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined,” said she.

This poem presents the reader with a dialogue between Amelia and a female friend. They both come from the same background where they shared the hard work and poverty of rural life. We learn from her friend that Amelia “used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream”. Amelia became so unhappy and desperate that she simply walked away from it, even though she had no obvious material resources to rely upon. Her friend chances to meet her one day when she is “in Town”. She is amazed to see how much ‘Melia has changed. ‘Melia is now dressed in fine clothes though, as her friend says, she left them “in tatters, without shoes and socks”. It seems that ‘Melia and her friend had worked as agricultural labourers; her friend sums up this work as “digging potatoes and spudding up docks” (dialect term for weeding). This work, as her friend puts it, left ‘Melia’s hands “like paws” and her face “blue and bleak” – a grim condition that her friend must still endure. Now, however, her cheeks are “delicate”, and her hands, now that they are no longer needed for labour, wear a style of “little gloves”, as worn by a lady. Her accent has also changed, She no longer uses the dialect of her locality, the spoken English of the labouring class, but has acquired the accent of a higher social class, one that her dialect speaking friend says, “fits ee for high compa-ny”.

Amelia explains how these changes have occurred: she has been “ruined”. A woman who had been “ruined” was a way of referring to a woman who had been, in the eyes of society, dishonoured by her sexual behaviour. In the context of this poem, it means that Amelia has become the mistress of a rich man who can lavish her with gifts in return for sexual ‘favours’. There is no suggestion that she is involved in a loving relationship. It seems to be a form of sustained prostitution. He pays her and she gives him sex. He has money and power and as a result society is prepared to overlook or downplay his behaviour whilst the woman is expected to guard her virtue or else be “ruined”. She is marked with a far greater social stigma. Amelia is quite open about what she had done and shows no sign of shame. She was escaping from a life of hardship that she could not tolerate. Clearly there are serious issues involved though the poem reads like a rather comical Music Hall performance. Metre plays a major part in establishing the comical tone. The metre is chiefly anapaestic (unstressed unstressed stressed) with an initial iambic foot in its tetrameter lines – tetrameter, four ‘feet’ to a line:


Who cóuld have suppósed I should méet you in Tówn?


This meter coupled with the use of rhyming couplets – the line above rhymes with “crown” – creates a breezy, ‘bouncy’ momentum which suggests light, comic verse. The irony being that this breezy rhythm is at odds with the suggestions of rural poverty and sexual exploitation.

The dialogue brings out the contrasting characters of the two ladies. The friend is friendly, outgoing, cheerful. We sense this from her greeting of Melia with her initial exclamatory “O”, her warm, colloquial endearment, “my dear” and her expansive hyperbole, “this does everything crown”. Her hyphenated final syllable at the end of several lines perhaps brings out a feature of her rural dialect as well as emphasising the final stress of the line – an emphasis with a rising pitch that brings out something of her uninhibited, perhaps rather ‘loud’, character. Melia on the other hand, answers in a terse, firmly stated manner – the repeated “said she” adds a curt finality to what she has just said. She may be “ruined” but she is unashamed and states it in a matter of fact way. The interplay between the dialect voice and Melia’s “polished” language is both entertaining and revealing. “Spudding up docks” seems to take us into the fields with the workers; with “thik oon,” and “theas oon” and “t’other” we seem to hear the characteristic voices of the village women. ‘Melia’s use of “one” (“some polish is gained with one’s ruin”) is a marker of an upper class accent. Her one word sentence, “True”, is another sign of her acquired linguistic polish. As is her use of the understated “pretty lively” when weighed against what being “ruined” could imply. As an amusing dialogue poem it lends itself to a form of recitation that emphasises its humorous side. The friend’s ‘bouncy’ character encourages a degree of exaggerated performance from the friend and Melia’s brief replies permit a degree of exaggerated polished poshness.

The interplay between the accents and the social forces that shape the accents is particularly effective in the closing lines. After the friend has been delighted by, “bewitched by”, Melia’s finery she wishes that she too could wear fine clothes and “strut about Town” – a rather naïve wish since it leaves out the sexual services she would have to perform. Melia’s response mixes her two accents, her original country girl accent and her acquired lady accent:


“My dear – a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,” said she.


Melia’s “My dear” in these closing lines echoes the friend’s “my dear” in the first line. However, where the friend’s was naively warm and welcoming, Melia’s has a patronising tone that brings out the social distance that now separates the friends – something that the friend, whilst seeing the material differences, did not imagine. “A raw country girl” continues the superior tone but Melia’s submerged identity as a country girl surfaces when, in her original dialect voice she says, “such as you be”. She immediately pulls back from this with “Cannot quite expect that” where “cannot” rather than ‘Can’t’ and the understated qualification, “quite”, marks the socially superior language. No sooner has she done this, but she reverts to her original dialect voice which suits the blunt finality of, “You ain’t ruined”. These shifts in voice bring out Melia’s lack of a sustaining social identity. She has lost her original social identity, though it was one that denied her a fully human identity – she was a working animal with “hands like paws”; her escape route has taken her into the affluent classes but on terms which deny her true membership.

At an Inn

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)


WHEN we as strangers sought

Their catering care,

Veiled smiles bespoke their thought

Of what we were.

They warmed as they opined

Us more than friends—

That we had all resigned

For love’s dear ends.


And that swift sympathy

With living love

Which quicks the world—maybe

The spheres above,

Made them our ministers,

Moved them to say,

“Ah, God, that bliss like theirs 15

Would flush our day!”


And we were left alone

As Love’s own pair;

Yet never the love-light shone

Between us there!

But that which chilled the breath

Of afternoon,

And palsied unto death

The pane-fly’s tune.

Hardy’s poem begins with an account of a visit to an inn. It outlines a story of what happened in the past before ending with the poet’s thoughts in his present moment. The onward movement of events is enacted in the short run-on lines: as the reader drops from line to line so events move on to the poem’s final reflections. One can imagine another version of the poem, one in which a change in lineation turns the alternating iambic tetrameter, iambic dimeter into lines of iambic pentameter. A change that would lose the poem’s forward momentum:

WHEN we as strangers sought their catering care

Veiled smiles bespoke their thought of what we were.

They warmed as they opined us more than friends

That we had all resigned for love’s dear ends.

The poet goes to the inn with an unnamed lady. The staff at the inn assume that they are a loving couple who are enjoying a romantic night. The poem’s use of   alliteration comes in pairs in, for example, “catering care”, “swift sympathy”, “living love”. This pairing  seems to echo that of the couple. The staff take pleasure in imagining the warmth and love between the couple. This “swift sympathy” with the presumed lovers  is seen as a life-affirming feeling. Love is a force that “quicks life”. Quick here is not a word for speed but an older usage. In this older usage, it can be used as a noun, or as an adjective, to describe things endowed with life. In the verbal form ‘quicken’, it means to animate or give life to. To 'quicken' was to receive life and the first movement of a baby in the mother's womb was called the quickening. Hardy’s “quicks the world” is his version of the verb ‘quickens’. His meaning, then, is that love gives life to the world. Perhaps, he goes on to suggest, it even animates the “spheres above”, that is, the whole cosmos. Warmed and moved by this animating spirit of love, the staff become not just the serving staff but our “ministers’, a word that has more elevated connotations than ‘servants’. They wish that they too could experience the lover’s bliss and so be as warmed and animated (‘flushed, ’ sexual connotations?) as the lovers.

That, however, is not the real experience of the ‘lovers’. Left alone in the afternoon, they discovered that what was between them was not the light of love but an emotional coldness. This is seen in hyperbolic, symbolic terms: the coldness is so extreme that it strikes dead (“palsied unto death”) a fly that was buzzing on the window pane. The way this is expressed is striking. “Palsied” is unexpectedly physically extreme and dire for an insect; “pane-fly” identifies the fly in a novel way and is neatly compressed.  Instead of buzz or some other similar word for insect noise , Hardy’s use of “tune is particularly striking and effective in the way it, figuratively speaking, links the fly to the ‘lovers’. The staff believe that the ‘lovers’ are in tune but they are not. In the face of the lack of harmony in the ‘lovers’,  the  pane-fly’s “tune” also dies – literally so in the case of the fly. Hardy then goes on to personify Love  as a force that acts independently of these supposed lovers – and at their expense.  It treats them as fit subjects for its sport in that it “shaped” them, made them appear like lovers, but then proved to be “numb” at the point of possible intimacy between them . Note that “port”, as used here, is not port in the nautical sense. Here it refers to the manner in which you carry or bear yourself (cf., porter, French ‘to carry’), or your style of living. The question in lines 29 to 30 can be paraphrased as, ‘Why did Love put on us the glow  and bearing, the appearance,  of lovers?’  Two other words call for further comment. “Hold” in line 27 and “cast” in in line 29. Hold can, of course, mean to grip something in the hand but I think that Hardy, once again,  has an older usage in mind. Hold, amongst other meanings,  can be a place of refuge or shelter or a lurking-place. You may have come across a meaning of hold as a place in the term a ‘ship’s hold’, a place for storing cargo. But it is the place of shelter or even the more malevolent sounding lurking-place meaning that fits best here: love lingered within his lurking place. “Cast” usually means a form of throwing down or away but it also has a theatrical meaning which is to allot parts to actors. So we can read both that love thrust upon us a bloom that was not ours and allotted a part in which we were supposed to play the parts of lovers.

The poem ends with a return to the present moment of writing and reveals that the events referred to took place some time ago (“That day afar”). Furthermore, what the couple now feel is a reversal of the earlier experience. They now feel an aching love for each other though as Hardy goes on to say, they are separated by land and sea so there could not be any outward sign of love. Using a parallel sentence structure, the essence of which is ‘We seemed what we were not but now we are what we seem not’, Hardy expresses the painful irony of the whole experience. Given what has already been said about the personified figure of Love amusing himself at the couple’s expense, this ironic reversal is perhaps the cruellest aspect of Love’s “sport”. The use of sport may carry an allusion to Gloucester’s lines in King Lear : “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport”. Notice also that Gloucester’s lines include “flies” which could indicate that Hardy’s lines about the “pane-fly” may have brought to his mind the lines from Lear  and so the idea of the Love god making “sport” with human beings – or perhaps the Lear lines prompted Hardy to include his “pane-fly”.

The term ‘apostrophe’ (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) can mean a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses, speaks to, a person or an idea or an object. It often announces itself with an initial, “O”. The closing lines apostrophise “sea and land”, and the “laws of men” and make an appeal “to stand/As we stood then!” That is, to stand in the same position though feeling the love that they now feel. “Sea and land” indicate the geographical distance between the couple whilst “Laws of men” seems to reveal why their potential love affair was not fulfilled. Assuming that the couple were not married, then their sense of Victorian sexual ethics (no pre-marital sex) might have suppressed any loving feelings. Even more so, if one or both of them were married to another.

We do not know exactly when Hardy wrote “At an Inn”. It was published in his collection, “Wessex Tales”,  of 1888 and he  went on writing and publishing poetry until his death in 1928. His career as poet, then, reaches across from the Victorian Age to the Modern Age. However, if we take one of the stylistic markers of modern poetry is to keep close to contemporary language and idiom, then Hardy was far from preparing the way for this change. Indeed, he may seem more (deliberately) ‘old-fashioned’ than his Victorian contemporaries.  Notice how often he chooses to use formal and rather literary words: bespoke, opined, foretold, deemed, ere.  Notice his use of  poetic inversion. Inversion means the reversal of the normally expected word order. It is often found in English poetry – though less so in much ‘modern’ poetry ie., poetry written within the twentieth century and in our own time. For example, in lines 19 and 20 the adverb “never” occurs before its verb, ‘never shone’ would be the conventional order  (though using ‘never’ in this way is still commonly found: ‘Never had she felt so happy’ adds emphasis beyond ‘She had never felt so happy’).  Other examples of poetic inversion are: “Came not” for ‘did not come’; “As we seemed we were not” for ‘we were not what we seemed’; “We aching are”  for ‘we are aching’. Another feature of Hardy’s style in this poem is his use of an older sense of a particular word. These words have already been identified but to give them as a list, they are: quicks, hold, cast and port. Hardy’s father was a stone-mason and before his career as a writer developed, Hardy was an architect and restorer of old churches. I suggest that Hardy’s use of words in their ‘olden’ senses takes on a character like that of the age-old stones of medieval parish churches. The overall effect is to create  a style that mixes the formal words of the literary and educated – “deemed”, “opined” and so on – with older meanings of common words and the occasional ungainly sounding phrase, “what/We aching are”.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

John Keats 1795-1821

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.


O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.


I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.


I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.


I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan


I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.


She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

‘I love thee true’.


She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.


And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hill side.


I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Thee hath in thrall!’


I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.


And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Keats’s poem is in the form of a ballad. Traditional ballads are a form of folk poetry. They usually tell a story in a very economical way. They often make use of characters who conduct dialogues with each other and, true to their ‘folk’ origins, they often use dialect words. The actual authors are unknown (they are often ‘named’ as ‘Anon’) and it is common to find that any one ballad has a number of different versions. Bishop Thomas Percy made a collection of ballads which was published in 1765 as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry . Notwithstanding the title, many of the ballads came from Scotland. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) made a collection of Scots ballads and gave it the title Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

It was first published in 1802 (there were later editions). An American professor, F.J. Child, gathered and edited a later collection with the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads . This was published in 1882. Child numbered the ballads from 1 to 305 and with each ballad he included variant versions which were given a letter – A for the first version, B for the second and so on. Ballads are often referred to by their Child number. A typical ballad has a series of four line stanzas – a four line stanza can be called a quatrain. Each line has four main stresses with a regular iambic beat: ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum. In many ballads the second and fourth lines of each stanza have three main beats: ti-ta ti-ta ti-ta. For example, this stanza from the ballad known as Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58) – the stressed syallables are in bold and the ABCB rhyme scheme is typical.


They had not sailed upon the sea

A day, but barely three,

When loud and boisterous grew the winds

And stormy grew the sea.


However, some ballads have four stresses in the second and fourth lines and some words, for expressive purposes, depart from the iambic pattern (unstressed/stressed).

Keats makes his own use of the form. Take the first stanza:


O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.


As you can see, unlike the paradigmatic ballad form seen in the stanza from ‘Sir Patrick Spens, Keats’s last line has fewer syllables, and this is true of the last lines of each stanza where we find either four syllables or five. Exactly where to place the stresses as we read these last lines is debatable. We can see that the metrical norm is a regular iambic as in, “Thee hath in thrall” and “I love thee true” . But, “On the cold hill side” begins with two unstressed syllables rather than the norm of one and the reading voice might well supplant the required ‘metrical voice’ and, aided by the succession of monosyllabic words, read out loud in an emphatic manner: “On the cold hill side”, and “And no birds sing”. Keats, then, makes his own use of the form.

The first line’s “Knight-at-arms” provides us with a medieval setting. Somebody, perhaps a passer-by or a traveller, encounters a knight in an uncharacteristic state since he is “palely loitering” rather than performing chivalric deeds. In the first two stanzas he questions the knight twice about his state. As he does so, he sympathetically observes his pale, haggard appearance. He also provides a setting which suggests late autumn. The withered sedge and absence of birdsong add an implicit question: ‘Since the lakeside is so lifeless, why loiter there?” And in the second stanza, the autumnal details pose the implicit question: Why so woe-begone in this season of fruitful abundance? The details given by the ‘traveller’ in the third stanza show just how keenly and empathetically the knight has been observed – note in particular the detail about the beads of sweat, the disconcerting “fever-dew”, on the knight’s brow. These details are particularly charged with significance. The white lily and the rose are rich in symbolism. Traditionally, they can be used to describe a beautiful female complexion. However, the white lily is also associated with death and mourning in that it is a funeral flower. The rose symbolises love and beauty. The traveller, then, sees a complex mix of illness (“fever-dew”), mental torment (“anguish”), death (the lily and things withering)), beauty (the lily and the rose) and lost love (the “fading rose”). Perhaps there is also a suggestion that to have tokens of female beauty, the lily and the rose (albeit fading), in the face of a knight-at-arms has an emasculating effect. Whatever ails him, has weakened his knightly potency. There is a quality of prophetic insight in these observations since love, beauty and death will be at the core of the knight’s answer. It is as if the questioner senses the essence, if not the particular details, of the knight’s condition.

The knight’s reply describes an encounter with a beautiful faery woman. This type of encounter with a beautiful woman with supernatural powers is not unknown in ballads. For example, in Child 37, Thomas Rymer , a man known as True Thomas is carried away on horseback by the beautiful “Queen of fair Elfland”. Once there, she feeds him with food and drink. After that he must remain with her for seven years. We can see the main features of the Child ballad in Keats’s ballad: the beautiful faery woman, the horseback ride into another realm and the feeding which seems to put some form of spell on the man. In Keats’s ballad, the knight takes the active role and begins the courtship: he adorns her with flowers whilst she is passively receptive. The sexually suggestive details of the “fragrant zone” and her “sweet moan” suggest that she has been willingly seduced. Continuing his active role, he takes her up on his horse and carries her away. However, he becomes oblivious to everything else whilst she in a controlled manner, “sidelong would she bend”, begins to enchant him with her faery song. The enchantment continues as she feeds him with “roots of relish sweet,/And honey wild and manna-dew”. According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, manna was the good food that God provided to sustain the Israelites in the desert. It miraculously appeared during the night and was there on the ground like the dew in the morning. It seems that these foods are to be relished and, being part of nature’s bounty, and even God-given, they seem benign and wholesome. However, the way “manna-dew” echoes the “fever-dew” of the afflicted knight hints that the goodness of these foods could be as deceptive. The way she declares her love is striking, “And sure in language strange she said – /I love thee true.” To declare love “in language strange” must have added to her exotic mystique yet, to a less enchanted person, it could suggest the dangers of the unknown and the difficulties in truly understanding her, given her “strange” language. “Strange”, of course, adds to the extraordinary nature of the whole ‘strange’ experience. But what exactly does it mean? Does it mean ‘strange’ in its intonation, its way of saying it, rather than in a faery language? If it is said in another language, has being enchanted given the knight an understanding of the faery tongue?

The switching between active and passive roles continues in stanzas eight and nine. She takes him to her “Elfin grot” but once there she seems to become the passive, needy one since “she wept and sighed full sore” – or is she acting? He then becomes the active comforter when he kisses her “wild wild eyes” with “kisses four” (two per eye?). She then takes the active role when she lulls him to sleep. If putting him to sleep was designed to further her control over him, it seems to fail since in his dream he receives warnings from generations of powerful men whom la belle dame has enthralled and reduced to a state of living death. This warning awakens him from his sleep and, to a degree, from his enchantment. To a degree, because whilst he is now in the ‘real’ world of the “cold hill side” and so no longer in the Elfin grot, he has been (inescapably?) changed by the experience. He has joined the doomed ranks of the kings, princes and “pale warriors” who have been enthralled by the beautiful “faery child”.

Some readers of the ballad see an alternative reading. They suggest that the faery is herself “in thrall” to a higher faery power. On this reading, her “sweet moan” is not an expression of pleasure but belongs with her weeping and sighing “full sore” in the Elfin grot. Her declaration of love is indeed true. Her tearful ‘complaint’ is an appeal for help to a knight whose code of chivalry binds him to help ‘maidens’. Her lulling him to sleep was designed to soothe him after carrying him off to the faery world. Perhaps she intended him to experience a dream that would reveal her enthralled condition but the knight’s fears produced a dream designed to save himself. If so, the knight’s dream is a sign that he has failed to respond to her needs. His all too human, and perhaps misogynistic, fears have generated a prophetic warning. On this reading, he has failed both her and his identity as a knight.

We do not have to settle for one reading or the other. Like the Rubin’s vase image which allows us to see either a vase shape or profiled faces looking at each other, we can switch between readings. We can settle for a complex ambiguity, a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’ reading.

Non sum quails eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)


Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

This poem’s title is taken from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC). It can be translated as, ‘I am not as I was under the sway of the good Cynara’. In his poem (it is the first poem in Book IV of Horace’s Odes ), Horace claims that he is too old for love affairs such as those he enjoyed with his mistress, Cynara. He ends his poem by admitting that he can still feel sexual attraction, though the erotic attraction he admits to at the end of his poem is for a young man.

Ernest Dowson is associated with a. movement in the arts known as Decadence. It has its origin in France where the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a leading figure. In England, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne and the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley were the leading figures. Decadence as a movement became associated with the fin de siècle (end of the century) culture that flourished in Paris and London in the 1890’s. Decadence stood for a turning away from the strait–laced, moralistic ethos of Victorianism. Unlike a Victorian attitude which saw art as serving a moral purpose, the Decadent movement thought of art as providing intense, pleasurable sensations of beauty. It was a case of art for the sake of aesthetic experience not for some moral purpose. The movement was labelled ‘decadent’ for a number of reasons. It cultivated forms of sexual passion that would be inconsistent with ‘Victorian family values’. Members of the movement were known for pursuing various forms of excess including alcohol – the French drink absinthe was particularly favoured – Dowson was an absinthe drinker. Rather than an optimistic Victorian vision of English progress in a God-governed world, Decadence tended towards a world-weary pessimism which encouraged a compensatory hedonism, a pursuit of pleasurable sensations. To be pessimistic showed that you were a sensitive, thoughtful person. Walter Pater (1839-1894), whilst not a member of the Decadent movement, did have an important influence. In his work on the art of the Renaissance he wrote, “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” In other words, the important thing is not to live in a sober, dutiful manner but to live with a particular intensity, to maintain a ‘high’, ecstatic state. Whatever Pater meant by it, it is easy to see how this could be taken to mean to live for particularly strong ‘burning’ sensations. In the absence of a credible optimistic view of life, one could live for intense sensations. These could include the sensations induced by drug and alcohol consumption as well as the higher sensations of aesthetic experience. Perhaps the downside of this pursuit of flame-like highs was a subsequent despairing low. ‘Spleen’ became a key word, it occurs in the titles of various poems. The spleen is an abdominal organ but it was seen as being responsible for affecting people’s moods. In particular it made people feel dejected, depressed, melancholy, gloomy. As a result ‘spleen’ came to be used to mean those feelings of dejection. Such feelings could be seen as marking you out as being outside of the unwarranted optimism of the common throng.

In Dowson’s poem, Cynara is a lost love who lives on in the speaker’s memory – whether she is deceased or not is not made clear. He describes his life as one of wild pleasures but claims that these pleasures were pursued in a vain attempt to distract himself from his memories of Cynara. It was a life of sex and wine, of wild partying, of music and dancing and of feasting. Yet no matter how intense these experiences, no matter how much he increased the degree of excess, he could not shed his memory of Cynara. He sees himself as suffering from a chronic sickness, the sickness of being haunted by an “old passion”.

The wildness and sensuality of the pleasures is emphasised. “Kisses and wine” are joined together in a way that suggests that kisses are like wine and that one can be ‘high’ on these wine-like kisses. Repetition and alliteration in “Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng” bring out the wildness as does the verb-adverb combination, “Flung … riotously.” “Throng” suggests the uninhibited mindless behaviour that can overtake an individual in a large group. The second stanza describes sleeping with a prostitute (see “her bought red mouth”). He unashamedly reveals this and presents it as a “warm” loving experience which she, judging by the way she sleeps in his arms, found fulfilling. The line, “Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet” brings out the pleasurable sensuality of the experience (notwithstanding “bought”). She may feel fulfilled and contented but he does not. Despite details that suggest the warmth and sweetness of his sexual experience, he feels “desolate and sick of an old passion”. He is haunted by memories of Cynara and, in so far as he can not remove her from his mind, he can claim to be faithful to her, albeit with the qualification, “in my fashion”. When he wakes he finds the grey dawn matches his mood: the luxurious warmth suggested by the redness of his sexual partner’s “red mouth” and, perhaps, the redness of wine, has given way to what he experiences as the desolate neutrality of the grey dawn.

In her sensuous physicality, his present sexual partner forms a stark contrast with the way Cynara manifests herself. In both the first and the last stanza she comes to him not as a physical presence, but as a “shadow”; she is experienced by way of a “breath” on his soul rather than on his body. The “Flung roses” of his riotous life style, which one imagines as red, link with the prostitute’s red mouth and symbolise the hedonistic life of physical pleasure. In clear contrast with red and roses, the colour and flowers that he uses to symbolise Cynara are “pale, lost lilies”. White lilies are traditionally used to symbolise virginity and purity. The Virgin Mary is often depicted with white lilies. They also suggest, particularly when linked with “pale”, a delicate, other worldly beauty. There is also a link with death since lilies can be a funeral flower. All in all, Cynara’s ghostly, ethereal beauty forms a marked contrast with the warm ‘red’ body of the girl he has bought. As has been pointed out ,we are not told what has happened to Cynara: has she died or have the couple split up? For the poem’s emotional impact, such details do not really matter. She is there to serve his emotions. Notice how the emphasis throughout is on his experience with each stanza ending with a self-justification.

One can see most of the main characteristics of ‘Decadence’ in Dowson’s poem. In true ‘Decadent’ fashion it describes the pursuit of pleasure, of excess and intense sensation. The music at the party becomes “madder”, the wine “stronger”. In defiance of Victorian morals, it openly refers to having sex with a prostitute. Despite the reduction of the woman to a “bought red mouth”, the line, “Night long within mine arms in love she lay” suggest that the sexual experience itself was warm and loving. This is a further challenge to Victorian moralism which would expect such an experience to be sordid and sinful – the problem comes not with the sex itself, but with the speaker’s fixation on another woman. In keeping with Decadent extremes, Dowson’s women embody the ‘extremes’ of lily-like ‘virgin’ and red-mouthed prostitute. And in keeping with Decadent fashion for world-weariness and pessimism, the highs of wine and sex, of dancing and riotous behaviour lead not to ‘spleen’ as such, but to the poet’s own form of despair and gloom.

Despair and gloom takes us to the key repeated lines: “I was desolate and sick of an old passion” and “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion.”. In the last stanza, “I was desolate…” becomes, “I am desolate and sick of an old passion”. By “old passion” he means a passion that belongs to his past but it could also suggest a passion that is age-old and which poets such as Horace have explored for centuries. This sense of an old passion, ie., an antique passion, is in keeping with the name that he uses for his lost beloved. Cynara is a name that belongs to a far distant time. Dowson’s use of a number of archaic words is In keeping with this anachronistic name. The antique words are: betwixt, thy (used four times)), yea, (three times), thee (four times) and thine. They are also words that can be described as ‘poetic’, that is words that are peculiar to poetry and are not usually found in common speech. The use of a name from Ancient Rome, makes one doubt that there ever was a real Cynara. Of course, it is possible there was a real-life counterpart (perhaps an Amy or a Helen) and there could even have been a modern girl called Cynara, but her literary pedigree (remember Horace’s poem) suggests that Dowson has created a poetic fiction.

Notwithstanding Dowson’s attribution of his sickness to his memory of Cynara, and his implication that his hedonism was an opiate to soothe his painful memories, perhaps one could reverse the roles. Perhaps instead of taking Dowson at face value and seeing sex and wine as a cure for his lack of Cynara, perhaps this poetic fiction, Cynara, could also be seen as acting as a perverse cure for his riotous pursuit of pleasure. Perverse because the memory of Cynara inflicts feelings of desolation upon him, but the very “Ah-ness” with which he repeats these feelings (a repetition with a mesmerising refrain), suggests a pleasure in dwelling upon them. Furthermore, these feelings of desolation mark him out as a superior, ‘poetic’ person. Ordinary people, those that belong to the “throng” (which he was in but not truly of ) , do not have these deep feelings of desolation, these incurable pangs of love sickness. Their beloveds are girls with sweet red mouths . They do not have the spiritualised beauty of that ‘pale lost lily’, Cynara.

However one may criticise the poem for its self-indulgent emotionalism, its rhetorical power is undeniable. Repetition of the fourth and sixth lines effectively enacts the painfully recurring thought of Cynara. Vivid contrast as well as alliteration, repetition and rhythm (note the emphatic cluster of stressed syllables), are put to striking use in these lines: “Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng/Dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind”. The memorable phrase, “Gone with the wind” has enjoyed a long life ever since Dowson coined it. Rhythm and rhyme create their own spell. Each stanza has four twelve syllable lines, one ten syllable line and the final line has fourteen syllables. A twelve syllable line is known as an alexandrine – a form which has its origin in French poetry. The metrical norm is iambic, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, but there are many departures from this norm eg., “Dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind” – a firmly maintained regularity would be at odds with the poem’s emotional turbulence. The fifth lines are all of ten syllables and form a contrast with the preceding twelve syllable lines before the voice expands out into the concluding fourteen syllable refrain.

The memorable refrain with its ambiguous qualification commands our attention. It addresses Cynara in an ardent exclamatory manner but the tone shifts after the exclamation mark. How do we ‘hear’ the tone of “in my fashion”? Is it a rather worldly acknowledgement of the limits of his faithfulness? An acknowledgement that someone like him is not going to be conventionally faithful? Do we read it as a somewhat cynical aside that knowingly acknowledges the limits of his faithfulness? Is it a sincere appeal to accept his deep-seated, constantly recurring memory of her as proof of his faithfulness even though his sexual behaviour, as judged by conventional standards, shows how unfaithful he is? The repeated passion/fashion rhyme brings out some of this ambiguity. ‘Fashion’ itself is ambiguous. A ‘fashion’ can be a way of making or doing something eg.,‘He played the piano in a relaxed fashion’. It can also refer to a way of dressing or a life-style as in the line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia describes Hamlet as “The glass of fashion and the mould of. Form”. Dowson intends ‘fashion’ in the sense of a way of doing something but it is shadowed by the other sense of ‘fashion’ as conforming to a particular style. Fashion in this sense is usually a temporary, passing thing but by linking it with an ineradicable “passion”, Dowson is giving it an enduring strength. On the other hand, if we link the “passion” with “fashion” it makes the passion a thing of modish style rather than substance. “Passion” becomes a part of a Decadent’s fashionable style. In short, does “passion” modify “fashion” or does “fashion” modify “passion”? As with the Rubik image. (profiled faces or vase?), we can see it either way, and this kind of ambiguity with its attendant emotional complexity is often found in poetry.