April soft and cold: Opposition of the stars

A couple of years ago I shared what is probably Andrew Marvell’s most widely-known poem, “To His Coy Mistress”. You know, the one that every adolescent boy pulls out when trying to impress an adolescent girl with bluestocking tendencies. Um.

This time around let’s have “The Definition of Love”, which takes us around and around the conundrum of this powerful emotion, which exists for the Other, yet separate from the Other. The perfect love is essentially unattainable, which I’ll confess is certainly a bummer, so you can see how “Coy Mistress” would grab all the attention over the centuries.

But I guess I’ve reached a point where I find this one more interesting than I would have done in high school.

“The Definition of Love”

My love is of a birth as rare

As ’tis for object strange and high;

It was begotten by Despair

Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing

Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,

But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive

Where my extended soul is fixt,

But Fate does iron wedges drive,

And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see

Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;

Their union would her ruin be,

And her tyrannic pow’r depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel

Us as the distant poles have plac’d,

(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel)

Not by themselves to be embrac’d;

Unless the giddy heaven fall,

And earth some new convulsion tear;

And, us to join, the world should all

Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

As lines, so loves oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet;

But ours so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,

But Fate so enviously debars,

Is the conjunction of the mind,

And opposition of the stars.