The Many Faces of Love
What the Greatest LOVE Poems
in English Say About LOVE
by Anne Kinsey
Copyright © 2012 by Anne Kinsey
All rights reserved.
Published by Castell Books
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Taking the stages of love out of order, this first poem looks at a love which is exquisite and delightful, but fleeting. Written in classical Tamil more than two thousand years ago, this poem goes to show that women falling in love with elusive men who offer thrills and romance but refuse to be tied down is nothing new:
He is from those mountains
where the black-faced monkey,
playing in the sun
rolls the wild peacock eggs
on the rocks.
Yes, his love is always good
as you say, my friend,
but only for those strong enough
to bear it,
who will not cry themselves out
or think anything of it
when he leaves.
The man in the poem is primitive and sensuous and playful, as suggested by the image of a black-faced monkey playing in the sun. He is from “those” mountains, a place remote and elevated. He toys with fragile objects, as suggested by the description of a monkey rolling a peacock’s eggs on the rocks. The object he toys with is not only fragile, but, like a peacock egg, has the potential of developing into something beautiful.
To the unfortunate woman in love with him, “his love is always good.” But, at the height of the romance while the thrills are greatest and the woman is very much in love, he leaves. The final line consisting of only three words stands in contrast to the earlier playful descriptions and evokes the sense of loneliness and desolation the woman feels when the man is gone and she is left alone.
Surely anyone who has been single and dating for any length of time has run into such a man who offers a love that is wild, sensuous, perhaps turbulent–and fleeting. And surely no poem better captures the nature of the man or the pain he leaves behind than this poem, whose author lived so long ago.
John Donne, in the eighteenth century, captured another moment most anyone in love has experienced: The sun rising after a night of lovemaking, and heralding the end of the lover’s time together. In this poem, the scene opens with the lovers in bed and the day dawning. The speaker–presumably the woman because eighteenth century women did not generally engage in business–asks, ‘Why should we rise because it is light? Did we lie down because it was night?’
‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ‘tis light?
Did we lie down because ‘twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.
In the next stanza, light is personified and linked with its source, the sun, which is compared to an eye. The poet says, fancifully, that if the light could speak, it would tell the man not to leave:
Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak as well as spy,
This were the worst that it could say,
That being well I fain would stay,
And that I loved my heart and honour so,
That I would not from him, that had them, go.
The speaker then laments business as ‘the worst disease of love’:
Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.
The speaker, the woman, values love above all else. Her lover, on the other hand, does not, and for this she chastises him and accuses him of betraying her as much a man who cheats on his wife with another lover. Another woman is left behind, even if just for the duration of the day.
Who can read Donne’s poem about lovers parting at break of day without thinking of the morning after Romeo and Juliet’s first, last, and only night together, when they quarrel over whether the bird they hear is the lark, the herald of morning, or the nightingale. Like the lover in Donne’s poem, Romeo must leave at the break of dawn, not because he has business which he finds more important than time with Juliet, but because if he is caught in Juliet’s bedroom, he will be murdered by her kinsmen, and because he has been banished for killing Juliet’s cousin and must flee to Mantua.
Like the speaker in Donne’s poem, Juliet does not want her lover to leave:
JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Romeo argues, in surely one of the most tender lovers’ quarrel ever written:
ROMEO: It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Juliet, though, has an explanation for the light he sees in the east. It is not the sunrise, but a meteor which will light his journey to Mantua:
JULIET: Yon light is not day-light, I know it, I:
It is some meteor that the sun exhales,
To be to thee this night a torch-bearer,
And light thee on thy way to Mantua:
Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone.
Romeo pretends to give up the argument, agreeing that the light is not the sun, but he offers yet another explanation. The light is the brow of Cynthia, the moon goddess. But he doesn’t really believe the light is moonlight. He declares himself happy to stay and be put to death if this is Juliet’s desire:
ROMEO: Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death;
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye,
'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow;
Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:
I have more care to stay than will to go:
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How is't, my soul? let's talk; it is not day.
Romeo’s ploy has the effect he intended:
JULIET: It is, it is: hie hence, be gone, away!
It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division;
This doth not so, for she divideth us.
It is the lark, the herald of the morn, the night is over too soon, and Romeo and Juliet part, not to meet again until Romeo finds her lying in a tomb.
One way to understand the entire play is that Romeo and Juliet is about the fleeting nature of young love with the characters themselves symbolizing first romance. Romeo is sixteen, and Juliet is fourteen. They meet, marry, and die within three days.
Tragedy, according to the ancient Greeks, was the imitation of a noble action. Noble in this sense perhaps meant great and all-encompassing. Romeo and Juliet love completely and sincerely and utterly, so much so that their love triumphs over the calamities which beset them. Their love was so great that in the end, by means of their death, other characters around them are transformed, and indeed, an entire society has a means through which to see its own errors and limitations. They die, as they must for the play to have meaning.
Young love is transformative, but the intensity of youthful passions simply cannot last.
In another poem about the fleeting nature of young love–and about the daybreak putting an end to the time for passion–the speaker regretfully acknowledges that he and his love will go no more a-roving: