The Poet's Poet Part 14

The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compa.s.s_,

Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are; A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, Being of its furthest fires oracular, The evident heart of all life sown and mown.

Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves,

Their shining fronts, Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, As river water hallowed into founts) Met in thee.

[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.]

Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_:

Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body nor Thee from myself, neither our love from G.o.d.

The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti identifies her lover with her Christian faith:

Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such I cannot love you if I love not Him, I cannot love Him if I love not you.

[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of Love_ (a sonnet sequence).]

It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett translation, --210.] is made by Sh.e.l.ley the justification of his shifting enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_ Sh.e.l.ley declares,

I never was attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion....

True love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away.

Love is like understanding, that grows bright Gazing on many truths....

Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity.

These last lines suggest, what many poets have a.s.serted, that the G.o.ddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which begins,

There was a d.a.m.ned successful poet, There was a woman like the Sun.

And they were dead. They did not know it.

They did not know his hymns Were silence; and her limbs That had served love so well, Dust, and a filthy smell.

The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who antic.i.p.ate at least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration:

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous pa.s.sion, My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady.

As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the ordinary lover, the new pa.s.sion does not involve the repudiation or belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho compares her sensations

Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year When I love thee.

In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love of the poetess, she a.s.serts of herself,

I doubt if ever she saw form of man Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, She hath not loved.

When Alcaeus protests, "But not with pa.s.sion!" she rejoins,

All That breathes to her is pa.s.sion, love itself All pa.s.sionate.

The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her:

How should they know that Sappho lived and died Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, Never transfused and lost in what she loved, Never so wholly loving nor at peace.

I asked for something greater than I found, And every time that love has made me weep I have rejoiced that love could be so strong; For I have stood apart and watched my soul Caught in a gust of pa.s.sion as a bird With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind Struggles and frees itself to find the sky.

She continues, apostrophizing beauty,

In many guises didst thou come to me; I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, Phaon allured me with a look of thine, In Anactoria I knew thy grace.

I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, But never wholly, soul and body mine Didst thou bid any love me as I loved.

The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her pa.s.sion:

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal grace.

It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment.

[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's pa.s.sion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_ (1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and f.a.n.n.y Brawne_ (1919); James B.

Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).]

Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool,

O wondrous deep, I love you, I give you my light to keep.

Oh, more profound than the moving sea, That never has shown myself to me.

But out of the woods as night grew cool A brown pig came to the little pool; It grunted and splashed and waded in And the deepest place but reached its chin.

The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman:

In her treacherous eyes, As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam, Here did he see his own eternal skies.

But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her revelation of her character:

Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay, Wedded and one with it, he moaned.

Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew, Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face.

It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's _Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem, _A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prost.i.tute_; Whitman, _To a Common Prost.i.tute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_; and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.]

To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae_:

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 pa.s.sion; Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of his pa.s.sion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a _reductio ad absurdum_ of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the _Vita Nuova_. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: _Dante_] and by Sara King Wiley.

[Footnote: _Dante and Beatrice_] Both these writers, however, show a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his grat.i.tude for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another famous Renaissance lover for the hero of _A Night in Avignon_, a play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of contrition.

Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his burning pa.s.sion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He explains,

I serve a lady so imperial fair, June paled when she was born. Indeed no star, No dream, no distance, but a very woman, Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake; Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit That thou hast heard of ...