The Poet's Poet Part 16

There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death.

Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable.

Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of the poet's sweetheart:

Two pa.s.sions dwelt at once within his soul, Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky.

And as the sunset dies along the west, Eve higher lifts her front of trembling stars Till she is seated in the middle sky, So gradual one pa.s.sion slowly died And from its death the other drew fresh life, Until 'twas seated in the soul alone, The dead was love, the living, poetry.

The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See _On the Vita Nuova of Dante_; also _Dante at Verona_.] Much the same kind of translation is described in _Vane's Story_, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears to be a sort of mystic autobiography.

The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: _Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's pa.s.sion for disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Pa.s.sion_, thus exalts his mistress, the abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets:

Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go From star to star, upward, all heavens above, The grave forgot, forgot the human woe.

Though glorified, their love was human love, One unto one; a greater love I know.

But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love.

Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and twentieth century writers may modestly a.s.sert that it is the fault of their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most idealistic verse.

However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course.

Plato a.s.sures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our "muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies.

Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.]

Bulwer Lytton's _Milton_ was, if one may believe the press notices, the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after death. Bulwer Lytton cites the _Phaedrus_ of Plato as the basis of his allegory, reminding us,

The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be), Dim broken memories of the state before, Form what we call our reason...

... Is not Love, Of all those memories which to parent skies Mount struggling back--(as to their source, above, In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:) Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?

Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George Edward Woodberry. His poem, _Agathon_, dealing with the young poet of Plato's _Symposium_, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism.

Agathon is sought out by the G.o.d of love, Eros, who is able to realize his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, one of those

Whose eyes were more divinely touched In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth.

As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the _Symposium_, he expresses his unhappiness:

Still must I mourn That every lovely thing escapes the heart Even in the moment of its cherishing.

Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be enn.o.bled:

Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts.

Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace; So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb, Their music linger here, the joy of men.

Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love:

The waste desire be his, and sightless fate, Him light shall not revisit; late he knows The love that mates the heaven weds the grave.

Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying,

In its fiery womb I saw The twisted serpent ringing woe obscene, And far it lit the pitchy ways of h.e.l.l.

In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality:

Let not dejection on thy heart take hold That nature hath in thee her sure effects, And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes, Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress, The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain?

But, he continues,

In fair things There is another vigor, flowing forth From heavenly fountains, the glad energy That broke on chaos, and the outward rush Of the eternal mind;...

... Hence the poet's eye That mortal sees, creates immortally The hero more than men, not more than man, The type prophetic.

Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love which Plato puts into his mouth in the _Symposium_. In conclusion, Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius:

For truth divine is life, not love, Creative truth, and evermore Fashions the object of desire Through love that breathes the spirit's fire.

We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with the _Epipsychidion_, not merely because it is the most idealistic of the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Sh.e.l.ley's personal experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the att.i.tude toward love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment of this theme is foreshadowed in _Alastor_.]

The prominence given to Sh.e.l.ley's earthly loves in this poem has led J.

A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks,

While Sh.e.l.ley's doctrine in _Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will not square with the _Symposium_.... When a man has formed a just conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested by this standard, Sh.e.l.ley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is spurious Platonism.[Footnote: _Sh.e.l.ley_, p. 142.]

Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not mean abstract beauty to Sh.e.l.ley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani.

He has protested against this judgment, "The _Epipsychidion_ is a mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Sh.e.l.ley wrote,

The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot bear to look at. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.

Sh.e.l.ley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is made prenatal. Sh.e.l.ley says,

She met me, robed in such exceeding glory That I beheld her not.

As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Sh.e.l.ley says,

She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way And lured me towards sweet death.

This early vision pa.s.sed away, however,

Into the dreary cone of our life's shade.

This line is evidently Sh.e.l.ley's Platonic fashion of referring to the obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, but an abiding presence in the soul.

The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Sh.e.l.ley describes his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision,

Whose voice was venomed melody.

The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers, Her touch was as electric poison.

Sh.e.l.ley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Sh.e.l.ley says of this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, however, the next step was taken,--the agonizing one of breaking away from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its forms may appeal to one. Sh.e.l.ley writes,

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lips Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse.