The Diverse Depictions of our “Almost-Instinct” Love as Seen in the Poetry of Sydney, Browning and Larkin

Of all the human emotions which have inspired artistic expression, the most prominent perhaps is love. From ancient statues of the unclothed, airborne son of the goddess Venus, to caricatures of a chubby cherub drawing a heart-tipped arrow printed on last year‟s Valentine‟s Day cards, love has pervaded throughout history alongside humanity itself. It is prevalent not only in the visual arts but also in literature, where various authors have treated the subject in unique ways. By evaluating these works, it can be seen that, while a vague conception of love has persisted, those emotions noted to accompany it have gradually changed. In deed, love as it is perceived now is most certainly not the love of centuries ago. From the Renaissance sonnet sequence of Sir Sydney Philip, to Robert Browning‟s dramatic monologues of the 19th century, and finally to Philip Larkin‟s 20th-century poem “An Arundel Tomb,” one can witness the many transmutations of the idea of love throughout history.

Sir Sydney Philip‟s sonnet sequence, amassing over one hundred sonnets, recounts the unhappy romance between Astrophil (“lover of star”) and Stella (“star”), a story wrought with despair. From the very form of the first sonnet in the sequence, penned in iambic hexameter, readers get a sense of the burden of love: that it is an emotion that overwhelms and flows beyond the iambic pentameter typical of sonnets. The first four lines,

"Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,

That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine,
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,"

which build upon each other in content, reflect the climactic accumulation of thoughts within the speaker as he struggles to confront his emotion. Astrophil describes his love for Stella as the “blackest face of woe,” one that reduces his mind to a “sunne-burn‟d braine” incapable of producing any impressive “inventions.” Certainly, the way in which the speaker presents himself in love – “Thus great with child to speake, and helpless in my throwes/Biting my trewand pen, beating my selfe for spite” – makes love out to be upsetting rather than pleasing.

Sonnet 31 of the sequence “Astrophil and Stella” is another which conveys an unfavourable impression of love. The poem presents Astrophil apostrophizing to the “Moone” who “climb‟st the skies” soundlessly and with “wanne a face.” Because of the moon‟s “languisht grace,” Astrophil believes it to be in love, implying in turn that he himself feels languished. The reason becomes apparent in the concluding quatrain and couplet wherein Astrophil reveals that he has been rejected by a “proud” Stella who calls his love for her “but want of wit.” This sonnet in the sequence conveys the loneliness of thwarted love in the solitary figure of Astrophil talking to the unresponsive moon. The conclusion of the poem in four questions which are never answered effectively conveys Astrophil‟s sense of confusion after having been misled by his own love into a state of dejection.

The sonnets of “Astrophil and Stella” follow Petrarchan convention. Like Petrarch who pined in his poems for the love of a woman named Laura, Astrophil yearns for Stella throughout the sequence which ardently focuses on the speaker‟s “resulting agony” from unrequited love (“Poetry” 179-180). Thus his sonnets present love as a distressing ordeal. Paradoxically, however, the sequence, which dwells obsessively on the despair of the speaker, inherently glorifies it as well, portraying love as something which is at once painful and pleasurable.

Robert Browning‟s dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess,” is strikingly different from “Astrophil and Stella.” Spoken by a Duke to the envoy of a Count, the monologue conveys the idea of a love that is forcefully possessive rather than, as in “Astrophil and Stella,” one that harmlessly languishes in despair. The shocking story within the poem is of a Duke who, jealous of the fact that “the bough of cherries some officious fool/Broke in the orchard for her,” among countless other things, drew the same “spot of joy” into his Duchess‟ cheek as did “[his] favour at her breast,” gives “commands” to have the lady killed. Her portrait, kept behind curtains that “none puts by” but the Duke himself, represents the Duke‟s domination of her in that he has ultimate control of who at last gets to see her. The meticulousness of the poem‟s structure – always ten-syllable lines arranged in successive couplets – further alludes to the speaker‟s need for order, and moreover adds a sense of calm to the poem which, coupled with the content, creates a rather sinister mood. Ironically, while the Duke attempts to discredit his former wife by saying she had “a heart…too soon made glad, too easily impressed,” his descriptions of her betray him, showing rather an innocent woman who delighted in all things in life, be they “the dropping of the daylight in the West” or “the white mule she rode with round the terrace,” and portraying himself instead, as Arnold Markley terms it, as “somewhat of a monster” ("An overview of 'My Last Duchess'”). Thus the poem invites us to see the deluding and destructive force of possessiveness within a relationship. The conclusion of the poem reiterates the theme of possessiveness: “Notice Neptune though,/Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,/Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!” Corresponding to the way that the domineering sea-god conquers the wild and elusive sea-horses, the Duke manages to tame his Duchess and pin her to the wall as another part of his personal art collection, immortalizing her in artwork in the same way that he has the powerful Neptune “cast in bronze.”

“An Arundel Tomb” by Philip Larkin, in which the poet speaks of love in the voice of one not explicitly involved in it, deals with the subject in yet another way, touching on the concept of love surpassing death, an romantic ideal that many would like to believe. The poem describes the tombs of an earl and countess who “side by side…lie in stone,” holding hands in a seeming final act of love. There is much focus on the fact that the earl and countess have essentially lost every other vestige of their identity. For example, as mentioned in the first stanza, their faces are “blurred” and their dress is only “vaguely shown.” “The Latin names around the base” do not capture the interest of the tomb‟s visitors who “look, not read,” and who likely wouldn‟t understand Latin even if they did. The “plainness” caused by the lack of identity of the two “hardly involves the [eyes]” of the tomb‟s visitors, until they see “his hand withdrawn, holding her hand.” The fact that it is their clasped hands which draw attention suggests that while time has stripped away everything else about them, their love lasts on in their embrace, undying.

Undermining this rather positive interpretation of the poem, however, is a doubt – a secondary meaning that can be found even in the use of the sole word “washing” in the line “Washing at their identity.” As Bryan Aubrey notes, “washing” can imply two things (“Critical Essay on an „Arundel Tomb‟”). Traditionally, water suggests purification. If we apply this significance to the line in the poem, as Aubrey in his “Critical Essay” does, the poet seems to say that the earl and countess have been purified by the departure from individuality, stripped of those worthless elements – their faces, their names, the way they dressed – leaving behind only the pure essence of life: love. The word “washing,” as Aubrey further argues, also suggests erosion, as a stone washed down to a pebble in a river, and this meaning applied conveys the idea that the erosion of the earl and countess‟ respective identities has transfigured the truth about them. What remains of them, their love, is but a pebble of what truly was, and therefore unreliable as fact.

This second interpretation tallies better with the conclusion: “Time has transifigured them into/Untruth.” The speaker considers the fidelity immortalized in the stone figures “hardly meant” by the dead earl and countess. Despite this, it has “come to be/Their final blazon, and to prove/Our almost-instinct almost true.” All of this clearly conveys the notion that the act of love by the effigies is nothing but a lie. The second last line – “Our almost-instinct almost true” is particularly interesting. The speaker seems troubled by the conflict between the “sharp tender shock” he received upon sighting the clasped hands and his own brooding certainty of the finality of death. That he calls the idea of love surpassing death an “almost-instinct” suggests that he has an inclination which comes to him as naturally as an instinct to believe in love and its eternal quality, but denies this tendency, terming it instead “almost” fact. The speaker sounds as though he himself wishes he could believe in the “almost-instinct.”

The final line of the poem, despite the certainty of the speaker in saying the tombs are now merely “untruth,” arguably undermines the speaker‟s sureness. This, as Aubrey notes in his “Critical Essay,” is due largely to the fact that the last line – “What will survive of us is love” – is able to stand alone. Unlike the rest of the stanza, whose lines feature enjambment and must always be read together with others to be understood, the final line has an affirmative tone. It is the heaviest, most striking line of the poem, and weakens the speaker‟s arguments by sheer emotional force alone. Most fascinatingly, that the last line, rather than the work‟s true message, should be in fact the most memorable part of the poem seems itself to render our “almost-instinct almost-true” – readers are more affected by one line which speaks to the heart than the entire poem which makes an argument to the mind. In brief, “An Arundel Tomb” engagingly offers a complicated and contradictory view of love that grapples with its very reality.

By the works of these three poets alone, it can be seen that the topic of love has had numerous interpretations and has been worked over in highly divergent ways by authors of various eras. From Petrarchan sonnets of the Renaissance which deal with the agony of unrequited love, to monologues which speak of its possessive and jealous nature as manifested in egocentric personalities, to more modern, complex poems with layers of meanings contemplating the immortality and truth of love in an ephemeral world, Love has been pondered from all angles. Perhaps it is because of all these variations in its depiction that love remains such a mysterious abstract today. Is love despair and pain? Is it the selfish need to control others? Or is it pure and immortal, “that later thing than death, more previous than life,” as Emily Dickinson once wrote? Whatever it is, it continues to fuel poetry the world over, inspiring fond memoirs by the wrinkled hand of a widow as it does “Roses are red, violets are blue” verses in the smitten schoolgirl, even to this exact moment, to this brink of history.


Sources

Aubrey, Bryan. "Critical Essay on 'An Arundel Tomb'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Gale. OTTAWA PUBLIC LIBRARY. 3 Dec. 2009 .

Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Eds. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1993. 278.

Larkin, Philip. “An Arundel Tomb.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Eds. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1993. 687-688.

Markley, Arnold. "An overview of “My Last Duchess”." Poetry for Students. Detroit: Gale. Literature Resource Center. Gale. OTTAWA PUBLIC LIBRARY. 3 Dec. 2009. .

"Poetry." Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. Ed. Paul F. Grendler. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. 179-180.

Sydney, Sir Phillip. “Astrophil and Stella.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Eds. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1993. 27.