In these Sonnets, the author has set down the record of a passion which
makes one more of those stories of the heart written by the poets who
have joined the company of Sir Philip Sidney. The company of poets is a
glorious one, and the poetic stories are among the most touching
expressions of human experience.
We can find no difference between these great chronicles of the heart,
beyond the fact of love winning or losing, except what time has made in
the fashions of art between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries.
One cannot believe that the complex psychology in the interpretation of
modern love makes that love essentially a different thing in man’s
nature then in its more primal expression, when social conditions were
less reticent and self-conscious in the tameless civilization of the
mid-sixteenth century. Here is the ancient and immemorial love of man
for woman, whose only change has been the difference between Adam waking
to behold Eve beside him and the conventional introduction of the sexes
which the custom of the twentieth century demands. The influence of time
upon love is not more literal in the science of sociology than in the
art of poetry, and one has but to take a typical Elizabethan amatory
sonnet-sequence and compare it with Mr. Meredith’s “Modern Love,” Mr.
Blunt’s “Esther,” or Mr. Gibson’s “The Wounded Eros,” to be convinced of
this opinion. The elemental note in the great sonnet cycles, from
Petrarch’s to those of our own day, being the realization of an
objective ideal in the opposite sex, with the interpretation of it
varying as human society progressed in its ethical, moral, and political
aspects, there remains—what has always made the intensity of interest
in this poetic form—the circumstance of personality giving tone and
temperament to the particulars of this episodic drama of man’s heart.
Apart from any consideration of the perfection of art in which any
series of related love-sonnets may be dressed, this question of the
personal attitude compels interest. It is the private chamber of a human
heart opened without reserve, for the intrusion of strangers to behold
the truth of a bitter or joyous experience, as fate may decree.
In this book of sonnets, there is touched a deep note of pathos in the
unrequited passion of a man who tells the circumstances of his own love.
It is so before all things, because it is the direct speech of a heart
without subtlety. I mean, that he invents nothing that is illusory
between himself and the object of his desire. If subtlety had been in
the heart of this lover, one might have expected more frequent verbal
conceits in the methods of telling his tale; but the lack of them by no
means diminishes the importance of its human interest. Indeed, the
modern sonnet has gained in this respect over its predecessors of the
English Renaissance. And in Mr. Gibson’s sequence the interest is
entirely a modern one.
These sonnets of the “Wounded Eros” keep, moreover, the dignity that
belongs to the character of thought and feeling employed by the best
examples. If less abstract in any symbolistic purpose, they gain
narratively by allusions sufficiently definite to link each phase of
emotion into a story,—the story old, but ever new, of passion in a
man’s heart for a woman’s love,—and the character and progress of it
unfolded in associations wholly spiritual. The one here celebrated
leaves us with the impression of being a myth created in the fervent
imagination of the poet. Her vague personality hovers in uncertain
imagery about the edges of the poet’s metaphors. One feels her influence
behind the poet’s conception of her virtues, her faults, and her
physical charms, rather than by gaining any perception of her identity
through speech or action. Yet it was around a similar ideal, or vision,
that Dante and Petrarch wove stories of devotion and rhapsodic worship:
and Shakespeare has been able to mystify the curiosity of three
centuries of prying criticism and literary history.
Despite the revelation of the lover’s heart in this poem, the poet has
veiled, if indeed she exists at all in any world more palpable than
Arcadia, the object of his affection behind the profuse chronicling of
his own feelings. It is through him the story proceeds for us; his
nature acting as an impressionable substance upon which her influence
shapes itself into mood and manner. Yet it is more often from memory and
recollection—the consecration of a dream—that the image weaves its
spell upon the worshipper:—
“Thou wilt not give me
Thy treasured self, more often than the time
Of every year doth change,”
he declares; and for a maiden so obdurate in denying those frequent
meetings which are the very Eden of love’s progress, we can plainly see
how the task became difficult in building the illusion of love between
these two people of the imagination.
If it was the woman’s indifference which led to such arbitrary
allowances of time when she might be visited, we can begin to understand
from what source is taken the significance of the author’s title. The
writer of these Sonnets had, as the reader following his story will
discover, his love wounded by all the opposing fates of his passion
concentrating in the cruelty and vanity of the woman he loved. That even
in these qualities of disposition, however, she was without that
self-conscious arrogance which intentionally hurts the feelings of
honest and faithful affection, is attested throughout the entire poem by
many a gracious allusion. We are prone to consider her innocent of any
base premeditated wile or motive; like Keats’ Fanny Brawne, she simply
lacked that sympathetic nature which was able to penetrate and
appreciate the true worth in the man’s heart which fate had laid at her
feet.
“Tell me, in truth, why thou dost still seem fond
Of me, yet ’neath my heart dost plunge the knife.”
This is the paradox in this woman’s nature, and a bit of real human
nature it is of the gentler sex, the attempt to delineate which has been
the theme of much noble music flowing from wounded hearts.
What is the mystery in the perverseness of such natures? Is it the
complexity in personality, of which the possessor has neither knowledge
nor control? Or is it the enigma of human nature moulded into the
subtler diverse forms of the feminine sex? Whatever it is, it offers
questions in psychology hard to deal with in any form of art. That it
can at least be handled with interest, this poem shows. Mr. Gibson’s
theme works out in its allotted way the immemorial conflict upon the old
battleground. All the forces of individual character and temperament are
levied in the pursuit and the evasion; and when in the end comes the
surrender or escape,—happiness or despair in the heart,—there is
still the same wonder and mystery of it all, such as man and woman have
experienced over and over again since time began. The end of this battle
of man’s and woman’s heart against terms of alliance with the opposite
sex is always, and has always been, inexplicable. A force deeper than
can be comprehended or controlled—the vital preservation of the human
kind—draws them by its inevitable laws towards the completion of its
wonderful purpose in mortal existence: and yet the peculiar
circumstances of man’s intellectual sovereignty over the destiny of his
kind have set this purpose into warring factions.
Man never ceasing to follow the sun of his life in woman’s heart, his
brother shall never cease to take interest in the story of an experience
which at one time or another has cast its sunshine or shadow over the
daily routine of his existence. In the hidden nooks and memory-places of
each man’s life there abides the reality or ghost of an ideal, with
woman’s hair and eyes and voice, cloistered in dreams of virtue and
tenderness and inhabiting realms beyond reach and concern of man’s
workaday world with its practical and sordid interests. This ideal is
carried in secret hours when no man’s suspicion can detect the captured
joy. It is far too holy a thing to have its birth and growth revealed to
the unsympathetic knowledge of any whose hearts are not likewise
confined in the prison-cage of a woman’s soul. It is left for poets and
romancers to look into men’s hearts and tell the world the stories of
these passions, for which life has given them the capacity to feel and
enact, but not the subtlety and precision of speech to express and
interpret.
The story of the “Wounded Eros” is, as the reader will discover, the
story of an oblation full of inexplicable shadows. Certainly, as the
lover relates the progress of his suit against the obstinacy and
contradiction in the woman,—so vague in all her influences!—there is
considerably less of that heroic attitude in a love-passion which we
would be inclined to associate with one who is so unreasonably ill-used.
This man is ever the optimistic lover in his despair; constant—even
unalterably persistent—in the hope of ultimately touching and winning
the sympathy of her nobler self in the woman. True, at times, because
of that unimpeachable self-respect, which is the touchstone of all his
dealings with life, he cannot keep silent about her faults of
temperament. But the spirit in which he sings of these obvious
shortcomings is one to chasten and correct that which does not so much
offend his own sensibilities as it blemishes and affects the character
and disposition of her womanhood. What true man has ever yet been blind
to the faults in the woman he loved! These deepen and enlarge her
virtues, since after all she is essentially human beneath the divinity
with which the idealization of man envelops her being. But all poets do
not conceive the sex so realistically in this respect as Mr. Gibson. Nor
in this does he take away anything from the exquisite fascination that
surrounds them. He makes, instead, more interesting and piquant those
perverse elements in the character of this woman, which furnish the
episodical themes for his sonnets to weave their unhappy design upon the
loom of his story.
I want to indicate here what seem to me the important qualities in the
poem, which are intended both to carry on its development from one
emotional phase to another of the story, and simultaneously to reveal
the peculiar personal characteristics of the man and woman. I want to
mention them in their detached aspects, because I think they are
effective in an unusual way. And while, after a close study of these
sonnets, I am convinced of their origin in the imagination,—that is to
say, there being no likelihood that the story is of an actually known
experience,—I am impressed with the note of sincerity which will
convince the reader of the poet’s serious and honest treatment of his
material.
In the circumstance which ensnares the man’s affections as he conceives
them, the author finds fate offering no atonement in the end for the
bitter trials of faith and patience endured; and in his art the poet
offers no compromise to appease the sentimentalist. Truth is too
insistent of her rights. Logic is too tenacious, too pitilessly
inflexible in its purpose of carrying the intentions of fate to its
grievous conclusions. Not at any point in the poem is there the least
suggestion that chance will alter the fortunes of this battle of hearts.
Only through a heightened sense of moral duty in the woman could there
come that strength of sacrifice which is the test of noble characters,
and change the final note of despair into one of exultation. While, as I
have said, the author does not attempt to work his art into false
attitudes, it is, strangely enough, just this hope which underlies his
apparent resignation at the end. He seems somehow to entrust Time to
transform the alloy of inconstant youth in the nature of the beloved one
into the purer womanhood of maturity, whom a larger experience and
deeper knowledge of life will teach to surrender her heart to his
constancy, faith, and unwearying devotion.
That there was a prophetic feeling from the very beginning that the
fruits of his affection were to be bitter fruits, is suggested in Sonnet
VII, where he declares, “Come, though I pay love’s price in future
pain.” And yet, despite this open-eyed acceptance of a task so full of
doubt, he can say in the very next Sonnet,—
“This pen
Now dedicate to love, thus born again
Out of thy breast....”
He makes the dedication of his life upon the altar of her heart with all
its strange inconstancies. With unquestionable intention she has lured
him with the skilfully exercised arts of girlish insouciance. And yet,
while her conduct is not exemplary, and should be lightly treated as the
dross mixture in the frivolous temperament of maidenhood, it is to be
rigorously censured when it continues wilfully to exercise itself upon
the serious nature of a man. Although the first thought one has, when
doubt and dismay have been the reward of affection, is to be mercifully
emancipated from the emotions which still make a woman dear, the heart
cannot wholly abandon the ties no longer recognized; and so when, as in
Sonnet XIII, he confesses,—
“I know not how to cast aside the power
That holds thy presence ever in my thought.
By night or day, thy coming once hath brought
Incessant longing for thee every hour.
Why can I not, in truth, then, overpower
This sense of something that is vainly sought,
And still content me with a friendship caught
From the occasional perfume of a flower?”
we feel in this case that the compromise is made in deference to the
woman’s lack of self-reliance in being frank. “A friendship caught from
the occasional perfume of a flower”—these lines, the most poetic and
significant in the poem, are suggestive of a very subtle pathos; and
obdurate as we are in not excusing the woman’s frailties, we do pity her
weaknesses, much in the same way as our regretful pity spends itself on
some beautiful wild flower with faint and wasting odors.
The flower of this lover’s heart is one nurtured by the sunlight of the
world’s opinion. It is not sheltered in the quiet nook of pastoral
inexperience with the ways of the urban world. Morally unspotted, it is
ethically tainted with all the sophistication of its environment. As in
Sonnet XIV, she is seen
“through the maze
Of lights and worldly episodes of man,”
it is inevitable that her lover should cry,—
“Shouldst thou, perchance, peruse these simple lines,
I wonder even if thy heart would be
Touched by the pathos of my love, and see
In them the attitude that love defines,
Unfettered by the selfish light that shines
Through many a worldly eye.”
And in Sonnet XXIX, where he says she is “sweeter than are the flowers
of spring,” that “give a delicate perfume unto the airs,” he
acknowledges those charms which
... “surprise
My soul with smiles that banish every gloom,”
yet regretting that one so bountifully gifted with physical charms, and
possessing all the polite accomplishments of culture, should be under
those influences that are, like a canker, eating the loveliness of soul
from her young life.
“I would that I ...
Might pluck thee from thy temporary bed
Of earthly pleasure, and possess the flower
Of thy young life, to keep it worthily
Within the garden of my heart.”
Before it is too late he would pluck her from her “temporary bed of
earthly pleasure”—she whom Love stands ready to transform into the
glory of her sex. The world, he tells her, is a bad school, with all its
deceits, rivalries, and petty selfishness, and he who sees her
comeliness would protect it from ruin in the “garden of his heart.” With
all his care and solicitude, with his admirable and untiring sacrifice,
she remains unresponsive to the full hope in his soul. There are the
“blessed hours” she brings him, but conferring them only to make him
sadder for the brief joy. For, “dying all too soon,” they leave him in
“pain
For many a day and weary week betimes.”
Because she constantly rejects the pressure of his suit, “Refusing
strangely love’s perpetual flowers,” which she will not accept, his
whole love seems vain,—
“Save for th’ alleviation of my rhymes.”
The solace he takes in rhyme is like an open sluice for the pent-up
emotions which he has not been allowed to pour directly into the harbor
of her affections. But time goes on and finds her, he declares, “false
in thy profession of love’s leaven,” and ever escaping from the
persistent assaults of a determined but irreproachable wooing. “Yet
ne’er lose hope, my heart,” he says:—
“Thou shalt succeed,
So thou persist in thy true quest, until
All barriers opposing thee do fall.”
And what barriers they were, obstructing the realization of this hope!
Inconstant as the sea, with an almost diabolical power to delude and
deceive, she seems to take infinite delight in raising the most sanguine
expectations only to dash the joy in shattered fragments upon the ground
of despair. Take Sonnet LXXI:—
“Thou camest unto me last eventide,
When the dull pain of absence had well-nigh
Made life for me one long-continued sigh—
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh! rapture to my soul, more sweet to me
Than glories to the conqueror of a nation!
Behold my dry heart, moistened at the sound
Of thy dear voice—none dearer could there be—
And my sad soul, once more within love’s station,
As thy fair form doth twine my heart around!”
Here at last seems the surrender. Now that her “fair form doth twine”
around his heart, the very suddenness of victory inspires even in its
joy a dubious misgiving; so hard won has it been, that all the past
anxiety and pain robs it of half the exquisite realization the event
should bring. Whether it is this, indeed, or a spirit of chastisement
that the following Sonnet evokes, one does not dare positively to say:—
“Yet now I cannot with impunity
Receive the gilded pleasure of thy love.
God knoweth with what zeal for it I strove.
But when I feel love’s sweet community,
It bringeth to me the lost unity—
The loneliness.”
Despite the momentary doubt, however, the next six sonnets are rhapsodic
in celebration of the perfect union of feeling that binds the two
hearts. “For love at last walks hand in hand with me,” he sings. And
there seems to lurk in all their association the atmosphere of a
conviction that happiness is finally to crown their lives. But the charm
is snapped. The woman has not yet “drunk the cup of worldly pleasure
dry.” Betraying his trust again, she proves the fickle baseness of her
nature. The wound she inflicts promises to be deep and lasting. The
bitter cry in Sonnet LXXXVII, with its splendid opening line, pierces
the heart with sympathy for this unhappy man:—
“God, through his offspring Nature, gave me love,
Though man in opposition saith me nay,
And taketh from my heart its life to-day,
As through the valley of the world I rove,
Still unaccompanied.”
From here on to the last Sonnet, the final stage of an unhappy
experience is told in many keys of emotion. Somewhat detached, in his
resignation to the inevitable, the man now turns upon his beloved a
scrutiny of recollection which analyzes her physical and mental
lineaments, and weighs each motive actuating her singular conduct. Fair
in his judgments of her virtues, there is no hesitancy on his part to
censure with rigor her distasteful faults. The good and the bad are so
interwoven in her nature as not to be superficially discerned.
She was a creature in whose nature contrary rarities were combined, to
exercise upon man powers to excite the highest joy and the deepest
despair. She was, as Sonnet CVIII draws her, like “Satan in angelic
vestment drest.” A maiden with wonderful physical charms,—fair of
complexion, from whose blue eyes shone the light of infantile
innocence,—snaring the hearts of men to torture them with cold and
cruel wantonness. Living for herself, and in herself, she took for
granted the homage of the world. Pleasure that came to her through other
people’s suffering she accepted as the price due one to whom pleasure
was ordained at birth. She never cared to consider life seriously;
existence was measured by her capacity for sensation. One wonders how
far in this she is a type of the modern woman; or is she merely an
exception in the portrayal here? But sad it is that, beneath their
frivolous exteriors, such women carry tragedy in their lives as a gift
to men.
“Yet love, though long unkind, hath taught me this,
That I may find expression on its page;
Though not the record of its perfect bliss,
Yet, something of its value to mine age,
Mixed with poison from the fatal kiss
That love still bringeth in its equipage.”
The martyrdom has been suffered, and here is the record! It is hoped
that something of its value—the lesson of its confession—may become a
contribution to the age. Every deep human experience is significant of a
moral. How it may affect the conduct of those who come to recognize in
it an intimate and personal admonition or justification, depends on how
deeply one’s sympathy touches the subject in hand.
The world of action is merely the concrete presentation of the
illimitable cosmos of ideas; passion and pain, joy and sorrow,—the
emotions dramatized into comic or tragic speech,—are the symbols of the
phenomena of instinct, somewhere actively concealed in the vague origins
of the human family. Afloat on the swirling current of existence, man’s
soul is tossed and buffeted by the contrary influences of a rebellious
primality. Its forces in the development and growth of civilization are
recorded by history, demonstrated by science, and analyzed by
philosophy. But art alone expresses and interprets it. Art alone
contains that contagious spirit which underlies truth and beauty. It
accomplishes this by an essential sincerity in the artist; and find what
fault one will with the manner and method in the composition which
pretends to the function of æsthetic presentation of life, this
sincerity redeems the work.
Little has been said here concerning the manner in which this poem is
constructed. The interest of the substance was too inviting for one to
be lured into dissecting its form. Artificial as the sonnet-form is,
with all its limitations, we have Wordsworth’s authority for its many
possibilities. There is never any question of the merits or demerits of
a poet’s sonnets. If he bends them to the purpose in hand, he achieves
his intention, and in this respect the sonnets of the “Wounded Eros” are
no exception.
W. S. B.
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