Allegory Marvell Definition Love

The Allegorical Metaphor: Marvell's 'The Definition of Love'
Author(s): Ann Evans Berthoff

Source: The Review of English Studies, Vol. 17, No. 65 (Feb., 1966), pp. 16-29
Published by: Oxford University Press
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THE ALLEGORICAL METAPHOR: MARVELL'S
'THE DEFINITION OF LOVE'
By ANN EVANS BERTHOFF
The souls of men, though they have descended even to ea

higher part holds forever above the heavens.
Plotinus, The Books of the Ennead, I
The most ambitious wight vexeth not his wittes to clim

Why? because it is impossible.
Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke
M AN'swhenlove of his heavenly soul has become so merely legendary that

we read a poem which celebrates that love, the theme may escape
us. We may underrate metaphor in such a poem, assuming that it is merely the
extreme expression of feeling rather than the essential bridge to the other-
wise incommunicable. Of course, with explicit assurance, we fare success-
fully: if we know the poet to have been a priest, his passionate metaphors
assume the proper tone with no extraordinary effort on our part required;
or if we are given a title we know what to listen for. But, titles aside, the
best assurance of recognizing this theme of the love of the soul is the expec-
tation that where there is allegory there is likely to be concurrently a meta-
physical subject. Indeed, allegory is the mode of expression necessary to
the very definition of certain metaphysical abstractions.
'The Definition of Love' proceeds by means of figures which in the
context of a 'love' poem would be expressions of the power of the poet's
love for his lady. And such they are generally taken to be: Marvell's great
poem is commonly read either as an ingeniously abstract declaration of love
or as a description of Platonic Love. But if we entertain for a moment the
notion that these figures are not hyperbole, that what we are presented with
is, in fact, a definition of a kind of love, the poem then is no longer princi-
pally a brilliant exercise in John Donne's wittiest manner. If we recall
other poems of Marvell's-'On a Drop of Dew', the two 'Dialogues', 'The
unfortunate Lover'-we will find here that same concern with the im-
possibilities necessarily incurred when the soul is born into the world of
time and passion. For the theme of 'The Definition of Love' is Marvell's
principal theme: Man's war with Fate is the cause of his despair and the
source of his joy.
Since the logic of the imagery, the attitude expressed, and the argument
itself are all of a piece, to characterize one is to define all. The key to the
R.E.S. New Series, Vol. XVII, No. 65 (1966).
BERTHOFF: THE ALLEGORICAL METAPHOR 17
poem is its abstractness: the imagery is highly inte

sion is reserved; the argument is unrelievedly p
abstractness is always acknowledged by critics, but thi
then simply ignored or else its implications are no
Professor Frank Kermode is so perplexed at the dispari
Marvell's poem and other poems in the genre of t
proposes the theory that Marvell's poem has had th
But the title is appropriate and exact. The poet will
be love. The riddling definition with which the poe
images which are consistently, relentlessly abstract
abstractness is twofold, I believe: it maintains the g
ent and guards the absolute character of the defini
love created by despair and impossibility. Consider
only expressive and not, literally, definitive, and the t
rather than grand, the rigorous paradox collapses.
Mr. Kermode is right to doubt that the poem is a
the subject to be a mortal passion which Marvell se
from other baser loves. For in that case the metaph
of not much use in a definition; they are merely p
that Marvell's poem 'distinguishes but it does not de
rarity, the unusual qualities of his particular love, that
This assertion is based upon Marvell's saying 'My l
vincing. Whatever particularity there is in 'The Def
actual but virtual: 'My Love' lends a personal tone t
set off-the curious phrase 'strange and high'. Whe
mistress fair, the figures may be ornate and abstract,
point give way to actual heart, eyes, voice, a glim
crowned hair-to a name. But the Love which Marvell defines in this
poem could not be so represented without damaging risk to its integrity
Certainly it is his love, but the strong implication is that the poet's love i
directed towards the unearthly, that the love being defined is not the poet's
'particular love' but a particular kind of love. The generality of the referent
controls the tone.
The argument of the poem, too, depends on abstractness. For example,
the first stanza from which the argument and most critical difficulties with
it stem:
My Love is of a birth as rare

As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.
I Frank Kermode, 'Definitions of Love', R.E.S., N.S. vii (I956), 185.

2 Loc. cit., p. 184.
2
18 BERTHOFF: THE ALLEGORICAL METAPHOR
Here and throughout the following stanzas, the sep

brates seems to call for a degree of abstractness in its
which earthly passion, no matter how intellectual
claim. And yet John Press can write: ' "The Defini
far less sensuous than "To his Coy Mistress", convey
longing of two lovers to be united." Since there is
expressed in this poem the notion that 'longing' is b
Hope could ne'er have flown'-that the situation in
himself is incommensurate with longing, this comm
supportable. The love here being defined has been
and though Mr. Press, along with most readers, ide
earthly passion, it is notable that the love of a woman,
ate despair and be nourished by despair, is fathered
The theme of the poem is not the love of a luckles
is one of the poem's strongest ironies that it opens wit
the first of the figures by which Marvell defines the
for its heavenly life. The metaphors which define
sense, riddles, for the love defined cannot be separat
state. One riddle therefore only begets another.
contrast between earthly and heavenly love. Nor i
'imagery' is drawn from heavenly love to describe i
passion; it is the other way round: the state of the
its life, are defined by way of a lover's philosophi
possibility.
Criticism of the poem has been concentrated on finding a source or at
least an analogy for the paradox of a love which is generated by impossibility.
In so far as it is a logical term and not simply an exaggeration, 'impossibility'
defines that which is contrary to the nature of reality. It is so used in this
poem from Philip Ayres's Emblems of Love, entitled 'The Impossibility':
Who warmly courts the cold and awkward dame
Whose breast the living soul does scarce inspire
With them an equal folly may proclaim
Who without fuel strive to kindle fire.3
The emblem defines an impossible state of affairs; it is not an expression of
John Press, Andrew Marvell (London, 1958), p. 30.

2 Pierre Legouis, noting that Massinger has hope and impossibility as neighbours,
remarks that Marvell 'improved' upon this figure by substituting despair for hope and
making those neighbours the parents of his love (R.E.S., xxiii (1947), 63-65). But this
is not an 'improvement'; it is a change of the figure and a radical change: the logical basis
is entirely different. If Marvell writes that Despair has fathered this love, that Impossi-
bility has mothered it, this is saying something other than that they are simply 'related"
to his love a little more closely than neighbours would be.
3 Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford, 90o6), ii. 356.
hopelessness or misery. In contrast, a lover who sigh

of his love sighs because there is no response, not bec
If he should speak of 'impossibility', the term would
does not, in his heart, lose the faith that 'Fortune re
Fate'.I Thus Cowley in his 'Impossibilities', a poem
Bush and others as a possible source for Marvell's p
nothing else would be impossible, 'could mine bring
home'. Cowley's is a passionate boast in which 'im
subjunctive; the term does not here designate a pres
of affairs.
A lover-by definition, we might say-could not arg
possibility of his love. Thus Sidney's Philoclea soon p
'impossibility' is for a lover impossible. Her appeal to th
reason to help her out of an impossible situation
analogue to Marvell's declaration:
O then, o tenne times unhappie that I am, since wh
kindleth love; in my despaire should be the bellowes of m
despaires the most miserable, which is drawn from impos
She is declaring that she loves 'Zelmane', a supposed

(and Philoclea's perspicacious mother) know to be th
Pyrocles, smitten with love for the lady Philoclea. He
is a tease for the reader who knows that what Philoclea claims to be im-
possible is not that at all. Rhetorically, that 'impossibilitie' is hyperbole, as
Philoclea herself decides once she has drawn up these two analogies, truly
intolerable in their absoluteness:
The most covetous man longs not to get riches out of a ground which never
can bear anything; Why? because it is impossible. The most ambitious wight
vexeth not his wittes to clime into heaven; Why ? because it is impossible.
Sidney's analogy is Marvell's theme and if Marvell found inspiration in

Philoclea's distraught exclamations it was in the logic of her supporting
argument, not in the rhetorical description of her supposed situation.
When the abstractness of the imagery and the cold, grand tone of 'The
Definition of Love' have been appreciated, they have often been taken as
evidence that the poem is a celebration of Platonic Love rather than a defini-
tion of the more usual variety of earthly love. But Marvell's 'Definition',
though it expresses that stoic awe which often characterizes the Platonic
lover, defines a love 'begotten by despair', and with despair the Platonic
lover has naught to do. Caroline poems which set forth the marvels of
x The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. G. M. Crump (Oxford, 1962), p. 58.
2 The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1912), p. 174.
Platonic Love are full of a self-conscious wonder, indeed

'holier-than-thou' is almost unavoidable. If not sco
distaste for those lovers who are enchained by the
Let our mutual thoughts betray,
And in our wills our minds display...
Thus we (my Dear) of these may learn
A Passion others not discern...'
Despair is appropriate to Platonic Love neither as motive nor as con-

sequence, for that form of affection is deliberately chosen with the con-
viction that it is less harrowing, more enjoyable than sexual love:
What human passion does with tears implore
The intellect enjoys, when 'tis in love
With the eternal soul, which here does move
In mortal closet, where 'tis kept in store.
(Philip Ayres, 'Platonic Love')
'The Definition of Love' cannot be read as a poem about Platonic Love

if the absolute character of the paradox of a love created by impossibility
and despair is granted. This is not a concession to be made in the interest
of simplifying the reading of the poem: it is a consequence of taking meta-
phoric definition seriously. Impossibility's mate, in Marvell's metaphor,
is Despair, not the mystical enjoyment of another's soul. Despair is
essential to the dialectic of Marvell's definition. It is carefully differen-
tiated from miseryz and defined as the fallow ground of a resolute accep-
tance of Fate.
Fate is not the way things go but the way things are. Fate is not a mode
of happening but the fact of being. Fate is necessity and the prime necessity
of temporal life is that the Soul must be, for the time being, displaced,
separated from its true home. The caged bird, the shipwreck, the prisoner
are all dramatic symbols of the soul in time, figures that are, after all, only
the literary expression of those mythic metaphors which grow from man's
most primal feeling, that he is lost: 'the world's an orphans' home'. The
feelings which are awakened by this knowledge-a knowledge which, in the
circle of time, itself grows from an awareness of the feelings-are Hope,
Despair, and Fear: Fear of corruption and the rough strife; Hope for the
discovery of paradise on earth; Despair of such discovery. But from that
Despair bursts Resolution. Such renewal is a theme found in Herbert and
I Stanley, ed. cit., p. 27.

2 Mr. Kermode rightly dismisses Dennis Davison's reading of the poem as 'an alterna-
tion of hope and despair', claiming that hope has no place in the poem. He then seeks to
compare Marvell's 'Definition' with a French poem in which the misery of a lover is
expressed. But misery has no more place in 'The Definition of Love' than hope. 'Despair
in love' is not its subject.
Hopkins. 'The Definition of Love' belongs, I think, w

piety in which resolution is the keynote.
Whether it is the lover's or the philosopher's, D
primarily an empty thing. It is only when it creates
comes into its own. The lover's despair, if it becom
tance of Fate, is no longer earthbound; it is no longer
of hope, as it is so often represented in poems of Mar
The Caroline sport of writing a brace of poems on H
be symptomatic of an energetic delight in metaphysi
poems are not notable for a subtlety of definition, becau
is not required. These poems are generally limited t
as the well-spring of desire, of Despair as the sorro
lover must bear. Definition is formulated according
with Despair below Hope and above Fear. The easy
' 'Tis Hope is the most hopeless thing of all', for in
the poet and the possibility of moving statement. But
the lover or the philosopher resolutely accepts Fate,
the conqueror of all earthly passion. It is no lon
negative feeling but takes on character and spirit a
type of the Soul which discovers joy in contemplatin
Heaven.
Marvell's 'Magnanimous Despair'-like Bunyan's Giant Despair it is
beyond a mere personal hopelessness-has shown the poet the nature of
his love because it is equal to it, as the epithet suggests:
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.
This divine thing-'that thing Divine' is Marvell's name for the Soul in 'A
Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure'-has not been
revealed by hopeful desire nor by a melancholic, peevish malcontent; for
with these it is entirely incommensurate.
Magnanimous Despair and the Love it creates form a dialectical unity,
just as the Drop of Dew represents in itself the incomparable joy of con-
templation of Heaven and despair of the life that makes such contemplation
possible. It is the kind of paradox found when two modes of being are
contrasted. And, far from being a mere verbal trick, it shares the profun-
dity of those sacramental metaphors by which Christ describes and defines
for His disciples the love of God for those who love His Son.'
See, especially, John xiv-xv where the imagery is comparable to Marvell's here. The
tone of that colloquy is analogous too: joy and certainty pitted against despair.
II
The abstractness of the poem, I have said, works to maintain

generality of reference and the absolute paradox of the love which is at
the creator and the progeny of despair. The secret of the poem's diff
is that the metaphors by which that abstractness is effected do not
'real' things or actual relationships. They are allegorical metaphors
they refer to metaphysical concepts which, though they are indeed d
from human experience, are themselves figurative. The poem's meta
are meta-metaphors. As they succeed one another there is a gr
revelation of significance, a discursive development of the argumen
this provides the scheme of the poem. And yet, because the refere
constant, there is, as well, a static quality about the poem's imagery
this fusion of the discursive-the quasi-narrative-and the emble
which the voice of allegory bespeaks.
The eight stanzas of 'The Definition of Love' present an argumen
strictly formal in its design as the 'Had we ... / But I ... / Let us .
'To his Coy Mistress'. The complex relationship of Love and Desp
described in the first two stanzas; the next five describe the action of Fa
the final stanza defines the consequence. I propose to follow that argu
by analysing the allegorical metaphors by which means it is present
The assertion that Hope is feeble in the case of the divine thing De
has revealed is tautological since Despair certainly itself defines that
lessness. But this tautology strengthens the paradox on which the
poem pivots. The term divine thing also needs strengthening; it is c
too vague to be of further metaphoric use. Marvell turns therefore t
primal metaphor of the journey:
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron Wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds itself betwixt.
My contention is that the poet stands in the same relation to the place
where his 'extended Soul is fixt' as he does to the divine thing, that his Soul
and the object of his Despair-created love are the same. Love is the desire
for union whether ethereal or carnal; the Body may speak soulfully of its
desire or the Soul may sing of its love of Heaven as if it were sublunary.
I am suggesting that 'extended Soul' means just what it says, that this is a
metaphoric definition, not a simple euphemism, like Ayres's 'mortal closet'.
Hope never could have joined the poet and the divine thing; it is a varia-
tion on that theme to say that the poet and his 'extended Soul' could be
joined if it were not for Fate. 'Extended' is the kind of conventional ironic
metaphor by which physical characteristics are attributed to the Soul,
though they may be very abstractly physical. Marve

the resultant contradiction in terms and describes th
figure in 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body', w
of
this Tyrannic Soul
Which, stretcht upright, impales me so,
That mine own Precipice I go.
Just as Body bitterly feels the 'cramp of Hope . . . and then the Palsie
Shakes of Fear', so the Soul complains of being 'inslav'd . . . by bolts of
Bones': a physical bond is the strongest metaphor for the relationship of
Soul and Body. In 'The Definition', the Soul extends from one point to
another where it isfixed. The terms are not so physical as 'stretcht'; indeed,
they are geometrical terms and they look ahead to stanza vII.' The spatial
metaphor they create repeats and reinforces the trope implied in 'arrives':
the journey of the Soul to its home or the flight of the Soul heavenward is
the commonest figure in descriptions of the Soul's return. It is impossible
to dispense with the metaphor long enough to explain the referent.
And yet I quickly might arrive.
Probably, 'quickly' is a pun here. The poet suggests that by rights he ought
to be one with that Soul which is part of his life.2 It is only because of his
temporal-and therefore temporary-existence that he cannot be united
with it: he might quickly arrive if only he weren't alive!
There is a further reinforcement of this concept of the essential unity of
the poet and his heavenly soul in the figure of the wedges. A wedge holds
apart a single mass from itself, or separates two masses which have an un-
usual affinity for one another.3 By the act of holding the Soul in absolute
I Of the soul of Love, Traherne writes in the Fourth Century, 66: '. .. In Length it is
infinit as well as in Bredth, being equally vigorous at the utmost Bound to which it can
extend as here, and as wholly their as here and wholy evry where' (Thomas Traherne,
Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford, 1958), p. zo3).
2 In so far as the poet and the soul he embodies are two, there are two loves: the love
of the temporal soul for its heavenly self and the love of the poet for his heavenly soul.
In so far as the poet is his embodied soul, these loves are the same. Since the voice is the
voice of the poet's and not of the Soul's, there is a 'personal' tone which offsets the
austerely general imagery.
3 Unwarranted particularizing of a term, figurative or literal, is the greatest hazard in
reading allegory. 'If "edge" and "point" (both common substitutes for "sword") sug-
gested Marvell's "wedges", this supports the notion that Marvell was thinking of some
military instrument, and even that he was alluding to the civil war' (Dennis Davison,
'Marvell's "Definition of Love"', R.E.S., N.S. vi (1955), 141). 'Iron wedges', like 'Iron
Gates', like all images, depends on the function of the vehicle in the context, not on other
properties which wedges may possess. That iron-strong and merely strong-the metal
of prisons, locks, and chains, should be associated with Fate (or the fatefulness of Life)
seems an inevitable symbolism.
disparate states, Fate's wedges thereby assure that u

it is defined by, polarity.'
Polarity is the concept which the next three stanz
metaphor being that of the 'two perfect Loves' wh
apart. Marvell enjoyed, we may believe, that rever
commonly in attendance as a figure on the theme
becomes the subject which the love of a man for a w
'Two perfect Loves' is clearly metaphoric, for to a
keep two mortal lovers apart because her power dep
would be to forget that Fate, seemingly defeated
moves on to further conquests. But what would 'he
union of earthly soul and heavenly soul:
And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.
Therefore rings exultant. It is the nature of existence itself, the very secret
of Time, which conditions as it creates these 'two perfect Loves'. The
parenthesis is a witty sotto voce: only if there are two poles, only if the Soul
partakes in sublunary existence, only if the Soul has a Body, can there be
any earthly love.z
The sixth stanza makes it clear that the one condition under which the
two states of the soul could be unified would be the union of Heaven and
Earth-and that would mean the collapse of the World's poles. On logical
and syntactical grounds, 'World' seems to include 'Heaven' and 'earth', a
x It is this binding function of the wedge that Isabel G. MacCaffrey has discussed in
her very suggestive analysis of the passage. ('Some Notes on Marvell's Poetry, Suggested
by a Reading of his Prose', M.P., lxi (1964), 265.) She cites from The Rehearsal Trans-
pros'd: '[Fate] ... drove the great iron nail through the axeltree of Nature' and suggests
that Fate's wedge is analogous to Fate's nail, that a wedge does indeed serve the same
function as a 'nail, i.e. an axle'. She finds support in Chaucer's Astrolabe 'where "a litel
wegge" is said to hold together all parts of the instrument'. But Chaucer's 'wegge' seems
to effect directly only the 'pyn', as a kind of adjustment screw-rather a minor role for
Necessity. Further, Marvell's Fate drives wedges: the plural suggests the woodsman's
wedges employed all along the split. And yet an astrolabe is one kind of 'planisphere'
and I have no doubt that Mrs. MacCaffrey is right when she remarks that 'the notion of
the wheel may have been present at one of the poem's growing points from the start'.
2 It is the one appearance-substantive, not figurative-of Love as passion, for it is
not passion which in this poem is to be defined. (I take the parenthesis to be significant
of this fact.) Brooks and Warren comment: 'Thus, the lovers, though separated, define
the ideal nature of love. The world of love, like a globe, turns on the axis of their relation-
ship' (Understanding Poetry [New York, 1941], p. 439). This comment only confounds
the paradox. If these earthly lovers are bound only by a conjunction of the mind, how
can it be that Love's whole world-not just the ideal world of Love-turns on that axis?
Like the opening stanza, the parenthesis is a riddle, the answer to which cannot be found
if the riddle is not taken seriously, that is, as metaphoric definition.
reading which supports construing 'the distant Poles'

than terrestrial. A recent writer rejects the 'celestial' ident
remark that 'the idea of common loves would be embarr
that links them with cosmic values'.' In my view it is pr
spondence suggested between the 'two perfect Loves',
includes Heaven, that validates construing 'the dist
tial.z
In short, the destruction of the polarity of Earth and
of Fate would be the end of the World. We may recall that
Lover-he who loves outside the timeless garden of hea
into the world of Time amidst just such violence:
No Day he saw but that which breaks

Through frighted Clouds in forked streaks.
While round the ratling Thunder hurl'd,
As at the Fun'ral of the World.
The identification of opposites suggests violence to Marvell's imagination,

whether primally grotesque as in 'The unfortunate Lover', or comic, as
here with giddy Heaven and new Convulsion and cramp'd. The union of
Earth and Heaven would cramp the World into a planisphere, the very name
a paradox. Marvell is fond of double metaphors, especially if a verbal
complexity is involved as here the identity of name, the term 'planisphere'
being shared by the condition of collapse and by the instrument or drawing
which pictures that collapse and is thus its emblem. The logical term
which these equivalences share, the characteristic, that is, that makes them
equivalent, is the capacity for a collapse which is a union.
But it cannot be so. Oblique lines/loves 'may well' meet eventually
(it 's always possible that earthly love can be realized); truly parallel lines/
loves can never meet. Again, it is the logically absolute impossibility of this
love which is defined in a geometrical metaphor. Oblique lines imply
angles and angles are 'imperfections' and thus symbolic of earthly love.
Parallel lines, because they are absolutely correspondent have a kind of
I Dean Morgan Schmitter, 'The Cartography of "The Definition of Love"', R.E.S.,

N.S. xii (1961), 49. Mr. Schmitter continues: 'With a terrestrial identification the poem
moves steadily through the simple and sensuous immediacy of commonly known references
to the climactic symbolic image of stanza vii.' There is neither simple nor sensuous image
in Marvell's poem.
2 Marvell uses 'pole' to denote celestial position when Thyrsis comforts Dorinda who
has complained that birds can get to Heaven but how can she 'that [has] no wings and
cannot fly ?'
Do not sigh (fair Nimph) for fire
Hath no wings, yet doth aspire
Till it hit, against the pole,
Heaven's the Center of the Soul.
pure identity and are thus symbolic of an inc

comparable imagery, Marvell in 'Eyes and Tears'
bound to falsify, whereas Tears, the sign of a deep
And, since the Self-deluding Sight,

In a false Angle takes each hight;
These tears which better measure all,
Like wat'ry Lines and Plummets fall.
What is symbolized in the defining metaphor o

'perfect accord' of two lovers,Z but the impossibil
discord, for the nature of this love is that it is not s
other than that absolute condition which is being d
of which are set forth in the final stanza. Fate, to
pow'r', keeps the earthly soul and the heavenly so
Therefore the Love which us doth bind
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.
The stars, like Fate, define not a particular misfortune but the condition of
existence in Time: this is the cause of the 'impossibility'. Since union is
impossible, the love of the embodied soul for its heavenly counterpart can
only be a 'Conjunction of the Mind', the Soul's conquest of Fate made
possible by the impossibility of other union.
The astrological connotations of the final lines, the possibility of a neat
antithesis of the malevolent stars in opposition and the lovers' minds in
planetary conjunction, have beguiled Mr. Brooks and Mr. Warren (and
others) into reading 'of the stars' as a possessive. It is the simpler grammar,
but it creates a problem in syntax, for the 'and' surely indicates that 'Con-
junction' and 'Opposition' are, in fact, apposites. I hear the poem ending
not with the challenge of Fate but with the answer to that challenge. Thus
construed, the lines read: 'Our love shall provide an opposition to the
stars.' 'Conjunction of the Mind' is the means of that 'Opposition of the
Stars' which defines the magnanimous response of the heroic Soul.
I Since it describes pure forms, geometry is particularly appropriate to the description

of the soul. We may recall Marvell's Drop of Dew, how 'Moving but on a point below I
It all about does upward bend.' Herbert develops a geometry of the soul in 'The Search'
(The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 162). There is
a point, a centre which is the earth and a sphere which is heaven. These lines (5-8, 41-48)
are close to Marvell's poem in tone and subject, that is, the relation of Man and God,
with Faith as the intermediary. Though the similarity to Marvell's imagery has been
noted in Herbert's poles and parallels which kisse and meet (11. 53-56), the poem has not,
to my knowledge, been cited on the score of its analogous subject and comparable tone.
2 Brooks and Warren, p. 439-
It is enlightening to compare Marvell's concludin

following stanza from Cowley's 'Impossibilities':
As stars (not powerful else) when they conjoin
Change, as they please, the Worlds estate;
So thy Heart in Conjunction with mine,
Shall our own fortunes regulate;
And to our stars themselves prescribe a Fate.'
The overthrow of Fate's tyranny which Cowley prom

counted out, for it is this Fate which has in effect cr
opposition to the stars is not their overthrow but the tran
power. The Soul in its sublunary existence opposes
cause of Despair, by the contemplation of Heaven, to w
by that Despair.
'The Definition of Love' ends in quiet resignation wh
resolute. The concluding stanza, as it has the same log
same intensity and, I believe, the same exhilaration as
Thus, though we can not make our Sun
Stand still, yet will we make him run.
For the Lover of the Coy Mistress, Time is a weapon t

Eternity. In 'The Definition', the enemy, we might b
Life, for it is the condition of life itself which is the c
that is not the verdict of the poet who is concerned to de
is created by that very despair. If Despair is the sire an
dam of this Love, then Time is the great progenitor.
The impossibility of the union of the Soul in its two
ical formulation of the most general and universal pro
Having to decide whether Marvell's poem is indeed
'definition' is obviated if it is recognized to be allegory
description setting forth the character of the Soul's lo
being will define that love. And the definition will n
phoric, since identification is impossible. This love live
thus it is that definition, as much as love, is the subjec
III
The love of the Soul for its heavenly existence is a phi

But philosophic discourse, when the soul is its subject, s
poetic mode; that is, it proceeds by metaphor. It is for
reading Plotinus can be instructive in the matter of the
metaphors. The assumption is not that Marvell was influ
Abraham Cowley: Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 19o
but that all those who think on the soul's life sh

Plotinus himself knew this. It is not 'allegorizati
the mythic character of those symbols which is at th
for instance:
In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocle

where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from t
wayfaring towards the Intellectual Realm. (Ennead,
Thus Plotinus justifies the figure of what he calls th

Soul by adducing the figure of the freed captive and
bird or air or flame. All these figures are equival
Of this grand store of equivalent images which d
dilemma of a soul in a body, a body inhabited by a so
used is probably the cage or prison. Marvell's 'Di
and Body', for instance, makes traditional use of t
vellian use of the tyrant soul who, from the Bod
jailer. Such images are emblems; that is, they
which themselves stand for ideas. The emblem is
metaphor whose use by Marvell has been so w
should, I think, recognize the emblematic charac
'The Definition' whose ambience is instead usuall
scientific terms. Marvell uses lines and poles, we
John Norris uses the prison and the lodeston
Aspiration'. It is quoted below in full.
How long great God, how long must I

Immur'd in this dark prison lye!
Where at the grates and avenues of sense
My soul must watch to have intelligence.
Where but faint gleams of thee salute my sig
Like doubtful moon-shine in a cloudy night.
When shall I leave this magic sphere,
And be all mind, all eye, all ear!
How cold this clime! and yet my sense

Perceives even here thy influence.
Even here thy strong magnetic charms I feel,
And pant and tremble like the amorous steel
To lower good, and beauties less divine
Sometimes my erroneous needle does decline;
But yet-so strong the sympathy-
It turns, and points again to thee.
I long to see this excellence

Which at such distance strikes my sense.
My impatient soul struggles to disengage
Her wings from the confinement of her cage.
Would'st thou great Love this prisoner once set fre
How would she hasten to be link'd with Thee.
She'd for no angel's conduct stay,
But fly, and love on all the way.'
The shamed admittance of the charms of earthly life is offset by the
impassioned declaration of longing for Heaven: the 'aspiration' is towards
Death.2 But short of Death, it is Heaven's 'magnetic charm' which miti-
gates the pain of temporal existence. Norris's emblematic lodestone is
comparable to Marvell's geometry in that each figure pictures the lines by
which a relationship may be schematically represented. The lodestone also
symbolizes by its character of attraction the unity of the Soul and Heaven,
as Marvell's polarity is a figure for the essential unity of temporal and
heavenly souls. But the further complexity of the figure of the lodestone is
made to yield in Crashaw's hands a paradox exactly comparable to that
which informs 'The Definition of Love':
... yea those dull things

Whose wayes have least to do with wings
Make wings at least of their own weight
And by their love controll their Fate.
So lumpish steel, untaught to move
Learn'd first his lightnesse by his Love.3
It is the very character of 'Steel'-its heaviness-which makes it 'light' in
the magnetic field of Heavenly Love. It is by this same reversal that Mar-
vell's Despair creates a love which by definition is, also, a denial of despair.
Whereas most Christian poetry on the great theme of the Soul's exile
stresses the hope of union by way of mystic ecstasy or death, Marvell,
stressing the very impossibility of union, finds his hope not in faith, not in
submission, not in grace, not in death, but in despair itself which brings
him to the resolution to oppose Fate by a 'Conjunction of the Mind'. The
Soul, aspiring towards Heaven, is in love and contemplation of the beloved
is the mode of its affection: thus are the complex metaphysics of the soul
transmuted to sublunary form, the mind's most profound intuitions given
the form of vital human experience.
I The Poems of John Norris of Bemerton, Miscellanies of The Fuller Worthies' Library,
ed. A. B. Grosart (Blackburn, 1871), iii. 173.
2 The association of Death and Love is commonplace, but there is neither Renaissance
ambiguity nor Liebestod here. Death is only the inevitable conclusion of the syllogism
whose quasi-comic character Marvell recognizes in 'quickly might arrive'.
3 'Against Irresolution in Matters of Religion', in The Complete Works of Richard
Crashaw, ed. A. B. Grosart (Blackburn, I872), i. 299.

Allegory Marvell Definition Love

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Allegory Marvell Definition Love

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The Allegorical Metaphor: Marvell's 'The Definition of Love'

Author(s): Ann Evans Berthoff

By ANN EVANS BERTHOFF

The souls of men, though they have descended even to ea

The most ambitious wight vexeth not his wittes to clim

M AN'swhenlove of his heavenly soul has become so merely legendary that

poem is its abstractness: the imagery is highly inte

My Love is of a birth as rare

I Frank Kermode, 'Definitions of Love', R.E.S., N.S. vii (I956), 185.

Here and throughout the following stanzas, the sep

The emblem defines an impossible state of affairs; it is not an expression of

John Press, Andrew Marvell (London, 1958), p. 30.

hopelessness or misery. In contrast, a lover who sigh

She is declaring that she loves 'Zelmane', a supposed

Sidney's analogy is Marvell's theme and if Marvell found inspiration in

Platonic Love are full of a self-conscious wonder, indeed

Despair is appropriate to Platonic Love neither as motive nor as con-

'The Definition of Love' cannot be read as a poem about Platonic Love

I Stanley, ed. cit., p. 27.

Hopkins. 'The Definition of Love' belongs, I think, w

The abstractness of the poem, I have said, works to maintain

though they may be very abstractly physical. Marve

And yet I quickly might arrive.

disparate states, Fate's wedges thereby assure that u

reading which supports construing 'the distant Poles'

No Day he saw but that which breaks

The identification of opposites suggests violence to Marvell's imagination,

I Dean Morgan Schmitter, 'The Cartography of "The Definition of Love"', R.E.S.,

pure identity and are thus symbolic of an inc

And, since the Self-deluding Sight,

What is symbolized in the defining metaphor o

I Since it describes pure forms, geometry is particularly appropriate to the description

It is enlightening to compare Marvell's concludin

The overthrow of Fate's tyranny which Cowley prom

For the Lover of the Coy Mistress, Time is a weapon t

The love of the Soul for its heavenly existence is a phi

but that all those who think on the soul's life sh

In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocle

Thus Plotinus justifies the figure of what he calls th

How long great God, how long must I

How cold this clime! and yet my sense

I long to see this excellence

... yea those dull things

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