No More Learning

Beauty is not precisely the quality we should
predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.

Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion
recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or
lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant
strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play
of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid
realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional,
neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary
fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its
moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with
tenderness and darkened with sorrow--though these last two moods,
the commonest in love-poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of
these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of
the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from
its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the
Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses
the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets
of the _dolce stil nuovo_, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their
successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their
_canzoni_, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception
of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The
result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope
seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished
in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and
inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in
nature. '[1] The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's
experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine
a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and
subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this
less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of
a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that
of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic,
conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.

The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite
its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it
proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the
counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which
excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love,
which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his
lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this
poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from
which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the
great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its
latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On
the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented
of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made
perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of
the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir
Galahad.

In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style'
that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love
identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making
woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first
awakening of the love of God.
'For Dante and the poets of the learned
school love and virtue were one and the same thing; love _was_
religion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and
finally of theology. '[2] The culminating moment in Dante's love for
Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should
return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words
that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in the _Vita Nuova_ is
completed in the _Paradiso_.

The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply
and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the
idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there
is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the
senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as,
according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of
his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing,
regret his wasted hopes and griefs. '[3] Laura is for Petrarch the
flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her
lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of
the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the
contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical strains in
Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he
cries:

E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core
Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo,
Ch'ogni occulto pensero
Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri 'l vede;
Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede,
Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi,
Piu si disdice a chi piu pregio brama.

Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal
Bembo and the French poets of the _Pleiade_, notably Ronsard
and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely
Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney,
Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in
the impatient strain of Petrarch:

But ah! Desire still cries, give me some food.

And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly
love:

Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.

And so Spenser:

Many lewd lays (Ah!