Embark on a poetic exploration with us as we peel back the layers of Andrew Marvell's "The Definition of Love," where we tease out the complexities of a doomed love with metaphysical flair. Alongside a comparison to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," we ponder the intricate dance of despair and impossibility in the quest for affection. The poem itself becomes a doorway to considering the ways love's portrayal has withstood the test of time, beckoning us to reflect on how its grand themes echo in our modern hearts.
Tackling the challenges of 17th-century poetry head-on, we share tales of our own pronunciation pitfalls, turning them into opportunities for deeper engagement with Marvell's text. As we dissect "The Definition of Love," we find ourselves in the throes of magnanimous despair, grappling with fate's cruel barriers. This linguistic journey not only enriches our understanding of Marvell's work but also invites us to discover the magnificence within the language of love that he so masterfully weaves.
Weaving past with present, the episode also muses on the chivalric codes of medieval literature and their transformation into today's romantic realism. We dare to dream of reviving chivalry, fusing imagination and affection with a healthy dose of practicality. As we traverse from the tales of troubadours to the truth of modern-day courtship, we champion a balance that honors the pursuit of profound connections in our lives, all the while ensuring our feet remain firmly on the ground amidst the stars of romantic idealism.
Embark on a poetic exploration with us as we peel back the layers of Andrew Marvell's "The Definition of Love," where we tease out the complexities of a doomed love with metaphysical flair. Alongside a comparison to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," we ponder the intricate dance of despair and impossibility in the quest for affection. The poem itself becomes a doorway to considering the ways love's portrayal has withstood the test of time, beckoning us to reflect on how its grand themes echo in our modern hearts.
Tackling the challenges of 17th-century poetry head-on, we share tales of our own pronunciation pitfalls, turning them into opportunities for deeper engagement with Marvell's text. As we dissect "The Definition of Love," we find ourselves in the throes of magnanimous despair, grappling with fate's cruel barriers. This linguistic journey not only enriches our understanding of Marvell's work but also invites us to discover the magnificence within the language of love that he so masterfully weaves.
Weaving past with present, the episode also muses on the chivalric codes of medieval literature and their transformation into today's romantic realism. We dare to dream of reviving chivalry, fusing imagination and affection with a healthy dose of practicality. As we traverse from the tales of troubadours to the truth of modern-day courtship, we champion a balance that honors the pursuit of profound connections in our lives, all the while ensuring our feet remain firmly on the ground amidst the stars of romantic idealism.
as lines, so love's oblique, may well themselves in every angle greet, but ours, so truly parallel though infinite, can never meet. Welcome to another episode of the Troubadour show. Today I will be reading a poem called the Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell. Now, andrew Marvell is a 17th century poet. He's born 1621 to 1678. This is right after William Shakespeare Shakespeare dies, I think 1616. He's writing that era, but it's a different era that they're experiencing in Europe.
Speaker 1:Andrew Marvell is a very interesting poet. One of his great poems is called To His Koi Mistress, where he tries to essentially seduce a mistress by making the argument that, hey, if we had all the time in the world, we could have this cautiousness and coyness and wait forever and don't worry about time. And we could take thousands of years and I could love every inch of you for 200 years for this body part and a thousand years for that body parts. But we don't have time. We're limited here on this earth for a very short amount of time. So let's make love and enjoy life while we're here. It's except he does it, of course, in a poetic way and it's a very fun and, I think, enjoyable poem. Now, this poem is very different. So this poem is called the Definition of Love, and I want to ask you and we're going to go through this afterwards, after we read this to think about if you agree, or where can you learn from Andrew Marvell? How can you apply this thought to your life? Now, I will say upfront that this is not, in my view, the purpose of poetry to teach you something, although it can teach you something. But one thing that I think a good poem like this can do is it can give you something to contemplate as well as enjoying the metaphors, the sounds, the meaning, all of it intertwined in one thing.
Speaker 1:So what I'm going to do, as I always do, is I'm going to read the poem to you. And now I just want to say that if you are lost in any time, that's okay. Don't worry about getting everything correct and understanding every word. There's a lot that I don't understand. Sometimes I'm looking stuff up, so there's a lot I'm trying to figure out myself and I'm doing my best to go through this. But there are some basic techniques that you can use, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but first let me just read the poem. So I'll read the poem. You could just listen, tune out, read on your own, skip forward whatever you want to do, but I recommend I'm not going to read it twice I recommend you read it a couple of times yourself to really get some understanding and enjoyment out of the poem.
Speaker 1:Okay, so here is the poem, the Definition of Love, by Andrew Marvell. My love is of a birth as rare as tis for objects, strange and high. It was begotten by despair upon impossibility. Magnanimous despair alone could show me so divine a thing where feeble hope could nare have flown but vainly flapped its tinseling. And yet I quickly might arrive where my extended soul is fixed. But fate does iron wedges drive and always crowds itself betwixt. For fate, with jealous eye, does see two perfect loves, nor lets them close. Their union would her ruin be, and her tyrannic power should depose and therefore her decrees of steel. Us as the distant poles have placed, though, love's whole world on us doth wheel, not by themselves to be embraced, unless the giddy heaven fall and earth some new convulsion tear, and us to join the world should all be cramped into a planosphere as lines, so loves oblique, may well themselves in every angle greet, but ours, so truly parallel though infinite, can never meet. Therefore, the love which us doth bind, but faith so enviously debars, is the conjunction of the mind and opposition of the stars. Okay, so hopefully that sounded okay to you.
Speaker 1:I think I made actually a couple pronunciation errors, but my recommendation is always to just read through these, enjoy them, get the most out of them. There's definite changes in pronunciation. That happens. You can't beat yourself up about this. The point of reading poetry is to enjoy as much as you can. But we'll go through them and I think I'll try and point out what I think I pronounced wrong. And if you think I pronounced something wrong, just put it in the chat. I don't have any kind of specialty in 17th Central pronunciation.
Speaker 1:So just as an example, as this first stands, my love is of a birth as rare as tis, for object strange and high. It was begotten by despair upon. Now I want to say impossibility because it goes with the high, a lone flown thing wing, and he often does. So. I don't know if that's mispronunciation or if you just couldn't think of another word. So we use that. That happens to, you know. I don't know if impossibility was once pronounced a little bit differently in Britain in the 17th century.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go through this poem. Let's kind of think about what we might be seeing here. So the first stands up and again the poem is called the definition of love. So you're always trying to think about that as you're going through it, assuming that's how he actually titled this. A lot of times poets don't title it, so I'm actually not clear on that. But let's assume the definition of love is the title my love is of a birth as rare as tis for object, strange and high. It was begotten by despair and upon impossibility.
Speaker 1:Okay, so right off the bat he's talking about birth love. So these are some you know, particular words that I'm noticing is relevant to this stanza. And he's saying my love is oh, and I touched my pin but I was totally unconscious this is my love token. My love is of a birth as rare as tis for object, strange and high. So it's a rare thing. He's referencing something strange and high, maybe the heavenly, but begotten. So begotten is, in this case, I think, about birth. So he's talking about the begotten. What is the begotter, the birther, the parents of his love?
Speaker 1:So you have these two, you know, abstractions or feelings, in this case despair and impossibility. So in a sense his love's, you know, origins are in something that's impossible to him and his despair, okay. So right off the bat we're getting a pretty despondent poem. That we're, you know, I probably shouldn't laugh, Poor guy. I mean, we've all been there, I'm definitely there for sure, where you have this dejection, this despair, and maybe you think that your love and let's assume for the sake of this whole poem, because I think it becomes clear that the love is for a person, a woman in this case, and it's a high, heightened, elevated love, it's a wonderful love, but it's for him be gotten by despair and impossibility. Okay. So I don't want to go to, I don't want to take forever on just that, but there's a lot to think about. Think about the idea of love being born of despair and impossibility. So what is he talking about here?
Speaker 1:So Magnanimous this is stanza two. Magnanimous despair alone could show me so divine a thing where feeble hope could never have flown but vainly flapped its tinsel wing and it's tinsel wing. So we have something here where we're getting this Magnanimous despair. So that's like a kingly generous, giving despair. It's the king is what I think of when I think of Magnanimous, and to him the Magnanimous Miss Despair has the divinity in it where hope is feeble. So in a sense he's saying I think that were he to have hope in his love, it would actually debase the love, or it would at least make it tinsel wings, so glittery little wings, feeble you know, a flapped, fragile and vain. So we get words like that, when it comes to hope versus despair is Magnanimous, divine, okay. So here's.
Speaker 1:This is an interesting idea, now that we're getting clear in our minds about what he's talking about in just two stances, is that you have his despair and impossibility, but that's a divine thing, that's kingly, whereas if you were to actually have hope, that this would, this love could happen. It's a tinsel wing, it's flapped, it's feeble, it's vain, okay. So that's a little, it's a little odd, I think, but you know what's he trying to say. Is there anything to what he's saying? And do we ever think that? I think sometimes we may have emotions that are similar in our beliefs to this.
Speaker 1:Okay, stanza three. And yet I quickly might arrive where my extended soul is fixed. But fate does iron wedges drive and always crowds itself betwixt. So so he says something like yet I could, and yet I quickly might arrive where my extended soul is fixed. So it's like, but fate does iron wedges drive and always crowds itself, betwixt. I mean, what I'm getting from this. I quickly might arrive where my extents. If I could get to this place, you know, could I reach my beloved? In a sense, that's where my spot is extended to like it's, that's where he's at, if fate would not get in the way. So, and in this case, get in the way is iron wedges driving. So there's something about fate being the thing that's getting in between him and his love.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we have these three stanzas. Now we have a stanza, you know that. So we're starting to get some some understanding, I think, of what's happening. We have a stanza of his. You know the origins of his birth, of his love, which is despair and impossibility, of him calling despair love impossible, of magnanimous versus hope, which is tinsel, you know, fleeting or glittery. Yet he could arrive at this anchor point of between heaven and earth, maybe, but fate stands in his way and crowds itself between him, betwixt, between him and his love. Okay, so why is love doing this?
Speaker 1:I think that's what we're getting in the next stanza, for fate, with jealous eye, does see two perfect loves, nor lets them close the union, would her ruin be and her tyrannic power depose. Okay, so fate is jealous. So fate, as in you know, think about Romeo and Juliet, two starcross lovers who are fated to be together. So they're fated to be together. The gods are the ones who are bringing everything together, and this is the 17th century. So they would. But in his case they don't bring them together. He's not able to have the union. So the two perfect loves, his love and her love, are not going to close like a circle closing into a united whole. And this is why, because of her tyrannic power deposed, or what, what she's deposing of her power. So you know, she has a kind of cruel throne that she's. This is fate not allowing to be moved into of their love.
Speaker 1:Okay, so here we have the next Danza. And therefore her decrees of steel, us as the distant poles, poles, p O L E S have placed the love's whole world on us, doth wheel, not by themselves to be embraced. Okay, this one's an important one, I think. And therefore her decrees, that's fate of steel, her steel decrees, her unflinching decrees, for us is the distant poles have placed. So I'm getting this sense of something about the distant poles.
Speaker 1:Now I don't think he means like a pole that you put in the ground, I think, because he's talking about the world and then we get hints later on in the poem to that helps us understand this. But we get. The poles are like the, the poles that go through. You know the earth right. So it's the, the, the poles of the earth, the North Pole, the South Pole, which are two opposite poles. They've been placed there and if you think about it, those two poles can never touch right? So if you think about if you, if you were to personify North Pole, personify South Pole, they're never going to interact with each other.
Speaker 1:So if they were in love and wanted to spend the night together, be together, marry each other, they can't do that right, cause they're obviously there separated from each other and he puts this in parentheses, but though the whole world is on us, does wheel, so the whole world revolves around their love. So it's a very important, but at the same time it's a love that cannot. You know, it's going to love born of despair and impossibility, so they can't be together. So again, I think this is an interesting metaphor, even though it's pretty dark and bleak and sad in a lot of ways. Okay, but wait, maybe there's some hope here. What's he saying here? Unless so this is the next dance no-transcript. Unless the giddy heaven fall and earth some new convulsion to your tear, tear, I believe it's tear and us to join the world should all be cramped into a planisphere. So I think what he's saying here is that if the giddy heaven fall and earth some new convulsion tear, so like again you have these two poles.
Speaker 1:Imagine that South and love, north run, love with each other, but they can't be together. What's the one way they could be together? They were a planisphere, like a. They are flat, right, and so then they would. That, would that. But what would that do to the world? That would crush the whole world's right and everyone would die and everything would be bad. But at least the north and south public would be together. So unless they get he heaven fall, so the heavens fall and earth some new convulsion, tear, and us to that to join the world should all be cramped into a planisphere. So that's the only way he thinks that their love can happen, and of course that's a bad thing and it's the sense of destroying the world as lines.
Speaker 1:So loves oblique may well themselves in every Angle greet, but ours, so truly parallel though infinite can never meet. So lines so oblique may, so the lines one I don't know if he's talking about poetry here. I always think when I hear lines from a poet that there's something about that. But there may be something about these lines. So when you think about like the lines of a poem, I often think of that. But lines has other meanings too. So, because he also talks about truly parallel, so maybe he's talking about the parallel lines that are keeping them apart of the two, north pole, south pole. So loves oblique may well themselves in every angle greet, but ours, so truly parallel though infinite can never meet. I mean to me this is he's still telling us some Ways that they can never be together. So loves oblique, so that's what like? Not parallel, basically not exactly able to be parallel.
Speaker 1:So in every angle greet, but ours, so truly parallel though infinite can never meet Therefore. So we get this lament that they cannot be together. Therefore, the love which us doth bind does bind, therefore the love which us does bind. So the love that binds us, but fate so enviously debars, makes impossible bars as from each other is the conjunction of the mind and opposition of the stars. So the love that binds us, that fate enviously keeps us apart, is the conjunction of the mind and the opposition of the stars. So the very stars, the very heavens, the very earth, that's what's keeping us apart, in a sense.
Speaker 1:Now I want to say, like what it's what he's trying to say. I think overall and you may disagree with this interpretation, and that's fine it sounds to me and it feels to me that he is in a despondent state I experience, as he's writing this, about a love he cannot have. And so he's justifying in a large S manner and a wide brooch of hey, I'm in this despair, so I'm going to show you this, how this impossibility is actually better than the real thing. And so he builds this whole conceit, this whole narrative, this whole world where the impossibility of the love is what makes it great and wonderful love. So do you agree with that? Do you agree that the fact, like there's something you know, I could take a step back of abstraction and say that there's something more beautiful in the impossibility. This is what I might call platonic love, or a love that's not able to be fully actualized and realized in nature, in the actual world. That's, I think, a little bit of what he's saying.
Speaker 1:And there is that we do, I think, often have a view like that in our culture. We sometimes think that the love that is, you know, to have elevated romantic love of the highest order, and we have all these stories of lovers who love from afar but can never have. If you have read or watched Les Miserables, or there's obviously Don Quixote, this is in our culture quite a bit. Now it's not as much, I think, in our everyday American culture today, but there's still, I think, a sense where practical, real, everyday love is not this grand romantic, a big love. In a sense it's really just, you know, like that kind of love is just for fairy tales and storybooks, but the love of a man and wife trying to get together and have kids and raise family and do all the practical necessities of life, that that kind of romantic love is not possible today. So I do think that dichotomy between the high love and romantic love and the practical everyday necessities is very prevalent and I think this is making an argument in poetic form and poetic verse for the former, for the love as separated. That's the heightened version and this is another way to put this is. This is the mind body dichotomy. Now I'll just tell you my personal belief. My personal belief is that this is not the case, that we don't have that dichotomy, that you can have both an elevated, real sense of love, even when it seems impossible, and that I do not believe that chivalry is dead, although it's mostly not in the culture.
Speaker 1:And I want to give you a little bit of an understanding of what I mean by chivalry. So chivalry is something that goes back to literature of the 12th century, which is primarily in the. I believe it begins heavily in the court of the Queen of Aquitaine, which is basically France. She had a large territory that she was in charge of for a long time, including Britain, and there was some literature and things were happening. I'll just say briefly one of the interesting occurrences of this era was that, because of the geography, in the south of France there were not much. There was not much south of the territory of France at that time, not French of today, of the 12th century. You can look on a map of what that looked like, but the territory was separated and from the warring north. So the south did not have a lot of wars going on. They were not fighting a lot in the south of France but in the north of France where they were dealing with rebellion in England and things like that and all kinds of wars going up there. There was a lot of warring going on.
Speaker 1:So the poetry of the time, one of the most famous ones of this era, is the song of Roland, which is a big war epic. That does have some elements of love, but love is not a big component of it. Now, in the south of France these are just representative poems, epic or longer poems in the southern France is something called Evane or the Night of the Lion by Krytian Detroit, and this one is a love poem and you get a kind of courting system in it. You get a method of how you're supposed to court somebody and the idea of courting comes from kind of this medieval era where there was a formalistic way of courting after a woman. But even more than that, part of what's happening in the real world at this era is you have all these knights and troubadours. Yes, this is the era of the troubadours. You have all these knights and troubadours, who are a lot of them come from some kind of families, you know, and they're just kind of hanging around a court, maybe a castle.
Speaker 1:They don't have as much to do in the south of France again, because they're not fighting and so they start just kind of telling stories to each other. They start singing songs to each other. Some of them are very sexual, some of them are very body, but some of them start, you know, having a little bit of like what love is and oh, I cannot have this princess over here, I cannot have this woman, but I'm in love with her, and so this is a lot of the sense that we get of this, this, this idea of love for this person that's separated from the physical, you know, interaction with it. Now, in that I think you do, there's a whole literature that develops and there's a whole strain, I think, of romance literature that goes all the way to today, where there is a kind of heightened sense of what love is and what love can be.
Speaker 1:Now, personally, I consider myself a high romantic, but in Iran's terms and views, I consider myself a romantic realist, not only in my fiction but also in my life. I think it is actually something that's real. So my understanding of romantic realism and this is not Iran, this is just me. But what I'm believe in is that you can have both. You can have a high, elevated sense of the world, of romance, of love, of your work and of striving for the, the, the object of your desire, and you can have it for reals.
Speaker 1:And I think that in a lot of cases, people don't actually believe that that's possible. I think, whether we realize it or not, we think we have to compromise and get somewhere in between or, you know, move more toward just being practical. When I see a lot of advice that's out there about how to deal with a breakup, how to deal with relationships, how to how men should talk to women, a lot of it is very practical, psychological do this, don't do that. Have this kind of view, like the idea of having some kind of long term commitment even if you're not together with somebody in a moment, would be considered ridiculous in most cases. But the Knights of Old did that kind of thing. They would wear tokens of love as they go into battle or, as they you know do, jousting, even if they couldn't be with that woman.
Speaker 1:So romantic, realist, though. So that's like a romance in novels that are separated from the actual getting together, although there are famous poems Guinevere and Lancelot, for instance and there's all kinds of you know wonderful poems where they do get together, and then there's all the things that get in the way of them being together, and that's there's also, I think, truth to that. But in my view it's very practical if you find the love that you want and you hold in your mind the vision of the world and the life that you want to have long term and you keep it in the realm of the hopeful. So this is where I completely disagree with Andrew Marvell. The second that these things become hopeless, really and truly hopeless, impossible. That's when the advice should be to leave it alone and drop it.
Speaker 1:But so long as there's even some sliver of hope, if you really have that high, heightened view of love, if you really understand what it means to love somebody and to have that on the highest level possible to human beings we're not animals, we could choose to be better If you can have that heightened sense of love, it is, in my view, very much worth it. But it has to be grounded in reality. This is where poets and philosophers and artists and literary writers get lost is that they hold on to that mega balloon of romanticism and romance and love and it drifts them off and they forget to plant their feet into the ground of reality. And that's where both have to and that's where romantic realism goes into place. They're both together.
Speaker 1:So you have to be focused on the facts of reality. You have to, and that in the case of romance, that means it can't be a love. That's completely impossible. So, like falling in love with an Angelina Jolie, like what that's? That you're watching her TV, that kind of impossibility, that's not heightened real love. Falling in love with someone who doesn't want to be with you and despises you or doesn't like you, that's enough.
Speaker 1:But if there's a good amount of or some kind of evidence that one day this is possible, I do think that it's worthwhile to have the heightened sense of love and romance, even if it's just for yourself, for your own ability to move and generate values in the world. Okay, so that was my rant about chivalry, courting. I don't think chivalry needs to be dead. I think we can. I'll speak to men. I think we can bring it back by being imaginative, being good people and being grounded in reality and focused on building ourselves up and not reading into things that aren't real and really trying to think about what's the best way to live a romantic, imaginative, flourishing life. So that's the Troubadour show and I'll see you next time.