Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
John Donne's Air and Angels uses the ideas of Platonic forms to refer to the idea of love. Since love is often considered to be an unreachable ideal, Donne articulates that love is nestled between a divine form and the concreteness of his significant other. He uses the idea of a flame to represent his perspective on love: comparing how it, perhaps, has a concrete presence, yet exists untouchable. He claims that love has embodied itself in his significant other, and that is how he knows that love can exist concretely. Yet at the same time it only exists in abstractness. The space where love is cushioned between an ideal and a concrete form are even further revealed by the use of the "unnamed lover". The ideal of the lover herself, although she must exist concretely, exemplifies what Donne is trying to communicate through this poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment