[Chapter 20! I made it! But then I changed it into an Interlude. However, this train has several tracks! Time to wrap it up, perhaps? A burning bush? We may have two growing in our yard. A tunnel of fire? Where’s Johnny Cash when you need him? I’ve had “Ring of Fire” playing in my head for two weeks, at least. Well, at any rate (ha), we are almost home, almost. Sigh. A lass in the grass! Language is so much fun; poetry is so delightful. If only I were capable of making better use of the poetry and prose: “Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove…”. I guess I shall have to look them up: his offer and her rejection; I know the shepherdess turns him down. The first is Marlowe; the second is Sir Walter Raleigh [who may have been executed for treason, for Heaven’s sake]. Both poems are delightful, and of course absolutely relevant here.
Come live with me and be my love
by Christopher Marlowe
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
by Sir Walter Raleigh
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten
In folly ripe, in season rotten.
Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.
The Dionysian offer, the Apollonian response, or so it seems to me: here’s the brief Wikipedia entry on these two modes of being, or perhaps two perspectives on reality, though the authors of the entry go on to discuss or define the Nietzschian view of the two modes in his Birth of Tragedy, worth reading as far as I remember. I think I was about 22 when I read it carefully, only 60 years ago. Whew! In any case the basic distinction is enough (though my friend Fred tells me there’s a good and important book on the subject by a Jesuit priest, Fa. Lynch.)
“In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo, son of Leto, is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason. Dionysus, son of Semele, is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts. The ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although they were often entwined by nature.”
Perhaps one way to think about the Dionysian is to see that it celebrates the particular, the details as revelatory, while the Apollonian contemplates the universal. The passionate shepherd breaks the world down into particular places in order to enjoy the presence and pleasures he imagines the shepherdess will bring in all these particular places: “valleys, groves, hills, and fields/Woods or steeply mountain.” In true Dionysian fashion his emphasis is on pleasure. Moving her mind with delights is certainly the main effort of his seduction attempt.
The passionate shepherd uses every particular he can think of to woo her. The second stanza, for example, involves the senses, sitting, seeing, hearing. Pseudo stability is imaged in his having them sitting on rocks, then the apparently harmless viewing of the shepherds at their occupation; finally listening to the choirs of birds singing “madrigals,” presumably secular love songs, though one might wonder why the birds are singing to the water falls, unless I am misreading the image. The use of “shallow” for the rivers, as well as “falls” has a touch of the ominous, since his desired relationship involves a shallow basis, only pleasure, and for a virtuous, chaste shepherdess, that relationship would be a fall. I’m only suggesting the subliminal here, though the same element appears throughout the poem.
The next three stanzas, for example involve his, first, making her “beds,” which of course is where he would truly like to have her, but the suggestion is scattered, buried in the numerous particulars he brings to bear on making the beds of roses and a “thousand fragrant posies.” His next ploy is to dress her in all the particular elements of nature available in that setting: a cap, a kirtle (essentially an undergarment), “embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.” Again the decoration is the thing celebrated thus far, the least substantial. Pretty no doubt, but for how long? The gown is next given particular attention though the manner of gathering the raw material is a bit ominous: fine wool, “which from our pretty lambs we pull.” The prettiness of the lambs, the appearance, doesn’t keep them inviolate, from having the fleece violently removed.
The remaining elements of dress are also somewhat superficial: a”belt of straw with ivy buds,” then a list of the particular semi-precious and precious elements that make up the last items of dress: gold buckles for the slippers, coral and amber for the straw belt. The passionate shepherd is quite brilliant in the way in which he brings the particulars of nature to seduce his lady into what, of course, is a natural act.
In true Dionysian fashion the final stanza offers a pastoral dance and serenade in the spring time, May, emphasizing pleasure (next to the last stanza) and then “delight”/“delights” used twice in the last stanza. Throughout the poem then he has managed to reduce the mystery of human love down to the purely natural level of sexual procreation. Unfortunately youth in our current culture are likely not to see anything wrong with that. Alas! The young lady, however, is not so easily taken in.
We notice first that she immediately concerns herself with the universals: he shattered nature into places, particulars; she reunites them in the universal: “the world,” and then adds “love” and the all important “truth.” And of course the primary universal she defines is what we have learned to call the second law of thermodynamics: things fall apart; everything dies sooner or later. Where is stability? The shepherd’s springtime song and dance turn to fall and winter in her response, and the consequences of the full natural cycle.
While it seems unnecessary to list how she undermines or negates all his particulars to demonstrate what nature also truly means, there are several that are worth exploring. In the second stanza, for example, she introduces the effect of the universal, time, on all the natural details he has offered. There are no “pretty lambs” here, for she understands the effect time has on all the shepherd’s “offerings.” “Time drives the flocks from field to fold/When rivers rage and rocks grow cold/And Philomel becometh dumb;/The rest complains of cares to come.” Whereas the shepherd had a choir of birds singing madrigals, she has one, the nightingale, who as a women was betrayed and raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus, who then cut out her tongue to keep her from talking. Transformed into a nightingale she can sing beautifully of her tragic fate, yet in the shepherdess’ verse she is silent, “dumb,” perhaps in reference to her final humiliation, the loss of her tongue, as well as the fact that cold weather must indeed silence her. The “rest,” I assume the shepherdess means the rest of the “birds,” sing of the other problems of suffering in human life: “complains of cares to come.”
The second universal in the shepherdess’ verse response is “the lie,” which she suggests in the second line of her if/then response: “And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,” then proceeds to reduce all his particulars to their superficial value: “pretty pleasures.“ The most telling reference to “the lie” occurs in the next stanza: “The flowers do fade, and wanton fields/To wayward reckoning winter yields;/A honey tongue, a heart of gall,/Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.” The sweet talking shepherd’s “honey tongue” conceals the deeper truth, “the heart of gall,” the bitterness of betrayal. While she uses the shepherd’s rhyme in the first two lines, “fields” and “yields,” and contrasts his superficial springtime with the reality of harsh cold winter in the second two, she also reveals her greater depth and understanding of human nature in the ambiguity of “fall.” While it follows the seasonal references, it also contains the reference to the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the garden where they listened to the serpent’s lie and disobeyed the divine prohibition. The shepherd truly offers nothing substantial in his plea as a basis for an enduring love relationship! She makes that failure perfectly clear in the following two stanzas.
Her good right response reminds me of “Matthew Arnold’s” (the narrator’s) failure in “Dover Beach,” where he never seems to grasp what the shepherdess knows: he says, “Ah love, let us be true to one another…” as a hedge against the loss of faith and the clashing of terrible armies and the oncoming darkness. Human romantic love by itself offers no substantial ground for trust or real stability, especially when anyone might be susceptible to the lie, the gall within: “in folly ripe, in season rotten.” All his offered decorations are like fruit that ripens and then rots! All the things, the particulars he has offered, are subject to decay finally and are therefore valueless in this situation. The “delights” she lists in the last stanza are all impossible, so that he would need either to offer a real substantial basis for their love, or forget it.
In a sense all that’s left is to throw his particulars into the fire and find a substantial basis for a real enduring relationship, other than pleasure. In a traditional sense that would suggest a sacramental marriage ceremony!
Image: “The Rape of Proserpine,” by Bernini (1598-1680). At least I think he did the sculpture.
