The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell

The Definition of Love

Analysis:

Love’s parentage
The opening ‘My Love’ refers to the state, not the person. Logically, we start at its beginning, its parentage. Here is the first surprise: they are abstractions! We are clearly going to be reading a highly abstract poem. ‘Despair’ and ‘Impossibility’ are definite negatives. Why? The only suggestion offered is that it is ‘for object strange and high’. Does this suggest the aristocratic origins of the beloved, as well as the quality of his love for her? Is his love elevated and outrageous, when he should be really thinking of someone of his own class and in his own league? Or is it the aristocracy of the mind? ‘Strange’ perhaps means ‘unique’ here.

Magnanimous despair
Stanza two has a wonderful oxymorons, ‘Magnanimous Despair’, leading to a wonderful paradox: how can despair ‘show him so divine a thing’, when hope could not? Here is the metaphysical wit, teasing us to get our heads round this conundrum. It could mean that because of the lady's nobility, he could never win her; but being a noble love, it is also great-hearted (the literal meaning of ‘magnanimous’), which was the highest virtue for the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. If the poet had merely ‘hoped’ for a suitable partner, he would never have allowed himself to fall in love with this lady. Despair is the price he has had to pay, but he was willing to pay it.

A philosophical interpretation
This is to imagine a definite context for the poem. A more general, more philosophical interpretation might be to suggest that only in despair lies the strength and integrity of emotion to break the lower sort of second-rate loving. Idealism both elevates and makes us aware of its unattainability.

Enter fate
Stanza three introduces a third term, Fate. If it were up to Love alone, he would soon reach his consummation. But Fate will not allow this. The next stanza expands on this: Fate, like a jealous lover, wants to guard her own power. Fulfilled love not only has great power, it is also self-determining – a theme Donne had taken up in his The Extasie. Donne believed such a state was possible; Marvell does not.

Parallel lines
The poem then sets up a series of extended images to explore this: in stanzas five and six, the image of the two lovers as two poles, turning absolutely together ‘Love's whole world’, but never able to touch because to do so would be to collapse that very world, to cause it to lose its dimensions. In stanza seven the image becomes geometrical: lesser loves may touch as oblique lines will. Perfect loves run as parallel lines and so never actually join.

Conjunction of the mind
The final stanza does not draw out these images, but returns to the threesome of Love, Fate and the lovers. Their Fate is paradoxically always to be separated, yet to be in true ‘conjunction of the Mind’.


Imagery and symbolism:

Separation

In addition to the parallel lines conceit, we need to look at the conceits in stanzas five and six. They are both images of separation, picking up from stanza three's ‘But Fate does iron wedges drive ... ’. Iron now becomes ‘Steel’, both reminiscent of his ‘the Iron gates of Life’ of To his Coy Mistress.

The macrocosm/microcosm image is again employed: ‘Loves whole World on us doth wheel’. But this time it is geographical or cosmological: the separateness is necessary to maintain the dimensionality of love. Physical union would merely flatten it out, or at least ‘cramp’ it ‘into a Planisphere’, a term taken from an astronomical measuring instrument called an Astrolabe.

Fate is personified as female, using Greek mythology to do this, though in that, the Fates are plural, three blindfolded spinners and weavers. But for Marvell, fate is certainly not some impersonal force – she is very much alive and hostile, a jealous lover herself.

Language and tone :

Abstract and concrete

The language of the Definition of Love is a strange mixture of abstract and concrete. The opening stanza suggests abstract language and a philosophical discussion, but we are suddenly confronted with very concrete diction: ‘Tinsel Wing’; ‘Iron wedges’; ‘Steel/ wheel’; ‘giddy Heaven fall’, and so on. There is clearly some more personal feeling behind this. There is not as much concrete diction as in To his Coy Mistress, but the tone of suppressed frustration is still unmistakable.

Ironic tension

The tone, on the whole, is more humorous than the other poem. There is more obvious play of the mind, more irony of tone. This tone is established in two ways. Firstly, through the very tight, economic verse form which Marvell learned from the Latin poets he studied. The effect is of tight control, an economy that belongs to the enigmatic and paradoxical. The metre can pass from simple monosyllables (look at how many there are in stanza one), to technical and abstract polysyllables (‘Magnanimous’, ‘Tyrannick’, ‘Convulsion’) with fluency and sharpness. The form is so ‘defined’, so ‘restricted’, that it helps us become aware of the ironic tension between formal control and the situational powerlessness of the poet – he can write a tight poem, but cannot resolve the contradictions. So the tone is delicately balanced – sometimes tongue-in-cheek; sometimes almost passionate.

We have only to compare this to a poem by another metaphysical poet, Abraham Cowley’s Impossibilities, to see how nuanced, how ironically controlled Marvell's tone is. Cowley has some similar ideas but his execution is clumsy and obvious.

Intelligent and poetic

The other way Marvell controls the tone is through the play of his mind, his wit. He can be intelligent and poetic at the same time. Marvell's wit, as is Donne's, is to achieve new insights through joining up unlikely concepts. But the spin off is a controlled and flexible, even ambiguous tone. ‘Is it this? Is it that?’ we keep asking of Marvell's tone? Is he deadly serious or is this a joke? Both and neither must be the answer. We might say that poetically, that is exactly what the ‘conjunction of the Mind’ is.

Structure and versification:

Simple yet unpredictable

The Definition of Love is remarkable in being highly abstract and yet having a remarkably pared-down verse form. It shows that it isn’t necessary to be long-winded to discuss complex ideas. The verse form is basically iambic tetrameter, though there are hardly any lines where there are four full stresses. Usually, at least one stress is only secondary, for example on minor words like ‘her’, ‘by’, ‘of’, or a second stress in a polysyllabic word, such as ‘Impossibility’, where the metre is really asking for ‘poss’, ‘bil’ and ‘ty’ all to be stressed. Clearly only ‘poss’, being the root syllable, can have a full stress. The others have secondary stresses. This shortens the lines even more. Each quatrain is a self-contained sentence, often neatly divided at the half-way point. The rhyme words are nearly always monosyllabic and stressed, so in a sense, obvious, and yet neat and sometimes surprising. We don't expect ‘Planisphere’ to come popping up as a rhyme for ‘tear’. That is Marvell's control: keeping it simple, yet unpredictable.