The Definition of Love

Marvell’s metaphysical conceit in “The Definition of Love” is not as easy or clear as the conceits tend to be in, say, Herbert or Donne’s poetry. Marvell seems to be using “Definition” as a sort of reference to geometric proofs: he is defining the space and relationships that make up love, built on geometric axioms and principles. There are distinct parallels in the poem to Donne’s use of the compass in “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” but Marvell’s poem seems detached and impersonal compared to Donne’s, in part because of the abstract principles he uses to define love, but also because he depersonalizes love in a way that Donne does not.Marvell starts with a paradox in which love is both a living thing that is born, but also an “object strange and high,” rather than a human being (2). Love itself is an object, a thing, rather than possessing a clear object or focus at this point. The speaker, too, is ambiguous, never defined as a man, woman, or thing. This is the starting point, for me at least, of the detached and impersonal feeling I mentioned. Love is strange, high, and ultimately foreign. Love does not connect to a person, other than the speaker, but even the speaker is alienated from love because it is produced by a union of Despair and Impossibility, rather than of the speaker and the beloved.

Despair, the speaker says, “alone / Could show me so divine a thing / Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flow” (5-7). Here, it seems that love is divine precisely because there is no hope. The object of love is unobtainable, and thus divine. There seems to be something vaguely protestant about this sort of divine love. But is love itself the divine thing, or is the object of love “so divine a thing”? Marvell leaves the “thing” undefined, or, perhaps defines it as a space, the place where Hope cannot fly. The image of space, particularly geometric space, is perhaps the most important one for the rest of the poem.

The third stanza builds on the notion of space as the speaker hopes to “arrive / Where my extended soul is fixed” (9-10). The soul is fixed upon the object of love, creating a line between the speaker and object, but “Fate does iron wedges drive / and always crowds itself betwixt” (11-12). Fate is a physical impediment, and it inhabits space by multiplying itself, “crowding” into a space it cannot share with another. The image of Fate is made concrete and physical so that the immaterial soul and the imaginary lines created between points cannot stop it.The next stanza changes the point of view of the poem: rather than the speaker’s perspective of the relationship between the lover and the beloved, we see Fate’s perspective, in which there are two separate loves, “two perfect loves.” The union of the two loves, we are told, “would [Fate’s] ruin be.” The difference in perspective will be important later in the poem, when we come to the final stanza, so I’ll return to this image then.

The next few stanzas are littered with geometric axioms, rules, and images, and in such a way as to suggest that the space between lovers that seems so unfair and the product of fate is actually what is necessary for love to thrive. Fate’s “decrees of steel” (again, Fate’s tools are physical and concrete) turn the two loves into “distant poles” that form an axis upon which “Love’s whole world . . . doth wheel.” Love exists, we might say, in the space between the two lovers, though the lovers themselves are separated by that space. The speaker imagines that the universe might collapse from three dimensions into two, creating a “planisphere,” and thus bringing the two poles together, but this would be “cramped” (24). The language here suggests that the speaker desires the space between lovers, even as he abhors it. The discussion of parallel and oblique lines suggests something similar:

As lines so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet. (25-28)

Oblique lines can meet, but a love that is truly parallel and infinite, can never meet. There are two potential ways to read this stanza that I can think of, though they are opposite readings. In the reading that might better continue the geometric images proposed earlier in the poem, if oblique lines meet and form an angle, they also have an end point where they meet, suggesting an end to love. They either stop at the point where they meet, or they continue in different, separate directions. Parallel lines, by contrast, are infinite, identical in both shape and direction. In order for the loves to continue, especially if love exists within the spaces between the lines rather than in the lines themselves, they must stay separate. The second potential reading borrows from Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of bias and swerving in the Renaissance that he proposed in “Fiction and Friction.” Oblique lines are the intersections of two genders; parallel lines would be the love of two people of the same gender. The love is so parallel, so similar, it is impossible on some social or cultural level, embodied in Fate’s iron wedges and steel decrees. The very ambiguity of the speaker and the object’s genders (if even they have any at all) makes this a fairly plausible reading.The final stanza manages somehow to encompass all these possibilities, returning us to the allegorical images of Impossibility and Fate that characterized the beginning of the poem as well as continuing the geometric axioms and principles that defined the middle and end:

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars. (29-32)

Love binds, returning us to the image of the soul that is extended to the object, creating a connection, but Fate debars, where the allusion to bars reminds us of the physical impediments of steel and iron that were used earlier. The conjunctions and oppositions of the final two lines are geometric and astronomical terms to describe the relationship of two objects to a third. To say that love is the conjunction of the mind means that the two objects look to be in the same place when viewed from the single point of the mind (think solar eclipse), and to say that they are the opposition of the stars implies that they are 180 degrees apart when viewed from the stars, or from Fate’s perspective (think of looking at the relationship of the moon and sun with the earth between them during a lunar eclipse). The double meaning of “opposition of the stars,” in which the stars themselves are opposed to the loves, helps keep the two perspectives in as much tension as the loves themselves are.