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.

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.