The Language of Love

Truly, as Marie de France says in her lai, Equitan,

Whoever indulges in love without sense or moderation

recklessly endangers his life;

such is the nature of love

that no one involved with it can keep his head.

And yet, as she remarks in another lai, Guigemar,

Whoever deals with good material

feels pain if it’s treated improperly.

Listen, my lords, to the words of Marie,

who does not forget her responsibilities when her turn comes.

How shrewdly, even matter-of-factly, this mysterious twelfth-century writer comprehends the two propulsions of the poet: the reckless abandonment to emotional experience; the cool-headed manipulation of her material.
            Marie’s Lais, a set of twelve verse narratives based on Breton legends, are key texts in the literature of chivalry and courtly love and were among the first writings to mention King Arthur and his court. They have influenced poets from Spenser to Keats, and their coupling of the Celtic supernatural with the formalized code of chivalry has been a primary influence on the conventions of European fairy-tale literature. But no one knows exactly who she was, other than the fact that she was born in France and, according to translators Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, “wrote either at or for the English court, which as a result of the Norman Conquest, was French-speaking in her day.”

In an afterword to his own translation of her lai Eliduc, novelist John Fowles noted that Marie may have gone to England as a member of the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. “The king to whom she dedicates her Lais . . . may have been Eleanor’s husband, Henry II; . . . and there is even a plausible possibility that Marie was Henry’s illegitimate sister.” In any case, “it is very difficult to imagine the Lais being written by other than a finely educated (therefore, in that age, finely born) young woman.”
            A fluent scholar of French, Fowles was deeply interested in the stories and legends that lie beneath so much French and English literature. But what also attracted him to Marie’s work was the way in which she “grafted her own knowledge of the world on new material.”

Effectively she introduced a totally new element into European literature. It was composed not least of sexual honesty and a very feminine awareness of how people really behaved—and how behavior and moral problems can be expressed through things like dialogue and action. She did for her posterity something of what Jane Austen did for hers—that is, she set a new standard for accuracy over human emotions and their absurdities.

Though I’m always irritated by Fowles’s tendency to use patriarchal shorthand—“a very feminine awareness,” forsooth—I think he is incisive about Marie’s remarkable ability to create new and complex characters and situations within the framework of what were, to her first audiences, already familiar narrative patterns. In Chaitivel, for instance, she tells the tale of a lady who is courted by four knights. After three are killed in a tournament and the fourth is gravely wounded, the lady “mourned for each by name.”

“Alas,” she said, “what shall I do?

I’ll never be happy again.

I loved these four knights

and desired each one for himself;

there was great good in all of them;

they loved me more than anything.

For their beauty, their bravery,

their merit, their generosity,

I made them fix their love on me;

I didn’t want to lose them all by taking one.

I don’t know which I should grieve for most;

but I cannot conceal or disguise my grief.”

When I read a passage such as this one, I almost feel as if Marie has reconfigured the notion of chivalry. Rather than the ideal of a singular devotion—one knight devoted to one lady—the notion takes on a new coloring: that of an individual’s responsibility to the bearers of the chivalric ideal. The lady in Chaitivel shoulders the weight of loving all of those men who have graciously loved her. Is the poet hinting that a woman’s sexual freedom can be not only an honorable choice but also a deeply moral one? If so, this is a breathtaking moment in the history of human conversation.

            Love is so often the trigger of transformation. What seems impossible without love becomes inevitable with it. In Marie de France’s Lais, that transformative love centers primarily around romantic partners. But for sixteenth-century poet Jan Kochanowski, the triggering change was the triangle of family love.

According to Czesław Miłosz, Kochanowski was Poland’s “first great poet,” a classical scholar whose decision to write in the vernacular helped expand the imaginative and sonic possibilities of Polish literature.

For all Europe the Renaissance was the hour of Italy, and Kochanowski spent several years there, traveling, studying Latin and Greek authors in Padua, writing poems in Latin. He did not switch to the vernacular immediately. That seems to have occurred in Paris, where he found himself on a return journey from Italy to Poland, and where he was perhaps prompted to rivalry by the example of Ronsard, who wrote in his native French, not Latin.

Nonetheless, Kochanowski was bound to what Miłosz calls “the poetics of classicism.” Even when he wrote in Polish, his models were the Latin and Greek poets, whose goal was “to create as beautiful a structure as possible out of topoi universally  known and fixed, instead of trying to name what is real and yet unnamed.” Much of Kochanowski’s lyrical poetry adheres to this aesthetic. The exception is a single cycle of nineteen poems, Treny, a title that translates as Threnodies or Laments. They appeared in 1580, after the death of the poet’s two-year-old daughter Urszula; and to the shock of his contemporaries, the poems did not conform to convention but exposed the parents’ raw pain and grief.

Threnody 6

Jan Kochanowski

Dear little Slavic Sappho, we had thought,

Hearing thy songs so sweetly, deftly wrought,

That thou shouldst have an heritage one day

Beyond thy father’s lands: his lute to play.

For not an hour of daylight’s joyous round

But thou didst fill it full of lovely sound,

Just as the nightingale doth scatter pleasure

Upon the dark, in glad unstinted measure.

Then Death came stalking near thee, timid thing,

And thou in sudden terror tookest wing.

Ah, that delight, it was not overlong

And I pay dear with sorrow for brief song.

Thou still wert singing when thou cam’st to die;

Kissing thy mother, thus thou saidst good-bye:

            “My mother, I shall serve thee now no more

Nor sit about thy table’s charming store;

I must lay down my keys to go from here,

To leave the mansion of my parents dear.”

            This and what sorrow now will let me tell

No longer, were my darling’s last farewell.

Ah, strong her mother’s heart, to feel the pain

Of those last words and not to burst in twain.

translated by Dorothy Prall

            Kochanowski’s grief and love rocket this poem into two markedly different spheres. The first is both public and infinite: it is the pantheon of poetic genius; it is time—past, present, and future; it is heritage, a torch passed from woman to woman, poet to poet, father to child, mentor to student. But how many sixteenth-century men would have voiced such confidence in the talents of a two-year-old? How many fathers would have joyously ceded their poetic power to a daughter? No wonder Kochanowski’s contemporaries were shocked. Not only did the poet use his skill with words to express real human anguish, but he used it to grieve publicly for the loss of a fellow artist—one who happened to be a very little girl.

            The poem would be remarkable even if Kochanowski had done nothing more than drape his dead daughter with poetic laurels. What he did, however, was to weave the public sphere of the artist into the private sphere of the family. “Dear little Slavic Sappho”: in those four words, the poet jumbles home, tenderness, history, and hope into the wholly  recognizable chaos of a devoted father’s pride and affection.

            Yet despite the grief we so clearly discern in this father, the poem does not focus primarily on his own loss. The poet is a watcher, and the poem memorializes what he saw: a singing child stalked by death, the parting of mother and child. The final two lines are a vivid, excruciating depiction of what a loving couple faces after the loss of a child: the terrible vision of the other parent’s grief.

Ah, strong her mother’s heart, to feel the pain

Of those last words and not to burst in twain.

In 1580, children in Poland died far more frequently than they do today. No doubt all of Kochanowski’s contemporaries had endured parallel family tragedies. But for whatever reason, this poet’s love for his wife and little daughter, the pain he suffered at sight of their pain—this was the transformation. Kochanowski was an intellectual, a man devoted to literature, yet it was his home life—a family dinner, the sound of a toddler inventing her own song—that taught him how to write a poem that brimmed with plain, everyday tears. For another poet, the inverse might have been true.

Take Phillis Wheatley, for instance. In a 1773 letter, the Countess of Huntingdon told Susannah Wheatley, “Your little Poetess remember me to her may the Lord keep her heart alive with the fire of that alter [sic] that never goes out.” By altar the countess meant faith in God, and certainly Susannah Wheatley’s “little Poetess” was avowedly and obediently religious. But the fire burning on Phillis Wheatley’s version of that altar was fed with words.

Born in West Africa, Wheatley was kidnapped at a young age and shipped to Boston, where wealthy merchant John Wheatley bought her as a domestic servant for his wife. According to a Wheatley relative, Phillis was about “about seven years old” when she arrived in Boston, an estimate based on “the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.” Very soon family members decided to educate their new slave, a project that snowballed when her owners discovered the greed for knowledge buried in this frail child. Wheatley scholar Sondra O’Neale writes,

After discovering the girl’s precociousness, the Wheatleys, including their son Nathaniel and their daughter Mary, did not entirely excuse Phillis from her domestic duties but taught her to read and write. Soon she was immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, British literature (particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin classics of Vergil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. In “To the University of Cambridge in New England” (probably the first poem she wrote but not published until 1773) Phillis indicated that despite this exposure, rich and unusual for an American slave, her spirit yearned for the intellectual challenge of a more academic atmosphere. 

            In an era when the Bible was often the only book in a New England house, Phillis Wheatley received an extraordinary education. The average free white man in Boston never glimpsed such riches. But for an obsessed reader, too much is never enough. Although the Wheatleys’ slave girl had faith in herself—“While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, / The muses promise to assist my pen”—she must have struggled to make peace with the knowledge that only university men would have the opportunity “to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space.”

            Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was Wheatley’s only published collection of poetry. The title suggests a stricture of tone and topic that the poems themselves sometimes belie. Or perhaps Wheatley’s conception of religious and moral was a more complicated amalgam of conviction and “intrinsic ardor.” She was, after all, well acquainted with Milton’s Paradise Lost, which might easily be construed as an argument for imagination as a moral virtue.

On Imagination

Phillis Wheatley

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,

How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee!

Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand,

And all attest how potent is thine hand.

From Helicon’s refulgent heights attend,

Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:

To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,

Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.

Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,

Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes,

Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,

And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Soaring through air to find the bright abode,

Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes

The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;

The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,

And bid their waters murmur o’er the sands.

Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,

And with her flow’ry riches deck the plain;

Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,

And all the forest may with leaves be crown’d:

Show’rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,

And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow’r, nor are thine orders vain,

O thou the leader of the mental train:

In full perfection all thy works are wrought,

And thine the sceptre o’er the realms of thought.

Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,

Of subject-passions sov’reign ruler Thou;

At thy command joy rushes on the heart,

And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try

To rise from earth, and sweep th’ expanse on high:

From Tithon’s bed now might Aurora rise,

Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,

While a pure stream of light o’erflows the skies.

The monarch of the day I might behold,

And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,

But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,

Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;

Winter austere forbids me to aspire,

And northern tempests damp the rising fire;

They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,

Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

How Wheatley must have loved her books! Although the poem never mentions an author or a book by name, “On Imagination” is the breathless, intoxicated song of a poet seduced by words, knowledge, and the ambition of creation. The poem crows, exults, dances, spins. It borrows Pope’s tidy couplets and infects them with a joyous frenzy that seems to presage Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Each poet shouted, “I’ve just read something that has changed my life!” But Phillis Wheatley shouted it first.

What is the language of love? It is the visibility cloak that reveals the wordless architecture of what we love. It is the tick of Plath’s “fat gold watch.” Like the lady in Marie de France’s Chaitivel, language shoulders the weight of loving. Or retreats from it. Wheatley’s poem, word-drunk and euphoric, sinks back, in the final stanza, into that dreadful self-hate we writers recognize so well—the fear, the expectation, the tight-lipped knowledge that we will never be what we so ardently love.

Winter austere forbids me to aspire,

And northern tempests damp the rising fire;

They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,

Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

Of these three poets, it is the oldest—that shadowy woman we know as Marie de France—who seems most immune to this misery. Kochanowski knows that he has lost his greatest gift to posterity; Wheatley knows that her ambitions are caged. Yet in the very first words of the prologue to her Lais, Marie declares,

Whoever has received knowledge

and eloquence in speech from God

should not be silent or secretive

but demonstrate it willingly.

This, too, is the language of love—this challenge she launches. Her words are a gift of courage from one poet to another, across history, place, and circumstances. Once upon a time, on a forgotten day in the 1100s, a poet named Marie recognized her “eloquence in speech” and chose to “demonstrate it willingly.” Her message is both gracious and clear:  on another day, in another land, the wise and eloquent poet may be you.