Part 1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
TWO GENTLEMEN IN TOURAINE.
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THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND OTHER POEMS.
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THE WOUNDED EROS.
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[Illustration: Charles Gibson’ signature]
[Illustration:
_Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?_ _Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:_ _Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,_ _Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?_ SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet VIII.]
[Illustration]
THE WOUNDED EROS
Sonnets
BY
CHARLES GIBSON
AUTHOR OF THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND OTHER POEMS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
[Illustration]
BOSTON PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR Printed at the Riverside Press Cambridge 1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY CHARLES GIBSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
SONNET PAGE
_A wingèd God, all powerful to-day_ xxxviii
I. When in the realm of rich resplendent thought 1
II. I dare not tell thee half the love I bear 2
III. How shall I woo thee then, O fairest maid 3
IV. With kisses would I woo thee first and say 4
V. How shall I ever thank thee for the boon 5
VI. Is it, in truth, a gift from Heaven’s hand 6
VII. What wingèd boy hath caught again my heart 7
VIII. Something did tell my soul, though not thy troth 8
IX. In what uncertain guise doth passion strive 9
X. With how distressed a sentiment my heart 10
XI. Now, should I chance to meet thee passing by 11
XII. It is a strange and wondrous thing that brings 12
XIII. I know not how to cast aside the power 13
XIV. I saw thee yester-even, through the maze 14
XV. Dost have no heart, sweet one, to visibly 15
XVI. Dost cherish something in thy heart for me 16
XVII. How delicate a passion in the heart 17
XVIII. To me thou art an angel, born to earth 18
XIX. Is it then given to some, life’s happiest hours 19
XX. Have I not loved thee truthfully enough 20
XXI. Shouldst thou, perchance, peruse these simple lines 21
XXII. If love too oft repeats itself herein 22
XXIII. How true it is that every joy we feel 23
XXIV. Yet why repine? ’Tis he who laughs that wins 24
XXV. Oh, for the longed-for moment that might bring 25
XXVI. Oh heart! hast thou no liberty to gain 26
XXVII. Dearest of dearer things, that are to me 27
XXVIII. For there is that in man which doth desire 28
XXIX. Sweeter than are the flowers of spring, that bloom 29
XXX. Consign me not, while honoring thy love 30
XXXI. Was it with joy or with time’s false relief 31
XXXII. Dost thou not feel some longing in thy breast 32
XXXIII. Even could to-day have brought thee unto me 33
XXXIV. Dear heart! why dost thou shun my own desire 34
XXXV. What fault within me dost thou cultivate 35
XXXVI. Loved one, though thou shouldst spurn me as a thing 36
XXXVII. Didst have, for me, one fleeting hour of love 37
XXXVIII. Ah me! Sad fate doth overcome my soul 38
XXXIX. And now what hope have I to touch thine heart 39
XL. How often have I asked, through this past year 40
XLI. Methinks the saddest of all pains to bear 41
XLII. As the wild waves roll o’er some rock-bound coast 42
XLIII. While sad at heart, that thou wilt not give me 43
XLIV. When clouds disperse, and sunshine fills the sky 44
XLV. Should I return, and find once more that thou 45
XLVI. What God hath made thee half of graven stone 46
XLVII. Canst thou not feel the tragedy of love 47
XLVIII. To-morrow I must journey for a space 48
XLIX. For what strange purpose hath God sent this longing 49
L. How little comfort is there in the thought 50
LI. For each long league that bears me far from thee 51
LII. When last I saw thee, thou wert uppermost 52
LIII. O mighty Prophet, who dost signify 53
LIV. If thou hadst felt toward me as I to thee 54
LV. Like the soft air of summer is thy smile 55
LVI. If every song I sing seems tinged with sadness 56
LVII. Like the new moon, cold mistress of the heaven 57
LVIII. Ah Love! Couldst thou but greet me every even 58
LIX. Love is not passion; nor is passion love 59
LX. What subtle fragrance, like some passion flower 60
LXI. Unto the sea my love I would compare 61
LXII. There is a lovely avenue of trees 62
LXIII. Upon the highland spaces greet me, Love 63
LXIV. When the red sun sinks toward the western line 64
LXV. Whenever thou dost let a passing thought 65
LXVI. If in the years to come life bringeth thee 66
LXVII. Oh! when the cold, fleet-footed hour of dawn 67
LXVIII. If, when thou hast found out that life is sorrow 68
LXIX. With what despair thou hast inspired my muse 69
LXX. How sweet to me are these soft days of spring 70
LXXI. Thou camest unto me last eventide 71
LXXII. Yet now I cannot with impunity 72
LXXIII. While thou art near to me, my spirit’s bride 73
LXXIV. While I gaze in thy dancing eyes, I seem 74
LXXV. In springtime, when pale primroses in flower 75
LXXVI. With every day that summer doth conceive 76
LXXVII. I know a path of velvet green, that sinks 77
LXXVIII. No time could hold my heart more fit than this 78
LXXIX. Now love returneth with new grace to me 79
LXXX. Though summer showers drown the seeds of love 80
LXXXI. Like columbine in May, or rose in June 81
LXXXII. Cold heart, that hath not felt some passing pain 82
LXXXIII. When thou, dear one, hast lived as long as I 83
LXXXIV. Strange law, whose reason man doth not possess 84
LXXXV. From Thee, Eternal Power, came my life 85
LXXXVI. My hope had been, that I might find in thee 86
LXXXVII. God, through His offspring Nature, gave me love 87
LXXXVIII. With some, the law of love doth work at ease 88
LXXXIX. Let not the measure of my love make thine 89
XC. All else may die: the leaves that Nature bore 90
XCI. O thou, fair youth, to whom the gods have given 91
XCII. Believe not, gentle maid, that all is won 92
XCIII. Love heeds not time, nor space, nor form, nor woe 93
XCIV. Happy my heart, and happier far was I 94
XCV. Strive as I would to banish from my mind 95
XCVI. Since on thy form hath beauty laid its hand 96
XCVII. In those brief moments when thou wert my own 97
XCVIII. Let not thy beauty serve thee in the guise 98
XCIX. When I alone unto my chamber go 99
C. When all the world would smile in summer time 100
CI. A little flower in my garden groweth 101
CII. My love makes of my life a sad display 102
CIII. If in thyself doth all my love reside 103
CIV. Though my true love should be my own undoing 104
CV. Though thou shouldst not perceive how love in me 105
CVI. To thee all life is but a passing pleasure 106
CVII. Not clothed in transient beauty nor pale health 107
CVIII. No mind have I to tell thee all thou art 108
CIX. Oh, Love doth play such wanton tricks with men 109
CX. Not all the years of my uncounted pain 110
CXI. At least thou canst not say I have not loved 111
CXII. Often do I in meditation dream 112
CXIII. If thou who readst this verse do find herein 113
CXIV. Yet ne’ertheless would I make holiday 114
CXV. Oh! well have I examined my defect 115
CXVI. Oh! what a thought hath filled my brain this night 116
CXVII. And with the morn, though sunrise shall disperse 117
CXVIII. Not every prince, nor king, nor emperor liveth 118
CXIX. How shall I all thy virtues here recount 119
CXX. ’Tis strange, how little doth the world perceive 120
CXXI. That which we have we value not to-day 121
CXXII. Oh, chide me not, if in this life I make 122
CXXIII. If thou wert chainèd by the bans of life 123
CXXIV. Thou art, in truth, my muse’s only guide 124
CXXV. Back from the sculptured chantry of the past 125
CXXVI. If all the value of my love is this 126
CXXVII. Oh! lay aside thy pen, since thou must sing 127
CXXVIII. The Wounded Eros fell upon the ground 128
_O thou, fair one, who never shalt be known_ 129
INTRODUCTION
In these Sonnets, the author has set down the record of a passion which makes one more of those stories of the heart written by the poets who have joined the company of Sir Philip Sidney. The company of poets is a glorious one, and the poetic stories are among the most touching expressions of human experience.
We can find no difference between these great chronicles of the heart, beyond the fact of love winning or losing, except what time has made in the fashions of art between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. One cannot believe that the complex psychology in the interpretation of modern love makes that love essentially a different thing in man’s nature then in its more primal expression, when social conditions were less reticent and self-conscious in the tameless civilization of the mid-sixteenth century. Here is the ancient and immemorial love of man for woman, whose only change has been the difference between Adam waking to behold Eve beside him and the conventional introduction of the sexes which the custom of the twentieth century demands. The influence of time upon love is not more literal in the science of sociology than in the art of poetry, and one has but to take a typical Elizabethan amatory sonnet-sequence and compare it with Mr. Meredith’s “Modern Love,” Mr. Blunt’s “Esther,” or Mr. Gibson’s “The Wounded Eros,” to be convinced of this opinion. The elemental note in the great sonnet cycles, from Petrarch’s to those of our own day, being the realization of an objective ideal in the opposite sex, with the interpretation of it varying as human society progressed in its ethical, moral, and political aspects, there remains--what has always made the intensity of interest in this poetic form--the circumstance of personality giving tone and temperament to the particulars of this episodic drama of man’s heart. Apart from any consideration of the perfection of art in which any series of related love-sonnets may be dressed, this question of the personal attitude compels interest. It is the private chamber of a human heart opened without reserve, for the intrusion of strangers to behold the truth of a bitter or joyous experience, as fate may decree.
In this book of sonnets, there is touched a deep note of pathos in the unrequited passion of a man who tells the circumstances of his own love. It is so before all things, because it is the direct speech of a heart without subtlety. I mean, that he invents nothing that is illusory between himself and the object of his desire. If subtlety had been in the heart of this lover, one might have expected more frequent verbal conceits in the methods of telling his tale; but the lack of them by no means diminishes the importance of its human interest. Indeed, the modern sonnet has gained in this respect over its predecessors of the English Renaissance. And in Mr. Gibson’s sequence the interest is entirely a modern one.
These sonnets of the “Wounded Eros” keep, moreover, the dignity that belongs to the character of thought and feeling employed by the best examples. If less abstract in any symbolistic purpose, they gain narratively by allusions sufficiently definite to link each phase of emotion into a story,--the story old, but ever new, of passion in a man’s heart for a woman’s love,--and the character and progress of it unfolded in associations wholly spiritual. The one here celebrated leaves us with the impression of being a myth created in the fervent imagination of the poet. Her vague personality hovers in uncertain imagery about the edges of the poet’s metaphors. One feels her influence behind the poet’s conception of her virtues, her faults, and her physical charms, rather than by gaining any perception of her identity through speech or action. Yet it was around a similar ideal, or vision, that Dante and Petrarch wove stories of devotion and rhapsodic worship: and Shakespeare has been able to mystify the curiosity of three centuries of prying criticism and literary history.
Despite the revelation of the lover’s heart in this poem, the poet has veiled, if indeed she exists at all in any world more palpable than Arcadia, the object of his affection behind the profuse chronicling of his own feelings. It is through him the story proceeds for us; his nature acting as an impressionable substance upon which her influence shapes itself into mood and manner. Yet it is more often from memory and recollection--the consecration of a dream--that the image weaves its spell upon the worshipper:--
“Thou wilt not give me Thy treasured self, more often than the time Of every year doth change,”
he declares; and for a maiden so obdurate in denying those frequent meetings which are the very Eden of love’s progress, we can plainly see how the task became difficult in building the illusion of love between these two people of the imagination.
If it was the woman’s indifference which led to such arbitrary allowances of time when she might be visited, we can begin to understand from what source is taken the significance of the author’s title. The writer of these Sonnets had, as the reader following his story will discover, his love wounded by all the opposing fates of his passion concentrating in the cruelty and vanity of the woman he loved. That even in these qualities of disposition, however, she was without that self-conscious arrogance which intentionally hurts the feelings of honest and faithful affection, is attested throughout the entire poem by many a gracious allusion. We are prone to consider her innocent of any base premeditated wile or motive; like Keats’ Fanny Brawne, she simply lacked that sympathetic nature which was able to penetrate and appreciate the true worth in the man’s heart which fate had laid at her feet.
“Tell me, in truth, why thou dost still seem fond Of me, yet ’neath my heart dost plunge the knife.”
This is the paradox in this woman’s nature, and a bit of real human nature it is of the gentler sex, the attempt to delineate which has been the theme of much noble music flowing from wounded hearts.
What is the mystery in the perverseness of such natures? Is it the complexity in personality, of which the possessor has neither knowledge nor control? Or is it the enigma of human nature moulded into the subtler diverse forms of the feminine sex? Whatever it is, it offers questions in psychology hard to deal with in any form of art. That it can at least be handled with interest, this poem shows. Mr. Gibson’s theme works out in its allotted way the immemorial conflict upon the old battleground. All the forces of individual character and temperament are levied in the pursuit and the evasion; and when in the end comes the surrender or escape,--happiness or despair in the heart,--there is still the same wonder and mystery of it all, such as man and woman have experienced over and over again since time began. The end of this battle of man’s and woman’s heart against terms of alliance with the opposite sex is always, and has always been, inexplicable. A force deeper than can be comprehended or controlled--the vital preservation of the human kind--draws them by its inevitable laws towards the completion of its wonderful purpose in mortal existence: and yet the peculiar circumstances of man’s intellectual sovereignty over the destiny of his kind have set this purpose into warring factions.
Man never ceasing to follow the sun of his life in woman’s heart, his brother shall never cease to take interest in the story of an experience which at one time or another has cast its sunshine or shadow over the daily routine of his existence. In the hidden nooks and memory-places of each man’s life there abides the reality or ghost of an ideal, with woman’s hair and eyes and voice, cloistered in dreams of virtue and tenderness and inhabiting realms beyond reach and concern of man’s workaday world with its practical and sordid interests. This ideal is carried in secret hours when no man’s suspicion can detect the captured joy. It is far too holy a thing to have its birth and growth revealed to the unsympathetic knowledge of any whose hearts are not likewise confined in the prison-cage of a woman’s soul. It is left for poets and romancers to look into men’s hearts and tell the world the stories of these passions, for which life has given them the capacity to feel and enact, but not the subtlety and precision of speech to express and interpret.
The story of the “Wounded Eros” is, as the reader will discover, the story of an oblation full of inexplicable shadows. Certainly, as the lover relates the progress of his suit against the obstinacy and contradiction in the woman,--so vague in all her influences!--there is considerably less of that heroic attitude in a love-passion which we would be inclined to associate with one who is so unreasonably ill-used. This man is ever the optimistic lover in his despair; constant--even unalterably persistent--in the hope of ultimately touching and winning the sympathy of her nobler self in the woman. True, at times, because of that unimpeachable self-respect, which is the touchstone of all his dealings with life, he cannot keep silent about her faults of temperament. But the spirit in which he sings of these obvious shortcomings is one to chasten and correct that which does not so much offend his own sensibilities as it blemishes and affects the character and disposition of her womanhood. What true man has ever yet been blind to the faults in the woman he loved! These deepen and enlarge her virtues, since after all she is essentially human beneath the divinity with which the idealization of man envelops her being. But all poets do not conceive the sex so realistically in this respect as Mr. Gibson. Nor in this does he take away anything from the exquisite fascination that surrounds them. He makes, instead, more interesting and piquant those perverse elements in the character of this woman, which furnish the episodical themes for his sonnets to weave their unhappy design upon the loom of his story.
I want to indicate here what seem to me the important qualities in the poem, which are intended both to carry on its development from one emotional phase to another of the story, and simultaneously to reveal the peculiar personal characteristics of the man and woman. I want to mention them in their detached aspects, because I think they are effective in an unusual way. And while, after a close study of these sonnets, I am convinced of their origin in the imagination,--that is to say, there being no likelihood that the story is of an actually known experience,--I am impressed with the note of sincerity which will convince the reader of the poet’s serious and honest treatment of his material.
In the circumstance which ensnares the man’s affections as he conceives them, the author finds fate offering no atonement in the end for the bitter trials of faith and patience endured; and in his art the poet offers no compromise to appease the sentimentalist. Truth is too insistent of her rights. Logic is too tenacious, too pitilessly inflexible in its purpose of carrying the intentions of fate to its grievous conclusions. Not at any point in the poem is there the least suggestion that chance will alter the fortunes of this battle of hearts. Only through a heightened sense of moral duty in the woman could there come that strength of sacrifice which is the test of noble characters, and change the final note of despair into one of exultation. While, as I have said, the author does not attempt to work his art into false attitudes, it is, strangely enough, just this hope which underlies his apparent resignation at the end. He seems somehow to entrust Time to transform the alloy of inconstant youth in the nature of the beloved one into the purer womanhood of maturity, whom a larger experience and deeper knowledge of life will teach to surrender her heart to his constancy, faith, and unwearying devotion.
That there was a prophetic feeling from the very beginning that the fruits of his affection were to be bitter fruits, is suggested in Sonnet VII, where he declares, “Come, though I pay love’s price in future pain.” And yet, despite this open-eyed acceptance of a task so full of doubt, he can say in the very next Sonnet,--
“This pen Now dedicate to love, thus born again Out of thy breast....”
He makes the dedication of his life upon the altar of her heart with all its strange inconstancies. With unquestionable intention she has lured him with the skilfully exercised arts of girlish insouciance. And yet, while her conduct is not exemplary, and should be lightly treated as the dross mixture in the frivolous temperament of maidenhood, it is to be rigorously censured when it continues wilfully to exercise itself upon the serious nature of a man. Although the first thought one has, when doubt and dismay have been the reward of affection, is to be mercifully emancipated from the emotions which still make a woman dear, the heart cannot wholly abandon the ties no longer recognized; and so when, as in Sonnet XIII, he confesses,--
“I know not how to cast aside the power That holds thy presence ever in my thought. By night or day, thy coming once hath brought Incessant longing for thee every hour. Why can I not, in truth, then, overpower This sense of something that is vainly sought, And still content me with a friendship caught From the occasional perfume of a flower?”
we feel in this case that the compromise is made in deference to the woman’s lack of self-reliance in being frank. “A friendship caught from the occasional perfume of a flower”--these lines, the most poetic and significant in the poem, are suggestive of a very subtle pathos; and obdurate as we are in not excusing the woman’s frailties, we do pity her weaknesses, much in the same way as our regretful pity spends itself on some beautiful wild flower with faint and wasting odors.