To …
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
To … is associated with the group of poems Shelley dedicated to Jane Williams in 1822, and it remains among the most lastingly popular and frequently anthologised of English love poems. It was one of the first Shelley poems I encountered, and since this week’s feauture is publishing on Valentine’s Day, it seemed auspiciousto revisit a literary “old flame” and see if it still burns as brightly.
A little biographical context is unavoidable. The poet and his wife, Mary Shelley, were close friends with Jane and her husband, Edward, and the two families eventually shared a small house in Italy, on the coast of Lerici. Both Edward and Shelley lost their lives in a sailing accident in the summer of 1822.
Like a knightly adherent of the Courtly love tradition, Shelley constructs a vow of chaste devotion in this poem, but makes demands beyond the genre in his plea to receive “pity” rather than submit to “disdain”. Jane’s participation in the fantasy romance is required, and there’s a faintly overbearing quality in the paired patterning of the lover’s statements and the woman’s imagined and wished-for responses.
The poem is beautifully made. Its flexible, songlike rhythm and verbal formality combine in two stanzas of considerable eloquence and elegance. While the play of anapaests brings a lightness to the metre, the pattern of three and two-beat lines with, respectively, masculine and feminine endings, asserts a control of the medium equal to the emotional control proclaimed.
In the first stanza, the sentence-subjects are not quite antithetical and their connection is emphasised by parallel grammatical structures. The subjects are “word” and “feeling”, “hope”, “prudence” and “pity”. The word which is “too often profaned” is carefully withheld, and then disclosed in the opening of the second stanza, “I can give not what men call love …” It’s a strange line, suggesting inadequacy rather than moral restraint, while loftily asserting the superiority of the love that remains physically unexpressed.
Those negatives forming the first and third line-endings in the second stanza seem to add a touch of coercion to the argument. Shelley’s atheism doesn’t preclude a reference to the Heavens, and the certainty that his love would find approval there. No doubt these Heavens belong to the classical rather than Christian tradition.
As a young reader, I particularly admired the comparison of the poet’s love with “[t]he desire of the moth for the star”. Now, it seems to strike a hyperbolic note, and yet the images it conjures are oddly affecting. The closing lines seem a humbler, plainer and more moving suggestion of the poet’s unhappiness than achieved elsewhere. Overall, the poem is a revealing expression of the pathology of “what men call love”. It’s more complicated than I first thought, and less dependent on the Romantic tradition in which it’s conventionally placed.
