There’s kiss and cuddle, kiss and tell and kiss and part. Finding a partner is not a straightforward matter. Ecstasy and humiliation may have a place. Love poems are first and foremost about the overwhelming experience of affection, idolisation and sexual passion. The death of passion or a break-up is rarely celebrated. The same is true of a lovers’ tiff or a realisation that there has been an ill-advised choice by one party or the other.
It is unusual for a poem to concern itself with the ending of such a venture. At this point we turn to Michael Drayton. He was a geographer and a student of Scripture. He was also one of the many English poets who have mastered that classic verse-form, the sonnet, to give expression to the bliss and heart-ache that characterise love-play. The poem will be found in almost any anthology.
‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’ he writes. It’s as though the matter is settled for good and for all. But that is just a starting-point. The lover has a glimmer of hope that what he longs for may still be so. He persuades himself, if not his beloved, into at least a hesitant look back, He even wishes to find it true that a reversal is possible. He is beside himself. He may comfort himself with the proverb that the course of true love never did run smooth. Human nature and the drive to reproduce make hay of abstruse speculation about desire.
Shakespeare’s generation, to which Drayton belonged, may have started the ball rolling towards the Romantic elevation of sexual passion into what it became as something transcending all other considerations. We will all have varying opinions about this. But we are compelled to understand that lofty theories about love, romantic or otherwise, are not just matters to be considered dispassionately. They are part of the terms and conditions of our brief life on this planet. Nowhere is this more beautifully put than in the Song of Solomon. The New Testament has nothing to add to this – unless we take it that 1 Corinthians 13 puts sexual passion in its place as one pointer to the boundless love of a Creator and Redeemer. There are profound issues of human experience where we have to do our best to call in help from people like Drayton who learned lessons in the school of hard knocks.
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