She closed the book quickly and slipped it into the canvas hold-all. This must not go to the jumble sale. Marvell—A Definition of Love—had poor Constance’s love been begotten by Despair upon Impossibility? Jane wondered. But then of course when writing an inscription one did not always consider the appropriateness or otherwise of the rest of the poem. 1935—Fabian would have been in his early twenties and Constance some years older—it must have been at some moment during their courtship. Jane wondered when she had taken her gift back, if it had been a conscious action performed on some special
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The Definition of Love
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic pow’r depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have plac’d,
(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac’d;
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
—Andrew Marvell
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44679
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/08/01/a-short-analysis-of-andrew-marvells-the-definition-of-love/
