The Allegory of Love Quotes

“But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

“Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes though stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we still are. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

“to what purpose was allegory employed? For the function of allegory is not to hide but to reveal, and it is properly used only for that which cannot be said, or so well said, in literal speech. The inner life, and specially the life of love, religion, and spiritual adventure, has therefore always been the field of true allegory; for here there are intangibles which only allegory can fix and reticences which only allegory can overcome. The poem of Guillaume de Lorris is a true allegory of love; but no poem of Chaucer’s is. In Chaucer we find the same subject-matter, that of chivalrous love; but the treatment is never truly allegorical.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“All men have waited with ever-decreasing hope, day after day, for some one or for something that does not come, and all would willingly forget the experience. Chaucer spares us no detail of the prolonged and sickening process to despair: every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“do not say that he did not in some way enjoy his frequent tears; but he enjoyed them not as a vulgar scoffer, but as a convinced servant of the god of Love, in whose considered opinion the bliss and pathos of a gravely conducted amour are the finest flower of human life.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“Here, as in the Book of the Duchesse, the old garden of the Rose is used to paint a picture of love itself, of love at rest. If a man will compare the beauties of this garden—the almost imperceptible wind, the darting fish, the rabbits playing in the grass, and the ‘ravishing sweetness’ of stringed instruments— with any literal portrayal of the same thing, he will find out what allegory was made for. This is the kind of symbolism that never grows old.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“But Chaucer, whatever we may think of him, was not a ‘regular fellow’, un vrai businessman, or a rotarian. He was a scholar, a courtier, and a poet, living in a highly subtle and sophisticated civilization. It is only natural that we, who live in an industrial age, should find difficulties in reading poetry that was written for a scholastic and aristocratic age. We must proceed with caution, lest our thick, rough fingers tear the delicate threads that we are trying to disentangle.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“When the men of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries thought of Chaucer, they did not think first of the Canterbury Tales. Their Chaucer was the Chaucer of dream and allegory, of love- romance and erotic debate, of high style and profitable doctrine.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“He cannot immediately demand the Lady’s love: there is a thorny hedge around the rose garden.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“A lover can always manage Fear and Shame, who are helpless if once Venus comes to his aid. The real enemy who cannot be flattered or overcome, who must be kept asleep because, if he wakes, your only course is to take to your heels, the ever-present dread of lovers and the stoutest defence of virgins, is Danger.”
― C.S. Lewis, THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

“The general impression left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that all love - at least all such passionate and exalted devotion as a courtly poet thought worthy of the name - was more or less wicked. And this impression, combining with the nature of feudal marriage as I have already described it, produced in the poets a certain wilfulness, a readiness to emphasize rather than conceal the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals. Thus if the Church tells them even that the ardent lover of his own wife is in mortal sin, they presently reply with the rule that true love is impossible in marriage. If the Church says that the sexual act can be 'excuse' only by the desire for offspring, then it becomes the mark of a true lover, like Chauntecleer, that he served Venus

"More for delyt than world to multiplye".”
― C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

“When poisons become fashionable, they do not cease to kill”
― C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition