The Price of Love
SHOW ME the man who has never fallen in, or been in love, and I will show you a man who has not completely lived. One who has never experienced the spring that manifests in one’s step, the urge to whistle, the joy of inhaling deeply and feeling that air almost explode in lungs and body, reaching out and touching the stars!
The excitement of that first or second date, the new page or perhaps the first page of a whole new chapter. To hell with the risk, throw angst or caution to the wind, go with the flow, be swept away by the tide.
Fun, joy, thrill and bliss. How could nature deny any living soul these feelings, or this pleasure? Or more importantly, perhaps, how could we deny it to ourselves? Surely it is part of ‘one’, and part of nature? Maybe. But there may exist another part to one’s nature that consciously or subconsciously guards against such abandon. A self-protection mechanism that protects against the unknown, against the risk, or worse, against the inevitable pain of loss, for loss at some stage or other, whether in life or death, is as certain as those reached for stars themselves. Grief, they say, is the price of love. But have we any control at all?
In his poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, John Keats (1795-1821) explores the affairs of a knight falling hopelessly in love with a beautiful dreamlike vision of womanhood. It is a simple, uncomplicated poem, using simple language with straightforward rhyming schemes telling a tale of love and death.
Keats, considered to be one of the English language’s greatest Romantic poets, wrote this whilst dying himself from tuberculosis, only one year prior to his own untimely death at the young age of 25. Witnessing the death of his brother, who succumbed to the same disease two years earlier, no doubt had a profound effect on his outlook. In this work, he suggests that our vulnerabilities in matters of the heart, come to one and only one conclusion.
That there is a dreadful danger attached to romantic obsession. He, or rather the knight in his poem, was perfectly willing, or helpless not, to fall in love with the beautiful Elfish lady, to whom he submits and surrenders. He gives up his freedom, like the fly in the spider’s web, stepping into the world of the impossible, loving the impossible and as a consequence becoming the victim of the impossibilities of love. Beware all who enter here!
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed – Ah! woe betide! – The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!’
La Belle Dame destroys and breaks all hearts that come in contact, that, is her nature. That is what love ultimately does. It’s final chapter is death. Life does the same. As does Time. The warnings are there for our Knight, but Keats suggests the situation is hopeless, that man, once submitting to love, is doomed. And yet, albeit a young man, I’m sure he was fully sold on the notion of what he believed love to be.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gapèd wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.
His use of the words ‘horrid warning’ in the second last stanza are the only hint in the 12-stanza poem that we possibly have a choice in these matters, there was a warning, there existed an option. So do we? Do we have a choice? Perhaps we don’t know until we encounter it, but personally, I’ll run with the words of Tennyson, from his poem ‘In Memoriam’: ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’
John J Kelly is a multiple award-winning poet from Enniscorthy. He is the co- founder of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award with the Wexford Literary Festival and co-ordinator of poetry workshops for schools locally. Each week, John’s column will deal mainly with novels, plays and poems from both the Leaving Certificate syllabus and Junior Certificate syllabus. kellyjj02@gmail.com