Our Word of the Week, eternal, leads us naturally in the direction of love. Let’s think of this. I used to have fun with my students, asking the girls if they would accept a marriage proposal from a super-rationalist I named Irving, and provided with the voice of a self-satisfied prig. Suppose then that Irving said to you, “I can say with reasonable certainty that I love you, and it is likely, given actuarial expectations, that I shall love you for the remainder of my life, though I cannot account for the probability if some breakthrough in medicine should lengthen us out for another ten or fifteen years. That, however, seems improbable, so there is no rational argument for turning me down, at least on this account.” Wouldn’t you look at him as if he simply did not know what he was talking about, when he used the word “love”?
Love isn’t a calculator, or, as Shakespeare says, “Love’s not Time’s fool.” We know that some animals mate for life: wolves do, and so do coyotes, as scraggly and woebegone as they look to our eyes. Many birds do so: the bright and bold Mr. Cardinal and Mrs. Cardinal, for example. But with man, it’s different. That’s because we’re partly detached from time. We rise above it when we recollect, and we see all our past life as fulfilled in the love to which we give our lives. Why, Debra and I were jesting about it just this morning — if she hadn’t disliked open spaces so much, if it hadn’t been for my bum leg, and all kinds of apparently trivial things, we might never have met! But it’s more than that, infinitely more. Our lives take all their meaning from our love, and that survives, in an earthly sense, in our children, but we also believe that our love is a gift from God, in whom nothing is lost. If you say that all the world was created so that this young man and this young woman, this John and this Sarah, were to unite in marriage and love one another till death and even beyond, you would be approaching the center of all things.
Our author today, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, gives the lie to the canard that to be a great artist you have to lead a miserable life — she and her husband Robert loved each other as warmly and closely and fully as any man and woman ever have. After all, he had whisked her out of her unhappy life in London, kept in a sort of straitjacket, she and her siblings, by their pathologically controlling father. She was never in very good health, but that didn’t make Robert impatient; he loved her all the more, the more he had to care for her. How much might we give to have been with the Brownings when they lived in Italy, in that dry climate, for the sake of Elizabeth’s health, and there they met and befriended the Hawthornes from America, Nathanael and Sophia — another couple deeply in love, and that certainly didn’t hurt Nathanael’s genius one bit.
Now then, in our sonnet today, Elizabeth begs Robert not to love her for anything she possesses, or for anything that is at all subject to time. That includes even his own loving care for her, and his pity when he wiped the tears from her eyes, because that pity too is ironically subject to change, because she grows joyful under his care — and then what’s left to pity? We may well like such things. If I think of the small town where I grew up, when it endures changes that wear away what I used to know, and essentially becomes a completely different place, it doesn’t move me in the same way, if it moves me at all. But persons aren’t like that. Each person is a world of meaning, an abyss of mystery. To love a person is to rise above the river of change. Isn’t it why we enjoy looking at pictures of the person we love when they were little children, long before we met? I have more pictures of the little Debra than she has of the little me, but any such picture is something to cherish, because when you love, you love the whole person, all of his or her life, and beyond life, too.
So in our Poem of the Week, Elizabeth asks Robert to do what in fact he did: to love her for the sake of love. She doesn’t mean that as a tautology. We are in the precincts of the divine. We take our toddling steps, led by love, from time and change, toward eternity.
If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love’s sake only. Do not say I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,— A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love’s sake, that evermore Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.
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