What is the cost of finishing a relationship?
On Monsieur's Departure
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.
Love can be straightforward. It can also be a terrifying paradox. When we want it, we don't get it. When we decide we can do without it, then we're mown down by Eros fluttering overhead with his bow and arrow. Sometimes those we fall in love with run entirely contrary to our ideal of beauty, and sometimes our friends and family think we're wrong in doing what feels so right.
In this poem we hear the anguished voice of a woman undergoing a total alienation of her public mask and her private feelings. The two are so far apart they are practically two different people in the same body. The result is a kind of madness.
Every inner emotion is contradicted by its outer expression. Inwardly, she grieves, she loves, she raves, but outwardly she appears indifferent, hateful and silent. 'I, I, I' she repeats, like a stuck record, trying to assert a self that's about to implode. As she says, 'I am and not'. In another context, this could taken as mystically enlightened, but here it denotes despair.
The reason for this mania is revealed at the end of the first stanza. She says: 'from myself another self I turned.' She has scorned her beloved—presumably for fear of condemnation.
Once thwarted, love that should illuminate our lives becomes a shadow, a depression, that we cannot rid ourselves of. In the second stanza, this shadow is like a proxy of the former beau, a hideous doppelganger. Love, which is outside the rational, is immune to analytical dissection.
In the third stanza, the speaker seeks any respite she can think of. There is a delicious sense of swooning as she begs for her fever to cool. It is the lack of control that is so unbearable. The list of possible cures serves as a chilling countdown to the final one of all: death. There is no love without vulnerability, but no misery worse than seeing that tenderness–with all of its secret hopes and dreams–come to nothing.
While the poem speaks to a universal situation, it undoubtedly owes some of its power to its author, Elizabeth I, whose image as the virgin queen is familiar to us from Renaissance portraiture to Hollywood cinema. Her iconography transformed a mere mortal into an almost superhuman Byzantine empress, with her arctic pallored face, imperious stare and elaborate, theatrical gowns.
How odd then to hear her mouth the words to a version of that barnstorming Judy Garland classic, 'The Man That Got Away'. Although officially she was only wedded to her country, it seems likely she enjoyed a series of romances, though no hard facts have ever been uncovered.
Two manuscripts of this poem identify its inspiration as the breaking off of marriage negotiations between Queen Elizabeth and the French Duke of Anjou in 1582, although a third implies a link with her favorite, the Earl of Essex, who led a rebellion and was beheaded by the Queen for treason in 1601. And we think our love lives are complicated!
Elizabeth discovered a sobering truth that we should note in our self-sufficient times: one may be a King or Queen, but one cannot rule the heart, which remains a dangerous anarchist.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was one of the most learned people of her day, translating many Latin texts into English, including Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.
Christopher Nield is a poet and freelance writer living in London. E-mail him at: christophernield@hotmail.com
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