TRUE LOVE

 

 

                                                TRUE  LOVE

British poet and dramatist William Shakespeare (1564-1616) said in one of his most popular sonnets:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

 

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his heights be taken.

 

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom:

 

If this be error, and upon me proved

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

                The type of love that Shakespeare has mentioned here is rare. For most of the so-called lovers,  love is now a time’s fool.  Their love is short-lived. They don’t mind becoming unfaithful to their lady loves one after the other. Love, for them , is a passing show.  When they break an alliance, they don’t regret. They experience no compunction of soul. Their love is physical, neither psychic nor spiritual.   No doubt, there was a time , some centuries ago, when the bonds of love between lovers were deep and ever-lasting.  Their union had a religious touch and the relationship they lived was sacred. The body was just a means of existence, not its end.  It was the soul which had its main attraction.  It had no satiation point.  As Shakespeare says it was no ‘Time’s fool though rosy lips and cheeks with his bending sickle’s came.

                Shakespeare closes his sonnet with the following lines:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.

 

It is this endless love which is the dream and aspiration of true lovers.  Their loyalty to each other is not an short-lived illusion  but a continuous reality.

 

Alas! this type of  true love ,as Shakespeare has mentioned, is now past history.

About 300 years after William Shakespeare , English poet  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) had to lament the loss of true and faithful love in these words:

 The sea of faith

Was once ,too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing  roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

He ends this short , but profound , lament with the following prayer:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

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6^th July 2022                                                        G. R. Kanwal