TRUE
LOVE
There are a numberless definitions of love. The best one
which I found somewhere was: It is a set
of emotions and behaviours characterized by intimacy, passion, and commitment. If
it is faithful, it involves care,
closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection and trust.
The English poet-playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
says in one of his sonnets:
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.
And,
according to him:
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 even to the edge of
doom.
True
love is everlasting togetherness. It is a spiritual union of hearts, a
perpetual faithfulness and immutable loyalty.
Unfortunately,
the times when lovers were faithful to each
other have became history.
The Victorian poet, and cultural
critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) found
that with the advent of industrial era and the conflict between science and
religion, faithfulness and loyalty started
declining. He wrote;
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round
earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle
furled;
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.
So
he appeals to his lady love:
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.
*******
G.r.Kanwal
19th March 2025
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