Putting Love on a Pedestal, Part 2

For Valentine’s Day last week, I delivered a column on Petrarchan love. There’s a lot to say on this pervasive motif, so here is Part 2, which takes us up to Shakespeare and his twist on Petrarch.

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In literature, as in life, something interesting happens when a thing becomes a Thing.

Dining out provides a perfect example. Have you ever seen a restaurant go from being the new kid on the block to a rising star to a place where it’s difficult to get a table? (The great Yogi Berra from baseball had a very Yogi-esque line for the last kind of restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”)

I actually experienced this phenomenon—well, the first part of it anyway—when I was a teenager. When I turned 16, my mom hustled me into the car to start applying for jobs, and I landed one at a place that was so unfamiliar to many people that they literally could not pronounce the name. My boss sent me out to the front of the restaurant, which was in a mall, to give out samples to strangers. I guess he figured “To taste it is to love it,” and the strategy worked. Still, it was far from a sensation. By the time I left, I’m not sure it even qualified as a rising star. Today, it definitely has arrived though, and everyone knows how to pronounce “Chick-fil-A.”

A similar thing happened to the motif we saw last week in the works of Dante and Petrarch. It became a Thing, and then something even more interesting happened.

An Unattainable Star

In 16th-century England, a poet named Philip Sidney wrote a sonnet sequence called Astrophel and Stella. The title says it all: Astrophel means star-lover, and Stella means star. In poems in the sequence, Astrophel recounts his experience of loving a celestial figure.

Sound familiar? Yep, even though he grew up in England, hundreds of miles from Italy, in a different century, Sidney was taking a Petrarchan stance to a woman, putting her not merely on a pedestal, but all the way up in the heavens.

The distance is significant. We admire something as brilliant as a star, but we also know we cannot reach it. Here is another aspect of the Petrarchan stance: the object of affection is out of reach, so the admirer is doomed to misery even while he is enchanted by the woman he loves.

Of course, real women are not as distant as stars, so there must be another reason that, here in the real world, Stella is unattainable. Sidney captures it in this poem, one of the most famous in the sequence:

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! What, may it be that even in heav'nly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries! Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

This poem has stuck with me for decades—I think because it nicely illustrates something called an apostrophe—a literary device in which the speaker addresses something that cannot reply. Here, Astrophel is addressing the moon, which seems to share his own melancholy because it is silently ascending the sky with “sad steps” and a wan face. Astrophel assumes that the moon, like him, is in love, but there’s a problem for both of them, a problem evident in the questions that Astrophel asks in the final lines. When he asks the moon, “Is constant love deem’d there but want of wit?” he is implying that the women whom they love do not return their affection and even consider them foolish. The next line makes a similar point: “Are beauties there as proud as here they be?”

Clearly, the stance that Petrarch and Dante had taken had become a Thing, something to be adopted by later writers.

Shakespeare’s Take

One of these writers is familiar to everyone: William Shakespeare. One of his most famous sonnets begins, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun . . .” He goes on to enumerate other decidedly un-Petrarchan features of her appearance:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

One has to wonder whether the poem was inspired by a real woman and, if it was, whether she took his calls after he recited it to her. (Centuries later, in his song “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen took a chance with a less poetical, but equally offensive line: “You ain’t a beauty, but, hey, you’re all right.” Even later, Bono of U2 sang, “You got a face not spoiled by beauty.” I don’t know how things worked out for either of them, either, but, when I speak to my wife, I’m going to stick with the model from Petrarch and Sidney, just to be on the safe side.)

Shakespeare was playing with the conventions of the Petrarchan stance. That’s what happens sometimes when the thing becomes a Thing. It’s so well known that other writers can have some fun with it. Readers (or listeners) recognize the motif and appreciate the twists on it.

Now that you know how Petrarch’s Thing was adopted and adapted by later writers, you might start recognizing the phenomenon everywhere: smartphones, superheroes, horror movies, sports cars, trading cards, sandwiches, and on and on and on. When a thing becomes a Thing, it takes on a life of its own.

OK, look, I need to go. Bono is calling me. I think he’s in need of some relationship advice.