Love’s Contentment
Come, my Clarinda, we’ll consume
Our joys no more at this low rate:
More glorious titles let’s assume,
And love according to our state;
For if contentment wears a crown,
Which never tyrant could assail,
How many monarchs put we down
In our utopian commonweal?
As princes rain down golden showers
On those in whom they take delight,
So in this happier court of ours
Each is the other’s favourite.
Our privacies no eye dwells near,
But unobservèd we embrace,
And no sleek courtier’s pen is there
To set down either time or place;
No midnight fears disturb our bliss,
Unless a golden dream awake us.
For care, we know not what it is,
Unless to please doth careful make us.
We fear no enemies’ invasion;
Our counsel’s wise and politic:
With timely force, if not persuasion,
We cool the home-bred schismatic.
All discontent thus to remove
What monarch boasts, but thou and I?
In this content we live and love,
And in this love resolve to die.
That when our souls together fled
One urn shall our mixed dust enshrine.
In golden letters may be read
‘Here lie content’s late King and Queen.’
One of the most viewed pages on this website is James Paulin’s. What makes this rather bewildering is the fact that Paulin is a completely unknown poet to whom (as far as I know) only a single poem can be ascribed–the one analysed here. I have found no information whatsoever about the man nor the origins of the poem on the internet. Judging by the surname one might guess that he was Irishman and that the poem, along with a spurious name scrawled upon it were stumbled upon in some dusty manuscript in an even dustier British archive. Perhaps it is a fabrication? Perhaps, perhaps…
Maybe the Paulinian mystery is all a part of the popular appeal then–we have a tendency to speak and write most about those authors of whom we know the least–and in writing this post I am reminded of the fabulations conceived around Homer and Shakespeare. While biographical details might elucidate many aspects of a work I tend to find literary criticism that speculates in personal details to be a little unnecessary. A good poem’s force and meaning should be sufficiently autonomous to be felt without knowing the person who stood behind it. Should those details be necessary, I more often than not see it as an aesthetic defect. That is not the case with James Paulin. Long live!
Form:
Eight quatrains in rhymed iambic tetrameter.
Analysis
The first line is so redolent of Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love that one suspects that Paulin had it in mind when conceiving this poem (a link to that poem). Where Marlowe’s love is one of pastoral simplicity however, Paulin’s diverges into something more richly metaphysical. The dominating comparison in the poem is that of love’s immensity and intricacies being akin to a courtly kingdom:
For if contentment wears a crown,
Which never tyrant could assail,
How many monarchs put we down
In our utopian commonweal?
As princes rain down golden showers
On those in whom they take delight,
So in this happier court of ours
Each is the other’s favourite.
The exuberance of such comparisons is cleverly contrasted with passages detailing a private intimacy:
Our privacies no eye dwells near,
But unobservèd we embrace,
And no sleek courtier’s pen is there
To set down either time or place;
And it is this intimacy that trumps all the wealth and grandeur of the court. The use of the word “contentment” to describe the author’s love is to a large extent ironic because on the one hand it is far greater than anything a kingdom could contain. On the other hand, it is perfectly fitting because the author needs nothing else.
All discontent thus to remove
What monarch boasts, but thou and I?
In this content we live and love,
And in this love resolve to die.
That when our souls together fled
One urn shall our mixed dust enshrine.
In golden letters may be read
‘Here lie content’s late King and Queen.’