I came across the last four lines of this poem in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” the most anti-marriage novel I know. Or was it in a book about the 150 poems Hardy wrote about his wife, 149 of them after she’d died. It doesn’t matter. Hardy had a very unhappy marriage, and there’s a great irony in him writing some of the great love poems in English after the death of a wife he mistreated.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was a Scottish poet who was involved in founding what became University College London. In the lovely poem “Love and freedom” he makes clear that he sees love and marriage as incompatible. “Love’s a fire that needs renewal/Of fresh beauty for its fuel:/Love’s wing moults when caged and captured,/Only free, he soars enraptured.” The poem could be seen as a manifesto for adultery or being a womanising batchelor.

I’ve been married for nearly 50 years and so have many of my friends. I don’t think any of us would say that we are “out of love.” Campbell is writing about romantic or erotic love, and he lacks the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks who identified six types of love. Eros is the love of sexual passion, and the Greeks were suspicious of it, thinking that it led to madness and a loss of rationality. Pragma is longstanding love, the love between long-married couples. If you want to know about the other four, read here: https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/how-does-the-way-the-ancient-greeks-thought-of-love-fit-with-the-triangular-theory-of-love/

Love and freedom

How delicious is the winning
Of a kiss at love’s beginning,
When two mutual hearts are sighing
For the knot there’s no untying!
Yet remember, ‘Midst our wooing,
Love has bliss, but Love has ruing;
Other smiles may make you fickle,
Tears for other charms may trickle.
Love he comes, and Love he tarries,
Just as fate or fancy carries;
Longest stays, when sorest chidden;
Laughs and flies, when press’d and bidden.
Bind the sea to slumber stilly,
Bind its odour to the lily,
Bind the aspen ne’er to quiver,
Then bind Love to last for ever.
Love’s a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel:
Love’s wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
Can you keep the bee from ranging
Or the ringdove’s neck from changing?
No! nor fetter’d Love from dying
In the knot there’s no untying.