Lucasta

 

 

 

It's Sir Richard Lovelace, born in 1617, perhaps in his late 'teens or early 20s (he survived only to the age of 40), but mature enough to have grown a splendid crop of rich black hair. Over his left shoulder is a motto that reads "prodesse non praeesse" which means something like "to be useful rather than to rule (or lead)." Of Lovelace, a contemporary said that he was "the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him... much admired and adored by the female sex."

 

Not only was he handsome and sexy, but Sir Richard was also a soldier in the English civil war, a playwright, and an accomplished poet. One of his superlative lyrics is the famous and oft-anthologized "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars."  It's only twelve lines, but what superb lines they are! Quite a triumph, it is, to embody an entire aristocratic caste and a system of values in a single short poem!

 

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,

         That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

         To war and arms I fly.

 

True, a new mistress now I chase,

         The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

         A sword, a horse, a shield.

 

Yet this inconstancy is such

         As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much,

         Lov’d I not Honour more.

The "plot" of the lyric is simple: the "speaker" leaves his beloved in order to "fly" to battle (he fought, naturally, on the royalist side). He loves "honor" more than he loves his mistress. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, honor has a multiplier effect on his love. And yet, although honor enhances love, honor is always primary, love subordinate. It's a curious kind of love lyric in which a suitor says to his beloved, I like you, but only second best.

What is "honor" for Lovelace?  It's a word with a spectrum of meanings -- nobility of soul, magnanimity, scorn of meanness, reputation, privilege of rank or birth, even chastity or virginity. But none of these possibilities seem to specifically apply in this poem.  For Lovelace and his Lucasta, honor is military. It is something won on the battlefield. About this he is uncompromising: the "new mistress" he will now "embrace" is "a sword, a horse, a shield" -- "war and arms." Not the "arms" of a lover, but weapons. 

A cynical being might therefore rewrite the last two lines of the lyric thusly: "I could not love thee (Dear) so much,/ Lov'd I not warfare more." Flat, imperfect poetry, but the parody is perhaps what the demystified poem actually asserts. Make war, not love.

What sort of war?

The primary weapons in the battles of the 1640s were mortar, cannon, musket, caliver, carbine, harquebus, and pistol. Sword, horse and shield had not entirely disappeared. Edge weapons were still in use, and the horse would remain the primary engine of war until it was supplanted in the twentieth century by internal combustion vehicles. But it would have been suicidal folly to go into 1640s battle with Lovelace's museum of weaponry. For "honor" and for the benefit of Lucasta, Lovelace evokes a romantic nostalgic world of tilt and tourney. Single combat, knight versus knight, hot horse against horse.

Lovelace imagines himself glorious in single combat, his mistress's favor (handkerchief or scarf) streaming from his helmet. It would not be so glorious to be mutilated by a cannon lugged into place by a base pioner. 

Lovelace easily conflates love, which is a private emotion, with military honor, which is clearly a public achievement. Very public, indeed, which is what led Baruch Spinoza, Lovelace's younger contemporary, to note that "honor" is not intrinsic, not an act of personal realization, but rather "a slavish subordination to the opinion of others." 

"I could not love the (Dear) so much,

    Lov'd I not a slavish subordination to the opinion of others more."

The rewrite has a different ring.

Spinoza: 

 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Yet the poem works, and the 21st-century reader who understands it should come away from the poem admiring the speaker, as you do. The speaker is not a brute; he is capable of loving and appreciating someone who deserves to be loved, one with a "chaste breast and quiet mind." And the battle he fights is an honorable one, a good fight, against an opponent who may be his match. The speaker is not a bully; he is not a sniper. He inhabits a completely different world, and it is the genius of Lovelace that he is capable of reaching across the centuries and helping us to understand that world.