A Mirror for Lovers by Zak William F.;

Author:Zak, William F.; [Zak, William F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

The day 49 dreaded has arrived in 87. The defenses the speaker erected earlier within which to “insconce” (49:9) himself have, predictably, been completely overrun. As 49 vowed, when the day of betrayal arrives, the speaker proves as good as his word: in 87 he does indeed forward all the “lawful reasons on thy part” (49:12) to defend the beloved’s right of defection, saying, in effect, “To leave poore me, thou hast the strength of lawes, / Since why to love, I can alledge no cause” (49:13–14).

The “license” he wanly attempts to legitimize here remains as offensive and deplorable to the speaker, however, as it did when he first contemplated it in 49. Even as 87 keeps 49’s stiff upper lip, its lower lip quivers involuntarily with outraged desolation. Only the strength of laws can rationalize the withdrawal of love once pledged, the speaker of both poems knows; but “why to love I can alledge no cause” (49:14) adequate to such a betrayal. The extent of the desolation expressed in 87’s first line and the implicit rebuke and guilt trip generated in the couplet make the poem’s intervening invocation of charters granted and revoked, bonds terminating, riches shifted about, and patents recalled seem like so much static interrupting an otherwise clear voice signal. True to form, the speaker has fallen on his sword for the beloved to maintain the young man’s good opinion of him, but in doing so he also conveys in his dying voice his passive aggressive judgment upon the oppressor who has made his martyrdom necessary.2

Reports of the speaker’s noble and pitiful death are greatly exaggerated, however. The beloved the speaker worships, greatly disappointed, is as much a narcissistic phantasm as was the dream vision of Amant in The Romance of the Rose: “Thus have I had thee as a dreame doth flatter, / In sleepe a King, but waking no such matter” (13–14). In Amant’s erotic dream of fulfillment he functioned as a king of all he surveyed aching for completion in the Rose; but at the anticlimactic awakening, all his yearning for the completion of desire has been woefully dashed. The speaker’s being “at a loss” at poem’s end here is not reason for sympathy and fellow-feeling so much as it is a disclosure of comic irony at his expense for his inveterately manipulative ways—whether flattery or shaming guilt should snare the prize. Neither the nobility of his self-sacrificial posturing nor the dying weakness in his voice is authentic. His feeling of loss is not that of a blessed presence, but only that in awaking “having thee” does not mean his being treated as the king he had hoped he might yet become, his every whim satisfied should this last ditch manipulation succeed.

L.1 is not testimony to the depth of the speaker’s feelings, but to their shallowness. True love for another is a thing in which one participates: it is not “for my possessing” (1). It is, in ironic truth, then, “too deare”—in other words, too “precious” for the speaker’s possessing.

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