The Poetry of Courtship

Good afternoon, and happy day after Groundhog Day, my friends! In the aftermath of this momentous festival, we are left with the prognostication of six more wintery weeks, for the Prophet Groundhog did see his shadow. Today is not a day of groundhogs; however, today is a day of art and love!

Long ago, there was a variety of poetry known as the poetry of courtship. This is what a young man writes when he courts a young lady. It is oft accompanied by the music of courtship, if the courtier happens to be skilled in music, as he should be. Alas, as far as I know, almost nobody does this anymore. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious being that there are not many courts in which courtiers can court these days. Of course, courtship has long gone on without any actual court; the persistence of the verb "to court" is really no more than a linguistic curiosity. More significantly, the loss of poetry and music in courtship can be attributed to a widespread lack of ability in both those subjects among young men. These are no longer essential parts of a well-rounded education, cast into the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing their teeth alongside Greek and Latin. If a young man is to learn poetry and music, he must do so of his own accord. God willing, he might even discover the wellspring of inspiration stowed among mythologies, histories, and Classics, not to mention the Truth.

Let us suppose that a young man has sought after these lost arts, and let us suppose a young lady has caught his fancy. The young man has been very reckless in allowing this to happen, but it is only with a bit of recklessness that a fantastic adventure may begin, as Chesterton once said. Bilbo was not forced to leave Bag End, and Frodo was not asked to bear the ring. Neither Bilbo nor Frodo sought his adventure nor was either at all adventurous. That is what makes them adventurers. Like these fine hobbits, our dear fellow remains on the road onto which he has wandered, able to be reckless and adventurous because he is not at home. The adventurous man by nature is at home adventuring, so he can never be adventurous or reckless.

Back to our dear fellow, it is evident by his pursuit of music and poetry that the lyric impulse, as Chesterton called it, is upon him, and now he suddenly has an immediate subject of which he must sing. There is no choice in the matter. To ignore the lyric impulse is to remain silent despite welling with song, and to do this is to inflict a sharp heartache. If our young man is genuine, he should have much to express regarding this young lady, with whom he has stumbled upon such wonderful excellence. I daresay that the poetry of courtship, in some form or other, is an absolute necessity, for the lyric impulse is itself loving adoration.

When I identify the lyric impulse, that which drives us to create, with love, my reasoning should already be evident in my definition of the lyric impulse. Do not, however, misunderstand the sense in which I here employ the English word "love." I do not limit my meaning to romantic love, which is adventurous love. I mean to cover the breadth of its meaning, from brotherly and sisterly love (the love of friendship), to the love between parents and their children (domestic love), and beyond, ultimately tracing itself to Divine love, which is Love. Is it not for the sake of love that we are made, not only initially, but also continually restored by the resurrection of the Christ, who is Love? And surely this does not cease upon the shedding of this mortal coil.

I have already explained that romantic love is adventurous. How strange that its consequence is generally the domestic love of parenthood, which is the opposite of adventure. Really, it is ideal, this familial interplay, because it is a paradox. (Chesterton would be proud of me right now.) How else can these varieties of love, even in contradiction, be fused so perfectly? Between the parents, there is all the adventure of romance. With children, the family is born, and thus the children have a home in this strange and wonderful (and too often terrible) world all around. With more children, brotherly and sisterly love expands, as do the other varieties. It is not by chance that procreation and love are ideally and inseparably linked.

Does this reflect the Divine Love? Indeed, for what love is more reckless and so adventurous as a surrender of one's very self to another? This is Christianity, in which there is no place for any uncrucified and unresurrected self. It is all adventure: the adventure of death, only to be met with the strangest and most unexpected adventure of all, resurrection, an ongoing adventure that leads straight home. In fact, it is home in the making. So it is all domestic. God is our Father, and he makes it very clear time and time again that we do well to view him as such, and we are all His children together. It is all brotherhood, sisterhood, and friendship. Christ is our brother, and the head of His Church. We are His body, together the children in the Divine family. Christianity amplifies Love.

Having digressed, let us now return to our friend. If our young man were to fail to possess some modicum of the lyric impulse or fail to heed it, he would only be fooling himself, and his misadventure would end in disaster. He would have to have been wrongheaded from the start. Having no urge to express love, it must be absent. As an aside, some who call themselves artists speak highly of expressing themselves, and this is wrong. Art is optimally about expressing some variety of love, ultimately Love, not oneself. Who is this artist to think that anyone is interested in him, but everyone is interested in love, something that is far greater than any artist. The surest sign that an artist is a fraud is that he calls himself an artist.

What of this simple young man, though, struggling to compose some reflection of this beautiful maiden? That is precisely it: reflection, or in a more philosophical terminology representation. When our lad composes a sonnet or a liebesleid for his lass, he does so in an effort to represent the inexpressible excellence he sees when her mere presence alights his eyes or when the simple sound of her voice graces his ears. When he has finished an artistic work of this kind, however, he finds himself in a complex situation. He has, at least for a time, sung the lyric impulse, and all is well. Alas, of his completed work, he is keenly aware that its excellence does not fully capture the excellence of its subject. One would expect this to be disappointing, but in truth this realization is far from it. The young man has made a work of art, something that is meant to be beautiful above all else, something that is beautiful, and yet his beloved is immeasurably more so.

What of the quality of the work? It is an interesting point of the poetry of courtship that, as far as the latter conclusion is concerned, ability is only of relative concern. A sonnet of Shakespeare and a lyric of our dear friend are on equal footing. Whether the Bard, by his immaculate verse, sings a mere semblance of the beauty of his beloved or our friend, in his childish folly, bellows but a poor reflection of his own fair maiden, it does not matter. The only condition is that each worked his song with all the resources he could offer, only to reach that invariable conclusion to which I have already alluded. The lover will be humbled, and by this tribute so too should be the beloved. For she, I suspect, should sense that our young man has bled his heart into his work, producing something beautiful as a reflection of her. To see reflected back from the artwork the immense adoration of our young man, she ought not help but to feel humbled that someone thinks so highly of her, for if she is nearly as excellent as our young man thinks, she will not place herself on such a pedestal, even if she could. Each, therefore, will be in humble adoration of the other, thanks to the poetry of courtship.

Is work of higher quality better? For the above purposes, I am honestly inclined to think that the question, outside of extraordinary circumstances, highly irrelevant. Where the question of artistic quality enters into relevance is the ability of our young man to enjoy his own work and perhaps for others to appreciate the art. It is better, I think, to have representations that can be enjoyed without necessarily any knowledge that they refer to anyone. To love a Shakespearean sonnet does not require that you know anything about its subject. What an honor it must be, though, to be the subject of a much beloved work of art. How much greater would our young man's tribute be if it turned out to be a great work of art? The question of quality is most relevant for our young man's striving with all his being to do something great, but even if he did, he and his lady would still face certain happy humility.

The question of the third party, those who might enjoy a work of art, eschews the position of an interesting possibility, as seen in the latter case, and assumes a position of prominence when it comes to making art reflecting God and the things of God. True, Handel could have kept the Messiah all to himself as his own little worshipful exercise, but why? It reduces the capacity of the artistic process to honor the Living God. The creation and enjoyment of virtually any sort of art (real art, that is) can be directed thus, but for the sake of illustration, let us suppose that I am working on an oratorio on the story of Gideon (I am not, though it would be awesome), the likes of which the world has never seen. The creative work itself makes the first half of the artistic process. The release of the completed work makes the second. The former allows for individual worship through artistic creation, and the second allows that same worship to expand into the community.

To conclude, I think it is only right to return to the music and poetry of courtship. Some of the finest examples of both music and poetry were written to this end. A look at the life of G. K. Chesterton, from whom I borrowed most of the ideas in the above article, shows that he well understood the importance of such poetry. He has left us some fine examples to be followed, as has the Bard, as has Petrarch, as have more than I can count. There are even some among the works of Poe. John Keats is a unique case, as he composed his while he died of tuberculosis, in lieu of being able to actually form a romance. Landing once again upon that word, Romance, I think it is best to leave the conclusion to Chesterton. This is really his argument, anyway, if he wants it. Romance, says Chesterton in the first chapter of Orthodoxy, is Christianity's answer to the double spiritual need for the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is adventure and homeland at once. It is a paradox, but it is true.