BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Two Gentlemen in Touraine.

(By Richard Sudbury.)

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Among French Inns.


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The Spirit of Love and other Poems.


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The Wounded Eros.


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THE WOUNDED EROS

BY

CHARLES GIBSON

AUTHOR OF
THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND OTHER POEMS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE


BOSTON
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR
Printed at the Riverside Press Cambridge
1908


COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY CHARLES GIBSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In these Sonnets, the author has set down the record of a passion which makes one more of those stories of the heart written by the poets who have joined the company of Sir Philip Sidney. The company of poets is a glorious one, and the poetic stories are among the most touching expressions of human experience.

We can find no difference between these great chronicles of the heart, beyond the fact of love winning or losing, except what time has made in the fashions of art between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. One cannot believe that the complex psychology in the interpretation of modern love makes that love essentially a different thing in man’s nature then in its more primal expression, when social conditions were less reticent and self-conscious in the tameless civilization of the mid-sixteenth century. Here is the ancient and immemorial love of man for woman, whose only change has been the difference between Adam waking to behold Eve beside him and the conventional introduction of the sexes which the custom of the twentieth century demands. The influence of time upon love is not more literal in the science of sociology than in the art of poetry, and one has but to take a typical Elizabethan amatory sonnet-sequence and compare it with Mr. Meredith’s “Modern Love,” Mr. Blunt’s “Esther,” or Mr. Gibson’s “The Wounded Eros,” to be convinced of this opinion. The elemental note in the great sonnet cycles, from Petrarch’s to those of our own day, being the realization of an objective ideal in the opposite sex, with the interpretation of it varying as human society progressed in its ethical, moral, and political aspects, there remains—what has always made the intensity of interest in this poetic form—the circumstance of personality giving tone and temperament to the particulars of this episodic drama of man’s heart. Apart from any consideration of the perfection of art in which any series of related love-sonnets may be dressed, this question of the personal attitude compels interest. It is the private chamber of a human heart opened without reserve, for the intrusion of strangers to behold the truth of a bitter or joyous experience, as fate may decree.

In this book of sonnets, there is touched a deep note of pathos in the unrequited passion of a man who tells the circumstances of his own love. It is so before all things, because it is the direct speech of a heart without subtlety. I mean, that he invents nothing that is illusory between himself and the object of his desire. If subtlety had been in the heart of this lover, one might have expected more frequent verbal conceits in the methods of telling his tale; but the lack of them by no means diminishes the importance of its human interest. Indeed, the modern sonnet has gained in this respect over its predecessors of the English Renaissance. And in Mr. Gibson’s sequence the interest is entirely a modern one.

These sonnets of the “Wounded Eros” keep, moreover, the dignity that belongs to the character of thought and feeling employed by the best examples. If less abstract in any symbolistic purpose, they gain narratively by allusions sufficiently definite to link each phase of emotion into a story,—the story old, but ever new, of passion in a man’s heart for a woman’s love,—and the character and progress of it unfolded in associations wholly spiritual. The one here celebrated leaves us with the impression of being a myth created in the fervent imagination of the poet. Her vague personality hovers in uncertain imagery about the edges of the poet’s metaphors. One feels her influence behind the poet’s conception of her virtues, her faults, and her physical charms, rather than by gaining any perception of her identity through speech or action. Yet it was around a similar ideal, or vision, that Dante and Petrarch wove stories of devotion and rhapsodic worship: and Shakespeare has been able to mystify the curiosity of three centuries of prying criticism and literary history.

Despite the revelation of the lover’s heart in this poem, the poet has veiled, if indeed she exists at all in any world more palpable than Arcadia, the object of his affection behind the profuse chronicling of his own feelings. It is through him the story proceeds for us; his nature acting as an impressionable substance upon which her influence shapes itself into mood and manner. Yet it is more often from memory and recollection—the consecration of a dream—that the image weaves its spell upon the worshipper:—