Eloisa to Abelard: Alexander Pope
“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;”
Eloisa to Abelard, when perused in the context of Pope’s Catholic upbringing, makes for an interesting read. He places a certain popular incongruity into his text, contrasting what pans out as an extremely descriptive account of ‘true love’ with separation due to the force of society and with the bounds of religion. The background narrative is mostly cliché. Eloisa and her much older teacher Abelard embroiled in an illicit affair, which once discovered leads to violence directed towards the latter. Both consequently turn to a religious life, with Eloisa becoming a nun, uncomfortable in what she seems to think is snakeskin and Abelard joining a Monastery. This text is also the source of the title of the 2004 romantic sci-fi ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. (For a more detailed understanding of a plot, you may consider reading the actual tale of Héloïse and her tutor Peter Abelard, which is available in plenty on the internet.)
Eloisa narrates her epistle with heavy and vivid emotion. Her solitary thoughts place her as a ‘neighbour of the dead’ due to her lovelorn situation, yet her address to Abelard almost blames him.
“While prostrate here in humble grief I lie,
Kind, virtuous drops just gath’ring in my eye,
While praying, trembling, in the dust I roll,
And dawning grace is op’ning on my soul:
Come, if thou dar’st, all charming as thou art!
Oppose thyself to Heav’n; dispute my heart;
Come, with one glance of those deluding eyes
Blot out each bright idea of the skies;
Take back that grace, those sorrows, and those tears;
Take back my fruitless penitence and pray’rs;
Snatch me, just mounting, from the blest abode;
Assist the fiends, and tear me from my God!”
Her reassurance to herself that ’twas no sin to love’ is a repeated rendition that is seen in love-epics echoed through time and history.
“From lips like those what precept fail’d to move?
Too soon they taught me ’twas no sin to love.
Back through the paths of pleasing sense I ran,
Nor wish’d an Angel whom I lov’d a Man.
Dim and remote the joys of saints I see;
Nor envy them, that heav’n I lose for thee.”
It again makes me wonder what goes behind art’s continued and self-perpetuating obsession with ‘Starr-crost’ love. Maybe it stems from us imagining a possibility of positive catharsis, or just the ease of understanding one-dimensional characters who believe they become (or die or separate as) something more (excuse my slight jilt of romance as a genre). The only interesting point in her confessional is the generous sprinkle of sexual overtones, uncommon even in modern romances, due to the surprising dichotomy between what we may term as ‘love’ and ‘lust’. Now, that may have arisen from Eloisa’s years of sexual repression due to her ‘deep solitudes’ in a nunnery after having been exposed to sensual pleasures, but it may have also been easier for Pope to express such ideas being a man puppeteering the voice of a passionate woman. This intersection of Pope and Eloisa may be noticed more overtly in the last stanza.
“And sure, if fate some future bard shall join
In sad similitude of griefs to mine,
Condemn’d whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more;
Such if there be, who loves so long, so well;
Let him our sad, our tender story tell;
The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint ’em, who shall feel ’em most.”
Eloisa states that whoever may feel her emotions may be able to present it best, suggesting that Pope makes a slightly arrogant claim. Conversely, he is heartbroken and I am being insensitive. Unfortunately, for my lack of enough insight into his personal life, I must not comment any further.
