Schmaltz just doesn’t sit well with traditional English sensibilities. We spend hundreds of millions of pounds on Valentine’s Day each year whilst acknowledging that it’s a load of commercial tosh.
There’s little point in wrapping love in a lace doily when at heart it’s a frill-free experience. Lovely as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How do I love thee? is, we’re more honest with ourselves if we savour particularly those great love poems which possess an anti-romantic streak. Direct, matter-of-fact verses will often chime better with our general disposition.
That’s true today perhaps more than ever. We’re no longer genteel enough to take affront to the threat of worms trying a Coy Mistress’ virginity, or to John Donne’s sexual metaphor in The Flea. Who knows, perhaps the current vogue for vampires even further intensifies their erotic appeal. The familiar motif of treasuring a lover’s scarf, or of Warming Her Pearls (Carol Ann Duffy) is totally subsumed by the outer-body carnality of Donne’s fantastic first stanza:
‘Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny’st me is;
Mee it suck’d first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
Confesse it, this cannot be said
A sinne, or shame, or losse of maidenhead…’
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