Fate and freedom in Marvell and Milton

The concluding image in Marvell’s lyric ‘The Definition of Love’ starkly depicts the separation intrinsic to the lovers’ existence:

As lines (so loves) oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet:

But ours so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

                                (25 – 8)

The perfection and harmony of their love paradoxically prevent them ever from combining or meeting ‘as one’. That is to say, the lovers will never meet to consummate their affections and their union can only remain emotional or intellectual, and certainly not physical. Yet this mixture of ‘Despair / Upon Impossibility’ (3 – 4) does not in any respect demean the value of the love or lessen its intensity: rather, it is from this that it reaches its perfection by transcending the ordinary. In finding a way to resist Fate’s ‘tyrannic power’ (16) they accomplish a fuller union than they otherwise would:

        Therefore the love which us doth bind

        But Fate so enviously debars,

        Is the conjunction of the mind,

        And opposition of the stars.

                                (29 – 32)

Although Fate has placed them ‘as the distant Poles’ and any physical union will only be the result of freak planetary accident, they have nonetheless defied her and found solace in pursuing more than ‘feeble Hope’ (7). They have overcome the immediate circumstances of the universe and uncovered a richer ‘divine’ existence within themselves, not dependent on the ‘vain’ and ‘jealous’ motions of Fate.

The position that the confident speaker of ‘The Definition of Love’ expounds is similar to that reached by Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost. At the end of Book IX the agony of their fall appeared irremediable:

                Thus they in mutual accusation spent

        The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,

        And of their vain contést appear’d no end.

                                (IX.1187 – 89)

Adam and Eve, and all humanity that will come from them, appear here as inherently ‘lost’ and at war with themselves. Like the fallen angels of Book II who ‘found no end’ to their arguments, lost in ‘wand’ring mazes’ (II.561), at this stage of the Fall the couple appear doomed to eternal, futile dispute. There is a hint at l. 1188 suggesting that if they look to themselves, rather than constantly accusing each other, they might move closer to resolving their argument. It is eventually by doing so that they manage to find what Michael calls ‘A Paradise within thee, happier far’ (XII.587). Eve is reassured that her Fall is in one sense blessed because it paves the way for the later arrival of the Son and the potential to reverse the direction of her transgression into a state higher than that from which she fell: ‘By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore’ (XII.623). It is likewise by reassessing his position in the world he inhabits that Adam finds consolation: he learns that he will become ‘worldly wise / By simply meek’. The inconsolable grief he felt in Book XI when shown the images of future devastation on earth has been replaced with a renewed faith in his own capacity to change the meaning of his and Eve’s situation:

Join now!

                all this good of evil shall produce,

        And evil turn to good

                                (XII.470 – 1).

The poem concludes with the postlapsarian couple confident in their own strength as they leave Paradise, aware that though the world they are entering will be harsher than the endlessly bountiful Eden, by looking beyond their immediate physical setting they can find new significances and value in it. Adam and Eve are not constrained by their fate: they possess the power to free themselves from the cruel reality of their environment, in a sense to overcome fate. Their freedom to do so, although ...

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