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Know about all the important short questions from The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell in very lucid and impressive style and language.
Short Questions from The Definition of Love
1. How does the speaker-lover in Marvell’s poem The Definition of Love?
In Andrew Marvell’s fine metaphysical love lyric The Definition of Love the speaker-lover is a victim of chronic melancholy born of unrequited love. He defines his love as a sublime power having strange and high aim. It is begotten by Despair upon Impossibility, that is, a frustrated longing for the unreachable. In other words, Despair and Impossibility are the parents of the speaker lover’s love. The speaker lover, thus, mystifies the nature and function of his love. one understands that this is spiritual love or Platonic love.
2. What does “magnanimous Despair” imply in Marvell’s The Definition of Love?
Ans. In Marvell’s metaphysical love lyric, The Definition of Love the speaker lover deifies his despair. Despair born of his lovelessness is personified, Despair is a god crowning him as sovereign king in the kingdom of love. The word ‘magnanimous’ is ploysemic. It has three different meanings large-hearted, having sublime soul and strongly determined. The speaker-lover states that only high-minded or determined despair can inject in his heart such a sublime feeling as his love is. In short, ‘magnanimous Despair’ is that sadness that does not destroy, but reconstructs, though spiritually.
3. Explain the image in which Hope is envisaged in Marvell’s The Definition of Love. (Short Questions from The Definition of Love)
Ans. In The Definition of Love the speaker-lover’s mysterious and strange love is born of ‘magnanimous Despair’, not of Hope. Hope has nothing to do with this grand love. Hope is envisaged as a feeble bird unable to fly to the stellar height of his love. Though the gaudy wings of Hope go on fluttering, it
can never reach the skyey this height.
4. How does Marvell in his The Definition of Love represent Fate in relation to love?
Ans. In the kingdom of spiritual love of which the speaker-lover in Marvell’s The Definition of Love is the sovereign monarch Fate is the Machiavellian villain. Always hostile to the fruition of perfect love, Fate not merely drives iron wedge in their love, but herself stands on the way of its success. Fate is jealous of the perfection of love, the union of the lovers boomerangs upon her thereby dethroning her. Accordingly, it is the fiat of Fate that ideal lovers cannot be united. They must remain in antipodal distance.
5. “Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel / Not by themselves to be embraced” Explain the metaphysical conceit here.
Ans. This is an instance of a fine metaphysical conceit. The lines evoke the image of the globe of love in which the love of the lover and the lady serves as the pivot. The world of love thus rotates around the speaker-lover’s love. This has the identification with the earthly globe that rotated around its axis. Thus, the heterogeneous ideas are synthecised by the poet’s imagination.
6. “But ours so truly parallel / Though infinite can never meet” – Explain the scientific idea / metaphysical conceit embedded here.
Ans. With a view to pointing out the ever unreachable success of his love the speaker lover here makes use of a scientific idea, an idea from geometry. One knows that parallel lines never meet each other. Ordained by Fate the lovers have become just two parallel lines. The use of this geometrical idea in the context of love is undoubtedly an instance of metaphysical conceit. The heterogeneous ideas are the lovers and the parallel lines.