Explore "The Definition of Love" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MY love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by despair
Upon impossibility.
Magnanimous despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive / Where my extended soul is fixed; / But fate does iron wedges drive, / And always crowds itself betwixt.
For fate with jealous eyes does see / Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; / Their union would her ruin be, / And her tyrannic power depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel / Us as the distant poles have placed / (Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel), / Not by themselves to be embraced,
Unless the giddy heaven fall, / And earth some new convulsion tear, / And, us to join, the world should all / Be cramped into a planisphere.
As lines, so loves oblique may well / Themselves in every angle greet; / But ours, so truly parallel, / Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind, / But fate so enviously debars, / Is the conjunction of the mind, / And opposition of the stars.