The poem of ecstasy: Finding the meaning of love

When the Roman poet Catullus first wrote “Give me a thousand kisses, or a hundred more” to his lover Lesbia, I wonder, was he trying to describe this sense of attachment that we call love? Is love a mere creation that humans invented to explain their arousal of dopamine? Or is it something else?

People might have different answers to the meaning of love. As an unfortunate humanities student, I tried to find mine in Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.”

I have been fond of Stoppard and his work for a long time. Maybe it was the personality of this Czech-born school dropout — who somehow produced many of the most beautiful plays in the 20th century — that triggered my interest. Or maybe it was because I was fascinated by his genuine works that comment on the nature of the lives of human beings. More than anything, I appreciate the way that time and emotions, in his work, seem to resemble specks of flying sand that we are unable to grasp or hold. Rather, we can only wait for them to pass by and disappear.

In Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” the two protagonists, originally minor characters in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” realize that they are characters written and manipulated by Shakespeare and therefore unable to act with their own agency. What follows is an inundating sense of nihilism: They live without objective meanings or value, but only for the pleasure of Shakespeare and the audience.

So one might presume that this is mirrored in the play “The Invention of Love.” Upon first glance, we appear on well-trodden ground: A. E. Housman, a Latin scholar, has died. But because of his classics major, he arrives at the Acheron, the Greek underworld. While there, he has a flashback of his own life, talks with his younger self and reflects on his (unsurprisingly) unrequited love for the straight male athlete Moses Jackson.

Housman realizes, after his death, that love is not the fantastic Disneyland sensation that people portray it to be, but rather a selfish invention. As he reflects, he realizes that he knew, perhaps even from the very beginning, that Jackson’s stereotypical heterosexual profile would mean Housman’s unrequited love was doomed to fail miserably. 

What is the point of loving, then? Unrequited love, for sure, seems to bring nothing good. In most circumstances, love brings desire yet also despair — pleasure yet also wrath. Catullus expressed his love for Lesbia in poetry. Still, when the passion declined, they eventually faced a painful break-up that would undoubtedly get 1 million views. If only WiFi existed back then. 

The story of Catullus, just like the unrequited love of Housman, demonstrates that love is an impermanent and trembling idea. It resembles a duckweed finding a home in a forgotten pond abounded by the tenderness of nature.

Reading Stoppard, Catullus, and many other works has shown me that this thing we call “love” takes on many different forms. The universal happiness — symbolised by a thousand kisses, and a hundred more — memorialized by Catullus was love. But the dirty breakup and the tragic, sorrowful and selfish relationship between Moses and Housman is also love. 

When Housman reaches Acheron, he starts chatting with random people, one of whom is his old classmates from Oxford, Oscar Wilde. As the pair converses, Wilde describes his distaste for Oxford, an unfortunate bout of syphilis and his love for Bosie Douglas that resulted in him going to jail for sodomy. 

As I read, I wondered, is it his love that put him in prison? Wilde disagrees. He explains, it was his invention of love that drove him to commit sodomy — his manufactured vision of what love should be drove him to fall in love with Bosie. Wilde created a fantastical and imagined picture of an idealized Bosie. Thus, his own invention of love led him to his demise: Despite knowing the consequences, he commits sodomy with Bosie.

If we view love merely as one of the common emotions we experience in our lifetime, we might never truly love someone, as we eventually grow accustomed to all kinds of feelings in life. But if love is an invention we choose to create for comfort, self-affirmation or desire, we discover not only love but ourselves. 

So we, as Housman once did, wonder “why [the lover] would not stay for me to stand and gaze.” We wonder why an “unaccustomed tear trickling down … why does [the] glib tongue stumble to silence” when our expectation of a relationship fails our manufactured love. 

We project an idea of love that hardly exists to fulfill our need for attention, care and self-discovery. 

When Housman, still reflecting on his life, talks with one of his old colleagues, the colleague describes Housman as a Spartan warrior who was willing to sacrifice himself to prove his love for Moses Jackson. But, as Stoppard said, such an unrequited love is only “a piece of ice on his fists, [that] can not hold or let go.”

Housman chose to grasp the icy love because, as a gay man in the late 19th century, he desperately wanted to be understood, even at the cost of his life. But such a projection of wishes on a straight male, Moses Jackson, could not produce anything but sorrow. 

This pure selfishness of love inspired Housman to try and use death to enlighten himself about his own projection of an invented love. It is just as hard as not letting Orpheus turn back and look at Eurydice — in the Greek tale, Orpheus rescues Eurydice from the underworld and Hades permits the lovers to leave with one condition: Hhe can not turn back to look at her until they’ve reached the earthly ground. Tragically, however, the intrinsic selfishness of love drives Orpheus to break his vow, leaving Eurydice, this model of love created by Orpheus, to vanish once more. 

So is love a nihilistic concept? Is it true that across the years and even in death, love will ultimately fail us, because it is an invented reflection of ourselves that we struggle to chase and understand?

A. E. Housman, besides being a Latin Scholar, was a great poet. In his collection of poems, “A Shropshire Lad,” a must-read if you are an aimless British teenager wandering the London underground, he depicts his attitude toward the idea of love. Whether love is a nihilistic concept, a genuine emotion that brings people joy or a mix of both that rotates like seasons, he urges the reader to explore love within the bounds of this limited and mutable life.

Leslie Tong PO ’29 is from California. She loves films, history and literature. She is reading “Tale of Genji” now for her class but loves it greatly.