Air and Angels

Psyche et L'Amour (Psyche and Cupid), 1889, William Bouguereau

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,

Before I knew thy face or name;

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,

Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be;

   Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see,

   But since my soul, whose child love is,

Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,

   More subtle than the parent is

Love must not be, but take a body too,

   And therefore what thou wert, and who

     I bid love ask, and now

That it assume thy body, I allow,

And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. 

Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought, 

And so more steadily to have gone,

With wares which would sink admiration,

I saw, I had love's pinnace overfraught,

   Every thy hair for love to work upon

Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;

   For, nor in nothing, nor in things

Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;

   Then as an angel, face and wings

Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,

   So thy love may be my love's sphere;

     Just such disparity

As is 'twixt air and angels' purity, 

'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

~ by John Donne

Le Ravissement de Psyche (The Rapture of Psyche), 1895, William Bouguereau

Donne is again writing about love, not just any love but pure, immortal love. He talks about love in the abstract and unseen in the first stanza as he writes, "Twice or thrice had I loved thee,/ Before I knew thy face or name" and then begins to talk about love in a more tangible form at the end of the first stanza. As Donne continues to the second stanza he writes of the ethereal nature of love that exists in a free an pure state like that of angels and air. In two stanzas Donne moves from discussing love in a tangible, earthly form to an elevated and heavenly love.

We Are Made One with What We Touch and See

We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change. 

Tristan and Isold, Rogelio de Egusquiza Image at Bonzasheila

With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. . . 


One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good. . . . 

A Nymph in the Forest, Charles Amable Lenoir (1860-1929). 
Oil on Canvas. 138.4 x 90.8 cm. Copyright Christies Images Ltd.

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this daedal-fashioned 
earth less fair,
That we are nature's heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass. 








And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul! 




We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

The Rapture (Abduction) of Psyche (Le Ravissement de Psyche), 1895. William Bougereau (1825-1905)

by Oscar Wilde