![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The male gaze presiding much of love poetry, and even here subjecting the female body to an objectification of silence, cannot think of love without being able to visualize it with such certainty. Without a physical incarnation of love in the woman’s body, it is impossible for the narrator to stumble upon anything but a “lovely, glorious nothing”. The angels, who were held as masculine figures in the contemporary times, could manifest only vis-à-vis the medium of air, which was also the purest of the four media of air, water, soil and fire. Love cannot originate in an abstruse, inexplicable fashion, and its codification, as such is possible only because it is mired to the flesh. The note of reverence detected in the initial four lines is unmistakably Petrarchan, but it is invoked only to be derided. ![]() The beloved’s body provides a haven to the soul of love itself. Unlike the angels who manifest themselves with the concomitance of voice or light, love, as idealistic an enterprise it is does not derive its origins from the spirit. The poet ponders redolently upon the past when he was engrossed with a woman, the effect of whose remembrance has the same delicate effect on him as does the emergence of angels from air. Markers of name and such become insignificant before the expression of love, which must manifest through the medium of the human body. ![]()
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