Valentine's Day: Love's Two Arrows

Cupid Awakens Psyche (by Canova)

Hearts, sweets, roses -- Cupid and romance -- a day to celebrate Eros.  The romantic objectives of Valentine's Day are expressed in many places, including in a text much older than Valentine or even Cupid for that matter: The Song of Solomon: 

"Come ... blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits."

Well!  That's HAWT!

People forget that Cupid (or Eros in Greek) bears two arrows: gold and lead.  The gold makes people fall in love, the other fall out.  Shakespeare, of course, plays (to pun...) with this in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Puck, sent on his mission by Oberon, makes Titania fall in love with the next being she sees.

Unfortunately, the Queen of the Fairies, Titania -- well above being physically mortal but not beyond suffering infatuation's unpredictable power -- gazes upon Bottom, an egotistical weaver in the town.  She falls for this ass-of-a-man who, not ironically, has grown the head of an actual ass to fit his personality.  Ever meet a "complete ass"?  Bottom is the man, inside and out.

Men Have Occasionally Fallen for Some Ass, but a Queen!?  (Source: nickbottomsblog)

Titania falls out of love with Bottom when Oberon has mercy on her and corrects her vision:

TITANIA
My Oberon, what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.

OBERON
There lies your love.

TITANIA
How came these things to pass?
O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now! (4.1.77-81)

See?  The whole problem is with the eyes: "...young men's love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes." Shakespeare again.  (Note: it says "young men's...eyes.")  And, of course, love--or at least infatuation --makes you blind.  Do ya think?  Titania -- in love with an ass: she can't see the faults in him that everyone else sees.  Her faerie companions can only roll their eyes as she dotes on this butt of a being.

In Shakespeare's day the idea was that the faculty of vision worked by "eye-beams" -- that is, light proceeded from people's eyes, like a beam, and illumined an object so they could see it.  Love, and especially "Love at first sight," occurred when two people's eye-beams crossed and -- Lo! --  "I loved you from the first time I laid eyes on you!" is how it all goes down.

Primarily, Love makes us do stupid things -- or at least contemplate doing them.  What is the fairly recent lyric (un-poetic, pop, and cliche)?  "I'd catch a grenade for ya -- yeah yeah yeah."  And do we ever wish Bruno would, please?  Not really -- not all the time.  But I bet he wouldn't.  And I bet most of the poets who said they'd climb mountains, swim oceans, slay dragons, and go off Questing through the many ages didn't actually do what they had promised in the heat of infatuation.  What does a teenager promise when he's wanting some?  Anything.  Still.  That's how love makes us feel: that we'd "do anything for love" -- but not to quote Meatloaf.

Even the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in the 1600s (better known as the poet John Donne -- his name rhymes with "dunn") felt it: 

Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
.     .     .     .     .
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.

That's Donne writing to his wife -- "Elegy XIX:  To His Mistress [Wife] upon Going to Bed."  I bet Donne did her.  I bet she indeed was un-Donne and then completely Donne. And if Donne was done before she was, I'd say he was one rotten rector in Love's Temple.

For the "Puritan" and "agelast" (ἀγέλαστος) [Link] among us, I will say "yes, of course -- there is agape [ἀγάπη], divine love, and love is more than sex, and sex without love is emptiness."  Well, yeah.  But if that's all you know about it, I'm going to assume your bedroom is pretty boring.  You might just recall that the Song of Solomon is...in the Bible, right?  No explaining that away.  Think of it this way: what's agape without consummation?  What's love without the beautiful (and pointed) line from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Ceremony of Marriage): "With my body I thee worship"?

St Valentine was, about the year 270 AD (or CE if you like), arrested, beaten to death with clubs, and then beheaded for secretly marrying Christian couples (during a time when Christians were persecuted) -- but that's not quite the whole story: Emperor Claudius II had banned marriages because he had a hard time getting men to join the army: they were too devoted to their wives and girlfriends (or "besotted" with them, as one scholar says: the men being "in the grip of  Ἄτη, or "Ate" -- pronounced "AH-tay").  The story has it that the Saint sent a final note to a girl who had become a friend while he was in prison: the jailer's daughter.  He signed it, "your Valentine."

Valentine's Day is a euphemism: it's about Eros, about how Love -- or infatuation, anyway -- makes us feel.  That's Cupid's influence.  Cupidity.  Eroticism.  Desire.  Fawning.  Wobbly knees.  Being a fool for love.  It's about the "hay day in the blood" (Hamlet).  It's the Springtime in the stamen and the pistil and the bee who necked-her.

Like a bee to the flower, we're drawn by something sweet (chocolates), tingly bits (champagne), a come-hither look (Oh, aye!), and a flower dressed (or nearly so) and on display to entice the bee.

One other point: Cupid is not well behaved.  He's usually and perpetually a very naughty lad.  The only time he is behaving is in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), when his wife is present.  Then he's being very good.

Nevertheless, people (and no less Cupid's wife) want some hawtness and nawty on the occasion of Valentine's Day.  Then...?  Even Cupid may find himself shot by his own arrow.