The Nature of 'Love/s' in Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Paramita Dutta

Mario Ruoppolo has fallen in love, and as he avers passionately to Pablo Neruda, ‘really, really in love’. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, who has been exiled to Italy for his communist ideas, is staying there on a beautiful island where Mario is the temporary postman, appointed to deliver letters only to him. The first word that Neruda says, on finding out that Mario’s beloved is called Beatrice is ‘Dante’. The semi literate postman does not understand what the great poet means. It is left to Neruda to elucidate that Dante Alighieri, a great poet, ‘fell for a certain Beatrice’ and that ‘Beatrices have inspired boundless love.’ Mario’s intention is not to bother Don Pablo, but he has a very simple request. He’d like Neruda to help him out and write a poem on his behalf for his Beatrice. Neruda walks out visibly ruffled and remarks, ‘I don’t even know her.’ He explains, ‘A poet needs to know the object of his inspiration’ and ‘I can’t invent something out of nothing’ (emphases mine). Mario, who had previously laboured to understand the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’ in his discussions about poetry with Neruda, quite fails to appreciate the demands and nature of poetic inspiration and exceedingly disgruntled, complains that if Neruda were to make such a fuss over writing a single poem then winning the Noble Prize would forever remain a distant dream for him.

I have chosen this sequence from the heart warming and poignant film Il Postino (The Postman) directed by Michael Radford[i] to begin my discussion, because it talks about love and essentially about poetry inspired by love. Neruda’s poetic credo as described in the scene above would reinforce the common perception that a love poem needs to be inspired by and addressed to a specific person and that ‘something’ cannot be invented out of ‘nothing’. If we look at the literary tradition of writing sonnets and love poetry, we will see that in thirteenth century Italy, Dante addressed his passionate sonnet sequence La Vita Nuova to Beatrice Portinari. A century later, Petrarch in his Rime Sparse or Canzoniere detailed his tormented love for his beloved Laura. When the vogue of writing sonnets travelled to England from Italy, we have in the sixteenth century Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella addressed to his beloved, the married Penelope Rich and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti written for his future wife Elizabeth Boyle.

The ‘object[s] of inspiration’ of the poets mentioned above are all creatures of flesh and blood and can be assigned specific names. It is only with Shakespeare’s Sonnets (published in 1609) that this simple logic falls apart. Who is the elusive ‘W. H.’ who is regarded as the ‘onlie begetter’ of the one hundred and fifty four sonnets on the title page of his sequence? The thirst for finding out the addressee/s of Shakespeare’s poems have churned out speculations, debates and conjectures through centuries especially by those critics, who unlike Mario above, refuse to treat poems as fictional constructs, as mere figments of a fertile imagination.

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