"Marriage As A Problem of Universals" by Dick Davis

Topics discussed in this episode include:
 
-The joy of comparing like-minded poems 
-The Platonic dilemma of romantic love 
-Heroic couplets 
-The Problem of Universals 
-Plato 101 
-The contemptus mundi of Platonism 
-The Renaissance vogue for Platonism 
-Petrarch and the legacy of the Western love lyric 
-Poetic structure as the mirror of thought structure 
-Marriage is inherently anti-Platonic 
-Plato vs. Aristotle 
-Deduction vs. Induction 
-Malachi, Heraclitus, and the Buddha 
-Cyclical vs. Linear enlightenment 
-Marriage as spiritual practice 

Text of poem: 

Marriage As A Problem of Universals

For Meera and Navin Govil 

Marriage is where 
the large abstractions we profess 
are put gently in their small place— 
the holist’s stare 
in love with Man has managed less 
than eyes that love one aging face. 

Marriage believes 
the universals we desire 
are children of a worldly care— 
while Plato grieves 
for stasis, the refining fire 
men pass through is the lives they share. 

Marriages move 
between the symbol and life’s facts, 
from Beauty to this troubled face— 
though what we love 
is Truth, Truth flares and fades in acts 
of local, unrecorded grace. 

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List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2:1 “Marriage As A Problem of Universals” by Dick Davis

            It’s been my experience that one of the small but significant joys of reading poetry is stumbling across a poem you admire that tackles a hyper-specific subject which then reminds you of another poem you admire that treats the same subject. There are of course countless poems about love, death, and nature, but it is only occasionally, unless you are deliberately looking for them, that you discover two poems which have alighted upon the same specialized theme, or the same specialized angle on a more general theme. Once this connection is discovered, there’s often much pleasure and insight to be gained from comparing the two poems, which often reveals not only the complexity of the issue being treated but throws into stark relief the stylistic and temperamental differences of the two poets, which can be fascinating in itself.

            In this episode and the next, I’ll be comparing two charming and thought-provoking poems which both deal with one might call the Platonic dilemma of romantic love: that is to say, the internal rivalry between two impulses that occur when you’re in love with someone: do you love the person for themselves, or love them as a sacramental representative of a universal ideal? Do you prioritize the concrete, or the abstract? Does love properly belong between two individuals who love each other for their own sakes, their own earthly happiness, or is love a means by which individuals use one another to ascend to higher visions of beauty? Even if one grants that both approaches are simultaneously possible, what is the relationship between these two imperatives? These are some of the questions that today’s and next week’s poem attempt to answer. 

            Today’s poem, “Marriage As A Problem Of Universals,” is by the illustrious British poet Dick Davis. Davis, who was born in 1945, is a contemporary master of formal verse who also happens to be the premier translator of Persian poetry into English. If you’ve ever read any Persian poetry put out by Penguin Classics, chances are you’ve read his translations, which merit comparison with John Dryden for their graceful and rigorous mastery of the heroic couplet. 

For those of you who don’t know, a heroic couplet is a set of two iambic pentameter lines that rhyme with one another, typically without any enjambment, which as we will remember is when a statement spills over grammatically from one line to the next. Because the couplet does not spill over, it is called “closed” as opposed to open. Here’s a famous example of heroic couplets from Alexander Pope, from his poem “Eloisa to Abelard:” 

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
 The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
 Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
 Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …

  Unlike the concluding couplet of an English sonnet, heroic couplets tend to follow one another for many lines at a time, and often comprise the entirety of a given poem. Because of their consistent, closed rhymes, heroic couplets give some of the best aural indication of metrical lineation of any form, as well as encourage the production of concise, logical statements in neat little two-line packets. For these reasons, the heroic couplet was highly favored by the rationalist neoclassical poets of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and the couplet is called “heroic” because of its frequent employment for translations of epic poetry during this time period, like in Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid or Pope’s translation of the Iliad. Medieval Persian poetry, though it employs many different meters, is almost always in couplets, therefore Davis has adopted the neoclassical tradition of heroic couplets as the most apt representation of Medieval Persian poetry in English. 

Davis was a dear friend and protégé of Edgar Bowers, my featured poet from Versecrafts’ first episode, so I thought it would be fitting to begin Season 2 with Davis, Bowers’ de facto successor. In one of his poems dedicated to Bowers, Davis talks about writing the elder poet a fan letter and how that led to a profound and fruitful years-long friendship. Inspired by this, several months ago I wrote to Dick myself, and we’ve since become fast friends. He’s a wonderfully kindhearted, hospitable, brilliant man, and I’m honored to speak about his work with you today. 

Before we get into the poem though, let’s talk for a few moments about the title, which might seem a little forbidding at first glance: “Marriage As A Problem of Universals.” The “problem of universals” is a famous problem in philosophy that was hotly debated in the scholastic Middle Ages and remains a matter of contention to this day. The problem in question essentially boils down to this: do properties of objects exist independently of the objects in which they are found? By “property” I mean an identifiable characteristic which is shared between objects—hence, a universal. For example, does the property “redness” somehow exist apart from a mere collection of red objects? Does “circularity” exist apart from a collection of circular objects? What about beauty? goodness? humanness? As you can see, the problem can become very thorny very quickly. 

Plato’s radical answer to this question is perhaps the most famous aspect of his philosophy: he believed that a property, say, “chair-ness,” could only be recognizable in individual chairs if the property itself existed as an existent entity prior to the objects, and that this entity, what he called an idea, could only exist if it was eternal and unchanging—after all, if “chair-ness” were temporary and constantly changing, how could we ever know if something was a chair or not? In order to account for his belief, Plato postulated that in order for our material world to be intelligible, there must also be another world, a world of ideas, where all ideas, like the idea of “chair-ness” or “redness” or “humanness” exist eternally and unchangingly. Furthermore, this world of ideas or forms is the blueprint for our world— nothing in our world could exist without the ideas which give them identity. Our world of gross matter and chaotic mutability is nothing but an imperfect reflection of the far more real world of pristine and perfect ideas. When Plato spoke in The Republic of escaping a show of shadow puppetry inside a cave to contemplate the sunlight outside, he was speaking of abandoning the belief that material objects were real in order to contemplate the true world, the world of ideas. 

This approach to the problem of universals leads Plato into some dangerous territory. If all material things are nothing but crude reflections of ideas, and ideas are the only truth worth pursuing, then material objects, including animals and people, become nothing more than instruments in the philosopher-mystic’s quest to reach a higher truth—in and of themselves, they are worth nothing. In relation to this point of view, a person in love is a very interesting case: on the one hand, they have become passionately attached to one particular person—this would seem to be the opposite of Platonic thinking, which always aims for the universal idea. On the other hand, the intense experience of love for another person may convince the lover to investigate what it is they love about that person—their beauty and their goodness—and motivate them to seek those qualities in themselves. Thus, the beloved becomes a stepping stone to an even higher love, a love for ideas, for truth itself, a process which Plato outlines in his famous dialogue on love, The Symposium. 

This relationship between the lover and the Platonic ideal is complicated even further by Western intellectual history. During the late Middle Ages, Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, was the overwhelming influence on Western education and philosophy. Over time however, Aristotle came to be unjustly associated with stale, dry, dogmatic book learning, and as the reforming agenda of the Renaissance began to gain traction, Plato and his more explicitly religious successor Plotinus came to be seen as a much more exciting, mystical, even magical alternative. Plato’s view of love as a means by which one could ascend to divine truth became engrained into Renaissance thinking, and by extension into Renaissance poetry. Petrarch, who did more than anyone else to popularize the love sonnet, wrote his poetry largely in the shadow of Platonic ideas. Because Petrarch became, for many centuries, the gold standard of lyric poetry, so too did Platonic attitudes about love become the norm for European love poetry up until, believe it or not, the 20th century. This is why so much of canonical Western love poetry is not about the specific characteristics of the beloved or her personality, but rather how divinely beautiful she is, how dazzlingly unearthly she is. Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 130, “My mistresses’ eyes are nothing like the sun” is a cheeky satire of this convention, though Shakespeare himself was very often guilty of using it. This Platonic, Petrarchan flavor led to some beautiful poetry which entrancingly melds the erotic and the theological, but it also resulted in a great deal of superficiality and monotony in Western expressions of love, a superficiality and monotony that we have still not entirely recovered from. 

 The tension between love for the individual and love for the abstract truth for brings us back to the dilemma I mentioned in the beginning of the episode. It is with this context in mind that we can now examine Davis’s poem with understanding. 

            The poem goes like this: 

Marriage As A Problem of Universals: 

For Meera and Navin Govil

            Marriage is where

the large abstractions we profess

are put gently in their small place—

            the holist’s stare

in love with Man has managed less

than eyes that love one aging face. 

            Marriage believes

the universals we desire

are children of a worldly care—

            while Plato grieves

for stasis, the refining fire

men pass through is the lives they share.

            Marriages move

between the symbol and life’s facts,

from Beauty to this troubled face—

            though what we love

is Truth, Truth flares and fades in acts

of local, unrecorded grace. 

             This poem is composed of three sestets for a total of eighteen lines, and each sestet rhymes ABCABC, a rhyme scheme which effectively splits each sestet into two tercets, a structural feature which is further emphasized by the fact that the first and fourth lines of each sestet are in iambic dimeter, the remaining lines in iambic tetrameter. Why might Davis have chosen this formal arrangement? Observe that the trochaic substitution “Marriage” forcefully begins each of these otherwise almost entirely iambic sestets. This use of anaphora not only gives rhetorical momentum to the poem, but it also informs us that each of these three stanzas are going to discuss the institution of marriage—the poet has thus visually organized his thought so that he can make three main points on a single topic. 

The first stanza, which begins with “marriage is where” offers a general statement about marriage. The second stanza, which begins with “marriage believes” goes further to assert a moral claim on behalf of marriage. Finally, the third stanza, which begins with the phrase “marriages move” offers a summarizing statement on what marriages actually do. The poem thus attempts to make a comprehensive argument about the nature of marriage by taking a claim and examining three different facets of it. Because each sestet is further subdivided by rhythm and rhyme into two tercets, Davis is able to control not only the logical organization of thought between stanzas, but within stanzas. In every sestet, the first tercet makes a claim which is then elaborated or commented upon by the second tercet. Because the second tercet entirely mirrors both the metrical shape and rhymes of the first tercet, a call-and-response effect is created which offers a kind of sonic, choral strength to the argument which it would not otherwise have. Marvelously controlled, the sound is the servant of sense. 

Let’s begin again with the first stanza: 

Marriage is where

the large abstractions we profess

are put gently in their small place—

            the holist’s stare

in love with Man has managed less

than eyes that love one aging face. 

In the first half of the stanza, Davis claims that marriage fundamentally changes our view of the world—the “large abstractions,” which we may take to mean the “universals” of the title, are humbled, are seen as less important than they once were. Though general ideas fulfill an important function, they are seen to perform a smaller role than they were once given credit for. The second half of the stanza clarifies and warrants this claim. Davis remarks that the holist, which is to say the person concerned almost entirely with abstract ideas, universals which apply to whole genera rather than particular specimens, has not accomplished as much by their abstract and general love for mankind—their rosy-eyed humanitarianism— than has a person, presumably a married person, who dedicates themselves to loving a specific individual. Davis thus makes his position clear from the outset—he is anti-Platonist and believes the institution of marriage is itself inherently anti-Platonist. This tracks when we consider that most Platonist-tinged love poetry addresses a forbidden, chaste, unconsummated, unrequited or brand-new love, and has historically had little to say about marital bliss. What marriage does, Davis claims, is bring you down from the clouds of general ideas about love to focus on actually caring for one particular person, and that this is a far more effective way of loving than to simply profess a general love for humanity. It’s important to clarify that Davis is not saying that a general love for humankind is necessarily a bad thing—he’s simply observing that this kind of love has far less of an impact on our actual lives than the intimate and unique love we share with other individuals, and that collectively, individual cases of love do far more to better the world than vague assertions of universal love. With the image of the “aging face,” Davis emphasizes the timeless nature of true romantic love, love that depends neither on a philosophical stance, nor on physical beauty, but a true and passionate affection for the soul of the beloved. 

Let’s begin again, and continue on through the next stanza: 

Marriage is where

the large abstractions we profess

are put gently in their small place—

            the holist’s stare

in love with Man has managed less

than eyes that love one aging face. 

            Marriage believes

the universals we desire

are children of a worldly care—

            while Plato grieves

for stasis, the refining fire

men pass through is the lives they share.

            Here in this second stanza, Davis refines his argument. It is not simply that particulars are superior to general ideas—rather, “the universals we desire/are children of a worldly care.” Davis claims, that is, that if we do want to achieve a real understanding of general ideas, we can only approach them through our study and care for particulars of the world. This might sound a little bit like Plato’s idea that we can ascend to the contemplation of ideas through the contemplation of particulars, but the argument is actually far more Aristotelian. Whereas Plato believed that worldly objects were inferior reflections of ideas and sought to use objects merely as a means to an end, Aristotle believed, like Davis does, that ideas, though important, are first and foremost the “children” of particular objects. That is, rather than ideas being the cause and the material world being the imperfect effect, it is the world which is the cause of our ideas about it—by studying the world, we can come to identify categories and patterns which apply to it, and these ideas are only useful insofar as they help us to describe the world. Plato’s approach uses deductive, top-down reasoning, imposing order onto the world from a pre-existent theory of ideas. Aristotle’s approach uses inductive, bottom-up reasoning, what we today would call empirical or scientific reasoning, attempting to discover the order of things from the actual study and experience of phenomena. 

Both Plato and Aristotle agreed that universals exist, which puts both of them at odds with the existentialist who, as I discussed two episodes ago, believes that existence originally contains no essences at all. However, Plato and Aristotle come at universals from opposite angles of inquiry, and this makes all the difference in determining how we should view universals and apply them to our lives. Having taken the Aristotelian position, Davis explicitly contrasts it with that of Plato in the second half of this stanza: whereas “Plato grieves for stasis”—that is, pines away for eternal, unchanging ideas— the true way to come to conclusions about life is to pass through the “refining fire:” the dynamic and often painful turbulence of day to day experience with other human beings, which, over time, burns away your naivete and hones your understanding of general ideas like love, responsibility, and beauty. With the phrase “refining fire” Davis has not only chosen an apt metaphor for what he is talking about, but he has also created a double allusion which enriches the meaning of the poem. The phrase “refining fire” comes from the Bible, specifically from Malachi 3:3 where it refers to how God will purify the Israelite priesthood of corruption. By using this phrase, Davis adds a theological dimension to the poem, a suggestion that, if there is a God, it is the will of God that we achieve soul-making wisdom not through philosophical speculation but through the trials and tribulations of life. Cleverly however, because of the context of Greek philosophy in which it is placed, “refining fire” also functions as an allusion to the philosophy of Heraclitus, who famously claimed that the world is made of fire, by which he meant that the nature of reality is constantly in a state of flux, an insight very similar to that of the Buddha, who utilized the same metaphor in his famous Fire Sermon. It was partly to escape Heraclitus’s disturbing insight that Plato postulated his eternal and static world of forms, but Davis insists that the fiery evanescence of the world is something we cannot ignore if we are to achieve true wisdom. 

Let’s begin the poem again, and this time, read all the way through: 

Marriage is where

the large abstractions we profess

are put gently in their small place—

            the holist’s stare

in love with Man has managed less

than eyes that love one aging face. 

            Marriage believes

the universals we desire

are children of a worldly care—

            while Plato grieves

for stasis, the refining fire

men pass through is the lives they share.

            Marriages move

between the symbol and life’s facts,

from Beauty to this troubled face—

            though what we love

is Truth, Truth flares and fades in acts

of local, unrecorded grace. 

In the first half of this stanza, Davis builds on his argument that our conception of the ideal is founded on individual life experience, going on to say that the experience of being married causes one to vacillate between “the symbol and life’s facts,” that is, between the universal and the particular, from the idea of Beauty itself to “this troubled face.” This idea of conjugal love as an emissary between material and the ideal recalls Plato’s conception of Eros in The Symposium, but unlike Plato, Davis sees this communication as one of cyclical conversation and flux, both realms illuminating one another, not as a linear stepping stone to transcendence. 

            In the final three lines, Davis elegantly and movingly sums up his position: he admits that what we truly love is “Truth” with a capital T: the ultimate form of forms which it was Plato’s goal to attain communion with. However, “Truth flares and fades in acts of local, unrecorded grace.” That is, Truth is something we can only catch glimpses of through the everyday, ephemeral, individual acts of love which cumulatively constitute a relationship, in this case a marriage. Marriage is thus seen as one of the greatest experiences a person can have, an experience that reveals truths that wouldn’t be accessible without the experience of love and devotion that a marriage supports. Marriage is thus a mystical tool, a vehicle for transcendence, but one that only functions insofar as the material details of the marriage are loved and preserved. Marriage effects the union not only of two souls, two actual people, but of each soul to the nature of life itself. To fiercely devote yourself to an individual is to devote yourself to the details of life, and by doing so, one becomes devoted to the world at large as it truly exists, expressed in dazzling, imperfect, lovable particularity. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s encounter this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Marriage As A Problem of Universals: 

For Meera and Navin Govil

            Marriage is where

the large abstractions we profess

are put gently in their small place—

            the holist’s stare

in love with Man has managed less

than eyes that love one aging face. 

            Marriage believes

the universals we desire

are children of a worldly care—

            while Plato grieves

for stasis, the refining fire

men pass through is the lives they share.

            Marriages move

between the symbol and life’s facts,

from Beauty to this troubled face—

            though what we love

is Truth, Truth flares and fades in acts

of local, unrecorded grace.