Such
heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most
beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's.
It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its
most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit
kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an
instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the
analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames
that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of
Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the
title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he
learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court.
Thou art a glorious madman,
Lodge exclaims,
Born to consume thyself anon in ashes,
And rise again to immortality.
Marlowe replies,
Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say,
What if? I shall have drained my splendor down
To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness,
And mirk and mire and black oblivion,
Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is,
Like the wild beasts.
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