On the Nature of Love

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s On the Nature of Love interrogates the paradoxical essence of romantic attachment through a dialectic of idealism and carnality, spiritual yearning and earthly surrender. Written during the late Victorian era-a period marked by seismic shifts in scientific, religious, and social paradigms-the poem distills Blunt’s lifelong fascination with love as both a transcendent force and a human vulnerability. Drawing on his unconventional biography and the era’s intellectual ferment, the sonnet transcends its deceptively simple structure to probe love’s capacity to simultaneously elevate and devastate.

Historical and Cultural Context: Victorian Anxieties and Blunt’s Radicalism

The poem emerges from a cultural moment when Darwinian evolution challenged theological certainties, and industrialization reshaped social bonds2. Blunt, an aristocrat-turned-dissident, channeled these tensions into his writing. His diplomatic career and travels across colonized regions like Egypt and India fostered a skepticism toward imperialist narratives, which subtly informs the poem’s interrogation of power dynamics in love18. The Victorian “crisis of faith” finds echoes in the speaker’s vacillation between love as “the soul’s eternal charter” and “carnal mystery”-a search for meaning in a destabilized world26.

Blunt’s anti-establishment leanings, including his imprisonment for supporting Irish land rights, resonate in the poem’s rejection of easy resolutions10. Just as he challenged political orthodoxy, the sonnet resists sentimental Victorian love tropes, mirroring the era’s growing interest in psychological complexity9. The final couplet’s abrupt shift from philosophical debate to personal plea (“Nay, give me any love...”) mirrors Blunt’s own life, where political ideals often collided with human desires4.

Literary Devices: The Architecture of Paradox

Blunt employs a Shakespearean sonnet structure subverted by intellectual restlessness. The tripartite division-abstract ideals (quatrain 1), physicality (quatrain 2), existential reckoning (sestet)-creates a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression. Rhetorical questions (“What shall my love then be?”) function as conceptual waypoints, each dismantling the previous definition. The repetition of “You ask my love” evolves from challenge to resignation, enacting the speaker’s spiraling uncertainty.

Key metaphors reveal Blunt’s deconstructive approach:

• “Charter writ in fire”: Combines legal contract imagery with apocalyptic intensity, suggesting love’s binding yet destructive power37.

• “Carnal mystery”: Oxymoron fusing sacrament and sensuality, critiquing Victorian prudery9.

• “Love in pain”: Inverts Romantic agony tropes, presenting suffering not as ennobling but as transactional (“that I will not give”)5.

The volta at line 9 (“What love can be more sweet...”) introduces a temporal dimension, contrasting immediate “joy” with love’s enduring “soul.” This mirrors Blunt’s own vacillation between fleeting affairs and his fraught marriage to Lady Anne Blunt, whose intellectual partnership sustained him despite mutual betrayals18.

Themes: The Double Helix of Eros

1. Spiritual vs. Carnal Love: The poem’s central dichotomy reflects Blunt’s fascination with Sufi mysticism during his Middle Eastern travels8. Lines 3-4 evoke Islamic calligraphy’s sacred geometry, while “finger-tips that press” grounds transcendence in tactile reality. This tension mirrors Victorian debates about art’s purpose-Blunt’s contemporary Walter Pater argued for life’s “burning, always” intensity, a credo echoed in the sonnet’s fiery diction26.

2. Love as Existential Risk: The sestet’s economic metaphors (“charter,” “give”) frame love as a perilous transaction. Blunt’s financial struggles with the Crabbet Stud-selling prized Arabian horses to settle debts-find poetic analogue in the speaker’s reluctance to invest in painful love89. The abrupt closure (“So let it be”) suggests capitalist pragmatism infiltrating emotional life, a distinctly modern anxiety.

3. Temporality and Immortality: While the octave dwells in eternal abstractions (“eternal charter,” “heavens”), the sestet confronts mortality (“life than meat”). This mirrors Blunt’s diary entries contemplating legacy versus lived experience4. The final line’s surrender to imperfect love (“any love”) becomes an act of existential courage, rejecting both Platonic ideals and nihilism.

Biographical Insights: The Poet as Paradox

Blunt’s complex marital history illuminates the poem’s tensions. His 1869 marriage to Lady Anne Blunt-a collaboration of intellectual equals-coexisted with numerous affairs, including with Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Morris79. The sonnet’s addressee becomes an amalgam: the idealized Anne (“soul’s eternal charter”) and transient lovers (“lips that kiss”). Line 12’s “love in pain” may reference Blunt’s imprisonment for Irish activism, where love of cause became literal self-sacrifice10.

The poem’s diplomatic lexicon (“charter,” “give”) reflects Blunt’s early career in foreign service16. Just as he mediated colonial conflicts, the speaker negotiates between love’s warring factions. The closing plea (“so it be love of thee”) echoes Blunt’s Bedouin funeral request-a cultural hybridity underscoring his belief in love’s transcendent particularity48.

Philosophical and Comparative Perspectives

The poem engages Schopenhauer’s view of love as life’s “compensation” for existential suffering. The speaker’s rejection of painful love (“that I will not give”) rebels against Schopenhauerian resignation, proposing instead Camusian revolt through imperfect connection57.

Comparatively, the sonnet inverts Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese:

• Browning: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” → Expansive celebration

• Blunt: “What shall my love then be?” → Interrogative doubt

Yet both conclude with existential commitment, suggesting Victorian love poetry’s shared bedrock beneath stylistic divergences79.

Emotional Impact: The Ache of Ambivalence

The poem’s power lies in its refusal to console. The escalating anaphora (“You ask my love...”) creates claustrophobic intensity, mirroring a mind trapped in its own contradictions. Readers experience love’s duality as somatic tension-the “fire” of line 3 becomes the “pain” of line 12, a thermodynamic metaphor for emotional entropy.

Blunt’s diction orchestrates this visceral response:

• Plosives (“press,” “kiss,” “pain”) → Physical urgency

• Sibilants (“soul’s,” “sweetest,” “cess”) → Intellectual evasion

• Imperatives (“give me”) → Desperate agency

The final line’s metrical irregularity (an extra unstressed syllable on “thee”) performs semantic rupture-a formal gasp underscoring love’s ineffability.

Conclusion: Love as Heretical Faith

On the Nature of Love ultimately posits romance as the last permissible heresy in a disenchanted age. By rejecting both spiritual absolutism and sensual nihilism, Blunt anticipates Modernist fragmentation while retaining Victorian earnestness. The poem’s enduring resonance lies in its unflinching catalog of love’s contradictions-a mirror for our own negotiations between heart and mind, aspiration and compromise. In an era of dating apps and emotional analytics, Blunt’s sonnet remains startlingly prescient: love as the one “charter” we cannot rationalize, yet cannot live without.