The Passionate Pilgrim – “Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye… persuade my heart to this false perjury…” (Longaville's sonnet to Maria in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

The Passionate Pilgrim – “Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye… persuade my heart to this false perjury…” (Longaville's sonnet to Maria in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

This is a sonnet which Shakespeare writes for the character of Longaville when Longaville is writing secretly to Maria in the play ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ with the intention of winning her love. Since it appears in a play, it is sometimes difficult to see it as separate from the context in which it appears in the play where Longaville, one of the King of Navarre’s three noble kinsmen, having taken an oath to study rhetoric and all the knowledge of the world, fast and have no contact with women for three years, promptly falls in love with Maria and writes and sends a love letter to her in Act IV Scene 2. Since it appears in ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ as a poem, I will try to treat it as a love poem, however, the irony of the context of the play, where the poet having sworn off matters of women and love, uses logic and rhetoric to argue that his falling in love is logical, is ironically humourous. When I refer to the poet, I mean both Longaville and Shakespeare as voicing his sentiments through the character of Longaville.

The sonnet starts with the poet drawing an analogy between logic and rhetoric and the act of falling in love with his love. The use of the oxymoronic “false perjury” in line 3 serves to gives some irony to the analogy. The use of words like “rhetoric” and “argument” when describing affairs of the heart adds to this ironic underpinning. The poet, who in the play is trying to study matters of the mind and reason, validates at the end of the first quartet, his breaking of his vow to not see women or delve in matters such as love for three years, by stating that, “Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.”

In the second quartet, the poet takes his logical explanation of his illogical love further. He claims that his initial vow to swear off women was an earthly vow and argues a technicality that, because his female lover is heavenly that his initial vow is outside her heavenly jurisdiction and thus he is cleared or “cured” of all “disgrace”. 

The third quartet extends the metaphors by stating that his initial vow was insignificant, “My vow was breath, and breath a vapour is…”
and that the lover, personified in the metaphoric sun, disperses “this vapour vow”.

In the final rhyming couplet, the poet conclusively claims that even if he broke his first vow, then it is wisdom that made him do it because, as he finally rhetorically asks himself:

“… what fool is not so wise
     

To break an oath, to win a paradise?”