The Passionate Pilgrim – “On a day (alack the day)…” (Dumaine’s love poem to Catherine in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

The Passionate Pilgrim – “On a day (alack the day)…” (Dumaine’s love poem to Catherine in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

In ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Dumaine along with Berowne and Longaville are kinsmen of the King and they all take an oath to study and fast for three years swearing off, among other things, women. Dumaine’s oath to the king in the opening of the play gives some sense of his character. His oath is more flamboyant and elaborate than his fellow kinsmen and when he swears off earthly concerns. Undertake the King's oath, he swears ''To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die…" Of course, he subsequently falls in love with Katherine. In this sense, we can see this poem as part love poem, part parody of a love poem.

It is a sonnet and but is written in the 18 line Heroic sonnet poetic form which was invented by the father of sonnet-hood the 13^th century Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini. It uses an iambic beat but not a pentameter. It has two Sicilian octaves with a rhyming couplet in the middle dividing them (poetically a different poet form which acts as a transition like this does, is called a pivot). The repeated use of rhyming couplets throughout the poem make it seem forcibly clumsy and over-simplistic poetically. All this is meant to give the sense that while Dumaine is caught up in the heavenly poetry of love, his poetry meanders through a terrestrial swamp.

The poet starts off by setting the scene for his lament of love. In the second and third lines, he clumsily personifies Love as spying “…a blossom passing fair…”. He uses the imagery of the wind gentling touching and playing with his love (the fair blossom) and Love wishes that it could so easily touch and “gan passage” to such a blossom as the wind which he now metaphorically refers to as “heaven’s breath”. The poet wishes that he, ironically objectified as the personified Love, could “triumph so” over the “fair blossom” like the wind does. Dumaine is obviously imagining his love as a flower - an inamorata. We get the sense that Dumaine is also writing himself into the poem as he becomes increasingly jealous of the wind and the liberties it takes with the female object of his desire. Shakespeare is too good as a poet to not be mixing metaphors and twisting perspective and personification for the purpose of parodying some love sonnets and mocking the character of Dumaine.

The irony then expands such that the poet starts to get sexually more crude and explicit in his imagery but perhaps Dumaine as the character supposedly writing this poem, seems naively unaware of the sexual innuendo lurking blatantly beneath his flowery but heavy handed verse. Here some knowledge of the play is necessary because Dumaine has sworn to have no physical contact with women yet complains that as a young man he is ready to “pluck a sweet “:

“But, alas! my hand hath sworn


Ne'er to pluck thee from thy thorn:


Vow, alack, for youth unmeet,


Youth, so apt to pluck a sweet…”

The final four lines cap off Shakespeare’s parody of love poems through using a barrage of classical allusions to the point of parodying the form as well as the character of Dumaine who speaks (and wrote) this verse.

“Thou for whom Jove would swear


Juno but an Ethiope were;


And deny himself for Jove,


Turning mortal for thy love.”

We assume "thou" means the person who is the object of Dumaine’s love, Katherine, the “blossom” in the poem, and that the poet believes that Jove or Jupiter, the Roman King of the Gods (ironically also a word for euphoric love in Shakespeare’s time) would swear allegiance to his love. He then calls his love Juno, Jupiter's wife, who normally has a dark cloak but is described as dark skinned here (normally thought to be not so attractive as a quality in Shakespeare’s day). Then he confusingly either says that Jove (Jupiter) would turn mortal to be with this woman or that he, the poet Dumaine, would deny himself the immortality of Jove (or the immortality he already believes he possesses) and turn “mortal for thy love”. This confusion is, of course, intentional. Just remember when reading this love sonnet that Shakespeare is a good sonnet writer mocking bad love poetry through a character who is inarticulate, over-verbose and in love.