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In a poem which has nothing to do with either air or angels, Donne configures the familiar
trope of love in ways quite distinct from the prevailing conception. The whole paradox of
Petrarchan love was in the idealization of the unattainable beloved figure. Her beauty and
fleeting charms and virtues could never really be measured within the confines of the physical.
Donnes Air and Angels resurrects the ashes of sensuous love, real love as experienced by
flesh-and-bone mortals from the ruins of Platos abstract and physically transcendent that was
even espoused by the NeoPlatonists. Resorting to the metaphorical usage of air and angels,
the poem furnishes a conceptualization of love cognizant of its empirical being, of the
necessitude of shared mutuality between the man and the woman within its ambit. The soul, if
extricated from the body, would be aloft the pleasure of corporeal love, which is very much
rooted in desire, which has its own legitimacy, as it were.
Markers of name and such become insignificant before the expression of love, which must
manifest through the medium of the human body. The poet ponders redolently upon the past
when he was engrossed with a woman, the effect of whose remembrance has the same
delicate effect on him as does the emergence of angels from air. Unlike the angels who
manifest themselves with the concomitance of voice or light, love, as idealistic an enterprise it
is does not derive its origins from the spirit. The beloveds body provides a haven to the soul of
love itself. The note of reverence detected in the initial four lines is unmistakably Petrarchan,
but it is invoked only to be derided. Love cannot originate in an abstruse, inexplicable fashion,
and its codification, as such is possible only because it is mired to the flesh. The angels, who
were held as masculine figures in the contemporary times, could manifest only vis--vis the
medium of air, which was also the purest of the four media of air, water, soil and fire. Without
a physical incarnation of love in the womans body, it is impossible for the narrator to stumble
upon anything but a lovely, glorious nothing. The male gaze presiding much of love poetry,
and even here subjecting the female body to an objectification of silence, cannot think of love
without being able to visualize it with such certainty. The image unfurling posits the soul as
having parented the body, and the body, in resemblance to the soul, assume this incarnation,
which also insinuates the possibility of the mans love for the woman as being definable in
solely, or predominantly physical terms. Hence we find the abject categorization of various
parts of her anatomy from the perspective of the male gaze. Once she is relegated to the
stature of his beloved, and has to therefore be the externalized expression of his love, her lip,
eye and brow all become symbolic (but, in continuity with much of Elizabethan love-poetry)
objects of admiration for the desiring male gaze. It is much more sinister in implication than
love affixing itself to her anatomical being. It is the limitations of the other sexs gaze, and that
too, in very subjectivist and often unreciprocated nuances, which remain with her, and define
her, only in absentia.
Such an imposition of views becomes evident to the narrator only after a while of him
indulging in his fancies. He finds it has capsized the pinnacle of the ship, which represents the
beloveds body. Just as a ballast or a heavy load is required to stabilize the movement of a
ship, so too the mere appreciation of the womans physical charms, he realizes, will not suffice
to stabilize love. The love which is moored onto her body must be made to adjust, so as the
two fit. Love certainly does not exist in a vacuum, and is to be found neither from all things
nor from that angelic and unqualified nothingness, but from somewhere-in-between. Only a
substantial expression of love in the objective sense of the term can adduce to the
engendering of the steadied love that seems to be at the core of the narrators obsessive
concern over adjudicating his love for his beloved. Physical union is what the narrator wants,
which can give solidarity to their relationship.
Signifying womans love as air and mans love as angel (the obvious implication being that
man is the pursuer, the more active agent in the game of love-making than the passive
woman who is more of the receiver, the yielder) the narrator claims eventually that it is the
harmonized synthesis of the two that will consummate their love. The air producing the angel
is as impure as the latter. By analogy, the poet argues that the womans love is also as pure,
or as independent as that of the mans love, and it is rather a mutual transaction of the two
that will diminish the space between mans passion and womens response, which had been an
arduously contested debate in literary discourse. In the final evaluation, the realms of angels
and men have a relative purity, wholly removed from the absolute purity shared by the aerial
worlds known to womenfolk. However, The fact of thy love being but a reflection of his,
another macrocosm with its own functionalities and machinations, abridges this disparity by
shared mutuality, but not wholly, for the poem ends with the somber realization that the
disjunction between mans fervors and womans responses will never be eliminated altogether.
The harmony that exists between the air and the angels is to be injected into the male-female
dialectic too, but with what results we do not know.
Moreover, the incommensurability of romantic relationships between the opposing genders
brings to mind the championing of male-to-male relationships in ancient Greece, and of the
legacy of pederasty that the poet was still contending with when he was writing this poem.
Love is transmuted into many shapeless but physical forms throughout the poem, and the
ambivalent critical interpretation of the last few lines is obviated after reading in between the
words.