Here is the second installment of my poetic quotes top 5. Enjoy!
‘How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d’
Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’; lines 207-210
Familiar to many from the film which takes its name from the third line, this quote is fundamentally a nod to the blessings of innocence and ignorance. Recall, for a second, the old adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’; that is the essence of this quote.
The poem, written in 1717, is a romantic (note the difference between the de-capitalised verb here, and the capitalised noun in my last post) tale about the unrequited love between Eloisa, and her tutor, Abelard, who is 20 years her senior. It is based on the true story of Heloise and Abelard Pierre, which dates back to the 12th century. Abelard is a supreme philosopher and he is nominated as the Canon of Notre Dame. Eloisa’s uncle, Fulbert, discovers the details of the affair between the two lovers and tries to put an end to it. Eloisa and Abelard continue their liaisons discreetly, and eventually she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. In order to avoid displeasing Fulbert, Abelard concocts a plan to get married in secret, but Fulbert announces the engagement publicly so Eloisa denies it, in order to avoid tarnishing Abelard’s reputation, and harming his career, and Abelard convinces her to go to a convent for protection. Fulbert thinks that Abelard has sent her away to get rid of her, so he has Abelard castrated. Eventually Abelard’s career is ruined by his relationship with Eloisa and he goes into hiding, living a solitary life as a hermit. He and Eloisa exchange love letters for the next twenty years, and spend only the briefest amount of time in each other’s company before they die. 600 years later, Josephine Bonaparte (wife of Napoleon I) learns of their story and has them exhumed so they can be buried with each other.
The tragic tale is similar to the more well-known story of Romeo and Juliet, and indeed is often categorised alongside Shakespeare’s masterpiece as one of the greatest love stories ever penned. The quote I have selected from the poem is poignant as it is antonymous with the rest of the narrative. In this section, Eloisa is speaking of a nun. The first line directly identifies the subject; a ‘vestal’ is a chaste woman – a nun in this case. With that in mind, the first line can be interpreted to mean that innocence and morality lead to happiness and good fortune. In other words, if you know not of love, or of sexual interaction, then you are sure to be in a much more agreeable situation, because you are devoid of the anguish that accompanies love. To refer once again to Shakespeare, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Juxtaposing the opening line of the poem with Shakespeare’s assertion, it becomes apparent where the derivation of the meaning of ‘how happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!’ lies.
The next line has many people confused when trying to deduce an interpretation of their own, due to its awkward syntax. However, if I rewrite it thus; ‘forgetting the world, by the world forgotten’, its meaning is slightly more evident. Put simply, it implies that the innocence and purity construed from the first line allows the nun to disappear from all concerns, and to be without concerns herself. In other words, she has forgotten the world around her, and in turn has been forgotten by the world. This is the scenario which Eloisa most desires; she wants to be totally unaware of the troubles that currently afflict her, and for the world around her to be totally unaware of her as well. She believes that only by being virtuous and at the same time ignorant of true happiness, can one really be solely happy, because true happiness carries with it the reciprocal – torment and suffering.
The third (and most famous) line serves to reinforce the imagery I have already conjectured. Sunshine is used here as a symbol of light and happiness, and ‘the spotless mind’ is a metaphor for ignorance, or a lack of memories: in other words, a mind that has forgotten the pains of an Earthly existence. So, the line fundamentally pertains to the preordained notion that happiness can only last so long as innocence remains. In fact, this line takes it one step further, by asserting that happiness can be infinite, so long as knowledge of pain is absent.
The final line serves to ratify the overall notion that happiness can be achieved by remaining distant from the world as a whole. Basically it states that your prayers for happiness will be granted, but you will forego any further wishes, because happiness is all you will ever have. Only by never knowing heartbreak can you ever know happiness as a lone emotion.
If we now step out of the 18th century, and cast our minds forwards 300 years to the present day, we can see why this poem has stood the test of time, and why it still resonates with readers to this day. For a start, everybody can surely sympathise with Eloisa, for nobody in this world can claim to be indifferent to, or unaware of pain and suffering, thus nobody can claim happiness to be the only emotional response they have ever experienced. Furthermore, everybody probably wishes they were able to forget certain aspects of their past in exchange for sunshine. I think, in a modern interpretation, it’s probably acceptable to project this quote over a larger surface, symbolically speaking, because the search for happiness in the present day is not solely attributed to the quest for true love. We have become less chivalrous as time has passed, and now we associate happiness with wealth and materialism, as well as finding our one true love. In the technological age, we are more likely to strive to be famous on the internet, and that fame, we suppose, would bring happiness with it. We yearn to be adored by society, admired by our peers, and accepted wherever we go. The simple message of those four lines of poetry are now such an alien concept to us that, rather than serving as an example of our highest ambitions, it has the opposite effect; perhaps it’s time we realised that true happiness is not found by creating the most popular internet video, or by being the centre of attention at the local bar, but by being separate from all the vices offered to us on a daily basis, and living our own lives as virtuously and as full as we possibly can. Of course, we are, like Eloisa, doomed never to experience happiness eternally, because love will not allow us never to experience heartache.
scripturient 