Volume 10 43
looked for by the narrator, but accepted as a gift of
nature.
In the last couplet of the first stanza, however,
the narrator stops using similes to describe her
heart. As the long sentence of the first stanza ends,
the narrator exclaims, “My heart is gladder than all
these / Because my love is come to me.” She holds
herself superior to the natural images with which
she began. The bird singing, the bough bending,
the shell floating are all suspended in time. Their
fates are precarious, and as literary critic Antony
Harrison has argued, “the idealized images of na-
ture that appear in the first stanza carry with them
the inevitability of their own destruction.” For the
bird in its “watered shoot” is exposed to danger;
the ripe apples threaten to fall to the ground or
break the bough; and the shell that now floats in
tranquil waters is, as Harrison shows, “vulnerable,
as a delicate object, to the changing moods of the
potentially destructive ocean.” For these reasons,
the narrator distances herself from these images.
Her heart may be “like” the bird, the tree, and the
shell, but it is not them. Her fate is not precarious
because the suspense is over. She loves, and her
lover has returned those feelings.
In the second stanza, then, as Harrison argues,
the narrator signals her “need to retreat from mu-
tability.” She must move away from the natural
world so as not to admit the possibility that her love
or lover could change with time. In this second
stanza, then, the narrator turns her gaze from the
outside to the inside. Instead of looking at real man-
ifestations of nature, the narrator wants the change-
able physical world enshrined in art. Represented
in art, the bird or the apple is frozen in time, im-
pervious to change. The doves, pomegranates, pea-
cocks, and grapes that are described in the second
stanza, therefore, do not occur in nature, but only
as images carved into a dais, or wooden platform.
Is the narrator inferring, as Harrison suggests, “that
the only true and permanent fulfillment of love is
to be found in the art it gives birth to”?
Other readings could also explain the move
from nature to art. Part of the narrator’s desire to
enshrine her love, to hold it unchangeable forever,
is evident in the ceremony she demands in the sec-
ond stanza. In the first stanza, the narrator describes
the state of her heart, and it is unclear to whom she
is speaking. In many ways it is as if she, like the
bird she compares her heart to, is simply singing
out loud the overwhelming emotions she feels. But
in the second stanza, she is more concerned with
audience. The first three couplets contain com-
mands to unknown servants: “Raise me a dais of
silk and down; / Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
/ Carve it in doves and pomegranates, / And pea-
cocks with a hundred eyes; / Work it in gold and
silver grapes, / In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys.”
Causing a platform to be raised, the narrator infers
that she wants a public celebration of her love. Nat-
ural love and passion, it seems, are unstable because
they are potentially illicit. Marked by a ceremony,
such as a wedding, this love becomes stable and
legally binding. The delicate shell of a Victorian
woman’s desire can be potentially crushed by an
ocean of social condemnation. Only when the love
is publicly acknowledged, is she truly free to love.
The language of public ceremony, however, is
overly exalted in the second stanza. The images
used suggest a coronation, rather than a wedding.
Purple is the color of royalty, and the fleur-de-lys
is the symbol for the French royal family. A dais
is commonly used as a platform for a throne. The
narrator infers that love turns her into a queen. This
image is both empowering and forbidding. Her pas-
sion “reigned” in, the narrator depends on outward
symbols rather than the natural feelings of her heart
to represent the strength of her love.
But, as the second stanza ends, the narrator re-
turns to the simple declarative style she used in the
first stanza, even repeating the same language, “my
love is come to me.” This repetition signals a re-
turn to the inward self. The outward show repre-
sented by the trappings of royalty and ceremony,
after all, merely indicates the narrator’s joy at ful-
filled love. The last couplet, “Because the birthday
of my life / Is come, my love is come to me,” ar-
gues that life itself begins only in returned love.
Reborn through love, the narrator has gained all the
wealth in the world. The royal treasure, then, of
“silk and downs,” “peacocks,” and “gold and sil-
ver” is a metaphor for what she has acquired
through love.A BirthdayThe precariousness of
the natural world, then,
springs not from the
transience of erotic love,
but from the transience of
human existence.”