For this paper you are asked to show what you have learned so far about reading, interpreting, and writing about...

The following sample essay (which you can read in your textbook on page 694) develops the observations about Aphra Behn’s “On Her Loving Two Equally” into a coherent essay. As this essay also shows, however, you will often discover new ways of looking at a poem (or any literary text) in the very process of writing about it. The writer begins by considering why she is drawn to the poem, even though it does not express her ideal of love. She then uses her personal response to the poem as a starting point for analyzing it in greater depth. As you read, pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses you perceive.

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Multiplying by Dividing in Aphra Behn’s “On Her Loving Two Equally”

My favorite poem in “Reading, Responding, Writing” is Aphra Behn’s “On Her Loving Two Equally”—not because it expresses my ideal of love, but because it challenges conventional ideals. The main ideal or assumption explored in the poem is that true love is exclusive and monogamous, as the very titles of two other poems in the chapter and the “Romantic Love” album insist: “How Do I [singular] Love Thee [singular]?” or “To My Dear and Loving [and One and Only] Husband.” The mere title of Behn’s poem upsets that idea by insisting that at least one woman is capable of “Loving Two Equally.” In fact, one thing that is immediately interesting about Behn’s poem is that, though it poses and explores a question, its question is not “Can a woman love two equally?” The title and the poem take it for granted that she can. Instead, the poem asks whether equally loving two people lessens the power or quality of love—or, as the speaker puts it in the first two lines, “How strongly does my passion flow, / Divided equally twixt two?” Every aspect of this poem suggests that when it comes to love, as opposed to math,

This answer grabs attention because it is so counterintuitive and unconventional. Forget love for just a minute: It’s common sense that anything that is “divided” is smaller and weaker than something unified. In math, for example, division is the opposite of multiplication; if we divide one number by another, we get a number smaller than the first number, if not the second. Although Behn’s use of the word flow to frame her question compares love to a river instead of a number, the implication is the same: When a river divides into two streams, each of them is smaller than the river, and its flow less strong; as a result, each stream is more easily dammed up or diverted than the undivided river. So the way the speaker initially poses her question seems to support the conventional view: Love is stronger when it “flows” toward one person, weaker when divided between two.

However conventional and comforting that implied answer, however, it’s one the poem immediately rejects. In the remaining lines of the first stanza, the speaker insists that each of her two lovers and the love she feels for him has not lessened the strength of her feelings for the other, but the reverse. Each lover and each love has “aid[ed]” (line 6) the other, making him and it more “powerful” (line 5). Indeed, she says, neither man would have “subdued [her] heart” (line 3) or “gain[ed her] love” (line 6) at all if the other hadn’t done so as well.

In the second stanza, the speaker gives us a somewhat more concrete sense of why and how this might be the case. On the one hand, being with either one of these men (“When Alexis present is,” line 7) actually makes her both “scorn” him (line 10) and “miss” (line 9) the man who’s not there (“I for Damon sigh and mourn,” line 8). This isn’t really a paradox; we often yearn more for the person or thing we don’t have (the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence), and we often lose our appreciation for nearby, familiar things and people. What is far away and inaccessible is often dearer to us because its absence either makes us aware of what it means to us or allows us to forget its flaws and idealize it.

Perhaps because all of this makes the speaker feel that she can’t possibly solve the problem by herself, the speaker turns in the third stanza to Cupid—the deity who is supposed to control these things by shooting a “golden-pointed dart” (line 15) into the heart of each lover. She asks him to solve her dilemma for her by “tak[ing] back” her love for either Damon or Alexis (line 15). As with her question in the first stanza, however, this plea is taken back as soon as it’s formulated, for if she loses Damon, “all [her] hopes are crossed”; if she loses Alexis, she is “lost” (lines 17– 18).

Here and throughout the poem , the speaker’s main preoccupation seems to be what she feels and what this situation is like for her—“my passion” (line 1), “my heart” (line 3), “my Damon’s aid, ... my love” (line 6), “my Alexis” (line 7), “I ... sigh and mourn” (line 8), “I do miss” (line 9), “my scorn” (line 10), “I languish, sigh, and die” (line 12), “This restless fever in my blood” (line 14), “my hopes” (line 17), “my Alexis” and “I am lost” (line 18). Yet the poem implies that the payoff here is not hers alone and that her feelings are not purely selfish. Both times the word gain appears in the poem, for example, her lovers’ gains and feelings are the focus—the fact that Alexis is able “to gain [her] love” thanks to “Damon’s aid” (line 6) and that “Damon gains nothing but my scorn” when she is missing Alexis (line 10). Moreover , ambiguous wording in the first stanza suggests that the men here may be actively, intentionally helping to create this situation and even themselves acting in contradictory, selfish and unselfish, ways. For when the speaker says that “Damon had ne’er subdued my heart / Had not Alexis took his part” (lines 3– 4), his could refer to Alexis or Damon and part could mean “a portion” (of her “heart,” presumably), “a role” (in her life or in this courtship drama), or a “side in a dispute or conflict” (over and for her love). Thus, she could be saying that Alexis (unselfishly) defended Damon’s suit; (selfishly) fought against Damon or took a share or role that properly belonged to Damon; and/or (neutrally) took his (Alexis’s) own share or role or defended his (Alexis’s) own cause. Perhaps all of this has been the case at various times; people do behave in contradictory ways when they are in love, especially when they perceive that they have a rival. It’s also true that men and women alike often more highly prize something or someone that someone else prizes, too. So perhaps each lover’s “passion” for her also “flow[s]” more strongly than it would otherwise precisely because he has a rival.

In the end, the poem thus seems to say that love doesn’t flow or work like a river because love isn’t a tangible or quantifiable thing. As a result, love is also different from the sort of battle conjured up by the martial language of the first stanza in which someone wins only if someone else loses. The poem attributes this to the perversity of the human heart—especially our tendency to yearn for what we can’t have and what we think other people want, too.

Through its form, the poem demonstrates that division can increase instead of lessen meaning, as well as love. On the one hand, just as the poem’s content stresses the power of the love among three people, so the poem’s form also stresses “threeness” as well as “twoness.” It is after all divided into three distinctly numbered stanzas, and each stanza consists of three sentences. On the other hand, every sentence is “divided equally twixt two” lines, just as the speaker’s “passion” is divided equally between two men. Formally, then, the poem mirrors the kinds of division it describes. Sound and especially rhyme reinforce this pattern since the two lines that make up one sentence usually rhyme with each other to form a couplet. The only lines that don’t conform to this pattern come at the beginning of the second stanza where we instead have alternating rhyme—is (line 7) rhymes with miss (line 9), mourn (line 8) rhymes with scorn (line 10). But here, again, form reinforces content. For these lines describe how the speaker “miss[es]” one man when the other is “by,” a sensation that she arguably reproduces in us as we read by ensuring we twice “miss” the rhyme that the rest of the poem leads us to expect.

Because of the way it challenges our expectations and our conventional ideas about romantic love, the poem might well make us uncomfortable, perhaps all the more so because the speaker and poet here are female. For though we tend to think all true lovers should be loyal and monogamous, this has been expected even more of women than of men. What the poem says about love might make more sense and seem less strange and even objectionable, however, if we think of other, nonromantic kinds of love: After all, do we really think that our mother and father love us less if their love is “divided equally twixt” ourselves and our siblings, or do we love each of our parents less because there are two of them? If we think of these familial kinds of love, it becomes much easier to accept Behn’s suggestion that love multiplies when we spread it around.

WORK CITED

Behn, Aphra. “On Her Loving Two Equally.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Eds. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. Print.