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A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted Part One Book Five Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s 3
An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s
Verses for Tragic Lovers
Adolphe and Ellenore
Is based on an essay I wrote
Around 1983
For a former mentor at university,
Who sadly died in 2008,
And who features
As Dr Elizabeth Lang
In various autobiographical
Writings of mine.
It concerns the protagonist
Of French writer Benjamin Constant's
1816 novel Adolphe,
(Which its author emphatically insisted
Was not autobiographical;
Nor a roman a clef),
Who is a prototypal victim
Of what has been termed
Mal du siecle,
Or the sickness of the century...
Which, born in the wake of the Revolution,
And arising from a variety of causes,
Political, social, and spiritual,
Depending on the sufferer in question,
Produced such qualities as
Melancholy and acedia,
And a perpetual sense of exile,
Of alienation,
That found special favour within
The great Romantic movement in the arts.
Although as a phenomenon,
Weltschmerz was hardly a novel one,
For after all, does the Word of God not say
That there is nothing new
Under the sun?
But it was possibly unprecedented
In terms of pervasiveness and intensity
At the height of Romanticism
And I'd have no hesitation
In labelling it tragic as a result.
In terms of my own pre-Christian self,
It was almost overwhelmingly powerful,
And so believer that I am, I feel compelled
To expose it as potentially ruinous,
For after all, is it not still with us
In one way or another,
Having been passed on by the Romantics
To kindred movements coming in their wake,
From the Spirit of Decadence
To the Rock Revolution?
And could it not also be said
That the peculiar notion
Fostered by Romanticism
Of the artist as a spirit
Set apart for some special purpose,
Of which pain is so often an essential part
Is also still among us?
Of course it could,
And I'd have no hesitation
In labelling it tragic as a result.
This Mal du siecle
Is surely especially melancholy
In the case of tragic lovers,
Adolphe and Ellenore,
For it results in Adolphe effectively
Drifting into a romance
With another man's mistress,
A young mother, Ellenore,
Who sacrifices everything for him
Only to discover he no longer loves her.
For Adolphe is in some respects
A work within the tradition
Of the libertine novel
Of the Age of Enlightenment,
And yet at the same time,
By no means an endorsement of libertinage.
Is rather perhaps, in many respects,
A powerful indictment of this tendency,
And thence as much a reproach
To the tradition; as a late addition to it.
And the forlorn figure of Adolphe
Was ultimately to prove influential,
Notably in Mother Russia,
Where he allegedly served in part
As model to Pushkin's fatal dandy,
The Byronic Eugene Onegin,
And if Tolstoy's Count Vronsky
Was also partially based on Adolphe,
Then there is of course a marked kinship
Between Ellenore and Anna Karenina.
In the end, though, one can only weep,
At the tragedy these eminently romantic
And sympathetic figures
Made of their lives. And I speak as one
Who was once in thrall to the tragic worldview,
But who came to view life
As something infinitely valuable,
To be lived fully under the guidance of God,
And not sacrificed like some beautiful bauble
For the bitter-sweet pleasures of the world.
Verses for Tragic Lovers Adolphe and Ellenore
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
We know little of the physical appearance
Of Adolphe, but in all probability
He possesses the youthfully seductive charm
Of Romantic heroes,
Werther, Rene and Julien Sorel.
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
Adolphe is preoccupied with himself
In the classic manner
Of the contemplative, melancholy,
Faintly yearning, hypersensitive,
Isolated, perceptive Romantic hero.
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
Perhaps he is somebody who believes
That self-interest is the foundation
Of all morality, but then, he announces:
"While I was only interested in myself,
I was but feebly interested for all that."
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
There is much genuine goodness
In Adolphe,
But much of it is subconscious,
Surfacing only
At the sight of obvious grief.
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
The cause of this inability to feel
Spontaneously, is very probably the result
Of the complex interaction
Between a hypersensitive nature
And a brilliant if indecisive mind.
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
By reflecting on his surroundings
To an exaggerated degree,
Adolphe feels a sort of numbness,
A premature world-weariness
Lucid thoughts and intense emotions confused.
Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.
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