I spent about 4 x as much time on this one as the last one, and it's only 3 x longer. This is a nerve-racking process!
(But thanks to Kellie for making it easier by helping with the music!)
K/S:"A Definition of Love"
My accompanying notes on youTube:
Unmet longing + stars + navigation.
The 17th cent. British "metaphysical" poets wrote about this stuff long before 1960's Star Trek.
I mashed-up this poem by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), music from "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi (born the year Marvell died), and Kirk and Spock.
So I guess that makes this metaphysical Baroque Star Trek slash...
Kirk & Spock do--eventually--fulfill the seemingly impossible demands Marvell set for ill-fated loves to meet. (Helps to have a starship.)
The angst of the poem is obvious enough, but some of the language may be unfamiliar to modern readers, so here's the whole poem to read at your leisure, if you want.
(I had to look up "planisphere" = a star chart made of a flat surface--the plane--with a movable disc--the sphere--on top; and "oblique lines" = lines that are neither perpendicular nor parallel.)
"The Definition of Love"
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced--
Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.
As lines, so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.
Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.
_______
Marvell's work is in the public domain; Paramount owns Star Trek; I offer this solely for pleasure and edification.
Thanks to Trekcore.com for the screencaps!
