The eternal lament of Alexander Pope
Before there was a new Jim Carrey film called "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," before there was a Jim Carrey, before there was film, there was a brilliant, troubled poet hunched over a manuscript in the early decades of the 18th Century.
He yearned for love, for the physical caress of a woman. Alas, it was never to be; his body had been shrunken and twisted from childhood because of tuberculosis of the spine. An enemy once referred to him as a "hump-backed toad."
Romantic love, the poet believed, was out of reach.
Thus Alexander Pope (1688-1744) had to settle for fame and riches and the awed respect of his fellow writers -- enviable fates, all, but not the destiny he dreamed about and burned for, deep in the London night.
Many reviews of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," the convoluted and enchanting movie starring Carrey and Kate Winslet as lovers who erase each others' memories of themselves when the affair sours, note that the title derives from a line in Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard," published in 1717.
But the poem was not just another work in Pope's substantial canon, a list that includes such renowned poems as "Essay on Criticism" and "The Rape of the Lock." Pope was the major poet of the 18th Century, coiner of phrases that have become so cozily familiar that they often are mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare or the Bible or common aphorisms of anonymous origin: "A little learning is a dangerous thing"; "Hope springs eternal"; "The proper study of mankind is man"; "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"; "Love the offender, yet detest the offense."
The 366-line poem with the "eternal sunshine" line is unlike virtually anything else Pope wrote. One of his earliest works, "Eloisa to Abelard" is intense and passionate and emotionally intimate -- the opposite of Pope's later poems, which are stately, measured and erudite, more like meticulously argued legal briefs.
"Eloisa to Abelard" is a cry of pain from a man who, just before he disappears into a staid and respectable maturity, raises his stricken young face to the sky and asks, for the final time, why love must forever elude him.
Knowing Pope's life story, knowing the poem, only deepens the experience of viewing a film created more than two and a half centuries after the poet's death.
"The poem is amazing," said Todd Parker, associate professor of English at DePaul University who specializes in 18th Century literature. "Pope does two things in it he doesn't usually do -- he writes in a woman's persona and he writes sympathetically in that persona." Typically, Parker added, Pope's work was awash in the misogyny that soiled his age.
But in "Eloisa to Abelard," the woman's voice is anguished and urgent, her love for Abelard heartbreakingly real: "Death, only death, can break the lasting chain," she laments.
Doomed lovers
Pope based his poem on the famous correspondence between doomed 12th Century lovers: Eloisa, the 18-year-old niece of Fulbert, a highly placed church official in Paris; and Abelard, 38, a teacher assigned to be her tutor. Their affair enraged Fulbert, who had Abelard castrated. Both lovers entered the religious life. Their letters -- filled with the torment of people who have pledged their love to God but still are besotted with each other -- originally were written in Latin, then translated into French and later English; the English translator, John Hughes, was a friend of Pope's, Parker said.
"The crisis of the poem is Eloisa's dilemma. What do you do when you feel a love is sinful but you can't give it up?" Parker declared. "The answer she comes to is that the only way to resolve it is to die. In this life, she won't be able to renounce her love for Abelard.
"When I teach `Eloisa and Abelard,' I try to get the students to see that it's a crisis of identity over the question of love -- and I think it's autobiographical," Parker continued. "He [Pope] could imagine a situation where you love, but your love has no point. The work has a strain of real vulnerability, of despair that he'll never know the kind of experiences that other people take for granted."
In interviews, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has talked about his affection for Eloisa's words. "Her story, her letters, are very beautiful to me," he told The Orlando Sentinel.
The line "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" in Pope's poem is Eloisa's vision of how a true nun -- one whose mind is not clouded by earthly passions -- would live. She knows that her love for Abelard is distracting her from her religious vows, since "Thy image steals between my God and me," she writes to her beloved. The ceremonies of religious devotion are no help. "One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight," she says. "Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight:/In seas of flame my plunging soul is drown'd,/While altars blaze, and angels tremble round."
In the film, Kaufman's lovers are doomed not by religion but by simple incompatibility: He's a dour dweeb, she's a messy flake. When things fall apart, each in turn utilizes the services of a strange man (Tom Wilkinson) who guarantees to erase their memories of the relationship. The couple, though, has second thoughts.
Even a film that creates the buzz of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" may not inspire a full-scale revival of interest in Pope, Parker cautioned. "I don't anticipate a rush to the bookstore to clean out the shelves of Pope's poetry," he said.
Were it to do so, however, the people who enjoy "Eloisa to Abelard" might be disappointed by the rest of Pope's work, Parker noted. It is formal and stilted, consisting by and large of poetic exercises in logic and rational thinking -- and rendered in dry, 18th Century wit -- rather than passionate, soul-wringing songs about the torments of love.
"It's highly polished. It really doesn't appeal to today's students, who expect poetry to give up its meanings in the first reading," Parker said. "It has a highly formal structure -- built layer upon layer. It has a very complicated architecture and demands a lot of intellectual work. Most people aren't willing to do it."
There is some faint evidence, though, that "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" may be inspiring a smidgen of new interest in Pope. Jim Manis, an English professor at the Hazleton campus of Pennsylvania State University, has maintained a Web site with most of Pope's major works for the past three years: www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/pope.htm.
The site, Manis said, received some 500 hits between Monday and Wednesday of last week -- the usual weekly total is about 300.
Those tallies, though, don't reveal if the visits are by people discovering Pope for the first time, thanks to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or veteran Pope fans who just felt the need for an extra dose of heroic couplets. Or, Manis added in an e-mail, "the increase may simply reflect the fact that our site receives more hits during March than it does during some other months, such as August."
Big seller in his day
Whether his poems become hot again -- Pope was a big seller in his day, Parker reported, and is believed to be the first author to make his living solely by his pen -- the use of a line from "Eloisa to Abelard" is a sweet homage to a man whose own experiences of love apparently were nonexistent, despite his desires.
And there is this: Had the man who wrote the line "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" gone to see the movie, he probably would have gone alone.
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From 'Eloisa to Abelard'
By Alexander Pope (1717)
In these deep solitudes
and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive
contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
. . . Oh come! Oh teach me nature to subdue,
Renounce my love, my life, myself -- and you.
Fill my fond heart with God alone, for he
Alone can rival, can succeed to thee.
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 . . .
