Song ("On Her Loving Two Equally") Essay Questions

Do you see Cupid as a protagonist or antagonist? Explain your answer.

Answer 1: Cupid is an antagonist. He is directly responsible for the narrator's discomfort and distress, having deliberately shot her with not one but two of his magic arrows, causing her to fall in love with two different people. He is therefore indirectly responsible for the misery of both Alexis and Damon, who are being alternately praised and rejected by the speaker. Three people are therefore suffering because of Cupid's mistake, and even in fixing the problem by removing the speaker's love for either Damon or Alexis, Cupid is destined to hurt her through the loss of identity that will come with a loss of love.

Answer 2: Cupid is a positive character. Although the speaker is torn between two people, Cupid has given her a double dose of attraction and adventure. He is also in a position to heal the speaker by taking back one of the arrows. The speaker—although she realizes that it’s impossible to love both Damon and Alexis equally—still suffers in the impossibility of doing so. Despite the loss of identity that might attend Cupid’s intervention, the speaker will at least have some relief from painful bifurcation felt by attempting to love both equally.

Explain how Aphra Behn uses some of the conventions of pastoral lyric to create her own poetic identity.

In “On Her Loving Two Equally,” Aphra Behn takes the genre of the pastoral lyric and empties it of all its conventions. Where the speaker of a conventional pastoral lyric would be a man seeking, expressing, and enacting his love of a woman, Behn presents her speaker as a woman who loves two men. This complicates the entire genre of the pastoral, since the speaker no longer sings about love and conquest of a singular individual, but rather the bifurcated split of sexual desire that comes in an attempt to love two persons equally. While the conventional pastoral lyric revels in the attainment of a desired object, here Behn creates a pastoral of uncertainty, where love is bifurcated between attainment and loss, presence and absence, to create a truly unique space in which she can explore the limits of heteronormative poetic identities and conventions.