Summary
“On Her Loving Two Equally,” quickly draws the reader in with the peculiar question about the strength of one’s passion when divided between two people. The rhetorical question here prompts the reader to engage with the speaker, directly musing about the nature of a love divided. Now, Behn introduces the lovers, first Damon and then Alexis, and suggests that the inception of the speaker’s love for either person occurred simultaneously—she could not have loved one without also having loved the other. Thus, stanza 1 ends with a sort of paradox, a stretching between the speaker’s love of Damon and the elastic return to loving Alexis.
Stanza 2 picks up by immediately elaborating on this sort of elasticity. Here, the speaker finds that it has become impossible to be fully immersed in the presence of only one of the lovers, since the absence of the other begs for mourning. Interestingly enough though, even having both Alexis and Damon side by side in the same space does not solve the speaker’s dilemma, since a choice must still be made between loving either. Love, it seems, is not an issue of proximity, and therefore, to choose one lover always results in the giving up of another.
Finally, by stanza 3, the speaker realizes that “loving two equally” stands as an impossibility, and so calls upon Cupid, the “winged god” of love, to make an executive decision. If it’s only possible to love one person, then the speaker would rather not have to decide, but instead places the decision in the hands of a god. As the poem closes without any sign of Cupid’s intervention, the speaker fades away, consumed by indecision.
Analysis
Throughout the entirety of the poem, “On Her Loving Two Equally,” Aphra Behn sustains a two-pronged exploration. The first questions generic expectations about lyric poetry and, more broadly, cultural expectations about love and gender roles; the second probes deep into the nature of love itself. Behn launches this exploration in an immediate fashion, invoking, through a rhetorical question—“How strongly does my passion flow,/Divided equally ‘twixt two”—both the pastoral lyric tradition and a mediation on the nature of love. To attend to one, like the speaker’s struggle to love both Alexis and Damon, is to also imply the other; pastoral poetry is nothing without a man’s love of a woman, but what does it become with a possible feminine love of two men?
Thus stanza 1 not only appropriates the genre of the pastoral lyric, but rather smashes it open, and in the remains builds a new space for exploring a sexual desire that is bifurcated on the possibility of loving plurally. As Behn so aptly puts it, the speaker isn’t caught between loving either Alexis or Damon, but can only love one on the condition of also loving the other:
Damon had ne’er subdued my heart,
Had not Alexis took his part;
Nor could Alexis powerful prove,
Without Damon’s aid to gain my love.
Here the end-stopped lines—the punctuation that breaks each line into stand-alone units of grammatical sense—mimic the speaker’s conundrum, namely the simultaneity of loving both Alexis and Damon, two individual, indivisible, distinguishable, and immutable men that are always separate from each other. Like the semicolon that forces the reader’s attention to one separate grammatical unit, the speaker can only love one fully at the expense of the other.
So, this paradox continues into stanza 2. This time, however, Behn’s subtle play with rhyme scheme serves to underline her point. In stanza 1, the speaker delivers rhyming and half-rhyming couplets in AABBCC, whereas stanza 2 alters that scheme to flow as ABABCC. The result then, is that, while stanza 1 keeps the lovers separate and paired,—the speaker can be with either Damon (AA) or Alexis (BB)—stanza 2 entangles them further, so that the speaker cannot be with one without missing the other (ABAB).
And this flipping between the presence and absence of each lover is exactly what Behn writes in stanza 2. “When my Alexis present is,/Then I for Damon sigh and mourn;” she writes in lines 1-2. When Alexis is present with the speaker, Damon is absent, and his absence, in turn, pulls on the speaker like a vacuum, bifurcating not only the speaker’s sexual desire as in stanza 1, but also the line between presence and absence. To love in the liminal zone of Aphra Behn’s new pastoral is to be metaphysically divided between love and loss, presence and absence.
This liminal space between presence and absence begins to fade, though, as the speaker reaches a tipping point. “Cure then, thou mighty winged god,” the speaker calls out, in lines 1-2, to Cupid in resignation, “this restless fever in my blood;” Here the tortuous back and forth seems to be over. The speaker no longer seeks to reconcile her love for both Damon and Alexis together, but instead wishes to have only one. Still, indecision lingers as the speaker refuses agency, instead deferring to Cupid. Here, the speaker seems to realize that without the generic road map of the pastoral, the narrative arc disappears, and agency seems to follow with it.
Thus, just as the poem begins with a question of genre and love, it also ends with the speaker asking Cupid which lover will be taken away. Moreover, the final half-rhymed couplet of the poem ends with the rather shocking implication that this choice will also lead to the loss of the speaker:
But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take?
If Damon’s, all my hopes are crossed;
Or that of my Alexis, I am lost.
Behn seemingly implies to readers that the condition of paring down love to a singular object of affection inevitably results in the fading of self. The suggestion is this: If my identity is contained in the love of many, then loving only one is a loss of identity. Thus, it should come as no shock when the mostly full rhymes of stanzas 1 and 2 begin to fade into half rhymed couplets of stanza 3. The poetic nature of the piece fades away and ends when “I am lost,” which rings out in the hollow space where pastoral lyric and custom once was.
