Chanson d’Aventure

          Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is the book The epigraph, drawn from Donne’s Ecstacie, judges the inter-relationship of body and soul and the spiritual union between individuals: the body is the all-too vulnerable vessel within which the soul is said to repose; the soul is the area in which emotions are born. The soul seeks outward expression through the body, inhibited at this point in time by Heaney’s stroke-induced paralysis. When the metaphysical dimension is stripped away Heaney and his wife Marie are the main actors in an extraordinary love poem. The chanson d’aventure originated in Old French lyric as a framing device in which the troubador- poet wanders into a wild, […]