The first act of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience, among its many absurdities, includes the following quatrain, sung by a bevy of poetical maidens and their beaus the British dragoons:
The pain that is all but a pleasure will change
For the pleasure that’s all but pain,
And never, oh never, this heart will range
From that old, old love again!
The absurdity of the quatrain lies in the fact that the love-struck singers will in a very few moments be separated as the maidens discover their latest literary crush: the devastatingly handsome poet Grosvenor.
The story is a deliberate farce. The author, W.S. Gilbert, meant the lyric as a parody of Victorian sentimentality, which he undoubtedly considered fully as shallow as any aesthetic maiden. But Gilbert nearly always wrote a little truer than he intended; and the hackneyed paradox on which he seized might (handled well) have done credit to a Donne or a Pope: the paradox of love so strong that it hurts.
That phrase too sounds hackneyed, partly because we have heard it so often that we don’t really hear it at all. We assume blithely that the pangs of love are due to fear of losing the object of our love. There is some truth in this assumption. A wise professor of ethics once told us in his class that from the day we had children we would never lack worry again. He was right: and a great part of a parent’s worry is the fear that through their actions or neglect something bad will happen to their child. That is, perhaps, the paradigmatic human fear of loss.
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