Quarrel in Old Age
Quarrel in Old Age - meaning Summary
Beauty, Decay, and Love
A speaker answers a bishop who urges spiritual withdrawal from the body's decay. He insists that beauty and filth are intertwined, that friends and bodily vigour may be gone while pride and learning remain. Love, he argues, inhabits the low and sordid as well as the exalted; completeness requires rupture and exposure. The poem refuses a simple moral split between the heavenly and the bodily.
Read Complete AnalysesI met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. 'Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.' 'Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart's pride. 'A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.'
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