While fashionable Westerners no longer wear Beaver hats, and most modern youth have never read Antony and Cleopatra, John Keats’s early-19th-century satirical and poetical critique of “Modern Love” is still all too applicable today.
The poem “Modern Love” made fun of how silly people in Keats’s time conducted their romances — with excessive and unwarranted drama, not to mention a great deal of show without depth. But some things never change, and I think today, more than ever, we have largely reduced love to a game, full of empty words, sinful indulgence, and never-to-be-fulfilled promises.
"And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up / For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle; / A thing of soft misnomers, so divine / That silly youth doth think to make itself / Divine by loving"? asked John Keats in "Modern Love." The language might seem old-fashioned, but the truth behind the words is still truth.
Of course, the main part of our problem now is that we have totally rejected the Biblical understanding of when sexual relations are permitted, which is only within marriage (e.g., see 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Leviticus 18, Deuteronomy 5:18, Matthew 19:4ff). "Fornication" is scarcely ever mentioned even in churches, and Jesus's prohibition against divorce (Matthew 19) is obviously not respected in modern America, where between a third and a half of marriages end in divorce. But beyond all this, many institutions and the entertainment industry have for decades encouraged young people to take love and sex as frivolously and selfishly as possible.
From explicit sex education in elementary school to LGBTQ-themed school events to inappropriate song lyrics to movies and TV shows glorifying unfaithful and self-centered characters, Westerners are encouraged from the earliest age not to take love seriously. Dating and weddings are all about show, but how many young people are urged to be generous, persevering, and self-sacrificial within romance? How many young people are taught that marriage is as much about giving as receiving? No wonder so many relationships and marriages end in heartbreak and divorce.
Below is John Keats's poem in full. While we in America don't call rubber/rain boots "Wellingtons" or read the story of Cleopatra drinking a dissolved pearl, we notice that too many people now as then treat hearts as playthings and love as a mere stage drama:
And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.
