Fustian Sacrifices on the Altar of Love: the Poet Pablo Neruda and the Murderess Mrs Pearcey

I mentioned in an earlier post my attendance at a wedding when we heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’), a characteristic rodomontade by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned, before the age of one, to be sacrificed on the altar of art.
See:  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-irreconcilable-sententiousness-of.html

That Anglo-Saxons shrink from such declarations as too operetta-ish was borne in on me when I read today the love letters of possibly England’s most notorious murderess Mary Pearcey (hanged 1890).

Novelettish professions of  sacrificial love:
the Kentish Town murderess Mary Pearcey and
the Chilean Nobel-Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda. 

Mary killed the wife and baby of her lover in an attack described as a bloodbath after inviting her victim to afternoon tea. The noted English criminologist, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, disdains the ‘fustian emotions’ of the killer and suggests they were fired by the romantic novelettes (shades of Madame Bovary) that were such a feature of railway bookstalls of the period. 

Five Percent Fervency.
Indeed, the emotions are ‘fustian’ – in the sense of overblown declarations of love – should we choose to judge Mary by the melodramatic appeals to her lover found in her letters, but whose fervency can be quantified as no more than five percent in intensity when measured on the Latin scale of Neruda’s vulgar overwrought declamatory promises. Mary wrote, aged twenty-four:

I would see you married fifty times over – yes,

I could bear that far better

than parting with you for ever

and that is what it would be

if you went out of England.

Murder following English afternoon tea seems well-mannered and modest when you consider Mary’s actions as commensurate with the sacrifices she was prepared to make in sustaining her affair with her married lover and, certainly, they are decidedly moderate when compared with the satyriatic effusions of the Nobel Prize winning Neruda, who is regarded as a provocative object of controversy by Chilean feminists.

So . . . two somewhat novelettish  professions of undying sacrificial love . . . from a buffo-sonorous Nobel-winning Chilean poet and a sordid murderess from Kentish Town . . . I leave you to judge the precise gamut of their credibility.