Valentine's Day In Shakespeare's Love Equinox: The Birds And The Bees

Edwin A. Sumcad
February 14, 2007
It only happens in the world of literature. In love, Shakespeare defied Nature’s law by creating his own Vernal Equinox.
Vernal Equinox is “… the first day of the spring season … of the year when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving northward …” [1] let’s stop here before we reach the edge and fall over the cliff of cosmic science. Here we are talking about love with a spice of literary novelty that knocks at the door of literature which my rusty hand is trying to open.

We are not talking about the Galaxy or about the theory of relativity. We are talking about the birds and the bees in springtime … in Valentine’s Day, if you are Shakespearean. It’s not about Einstein. It’s about Shakespeare. So let’s drop our anchor here before we proceed.

Recalling the rainbow years of my literary days when the sun was shining over the study of Victorian literature as bright as if not brighter than it shines today, it is clear to me that it was Shakespeare who alluded to the 14th day of February as the day sacred to St. Valentine when birds “begin to couple”.

American lexicographer Noah Webster had this lexicon written in stone. [Tryon Edwards, The New Dictionary of Thoughts, Grosset & Dunlap, New York.
It is about six days immediately prior to the 14th day of February [2] that letter carriers bend their back carrying bags of letters and tons of Valentine Cards – approximately half of the total one billion pieces annually -- that profess a lot of love and care for someone dear. [3] This great volume of affectionate cards is second only to an avalanche of Christmas cards that inundates the post office during Yuletide Season.

On top of it, flowers bloom in the heart of lovers – someone’s lover or a lover of someone – and with chocolates and a truckload of gifts, sweep loved ones off their feet!

But let’s say it in a Shakespearean way: It is the time when the birds and the bees start “to couple” – got it?

The preservation of the human specie is no different from the way the birds and the bees preserve their own. As engine of procreation, love works overtime, mostly at night when human couples are too busy working during the day to give each other the required attention, just as bats sleep during the day and works overtime only when the sun is down.

Efficiency-wise, it reminds us of road construction workers who do their thing most cost-effectively from midnight to the first ray of dawn when the flow of traffic is kinder, and roadwork can be done with less obstruction and minimal detractions. On the road, they put the “detour” arrow sign that points “this way”, or “that way to …” In hotel rooms, you don’t knock at the door when you see the “don’t disturb” sign hanging on the doorknob.

Shakespeare would most probably jolt you out of your forty winks. With those peculiar squinted eyes and plaintive smile, Shakespeare would most likely snap: “Don’t knock, it’s occupied. Dig?” That’s because motel rooms are actually “restrooms”. It’s private.

It has been said that Shakespeare’s disciples in the literary world would probe nonchalantly those whose mind snores when attempting to tackle Shakespeare as Shakespeare. In the audience, attention span is normally from narrow to zero. In lectures, there is that irresistible urge to rudely wake them up. I thought of a handy bucketful of ice water that should do the trick.
The sad truth is, high heeled intellectual pretenders would pay handsomely to get to the arts theater to see and attempt to digest and appreciate Shakespeare only for you to see them snore on their seats with their eyes open. The moment you are out of the theater, you cannot talk about the play to a bunch of somnambulists whose minds are blank, and you feel offended when they roll their eyeballs upward because you were trying to strike a conversation which to them was something mentally past midnight.

To me Shakespeare’s emotional tragedy on the stage has also a much more awkward tragedy in the wrong audience

Littérateur extraordinaire, Shakespeare would say in a thousand different words what you think and what I think about the birds and the bees on Valentine’s Day when they “couple”.

The most important point to consider if you want to know more about Shakespeare is that this literary genius may be fiercely dogmatic and brutal in treating the characters of his literary creations -- he stabbed them, choked them, poisoned them, or crowned them with laurels in the throne of success or nailed them down on the cross of failure with unimaginable cruelty like how he exploited the weakness and meanness of man in Macbeth when he wrote about tragic love, trust and treachery with such intellectual aggression and emotional pull, but he was never street-like vulgar, indecently loutish, and has neither been obscene nor has ever been morally compromising with unleashed passion when he wrote his heart out in Romeo and Juliet .

Shakespeare’s natural state of the art skill to obscure the lewd and the obscene [it is not actually what you read or there is more to it than what the words say] when he uses the quill and the ink to good advantage, convinced me that William Shakespeare is one of the smartest brains any investigating scholarly artist may yet discover in the evolving old literary scriptures, and even in the nebulous storybook of modern literature. Trust me for, with conviction, I say this where my mouth, bread and butter have been some years back.

While the legendary fountain has the elixir of youth, springtime has the elixir of love. Yet to Shakespeare it is not in spring but in Valentine’s Day -- just about right in the reclining acme of winter -- that Cupid shoots his arrow and hits the heart and explodes it with infectious love wildly spreading all over the world.
It simply means that Valentine season is when we start to talk about humans, the birds and the bees that “couple”, whereas springtime is about flowers that bloom, which is a strong invitation to romance. It is the Ying and Yang of time when the male pursues the female and vice versa as if it is a natural law only to be obeyed by the living in the animal kingdom.

No one can defy this natural law or go against its powerful command without the specie’s self-destruction [my other self-part in economics established this indomitable finding, i.,e., because of defiance, the progression curve of increase or expansion hits zero and crosses down the negative horizontal axis of the tracking graph]; it is so naturally designed with faultless infinite wisdom that its natural course is like that of the river that only flows downstream, never upstream. Yet, there is a pleasant surprise behind all these.

In literary art as it is in economics, only Shakespeare could make this defiance work with positive results, even turning it into more attractively romantic. At least in the United States and the rest of the northern hemisphere, spring does not arrive until March. If we look at the Gregorian calendar, the first day of spring does not come until in-between March 20th-21st of the year, otherwise known as the arrival of the Vernal Equinox. [Refer to Note (1)] For love, Shakespeare made February the first month of spring.

In springtime, the day is much longer, giving soul-mate seekers ample time for flirting and courting; there is also much more time for the birds and the bees to enjoy life as “couples” loving each other one at a time.
What is happening in spring that makes one feels heavenly attracted to the opposite sex? From the spirit of gardening, Willa Cather has this to say of springtime that seduces the lovestruck:
“The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathes is saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot has a reflection of the blue sky.” [4] Pregnant with possibilities, the earth is there lying naked under the sun, only waiting for someone to touch, this I might add.

But like the river parable, Shakespeare moved springtime upstream -- from March upward to earlier February -- thus breaking the law of the Vernal Equinox. For posterity, American lexicographer Noah Webster recorded Shakespeare’s defiance of Nature’s prescribed law. After all, the literary guru could not be wrong on February the 14th as real love’s dateline ex cathedra. St. Valentine was there to back him up.

It then goes without saying that in love, Shakespeare created his own Equinox. And that’s how powerful the Shakespearean Equinox has become to this day, especially on Valentine’s Day.#
© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access February 13, 2007