By Ratan Bhattacharjee
The history of Valentine’s Day is tragic dark and bloody, though it is time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. Emperor Claudius II executed two men both known by the name Valentine on February 14 of different years in the third century AD.
The Catholic Church all over Europe honoured martyrs with the celebration of St .Valentine’s Day.From February 13 to 15 the Romans used to celebrate the feast of Lupercalia.
Noel Lenski, a historian of The University of Colorado at Boulder, was of the opinion that the Roman romantics getting drunk and naked were given liberty to make women fertile who actually line up for them. This brutal feat was regarded as a festivity of love.
Later, Pope Gelasius I combined the StValentine’s Day with Lupercalia to expel the pagan rituals of physical intercourses. The drunken revelry was given a sophisticated coating . Here we cannot ignore the simultaneously happening of Norman celebration of Galatin’s Day and it meant a love day as Galatin meant ‘lover of women’.
In the post-industrial revolution era, valentine cards were made in mass scale and Valentine’s Day ushered in a huge business. Today according to a market research by IBIS World, the V-Day sales reached $17.6 billion and this year it is expected to reach the highest mark of $18.6 billion.
“When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in The Parliament of Fowls, the first English Valentine poem in honour of the arranged marriage between England’s Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, May 3. He dreamed up the idea that all birds chose their mates. People used a different calendar before 1582.
After Chaucer’s death, Valentine’s Day celebrations got pushed back to February 14.
In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a character who discovers two lovers in the woods and asks: “St Valentine is past; begin these wood-birds but to couple now?” Even Hamlet’s fiancee Ophelia too sings “Good morrow. This St.Valentine’s Day /All in the morning bedtime/And I a maid at your window/ To be your valentine.”
Even John Donne, the pioneer of metaphysical poetry who contested Petrarchan genre of love poetry, too glorified the Valentine’s Day in his poem — This day more cheerfully than ever shine,/This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine.
It is exotic to hear a lover whispering to his beloved’s ears in a Barista Coffee Shop : “Doubt thou the stars are fire/Doubt that the sun doth move/Doubt truth to be a liar/But never doubt I love” and only on Valentine’s Day this is possible.Valentine’s Day expectations are a set-up for heartbreak. The most unpleasant experience of having one in a romantic relationship is the long waiting to say the three magical words ‘I Love You’.
Silence on the part of the fiancee is like a quicksand which may drown the person seeking love and many overmuch optimistic lovers console their heart break by saying ‘Waiting is love’. The Oscar Wilde’s story The Nightingale and the Rose showed how the nightingale sacrificed itself on the thorns of the rose plant bleeding while singing to make the rose bloom for the boy it loved. The girl for whom the boy took the rose did not accept it saying that her lover would bring costly gifts which might be better than the rose. Probably for this girl, the Valentine’s Day will never bring the romance in the air.
The Valentine’s Day inside the mind is all that makes a real Valentine’s Day, not the commercialisation done through sales and purchase of costly gifts, candy or flowers. So we need a Valentine’s Day to touch the wishes and aspirations as we have for a holiday. Charles Lamb who craves for a Sunday across the whole week, found after his superannuation that all his week days have become Sundays. This waiting for a Sunday is the essence of the Valentine’s Day.
(The author is an associate professor and Head of the Post Graduate Department of English, Dum Dum Motijheel College, Kolkata)
