So through the eyes love attains the heart

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I found this poem in Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth in the chapter Tales of Love and Marriage.

So through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Than by this birth and commencement move by inclination.

By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from their pleasure,
Love is born, who its fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is perfect kindness,
Which is born�there is no doubt�from the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.

�Guiraut de Borneilh
(ca 1138-1200?)

I like the sentiment of this poem. Campbell talks about the three kinds of love: Eros, Agape, and Amor. Before the twelfth century Amor did not exist or at the very least not acknowledged. It was the Troubadors and Minnesingers of the 12th century that promoted this kind of love. Eros is sexual love or as Campbell described it "the zeal of the organs for each other." and it is impersonal. Agape is that of brotherly love. Love thy neighbor and all that. Whereas Amor or Romantic love as we know it is a person to person kind of love. The identification of one with the other.

And in the Middle Ages this was absolute heresy. Marriages were arranged. Sure there could be love in those marriages but not the kind the Troubadors sang about. This is why we have such romances as Tristan and Iseult. It is our modern ideal of love. It violated the morality of the day. Does it still?