Chaucer throughout his works attacks the theory that dreams may be interpreted, but he gives us a true symbolical interpretation in this poem. He also here recorded unconsciously some of his own past griefs in love. Freud taught that anxiety dreams were due to the repression of the libido being converted into fear. We also know from anthropology that the boar was a sexual symbol. In the poem Diomede appears to Troilus as a boar, also, because Troilus had heard the story of Meleager and the boar and of the ancestry of Diomede. Even though he had forgotten the tale, if he did, since he was reminded of it by his sister, it was still present in his unconscious. His anxiety was due to the fear that Diomede had really won Criseyde. The fear that he experienced at day, that his sweetheart would be lost to him—the anxiety that his libido would be repressed, become an anxiety dream in which the boar is the symbol of his rival.
In the fifth elegy of the third book of Ovid's Amores, the author reports a symbolical dream of the loss of his love. It is correctly interpreted, in a Freudian manner, by an interpreter of dreams. The poet dreamed that he took shelter from the heat in a grove under a tree. He saw a very white cow standing before him, and her mate, a horned bull, near her chewing his cud. A crow pecked at the breast of the cow and took away the white hair. The cow left the spot; black envy was in her breast as she went over to some other bulls. The interpreter told Ovid that the heat which the poet was seeking to avoid was love, that the cow was his white-complexioned mistress and that he was the bull. The crow was a procuress who would tempt his mistress to desert him. The sexual symbolic interpretation shows that Freud's most unpopular idea was known among the Romans. It happened that Ovid's mistress did prove unfaithful to him and he complained of the fact. His dream arose, however, from his day fears, and he had previously written a poem in the Amores against a procuress.
Ovid is one of the greatest love poets in all literature, and his Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his Heroides translated by Pope records some of his own love griefs, though these are recorded in his Amores directly.
The symbolism that psychoanalysis deals with is that of the unconscious. Symbols may have the most significance when the dreamer or writer least suspects it. And it is only by the study of folk-lore, wit and the neuroses that one gets to see their meaning.
No doubt the critic who examines literary masterpieces to find sexual symbols will not be a popular one; but that does not alter the fact that the sexual meaning is there. The field will no doubt be taken up in the future by some critic who will not fear to brave public wrath.
It will be seen that many writers who were deemed respectable and pure because they never dealt with sexual problems are full of sex symbolism. They consciously strove to conceal their sex interest, but their unconscious use of sex symbolism shows that they were not as indifferent to the problems as they would lead us to imagine.
Browning rarely wrote directly of sex. He is admired justly by all lovers of literature; and women are among his most enthusiastic lovers. It is true one of his poems, the "Statue and the Bust," has puzzled his women admirers. Adultery seems to be defended here. Now there are some innocent poems of the poet rich in sex symbolism. It is well known that dreams of riding on horse-back, rocking, or any form of rhythmic motion through which the dreamer goes, are sexually symbolical. In older literature and in colloquial language the word to ride is used in a sexual sense. Browning is especially addicted to writing poems describing the pleasure of riding, or poems in rhythmic verse which suggest the riding process. It has never dawned on critics to suggest that there may be a cause for this that is to be found in the unconscious of the author.
Take his "The Last Ride Together." The speaker who is rejected asks his love to give him the pleasure of a last ride with her. Not being able to get the pleasures of love from her, he seeks them in another form, a symbolic one. He will now imagine that he receives them; he is prompted to his strange request by unconscious causes. He wants a substitute for the actuality. "We ride and I see her bosom heave," he says. Every stanza says something about the riding. "I ride," "We ride," "I and she ride" are repeated throughout the poem. He addresses the poet, the sculptor and the musician and tells them that he is riding instead of creating art; by this he means that they express their longing to love in art; he does so by riding. "Riding's a joy." He also lies to himself and pretends he is not angry at his mistress and that perhaps it was best he didn't win her love; he pretends he has no regrets for the past and that he is satisfied with the ride instead of her love. The poem is an excellent example of the unconscious use of symbolism in literature. The meaning is clear.
Two other poems of Browning where sexual symbolism may be present though there is nothing of love in the poems are the famous "How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "Through the Metidja to Abd-El-Kadr." The sexual significance can be seen in the rhythmic swing, for both poems suggest the motion of the horse rider. The effect in the latter poem is produced by the use of the words "I ride" twice in the first, third and eighth lines of each of the five stanzas, thirty times, and by having each of the forty lines end with "ride" or a rhyme to "ride."
"As I ride, as I ride,