by Nils Peterson
Love Poems, Why?
Auden says somewhere that a woman should be wary if her sweetheart starts sending her love poems because, for the duration of the writing, she wasn’t being thought of, the poem was.
Auden is being sly-spirited here, though there is truth in what he’s saying. The love poet is paying attention to his or her feelings about the beloved, what is being called up out of the inner life. These feelings are brought on by the loved one, but they are uniquely one’s own. You’ll remember that in the scene when Benedick realizes he is in love with Beatrice his last words are, “I’ll go and get her picture.” This was not to memorize the mole on her upper lip, her dimple, or pretty chin, but to be in her continual presence so that he can explore the feelings she evokes. All lovers, in their amazement ask, What is going on with me? What do I feel? What do I want?
When I see you
even for a moment
I cannot speak
my tongue is broken
fire rides under my skin
I am blind, my ears ring,
and I sweat and tremble
with my whole body (Sappho, trans. Peterson)
Wild Nights – Wild Nights
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
our luxury! (Emily Dickinson)
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you…. (Margaret Atwood, “Variations on the Word, Sleep”)
Why am I different? What has happened to me? What am I hearing when I hear her speak my formerly ordinary name?
She said to me
Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,
Because she wasn’t calling me, I think,
Or telling me. She used my name to
Talk in another way I wanted to know.
(“Picnic,” John Logan)
What is this different way we are hearing our names and what can we give back, what gift to express our gratitude for this new way of being? At least a compliment. And the compliment too reflects not only the complimented but the complimentor, for now one is filled with extravagant feelings and wants to find a way of expressing them extravagantly, not only for the loved one, but for one’s own self:
Who is it that says most, which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you alone are you…?
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 84)
She is all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us…. (John Donne, “The Sun Rising”)
If I could meditate as deeply
on the sacred texts as I do
on you, I would clearly be
enlightened in this lifetime!
(“Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama,”
trans. Barks)
Next, what can one do about it? All of a sudden world and time are so precious. How can we make the beloved understand that? How can we make ourselves understand that? Can we use the fear we feel ourselves that there isn’t world enough and time to come to completion, or do we assert that time and the world have stopped because of what has happened to us?
The sun that sets may rise again
but when our light has sunk into the earth
it is gone forever. (Catullus, trans. Horace Gregory)
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
And when this tremendous experience of union comes to us, how can we find a language wild enough and extravagant enough to describe this ravishment of the senses?
I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats….
(Olds, “Greed and Aggression”)
I know there are poems of despair to match these poems of joy – at least as many. But that is for another essay. What I like about love poems is their exuberance, their joy in being. When you’re in love how can you help but go through the world with a strut, and how can you not strut your stuff in your own poems?
I close with a paraphrase of quotation by Ted Hughes. He is talking about how difficult it is to describe the flying of crows, but Cupid too “is winged and doth range…” – so [I’ll use Cupid’s more dignified name, Eros.]
“It is not enough to say that Eros flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite loveeness in the Love’s flight. All we can do is use words as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in Love’s flight, the barefaced bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture and the headlong sort of merriment– you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpsed knowledge of Love’s wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when your heart’s pierced by his arrow.” Yet we try.
Why Not To Google
It’s a little after 4 in the morning – not quite sleepy, an hour before I’ll use the espresso machine beside my bed, a pleasant almost awakeness.
A fragment of a hymn, maybe left over from some talk the other day, “First the blade and then the ear/ Then the full corn shall appear.” Isolated for the moment without tune or or other lines. I could google with my under-the-bed IPad, but, I don’t want to.
Now I’m aware the tune for the phrase was there after all, but I can’t yet remember how the hymn started or where it went next. It’s a lovely phrase and I brood on it – then remember the last words, “Harvest home,” and after awhile the tune to get me there. Next the beginning, “Come ye thankful people come. Raise the song of harvest home.” More, “All is safely gathered in/ E’er the winter’s storms begin…,” and now I’m back to being a boy in the choir of the cathedrally Presbyterian church that the rich people in town all went to. I, as the son of a chauffeur, got to go sort of in the back door to Sunday school, and, yes, the choir, the children’s choir – a good one – Charlotte Garden, the organist, conductor, minister of music, something of a local name. I remember Teddy Baer in the choir, a couple of years older than me, maybe Margaret McKenzie who was in my class at grammar school, brother Bill, maybe, a year or two later, not Jimmy Peale or Walter Pease – did their parents go to a different church or no church?
It is a Thanksgiving hymn, and I remember another, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” and now it comes back – I must have been no older than 8 or 9 – leading the whole congregation at the morning service in a call and response. It must have been a children’s program put on as Sunday service in the great, resonant high hall of the chapel before all the rich people,
Me: For food and drink …
Congregation: We thank thee Lord.
[Memory refuses to bring more saying this is enough.]
Mother was so proud, for years she would recite my words at strange times as sort of a comfort to herself.
So, Google would have come with a cudgel of fact for it is the enemy of memory our dwelling place. Its way of knowing is a dead end, not a pathway.