Love poems! (10.17.18)

Lovey-Dovey All the Time 

I don’t know about all of you, but love has been on my mind a lot lately.  Love abused and love wielded like a club.  Love misremembered and love misinterpreted.  Love denied and love decried.  Love in these registers has been shoved in my face in very public and publicized ways.  And politicized.  And weaponized.  And pounded home like a closing argument.  Through it all, though, a groovy kind of love[1] keeps wanting to have its say, namely, through poems and songs.  On more than one occasion, if anybody has been listening, I could be overheard singing “All you need is love . . . love is all you need.”

A poet friend said recently, apropos of nothing much but the times we live in, “Where are all the love poems?” Right!  Well, they’re never far away, if we listen for them.  Some of you have brought lovely love poems in to share with the group lately (including moving ones by Doug and Curt this very afternoon), so I guess it’s time that we make a project out of writing love poems.

But what kind of love poems?  What is a love poem anyway?  By this I mean, what constitutes a love poem, what does it look like, how does it work, and, most importantly, what can be said in a love poem? There was a time when I believed the only thing that could be said in a love poem had already been said: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”  What could I add to that?  Plenty, I think, if the following examples are any indication of the broad range of themes, moods, perspectives, treatments, voices etc. that love poetry opens up to us.

But please do this before you sit down to write your love poem for next week (or go rooting through your darning basket for the perfect length of thread): read these examples and my takes on them.  Then think about your own responses to them, whether they suggest new ways you can write about love.

AND NOTE: One thing I hope that you avoid is simply to write about love.  A love poem, in the sense that we are approaching it for next week, is an address to a lover or to something dearly loved.  It’s a poetic expression of love.

⤊ ⤊ ⤊

We could go back to the Greeks to have a look at love lyrics, to Sappho, for instance, and I suggest that you do so.  She wrote a very specific kind of love poem, very intimate, very poignant, very passionate, and very real (that is, not courtly).  Or we could study the Song of Solomon, in the Bible, which the literary critic Susan Sontag once described as an erotic love poem appropriated by the Established Church, which had to explain away, somehow, its obviously sexed-up language and imagery.  Or we could revisit Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, or Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, or any number of famous poems and sequences.  And I hope you read these incredible works (well, in the case of The Fairie Queene, maybe portions of it): a poet should not pass on to the next world without having read these works, if only because there will be a quiz the day you arrive.  Instead, I’ve elected to keep the selection American.  You’ll see in the following pieces how differently love poems can be conceived of and written.

One thing to note about the American love poem: it’s almost always intimate, private (this is a bit of a paradox), deeply personal, and addressed directly to a beloved.  (June and Curt have given us a couple of very good examples of this type of love poem recently.)  This one, by Miss Bradstreet, is of course famously anthologized.  It is passionate and expressive, and, as I say, directed to one person.  It’s actually “English” and not “American,” since America didn’t exist for another century after she wrote it, but unlike many an English love lyric, it’s not written for show, that is, for the Court, in the way Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s love poems were written.  Miss Bradstreet was not trying to establish her bona fides with this one.  It’s homespun poetry, and that’s the American-ness of it to me.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

─ Anne Bradstreet (1678)

If ever two were one, then surely we;

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than the whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

The while we live in love let’s so persevere

That when we live no more we may live ever.

Can you write a love poem about or to something other than your lover?  Can you address a love poem to someone you don’t know and will never know?  Can you express love for a corpse?  I think so.  I think Walt Whitman did in this one.

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

─ Walt Whitman (1865)

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

I never thought about Emily Dickinson as a “love poet” until I read this poem in college.  I’d taken a semester-long course devoted to her work and this one really grabbed me, partly because it’s so accessible, but partly because of its obviously erotic undertones.  Emily Dickinson!  You could do with this poem what the Church Fathers did with Song of Solomon, I suppose, but why would you want to rob Emily of her private passions?

[Wild Nights]

─ Emily Dickinson (1891)

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—

To a Heart in port—

Done with the Compass—

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor—Tonight—

In Thee!

John F. Kennedy must have believed it was possible to write a love poem to one’s country when he invited Robert Frost to read this one at his inauguration.  We could use a poet (and a president) like that today, don’t you think?

The Gift Outright

─ Robert Frost (1942)

The land was our before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

Don’t be surprised to find a poet writing a love poem to himself, or more to the point, to his own image in a mirror.  Or even more to the point, to his own genius (that is, in the sense of uniqueness or essence).  And don’t be surprised that that poet is William Carlos Williams.  “Danse Russe” is set in about as private a setting as a poem can be . . . in a north room, no less.

Danse Russe

─ William Carlos Williams (1916)

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely,

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

It’s no stretch to think of love poetry and nature in the same vein.  What is different about the following poem is its essential violence, and muted vehemence regarding mortally injured Nature in relation to Man, and the love directed toward that Nature.  Not everybody will classify this as a love poem, but it has always felt that way to me in its intimacy, its in-the-moment quality, its detail of “the beloved,” and its fatalness.

from Hurt Hawks

─ Robinson Jeffers (1928)

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Nobody said every love poem had to be uplifting or sentimental!  Robert Lowell was incapable of either of these gestures, anyway, at least in his poems.  Yet he could write soul-shaking love poems, fatalistic and downcast as they could be.  This one is part of a book-length sequence titled For Lizzie and Harriet, Harriet being his daughter, if I’m not mistaken.  So this is a love poem—intimate, almost oppressively so, and addressed to a specific person—by a very troubled man-husband-father-poet.

The Human Condition  (Harriet)

─ Robert Lowell (1973)

The impossible is allied to fact—

should someone human, not just our machinery,

fire on sight, and end the world and us,

surely he’ll say he chose the lesser evil—

our wars were simpler than our marriages,

sea monster on sea monster drowning Saturday night.

An acid shellfish cannot breathe fresh air. . . .

Home things can’t stand up to the strain of the earth.

I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives

lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,

as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.

I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,

young when the century mislays my name—

no date I can name you can be long enough.

Here’s another love poem, about love and the world, as the title plainly states.  Wilbur, who died recently, was a traditionalist all his life (in the cohort of Donald Hall, William Stafford, Donald Justice maybe).  He was an American poet, but looked to the east, to the Continent, when many of his generation were staunchly American or otherwise looking west, across the Pacific.  I think of the word urbane when I read his poems.  This poem is definitely a love poem . . . what kind of love poem, I am not so sure.  Okay, so maybe it’s “about” love rather than a direct expression of it, but it sure feels expressive to me.  Maybe it’s spiritual, or spirit, love we’re reading about here.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

─ Richard Wilbur (1967)

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bedsheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go sweet and fresh to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

Of course, love poems can be written as the blues, too.  Ai, which means “love” in Japanese, burst into my consciousness with her first book in 1973 (Cruelty) and then again with Killing Floor (1978). For some reason, I lost track of her after that, but she continued to produce books each decade until her death (breast cancer) in 2010.  She was known for writing raw stuff, poems suffused with violence and sex, as the titles above suggest, and as the poem below shows.  Sometimes these elements are direct, sometimes just below the surface.  I include this one to suggest that a “love” poem can express dependencies as well as passion.

Why Can’t I Leave You?

─ Ai (1970)

You stand behind the old black mare,

dressed as always in that red shirt,

strained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,

that will not stop for anything,

stoking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.

I pick up my suitcase and set it down,

as I try to leave you again.

I smooth the hair back from your forehead.

I think with your laziness and the drought too,

you’ll be needing my help more than ever.

You take my hands, I nod

and go to the house to unpack,

having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip

for you to take off, because you like that

and when you come in, you pull down the straps

and I unbutton your shirt.

I know we can’t give each other any more

or any less than what we have.

There is safety in that, so much

that I can never get past the packing,

the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy,

come close between my thighs

and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

---

[1] Forgive me, please, for this nod to Pop.