Love Poetry

Love Poetry

Big Frank has been reading James Fenton’s excellent anthology of love poetry, entitled "The New Faber Book of Love Poems". It is a hefty tome that arranges the poetry by authors, alphabetically. He included everything from Amercian folk songs (Frankie and Johnny) to blues licks, the usual list of great lyric poets (Burns, Blake, Shakespeare, Rossetti, etc.), and many many new discoveries. What he does especially well is to capture the full scope of love better than most anthologies. Typically you get the ying and yang of love: the wild passion accompanying its birth, and the woe after it has collapsed. Fenton includes the poems reflecting what lies between the 'I love you.”, and the ‘Oh, no; it’s all over now.’ It is this fullness that gives the anthology its richness.

In the introduction Fenton summarizes this quite well: “I love you. You love me. I used to love you. You don’t love me. I want to sleep with you. Here we are in bed together. I hate you. You betrayed me. I’ve betrayed you. I want to kill you. Oh no! I have killed you. Such are the simple propositions on which these lyrics elaborate.”

Perhaps it would do well to start at the end of the progression - an end that becomes a beginning. Here is W.D. Snodgrass on the lingering introspective reflection of lost love. A poem that captures the spurned lover in yet another of his backward glances – his revery of “what if”:

The Last Time

Three years ago one last time, you forgot
Yourself and let your hand, all gentleness
Move to my hair, then slip down to caress
My cheek, my neck. My breath failed me; I thought

It might all come back yet, believed you might
Turn back. You turned, then, once more to your own
Talk with that tall young man in whom you’d shown
In front of all our friends such clear delight

All afternoon. You, recalled then the long
Love you had held for me was changed. You threw
Both arms around him, kissed him, and then you
Said you were ready and we went along.

In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem The Dug-Out we have a different kind of fear expressed than the oft-expressed fear of loss. Here it is not the loss of the lover’s love; it is not the lover going off with someone else, or leaving for loss of feelings. Here it is the fear of the loss of one’s lover through the death of one’s lover. The knowledge that, with certainty it will happen makes it all the more disturbing as Sassoon expresses so well.

The Dug-Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head . . .
You are too young to fall asleep forever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.


Don Patterson’s “The Gift” expresses the horrible emerging from the well intentioned gesture – the gift. Here it is almost like Blake’s “The Rose” – love’s fragility and the parallel destroyers that accompany us in life – even when in love:

The Gift

That night she called his name, not mine
and could not call it back
I shamed myself and thought of that blind
girl in Kodiak

who sat on the stoop each night
to watch the daylight fade
and lift her child down to the gate cut
in the palisade

and what old caution love resigned
when through that misty stare
she passed the boy to not her bearskinned
husband but the bear.


Alice Oswald has a sonnet that takes a brighter look at love: love expanding into everything. Here it’s like an inhalation and exhalation; love’s private present luck-blessed alarm that echoes back off everything and is reflective of everything.

Wedding

From time to time our love is like a sail
And when the sail begins to alternate
From tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
And when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
And if the coat is yours, it has a tear
Like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
To draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
And when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions . . .
And this, my love, when millions come and go
Beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
And when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
Tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
And when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
Which is like love, which is like everything.

John Fuller captures the ambiguity of love in “Two Voices”. Here is the dichotomous full view of love – a Blakean voice reminiscent of “The Clod and the Pebble” or “Thel’s Motto".

Two Voices

Love is a large hope in what,
Unfound, imaginary, leaves us
With a beautifying presence.
Love always grieves us.’
So sang youth to the consenting air
While age in deathly silence, thus:

‘Love is a regret for what,
Lost or never was, assails us
With a beautifying presence.
Love never fails us.’

James Fenton’s “The Alibi” humorously and poignantly captures the alienation of love and the ridiculousness of haughty smugness:

The Alibi

My mind was racing
It was some years from now.
We were together again in our old flat.
You were admiring yourself adjusting your hat.
‘Oh of course I was mad then,’ you said with a
Forgiving smile,
‘Something snapped in me and I was mad for a
While.’

But this madness of yours disgusted me,
This alibi,
This gorgeous madness like a tinkling sleigh,
It carried you away
Snug in your fur, snug in your muff and cape.
You made your escape
Through the night, over the dry powdery snow.
I watched you go.

Turly the mad deserve our sympathy.
And you were driven mad you said by me
And then you drove away
The cushions and the furs piled high,
Snug with your madness alibi,
Injured and forgiven on your loaded sleigh.

And then we have Robert Burns, he of the “And I will luve thee still, my dear,/ Till a’ the seas gang dry.” Well, maybe not quite that long. For in addition to “A Red, Red Rose” Burns also wrote “Wantonness”.

Wantonness

Wantonness for every mair,
Wantonnes has been my ruin;
Wety for a’ my dool and care,
It’s wantonness for ever!

I hae lov’d the Black, the Brown,
I hae lov’d the Fair, the Gowden:
A’ the colours in the town
I hae won their wanton favour.

W.H. Auden often writes of the grief of love: :”I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” In “The More Loving One” he confirms his choice to be “the more loving one” even if it be in the indifferent gaze of the loved one.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark subline,
Though this might take me a little time.

Well then, not all are as willing to be “the more loving one”. Take Elizabeth Thomas, for example in the aptly titled “The Execration”. This well addresses the “I hate you” – phase of love – not often included in such anthologies.

The Execration

Enslaved by passions, swelled with pride,
In love with one whom all deride;
A carcase well, yet mind in pain,
Reduced to beg, but beg in vain;
To live reserved and free from blame,
And yet incur an evil fame:
Let this! This be the wretched fate
Of Rosalinda, whom I hate.

However, we can't leave the great anthology on such a note. Let's part with an unexpected treat, ironically from the first poet included in this book, Fleur Adcock. This poem speaks well of our time perhaps more than of times past: the emphasis and value of friendship in love.

Happy Ending

After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies - those
they had willingly displayed - but a frail
endeavour to apologise.

Later, though, drawn together by
a distaste for such 'untidy ends'
they agreed to meet again; whereupon
as though what they had made was love -
and not that happier outcome, friends.