Love
Poetry With an Edge
By Doug Talley
We
have in English but one word for love, an unfortunate poverty
surely, when a single word must answer to such a vast range
of emotion and fortune. Other words, such as affection,
or fondness, or charity, fill spaces in our vocabulary,
but none of these are elastic enough, in and of themselves,
to explain both the love that burns like a fire and the love
that settles a child into sleep. The Greeks, ever adept at
drawing distinctions, felt the need for at least two words,
and gave us eros and agaph, the former, eros, meaning the kind of love that corresponds
with emotional and physical need, and the latter, agape,
meaning especially brotherly or sisterly love, a spiritual love
if you will, the kind of love God has for man and man for God.
In
the poet’s world, a word will surface for every joy, and for
every sorrow as well. Love knows both extremes, and poets have
explored the spectrum between both endlessly. Particularly
as Valentine’s Day approaches, it may be we think a little too
simplistically about the rich ironies fostered by love in every
culture and epoch. In our own time, we resort to candy and
flowers and greeting cards with quaint ditties as the ideal
expression of our feeling, genuine and well-intentioned enough,
but perhaps we forget that cities have burned and nations have
fallen in the name of love. We might forget, in the comfort
of our relationships, the sheer power love may unloose. The
city of Troy crumbled to ashes with the misbegotten, illicit
love of Helen and Paris. On the other hand, no less tragically
and yet with a far happier outcome, the son of God through love
laid a foundation to transfigure an entire world. Strong emotions
require strong words and the best poets give us both.
Love
as a Restless Passion
Anyone
who has ever fallen in love knows the anxiety of the drop.
We stumble into some unknown cavity, unable to fathom its depths
or boundaries or discern the outcome. The first uncertain days
of new love we know only as a restlessness. Teenagers suffer
through it daily. The Greek poetess Sappho, writing approximately
during the sixth century before Christ, articulated forever
the classical expression for this kind of love, with clarity,
simplicity and immediacy. She was a prolific writer, but now
only fragments remain:
Eros d’ etinaxe moi
frenas, ws anemos kat oros drusin empetwn
Love rifles my heart,
like wind rushing down a mountain through an oak.
deduke men a selanna
kai Plhiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d’ ercet’ wra,
egw de mona kateudw.
The
moon has fallen
and the Pleiades.
At midnight the hour
passes, and I lie alone.
Sappho
depicted in these two small fragments a love as wild and reckless
as a mountain wind and as vast and forlorn as the nighttime
sky. We know the intensity of this feeling, and are able to
name it, only because poets have given us the words to do so.
Otherwise, we might suffer in silence, which is a terrifying,
intolerable prospect.
Love
as a Poison
Perhaps
one of the most frightening descriptions of love ever written
may be found in the Aeneid where Virgil depicted love
as a kind of poison. It is impossible to tell if Virgil really
felt this way about love, or rather only perceived that love
can end tragically and therefore concluded that the gods who
meddle in human affairs must have contrived such love, or else
it would not end so badly. In Book I, lines 683 to 688, the
goddess Venus with her minion, the boy Cupid, contrives to manipulate
Queen Dido into loving Aeneas. Venus instructs Cupid to assume
the features of Aeneas’ son Ascanius, and as a young boy ingratiate
himself into Dido’s affection. During this innocent interlude,
Cupid will inject her with venom, a burning desire for the boy’s
father Aeneas:
Tu faciem illius noctem non amplius unam
Falle dolo, et notos pueri puer indue vultus,
Ut, cum te gremio accipiet laetissima Dido
Regalis inter mensas laticemque Lyaeum,
Cum dabit amplexus, atque oscula dulcia figet,
Occultum inspires ignem, fallasque veneno.
You (Cupid) will counterfeit by illusion his face,
Not more than one night, and as a boy assume the
boy’s
Familiar features, so that Dido receives you joyfully
To her lap amidst the royal tables and cups of wine.
When she offers her embraces, presses her sweet
kisses,
You will inspire a hidden flame and fool her with
poison.
The
idea of love as a poison, a deadly liquid agent coursing the
human body, calls to mind the observation of a psychologist
friend, that young love is largely a flood of raging hormones.
It is depressing enough to consider we may have little control
over this contaminant, love. It is even worse to consider love
as merely a convenient tool in the hands of a god to shape self-serving
outcomes, including the utter destruction of an innocent soul,
in this case, a noble queen. Aeneas is the hero of Virgil’s
epic, but most readers invariably care more for Dido, infected
with love and then abandoned to ruin.
Love as an Illness
A
number of critics believe William Shakespeare wrote Romeo
and Juliet early in his career when he was still more of
a poet than a dramatist. The action of the play is occasionally
slowed by lyrical speeches and exchanges of wit. And yet these
passages hardly seem a weakness in the play, because they typically
expound on some aspect of love, articulated in the language
of England’s greatest poet. At the outset of the play, Romeo
is the victim of an unrequited love, and Shakespeare would seem
to be poking fun at the predicament of a callow youth overwhelmed
more by the idea of love than by love itself. Romeo is full
of himself, reciting high sentences and lofty words for the
bitter-sweet paradox he feels:
O
heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
(Act I, Scene I, ll. 183-188)
Romeo
is sick, and love is the illness. There is nothing highly original
in Romeo’s vexation, which is precisely Shakespeare’s point.
Romeo is swooning from an effect more imagined than real. He
has no real experience with love and no real language for it.
Part of the fascination of the play is found in the development
of Romeo’s language as he experiences real love for Juliet and
matures in it to a desperate end. In the play’s last scene
when he takes his own life by poison in Juliet’s tomb, his sickness
is no longer imagined. He has truly felt its torment:
Thou desperate pilot, now
at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark.
Here’s to my love! [Drinks.] O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
(Act V, Scene III, ll. 117-120)
Shakespeare repeatedly explored
the theme of love as an illness. He must have felt it keenly
himself, as related in Sonnet 147:
My love is as a fever,
longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are
At random from the truth vainly expressed,
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as Hell, as dark as night.
At times, as Shakespeare demonstrates
in Romeo and Juliet and suggests in this sonnet, the
illness of love is fatal. For some there is no cure.
Love as Death
Guido
Calvacanti lived from 1259 to 1300 and was a contemporary of
Dante, who considered Calvacanti his closest friend. The two
exchanged letters and poems, frequently on the subject of love.
As much as any other, Calvacanti established the courtly tradition
in Italy. He wrote during a time when the sonnet was not only
fashionable, but also highly refined, yet he removed from the
form the more bombast excesses of predecessors and established
a more natural and direct style, as exemplified by the following:
O donna mia, non vedestù colui
che ‘n su lo core mi tenea la mano
quando to resondea fiochetto e piano
per la temenza de li colpi sui?
E’ fu Amore, che, trovando noi,
meco ristette, che venia lontano,
in guisa d’un arcier presto sorïano
acconcio sol per uccider altrui.
E trasse poi de li occhi tuoi sospiri
i quai me saettò nel cor sì forte,
ch’i’ mi partii sbigottito fuggendo.
Allor m’apparve di sicur la Morte,
accompagnata di quelli martiri
che soglion consumare altrui piangendo.
My Lady, did you fail to see him, who
held on my heart an unrelenting hand
while I spoke to you, my voice weak, unmanned,
for fear the pain he would condemn me to?
He was Love, who found both me and you,
but stayed with me, coming from a distant land,
and not unlike an archer taking stand
ready to drive his shaft through all in view,
he then pulled sighs from those eyes of yours
which he fired so sharply into my heart
that I departed from you fleeing with my fears.
And Death appeared to me with a sudden start,
accompanied by all the agonizing sores
which have long, long consumed me with my tears.
More
than any other poet before him, Calvacanti introduced the scientific
and medical learning of the day into his poetry and so the heart
as a traditional poetic image, the seat of love, was now depicted
scientifically, as the seat of a medical process. To Calvacanti,
love was not just an agent that figuratively might induce illness.
There were medical reasons why love would have a physical effect
on the body. The “sighs” of a lover were vital spirits, material
substances, that could literally and physically flee one’s own
heart, or infect the heart of another, and thereby, according
to the science of the day, cause death.
Love that
Sanctifies
Some
may argue justifiably that love described as poison or illness
or death is not love at all, but rather its failure or its loss.
Without question the classics include among their canon a sad
chorus of books and poems seeing life badly and bemoaning the
pain and sorrow experienced in the name of love. There can
be, on the other hand, a different experience with love, one
that is wholesome and enriching and sanctifying. Not long ago,
Elder Neal A. Maxwell alluded to this kind of love when he counseled:
