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:

Curiously, the kind of love which is solid and settled, which provides foundation to healthy family life, seems to find expression in classical literature only rarely.  And yet there are poets, who in the words of St. Paul, have given expression to this “more excellent way”.  Next month’s column will cite a few.  Until then, we might be wise to check ourselves and temper the excesses of love as we celebrate Valentine’s Day.  Even love may benefit from moderation, from adoption of the classical Golden Mean.  The Latin poet Horace articulated this perspective quite well in his second book of odes, number 16:

            Laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
            oderit curare et amara lento
            temperet risu; nihil est ab omni
                        parte beatum.

            The happy soul will take no thought
            for the morrow and will temper bitter things
            with a wry smile; nothing from every view
                        is beautiful.

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