April 19th: “When You Are Old”

“When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats.

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This is another one that’s a teeny bit self-indulgent–wow, Yeats, you were the only person to love Maud Gonne for who she really was, huh? But what I love about it is that it’s not explicitly a poem about how she’ll be sorry she didn’t love him back. It’s rather a poem about the sadness of love ending, and life going on without it. Let’s compare it to the poem it was based on, “Quand vous serez bien vieille” by Pierre Ronsard. This translation is by Anthony Weir, you can read it in the original French here.

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Yeah, I’m willing to cut Yeats some slack, seeing as how his poem is approximately ten million times less obnoxious than that. For another perspective on Yeats and Maud Gonne, see: all of Yeats’ other poetry (sorry, cheap joke, but I am particularly fond of “Among School Children” which has one of the best descriptions of love I’ve ever read), this hilarious comic by Kate Beaton, and presumably in Gonne’s own autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, unless she felt that other aspects of her life might be more important to talk about. It would probably be frustrating to live a long and full life and be a revolutionary and all that and still have everyone just want to talk about how you didn’t marry Yeats even though he asked you five times.

April 18th: “Love? Do I love?”

I read this first as a chapter epigraph in Gaudy Night. It’s great, isn’t it?

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from “The Second Brother: an Unfinished Drama,” by Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

…Love? Do I love? I walk
Within the brilliance of another’s thought,
As in a glory. I was dark before,
As Venus’ chapel in the black of night:
But there was something holy in the darkness,
Softer and not so thick as other where;
And, as rich moonlight may be to the blind,
Unconsciously consoling. Then love came,
Like the out-bursting of a trodden star…

April 17th: “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

This is one of those poems you see so often it feels like cheating to post it, but I love it so much I don’t care. A word of geeky explanation (I was so excited when I learned this in history class and was able to connect it back to the poem!): the metaphors in the third and fourth verse in particular come from the old idea that the earth was at the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, planets, and each star were set in rotating crystalline spheres around it. These spheres were made, not of earth, air, fire, or water, but of a fifth, perfect element called simply “quintessence.” So everything “sublunary,” or below the moon, was physical and terrestrial, while everything past it was celestial.

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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“The breath goes now,” and some say, “No,”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refin’d
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

April 15th: “This Living Hand”

This Living Hand
by John Keats

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

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Keats is another self-centered poet, although you can hardly blame a very young man dying of tuberculosis in the same house as his never-to-be-wife for being bitter, jealous, and self-pitying: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks,” he wrote to his girlfriend, Fanny Brawne, “your loveliness and the hour of my death.” Can we say emo? How about creepy?

Because of this kind of talk, poor Fanny was reviled by generations of literary critics and Keats biographers…but her own letters were all burnt on Keats’ death, so it was a very one-sided story. Recent scholarship suggests she probably loved him and did her best (one essay I read said, “She may even had had some appreciation for his poetry,” which cracked me up).

So Keats was not ideal boyfriend material (he was also kind of a misogynist), but I don’t care! I still have a huge crush on him and his poetry is my favorite among the Romantics. This one in particular is intensely powerful and chilling. I love the combination of bitterness and resentment with the offer of forgiveness and reconciliation, the incredible way he’s captured the horror of death and the conflicting impulses of the heart.

Poetry is sexy.

April 14th: “We Talk of Taxes, and I Call You Friend”

I love the combination of cynicism and sincere passion in this one. Compare “Love is not all: it is not meat or drink” by the same author, brought to my attention by alert reader Cecilia Grant.

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“We Talk of Taxes, and I Call You Friend,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Do you have a favorite pessimistic poem about the beginning of a relationship? (Yes I realize that’s rather specific, but I bet there are lots of them out there.)

April 13th: “I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ”

“I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ,” by Walt Whitman

I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn I pass’d the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walk’d the woods at dusk I heard your long-stretch’d sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you, when all was still, ringing little bells last night under my ear.

April 12th: “Song of Solomon”

The first time I read the Song of Solomon, when I was about 14, I thought it was weird. But later it grew on me, and now I think it’s one of the sexiest poems out there. I know in some Christian traditions it’s believed to be an allegory of Christ’s love for the Church, but for most Jews it’s a sacred poem celebrating love. A song of verses from it, “Dodi li” (meaning “My beloved is mine”), is often sung at Jewish weddings. Here’s my favorite part (from the King James Version, which is my favorite translation, being an English history and literature geek and all; you can find the rest of the Song in that translation here):

10 How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!
11 Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
12 A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
13 Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
14 Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:
15 A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
16 Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

April 11th: “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

A tragic one today, from “In Memoriam A.H.H.” by Tennyson. The whole poem is one of the saddest, most beautiful things I’ve ever read–if you’re interested, you can find the rest of it here.

VII.

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more–
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

April 10th: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”

Here’s another one that’s not about the poet’s girlfriend at all; rather, it’s a commentary on the folly of hyperbolic poetic comparison. And yet! It makes me swoon.

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Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

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And if THAT didn’t make you swoon, listen to Alan Rickman read it:

That background picture is amazing, isn’t it?