by Laura Barber
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
JOHN MILTON
from Paradise Lost, Book IX
They sat them down to weep, nor only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent:
For understanding ruled not, and the will
Heard not her lore, both in subjection now
To sensual appetite, who from beneath
Usurping over sov’reign reason claimed
Superior sway: from thus distempered breast,
Adam, estranged in look and altered style,
Speech intermitted thus to Eve renewed.
Would thou hadst hearkened to my words, and
stayed
With me, as I besought thee, when that strange
Desire of wand’ring this unhappy morn,
I know not whence possessed thee; we had then
Remained still happy, not as now, despoiled
Of all our good, shamed, naked, miserable.
Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve
The faith they owe; when earnestly they seek
Such proof, conclude, they then begin to fail.
To whom soon moved with touch of blame thus Eve.
What words have passed thy lips, Adam severe,
Imput’st thou that to my default, or will
Of wand’ring, as thou call’st it, which who knows
But might as ill have happened thou being by,
Or to thyself perhaps: hadst thou been there,
Or here th’ attempt, thou couldst not have discerned
Fraud in the serpent, speaking as he spake;
No ground of enmity between us known,
Why he should mean me ill, or seek to harm.
Was I to have never parted from thy side?
As good have grown there still a lifeless rib.
Being as I am, why didst not thou the head
Command me absolutely not to go,
Going into such danger as thou saidst?
Too facile then thou didst not much gainsay,
Nay, didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss.
Hadst thou been firm and fixed in thy dissent,
Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me.
To whom then first incensed Adam replied.
Is this the love, is this the recompense
Of mine to thee, ingrateful Eve, expressed
Immutable when thou wert lost, not I,
Who might have lived and joyed immortal bliss,
Yet willingly chose rather death with thee:
And am I now upbraided, as the cause
Of thy transgressing? not enough severe,
It seems, in thy restraint: what could I more?
I warned thee, I admonished thee, foretold
The danger, and the lurking Enemy
That lay in wait; beyond this had been force,
And force upon free will hath here no place.
But confidence then bore thee on, secure
Either to meet no danger, or to find
Matter of glorious trial, and perhaps
I also erred in overmuch admiring
What seemed in thee so perfect, that I thought
No evil durst attempt thee, but I rue
That error now, which is become my crime,
And thou th’ accuser. Thus it shall befall
Him who to worth in women overtrusting
Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook,
And left to herself, if evil thence ensue,
She first his weak indulgence will accuse.
Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,
And of their vain contest appeared no end.
GEORGE MEREDITH
from Modern Love
XVII
At dinner she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game;
HIDING THE SKELETON shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here’s the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamour’d of our acting and our wits,
Admire each other like true hypocrites.
Warm-lighted glances, Love’s Ephemerae,
Shoot gaily o’er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light
shine!
PATIENCE AGBABI
Accidentally Falling
ERNEST DOWSON
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
JOHN DRYDEN
from Marriage A-La-Mode, I, i
Why should a foolish Marriage Vow
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now
When Passion is decay’d?
We lov’d, and we lov’d, as long as we cou’d,
Till our love was lov’d out in us both:
But our Marriage is dead, when the Pleasure
is fled:
’Twas Pleasure first made it an Oath.
If I have Pleasures for a Friend,
And farther love in store,
What wrong has he whose joys did end,
And who cou’d give no more?
’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,
Or that I shou’d bar him of another:
For all we can gain, is to give our selves pain,
When neither can hinder the other.
MICHAEL DRAYTON
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part:
Nay, I have done; You get no more of Me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I my self can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our Vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our Brows
That we one jot of former Love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest Breath,
When
, his Pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of Death
And Innocence is closing up his Eyes;
Now, if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From Death to Life thou might’st him yet recover.
SIR THOMAS WYATT
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked Foot stalking within my Chamber.
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take Bread at my Hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty Times better; but once in special,
In thin Array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose Gown did from her Shoulders fall
And she me caught in her Arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’
It was no Dream; for I lay broad waking:
But all is turned thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange Fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what hath she deserved.
NICK LAIRD
To The Wife
After this iceblink and sudden death of the mammals –
that wolfhound our youngest will poison with gravy on
sponges,
the calf whose back leg you fatally shatter, driving home
fast,
too sad, from the clinic – and after neither of us have a
mother
or father and we’ve washed up our minuscule five o’clock
dinners,
having pottered around the stores all afternoon, mumbling,
buttonholing assistants to complain about prices or rain,
and change over our eyewear to examine the papers
with that contemptuous squint we’ll both have adopted,
and decide how we’ve read all the books that we will,
and think even those in the end offered hassle and pain,
do you think we could find a way back to an evening
when holding each other will not be about balance
and all of the tunes are inside us and wordless?
D. H. LAWRENCE
Trust
Oh we’ve got to trust
one another again
in some essentials.
Not the narrow little
bargaining trust
that says: I’m for you
if you’ll be for me. –
But a bigger trust,
a trust of the sun
that does not bother
about moth and rust,
and we see it shining
in one another.
Oh don’t you trust me,
don’t burden me
with your life and affairs; don’t
thrust me
into your cares.
But I think you may trust
the sun in me
that glows with just
as much glow as you see
in me, and no more.
But if it warms
your heart’s quick core
why then trust it, it forms
one faithfulness more.
And be, oh be
a sun to me,
not a weary, insistent
personality
but a sun that shines
and goes dark, but shines
again and entwines
with the sunshine in me
till we both of us
are more glorious
and more sunny.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
DOUGLAS DUNN
Modern Love
It is summer, and we are in a house
That is not ours, sitting at a table
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
But how we are, or how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The Skunk
Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the veranda.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.
After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air
Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.
And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.
It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.
THOM GUNN
The Hug
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.
I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
ANNE BRADSTREET
&n
bsp; To My Dear and Loving Husband
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 whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
GEORGE CRABBE
The ring so worn, as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove;
Worn with life’s cares, love yet was love.
DOM MORAES
Future Plans
Absorbed with each other’s flesh
In the tumbled beds of our youth,
We had conversations with children
Not born to us yet, but named.
Those faculties, now disrupted,
Shed selves, must exist somewhere,
As they did when our summer ended:
Leela-Claire, and the first death.
Mark, cold on a hospital tray
At five months: I was away then
With tribesmen in bronze forests.
We became our children, my wife.
Now, left alone with each other,
As we were in four continents,
At the turn of your classic head,
At your private smile, the beacon
You beckon with, I recall them.
We may travel there once more.
We shall leave at the proper time,
As a couple, without complaint,
With a destination in common
And some regrets and memories.
We shall leave in ways we believed