Sods = Chunks of peat.
Clabber = Of the consistency of curdled milk.
Square the circle = An ancient mathematical problem that has come to mean attempting the impossible.
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3
THE COMEDY OF EROS
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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DOMESTIC GODDESSES
Love poets have traditionally depicted women as the “weaker vessel”—as the passive recipients or objects of love. Today, reading the old poems, we ask ourselves, What on earth were they thinking? It was doubtless never true in the first place, and it’s certainly not true of the vessels in the next two poems.
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Pomegranate = A ripe fruit. Compare this, and the beginning of Parrish’s poem, to the language of the Song of Songs (page 88).
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PUCKER
Ritah Parrish
My love is deep and penetrating. Subterranean.
Large, thick, slow, deliberate, vulgar, low, archetypal, animalistic.
Ripe for splitting open, to be savored, enjoyed.
I am a pomegranate.
And you.
You are everything that ever was
And everything that ever shall be.
I could pray to you.
And, so it begins.
You take me in your arms and fold me like a fan.
You lead me about the room.
My body is pliant, supple.
Your hands stretch wide across my belly, self-assured.
Even your fingers are confident.
We are groveling.
Grinding.
Sinking deeper into it.
Slathering each other with it.
And, then I feel it.
It is traveling through my bowels
Like a vengeful eggplant on fire,
Violently pushing and gurgling its way through my lower intestine.
Mocking my sensuality.
For a moment I am shaken.
How can this be? I was so careful at dinner.
Oh God, the cauliflower.
Why? On this day of all days.
The day I wear the crown of woman.
I travel through time.
Suddenly I am 9 years old, in Sister Mercede’s 4th grade class.
And Christi Ramalo, with her ample bosom and hairy upper lip,
Tells me I’m not cool enough to be in the 7-Up club.
And all my mother can say is,
“Honey, sometimes life just isn’t fair.”
For a moment I fantasize
Just letting it rip.
Will you liken me to some winsome peasant?
Will you love the honesty of it?
Maybe you’ll think I’m earthy.
Next, I imagine standing up,
Clutching the bedpost
And proudly declaring,
“It is I, Flatula!”
Would that frighten you, my love?
My muscles tighten
And I begin to pray,
Sweet Baby Jesus
Let your light shine through me and
Neutralize this demon squash-like gas.
I feel an enormous thrust. Is it over?
You cover me with kisses and tenderly pat my thigh.
I tense up and hope for a miracle.
I whisper, “Sweet dreams, my love.”
Barely able to contain the steaming monster inside me.
You begin to snore.
I press myself against the wall,
Adhering my buttocks firmly to it
And say twenty-seven
Hail Marys.
I relax for one tiny moment and it moves,
Explodes.
And I am thrown from the bed.
Dear God help me!
A loose chunk of plaster breaks from the ceiling
And flies through the air.
I try to throw myself in front of it.
I try to cheat fate.
But it is too late.
Too late my love.
The plaster chunk delivers
A cruel but swift death.
I cradle your dented head in my arms and I weep.
I weep for the cruelty of fate,
The loss of true love,
And my lack of muscle control.
I blame myself.
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Slam Action
This poem by Ritah Parrish comes from the recent phenomenon of “poetry slams,” where poets stand up in front of a crowd and duel with words. Slam poems, like this one, often tell stories, play with expectations and conventions, and try to shock by using powerful images or raucous humor. It’s not a craft for fainthearted lovers.
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LOVE PORTIONS
Julia Alvarez
We’re always fighting about household chores
but with this twist: we fight to do the work:
both wanting to fix dinner, mow the lawn,
haul the recycling boxes to the truck,
or wash the dishes when our guests depart.
I don’t mean little spats, I mean real fights,
banged doors and harsh words over the soapsuds.
You did it last night! No fair, you shopped!
The feast spoils while we argue portions —
both so afraid of taking advantage.
But love should be unbalanced, a circus clown
carrying a tower of cups and saucers
who slips on a banana peel and lands
with every cup still full of hot coffee—
well, almost every cup. A field of seeds
pushing their green hopes through the frozen earth
to what might be spring or a springlike day
midwinter. Love ignores neat measures,
the waves leave ragged wet marks on the shore,
autumn lights one more fire in the maples.
Tonight, you say you’re making our dinner
and won’t let me so much as stir the sauce.
I march up to my study in a huff.
The oven buzzer sounds, the smells waft up
of something good I try hard to ignore
while I cook up my paper concoction.
Finally, you call me down to your chef d’oeuvre:
a three-course meal! I hand you mine, this poem.
Briefly, the scales balance between us:
food for the body, nurture for the soul.
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Unbalanced Love
Here’s a portrait of a partnership in which roles are reversed, expectations overturned, and the lovers become dueling jugglers in a carefully choreographed slapstick scene. With, of course, a happy ending.
Chef d’oeuvre = Masterpiece.
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LONELY HEARTS
Wendy Cope
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I’m into music, Shakespeare and the sun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Executive in search of something new —
Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Successful, straight and solvent? I am too —
Attractive Jewish lady with a son.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
I’m Libran, inexperienced and blue —
Need slim non-smoker, under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Please write (with photo) to Box 152
Who knows where it may lead once we’ve begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
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Personal Notice
/> Unlike the sonnet, the poetic form known as the villanelle is rarely employed for love poetry. It has a long tradition in light and humorous verse, by virtue of its repeating phrases and tight structure. And, though it has been used for serious poems as well, this is not one of them.
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LOOKING FOR KERMIT
The problem of the one-night stand is nothing new. But in a fast-moving modern culture, finding a prince among all the frogs has gotten much more complicated.
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“I, BEING BORN A WOMAN”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, — let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
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Body Language
The newly liberated post-Victorian attitudes of the Roaring Twenties show up often in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who so distinctively employs a formal poetic diction against a context of modernity. In this sonnet the poet’s mind is saying one thing, in precise, poetic language; her body, however, says something else.
Propinquity = Nearness, proximity.
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AFTER THE FALL
Among the consequences of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, apparently, are rocky relationships. The next two poems are very flawed voices singing lovers’ complaints from east of Eden.
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Unhandyman
For Alan Dugan, lousy carpentry skills become an image of humanity’s broken, fallen, imperfect search for love and connection. We sympathize. Even so, we imagine what it would be like driving on a trip with him and having to get him to stop and ask for directions …
I and Thou = Also the title of a book by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber (1878–1965).
Carpenter = Jesus was, by tradition, a carpenter.
Hell = For Buber (and, by extension, for the poet) love — both divine and human — is possible only where subject relates to subject (I to thou) rather that subject to object (I to it). Lovers share equally in care, commitment, and responsibility. Aloneness, estrangement, and lack of connection become hell.
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LOVE SONG: I AND THOU
Alan Dugan
Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh, I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.
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Reality Show
There wasn’t such a thing as television broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, when Dorothy Parker held court at New York’s Algonquin Round Table, but here’s a love song that presages early twenty first-century cutthroat “reality shows” such as Survivor, The Simple Life, and The Amazing Race, all rolled into one. And it’s just as real us any of them
Darby and his Joan = Subjects of a ballad popular in England in the mid-1700s. “The Happy Old Couple.” by Henry Woodfall; they became proverbial examples of peaceful and dull married life.
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LOVE SONG
Dorothy Parker
Suppose we two were cast away
On some deserted strand,
Where in the breeze the palm trees sway —
A sunlit wonderland;
Where never human footstep fell,
Where tropic love-birds woo,
Like Eve and Adam we could dwell,
In paradise, for two.
Would you, I wonder, tire of me
As sunny days went by,
And would you welcome joyously
A steamer? … So would I.
Suppose we sought bucolic ways
And led the simple life,
Away — as runs the happy phrase
From cities’ toil and strife.
There you and I could live alone,
And share our hopes and fears.
A small-town Darby and his Joan,
We’d face the quiet years.
I wonder, would you ever learn
My charms could pall on you,
And would you let your fancy turn
To others? … I would, too.
Between us two (suppose once more)
Had rolled the bounding deep;
You journeyed to a foreign shore,
And left me here to weep.
I wonder if you’d be the same,
Though we were far apart,
And if you’d always bear my name
Engraved upon your heart.
Or would you bask in other smiles,
And, charmed by novelty,
Forget the one so many miles
Away? … That goes for me.
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CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Poems answer and comment on one another. One of the most frequently answered is Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which crystallized some pastoral conventions of classical and Renaissance poetry. We’ve already seen twentieth-century poets Ogden Nash (page 11) and John Updike (page 10) answering Marlowe, but Marlowe’s Elizabethan contemporaries, including John Donne and Sir Walter Raleigh, felt compelled to answer too.
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Philomel = The nightingale.
Gall = Bile, the “dark humour.”
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THE NYMPH’S REPLY TO THE SHEPHERD
Sir Walter Raleigh
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee and be thy love.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage, and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complain of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy bed of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten;
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
Thy belt of str
aw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move,
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.
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Real Shepherds Don’t Wear Roses
The idea of a pastoral Arcadia where lovers frolic among the shepherds was a convention that even the classical authors admitted was sort of lame; the Roman poet Virgil introduced a tomb to the green fields of his pastoral poems. Raleigh’s “reply” echo’s Virgil’s theme, Et in Arcadia ego — “I [death] too am in Arcadia.” But, if it weren’t for that …
Kirtle = Gown.
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Everybody’s a Critic
Here’s one side of a dialogue between two lovers, or a poet imagining such a dialogue, where the speaker is trying to paint a seductive picture with words, employing the traditions of pastoral hyperbole, and she’s having none of it. If you were she, after all, would you want your thigh compared to the trunk of an apple tree?
Watteau = Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), French rococo painter of pastoral scenes.
Slipper = Watteau never painted a lady’s slipper hanging in the sky. The speaker here has his rococo painters mixed up.
Fragonard = Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), who did paint a slipper flying off a lady’s foot, in The Swing.
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PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Love Poetry Out Loud Page 4