William Carlos Williams
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady’s
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze — or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
—as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes—below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore—
Which shore?—
the sand clings to my lips—
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
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NURSERY RHYTHMS
The rhythm of a poem can tell us a lot about its mood. A limerick’s rolling meter (known as anapestic) fits its typically bawdy and silly subject matter. The following two poems have a similar bouncy, optimistic, childlike rhythm, like that of nursery rhymes, that touches lightly on love.
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Devon Maid = Keats wrote a friend that “the [Devon] hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ’em—the Primroses are out, but then you are in.… The Women like your London People in a sort of negative way—because the native men are the poorest creatures in England.”
Junkets = Dairy desserts set with rennet, a preparation used to curdle milk, derived from the inner lining of the fourth stomach of a calf.
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WHERE BE YE GOING, YOU DEVON MAID?
John Keats
Where be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there in the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?
I love your meads, and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly,
But ’hind the door I love kissing more,
O look not so disdainly.
I love your hills and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating —
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!
I’ll put your basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I’ll hang on a willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy’s eye,
And kiss on a grass-green pillow.
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A Roll in the Hay
It is spring, and you are a young poet visiting the coast of Devonshire to take care of a sick brother, who may be dying of tuberculosis. So you get out of doors, and your thoughts turn to … well … not to your sick brother.
Ye = Notice how Keats uses this in the first stanza, when speaking directly to the girl, and not in the latter three, as his imagination takes flight. In early modern English, “thee” and “thou” were considered familiar forms of address, and “you” was more formal—the opposite of today’s usage. Th—from the Old English rune ρ (“thorn”)—was often written as y. In Keats’s time, in more isolated parts of England, such as Yorkshire and Devonshire, country folk still used the old forms of address. Try reading “ye” as “thee.”
Daisy’s eye = The sun (the day’s eye’s eye).
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Flipping a Coin
Loves me? Loves me not? Here’s a mature poet looking back on his youth and a time when he was falling in love with a woman he would pursue fruitlessly for years. Was it all worth it, he wonders? Is love ever not worth it?
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BROWN PENNY
W. B. Yeats
I whispered, “I am too young,”
And then, “I am old enough”;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
“Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.”
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
And the penny sang up in my face,
“There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
That is looped in the loops of her hair,
Till the loops of time had run.”
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny.
One cannot begin it too soon.
4
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye
—W. B. Yeats, “A Drinking Song”
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INFATUATION
“I only have eyes for you,” goes the song, describing the intense attraction that sometimes makes otherwise reasonable people take leave of their senses. Whether for a night on the town or a lifetime together, it’s a passion worth capturing in words.
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Moral Blazon
One traditional form of love poetry is a “blazon,” a listing of the beloved’s qualities. Browning puts a twist on the old formula by showing the moral effect her beloved has on her — he makes her a better person.
Griefs = Her love affair and secret marriage to the poet Robert Browning freed her from life as a homebound invalid.
Lost saints = The remembered deaths of her mother and brother.
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HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
JUKE BOX LOVE SONG
Langston Hughes
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem’s heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day —
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.
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Broadway Boogie-Woogie
Langston Hughes often sought to catch the cadences of blues music in his poetry, and he certainly does in this one, a vignette of Harlem at night in the mid-twentieth century.
Tone = Read it as a verb, to tone … down.
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STRANGE SHORES
Anne Bradstreet didn’t want to go to America in 1630, when her husband decided to do so, because it meant leaving behind civilized English society at age eighteen to raise a family on the frontier in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She went out of love and a sense of duty. Centuries later John Berryman wonders how.
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Love and Money
Marriage is a bargain between two people, and this sonnet by Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672) is framed in terms of value received. She values his love more than money, and that’s all she asks of him in order to deal with the trials of colonial life.
> Ought but = Other than.
Persever = Persevere; pronounce it “per-sever.”
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TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND
Anne Bradstreet
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 persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
from HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET
John Berryman
1
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman —
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
“Simon …” Simon will listen while you read a Song.
2
Outside the New World winters in grand dark
white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands
foxes down foxholes sigh,
surely the English heart quails, stunned.
I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
spares from his rigour for your poetry
more. We are on each other’s hands
who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,
3
thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won’t stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims; or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer and disappear.
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Love across the Centuries
After reading the poems, journals, and letters of Anne Bradstreet, three hundred years later, John Berryman writes a love letter to her ghost. He later said he began it thinking it would be seven or eight stanzas long, but ended up writing fifty-seven stanzas. Here are the first three.
Governor = Her husband, Simon Bradstreet (1603–1697), governor of the colony after her death.
Sylvester, Quarles = Favorite writers of Bradstreet’s.
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SONG: TO CELIA
Ben Jonson
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sent’st it back to me,
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
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ROSY SCENARIOS
When you follow the florist’s advice and “say it with roses,” you’re not only sending flowers, you’re sending a message. Roses have traditionally been associated with blood and soul, and both carnal and spiritual love.
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Flirting
There’s a long poetic tradition in which the poet, constrained by good manners, politics, and jealous rivals or parents, can’t come out and say what he means openly. Look for secret messages.
Jove = Jupiter in Roman mythology.
Wreath = A classical symbol of victory and celebration.
Sent’st it back = Refused it.
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Global Warming?
Robert Burns had another sort of warmth in mind in the late 1700s, when he published this. Ornate and self-consciously witty verse was all the fashion, and his simple Scottish folk poems were considered unconventional. The Romantic poets of the next century admired them, though, and the poems have lasted, while many of the eighteenth century’s more sophisticated poets are largely forgotten.
Rose = For Burns, the rose that represents his love may carry classical associations, but mainly it’s a simple flower.
Gang = Go.
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A RED, RED ROSE
Robert Burns
O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!
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CLASSICAL BEAUTIES
Here are two poets steeped in the classics, discoursing on beauty. Thomas Carew, in the tradition of John Donne and his circle, uses classical images and ideas to represent the attractions of his beloved. Randall Jarrell starts to do the same thing, then finds himself getting a little carried away.
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Cavalier Attitude
The light, bantering attitude of this poem, and its deep grounding in classical mythology and literature, is typical of the “Cavalier poets” — the gentlemen-soldiers of the court of King Charles I. Carew is thought to have died before the outbreak of the English Civil War.
Orient = East, where the sun rises.
Causes = The beloved’s beauty gives rise to flowers.
Atoms = The particles of dust that twinkle in sunbeams.
Dividing throat = When the beloved sings or speaks.
Sphere = In the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, a sphere of fixed stars lay beyond the sun and planets.
Phoenix = The mythical fire-bird associated with the sun.
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ASK ME NO MORE
Thomas Carew
Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day,
For, in pure love, heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.
Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.
Ask me no more where those stars light
That downwards fall in dead of night,
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixèd become as in their sphere.
Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.
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The Books of Love
What college student hasn’t dozed off while studying in a carrel at the library? A dangerous business, that! You never know when some tw
eedy English professor is going to spot you snoozing there, fall in love, and make a poem out of you — a poem about waking you up from your dreamy childhood into an enlightened, but somehow more terrible, life as an adult.
Waist = The girl is no classical beauty, though the poet nevertheless finds her charming.
Decrescendo, bars = Musical terms that bring to mind an operatic aria.
Murders = Oedipus, subject of an opera by Igor Stravinsky based on the ancient Greek play by Sophocles, murdered his father and married his mother, not knowing who they were.
Egyptian Helen = An opera by Richard Strauss; one version of the Helen of Troy story held that she never actually reached Troy.
Brünnhilde = Soprano role in Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelungen.
Salome = Title role of another Strauss opera.
What doest thou here? = God’s question of the prophet Elijah, who was hiding in a cave in I Kings 19:9.
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A GIRL IN A LIBRARY
Randall Jarrell
An object among dreams, you sit here with your shoes off
And curl your legs up under you; your eyes
Close for a moment, your face moves toward sleep …
You are very human.
But my mind, gone out in tenderness,
Shrinks from its object with a thoughtful sigh.
This is a waist the spirit breaks its arm on.
The gods themselves, against you, struggle in vain.
This broad low strong-boned brow; these heavy eyes;
Love Poetry Out Loud Page 5