Love Poetry Out Loud
Page 11
A depth in love, and that depth bottomless.
Now since my love is tongueless, know me such,
Who speak but little ’cause I love so much.
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Quiet Waters Run Deep
Hollywood suggests that most women prefer the strong, silent types. Such, at least, would be Robert Herrick’s hope, as he argues in this sonnet. Somehow his words ring hollow.
Full casks = An empty barrel makes a loud noise when “thunked”; not so one that’s full.
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EMPTY WORDS
Emerson called poetry “a meter-making argument.” Sadly, the evidence of the ages suggests that it’s nearly impossible to argue someone into love. Rhetoric is what poets have to work with, though. T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats are two of modern literature’s most eloquent arguers. See what good it does them in the next two poems.
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S’io credessi = In this prefatory excerpt from Dante’s Inferno, a spirit in hell agrees to speak candidly, thinking that he’s talking to one of the damned. Prufrock’s in much the same situation, his doubt and self-loathing coming through.
Let us go = It may help to imagine Prufrock walking through town on the way to a tea party, probably talking to himself, or an imaginary companion from among the damned.
Like a patient = He begins with a showy and inappropriate simile, and follows up with several more gloomy, hopeless figures of speech.
Question = Just as he’s building up to a rhetorical point, he is interrupted by an imagined “stupid” question.
In the room = This image distracts him for a moment.
The yellow fog = Another fumbling figure of speech — metaphor this time. Eliot, a cat lover, was the author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, from which was derived Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats.
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Every Trick in the Book
It’s often said that Eliot’s famous “love song” isn’t a love song at all. But let’s give Old Possum the benefit of the doubt here: it’s a love song, just Prufrock’s inept one. Prufrock, the character who’s speaking (or singing) it, is a showy rhetorician but a lousy troubadour. Try reading the poem as if you’re someone trying every rhetorical trick in your arsenal to connect — to no avail.
There will be time = Prufrock frets about the party and gets all tangled up in his rhetoric, anticipating “stupid” questions like the one just asked.
Morning coat = He considers being a no-show at the party, then turns to another form of communication fashion and clothing. But, again, he fears he will be misunderstood.
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THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
T. S. Eliot
S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all —
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all —
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . . . . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . . . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of
you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” —
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all,”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor —
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . . . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
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Universe = Here, a moment of bombast, followed immediately by two lines muttered to himself.
Known them all = Prufrock’s voice now goes Shakespearian and prophetic, like John the Baptist’s, including a reference (dying fall) to Shakespeare’s plays, followed immediately by another moment of doubt.
The eyes = Again he speaks with the voice of prophecy, another failed rhetorical mode.
The arms = Sex can be a kind of communication, and it is an argument that overwhelms Prufrock.
Shall I say = He tries to sum up his earlier rhetorical points, and realizes how hollow it sounds.
Ragged claws = He mutters this, beginning to suspect that language is useless.
Smoothed = Once more, the image of the cat.
Platter = John the Baptist’s head is said to have been cut off and brought on a platter to the lovely Salome, at her request.
Lazarus = Again the prophetic voice is futile; he would not be understood.
Magic lantern = He imagines a sort of X-ray machine that can shine through him and project his innermost thoughts and feelings for all to see— but even then he fears he would be misunderstood.
I grow old = This is muttered again.
Mermaids = In mythology, the singing of mermaids lured men to their deaths.
Human voices = On this dispairing note, as Prufrock utterly gives up on the idea of communicating with real women, the poem ends.
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An Artsy Crowd
As noted on page 104, Yeats long sought the hand of Maud Gonne, whom he addresses in this poem. Exchanging polite, meaningless words about art and beauty with Gonne and a friend, he suddenly realizes how all that hard work of making beautiful things out of his failed pursuit may have been for nothing. Has he wasted years of his life?
Idler = Poets are often considered lazy bums who can’t hold a “real” job.
High courtesy = A reference to “courtly” poetry, such as that of the French troubadours, who were members of the royal court.
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ADAM’S CURSE
W. B. Yeats
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, “To be born woman is to know —
Although they do not talk of it at school —
That we must labour to be beautiful.”
I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.”
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
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THE COLD SHOULDER
Indifference can produce excruciating hurt. These two poems manage to convey its effect in all its iciness.
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Desire and Hate
Robert Frost was a prickly character, and his plain-spoken poems sometimes hide deep alienation, as in this short reflection, which is not really about the end of the world.
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FIRE AND ICE
Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
“AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES”
Emily Dickinson
After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz co
ntentment, like a stone —
This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First—Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
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Letting Go
The numbness of failed connection—whether spiritual or romantic is not clear here—suffusing these lines seems worlds away from the ecstatic desire to connect on page 24. Which is why, perhaps, both poems ring so true.
Ought = Nothing.
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SOUR TASTES
Miscommunication makes for recrimination. As a rule, poets do recrimination quite well and have a lot of practice at it. Here are bitter love poems from two of the best.
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A Parliament of Fools
Parliament comes from a root that means to talk, but when the talking ends, what’s left unsaid doesn’t go away. Perhaps that’s why Philip Larkin finds a parliament a useful image for broken love, with a few back-benchers always ready to defy the party line.
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“SINCE THE MAJORITY OF ME”
Philip Larkin
Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do
We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways.
But silence too is eloquent:
A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.
THE RIVAL
Sylvia Plath
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.