by Laura Barber
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: La Passion Vaincue
Indifferently
Wendy Cope: Loss
Sir Thomas Wyatt: ‘Farewell Love, and all thy laws for ever!’
Edith Nesbit: Villeggiature
Henry King: The Double Rock
A. E. Housman: ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’, from A Shropshire Lad: XVIII
Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat’, from Merciles Beaute, III: Escape
Stephen Dunn: Each from Different Heights
Charlotte Mew: I So Liked Spring
Derek Walcott: Love after Love
After death
Elaine Feinstein: Hands
R. S. Thomas: A Marriage
Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Music, when soft voices die’
William Morris: Summer Dawn
Thomas Hardy: The Voice
Douglas Dunn: Reincarnations
John Milton: ‘Methought I saw my late espousèd saint’
William Shakespeare: ‘I dreamt there was an emperor Antony’, from Antony and Cleopatra, V, ii
William Barnes: The Wife A-Lost
Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee
Henry King: ‘So close the ground, and ’bout her shade’, from The Exequy
Eternally
Margaret Atwood: Sunset II
Edmund Spenser: ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’, from Amoretti: LXXV
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘If thou must love me, let it be for nought’, from Sonnets from the Portuguese: XIV
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘If I were loved, as I desire to be’
Emily Dickinson: ‘I have no Life but this – ’
Leonard Cohen: Dance Me to the End of Love
Acknowledgements
Index of Poets
Index of Titles and First Lines
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 candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion, put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with the 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.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from
Sonnets from the Portuguese: XLIII
Preface
‘I love you.’ These three words, in this combination, are surely the most glorious, exhilarating and significant in the language. They’re also some of the most mercurial, ambiguous and downright inadequate. ‘I love you’ appears to say it all, but at the same time, it doesn’t even begin to cover all the things we might be feeling when we say it. There’s a world of difference between the cautious ‘I love you’ that nudges a friendship towards romance, and the certain ‘I love you’ that confirms long-term commitment. And between the conciliatory ‘I love you’ that marks the end of domestic hostilities, and the hope-crumpling ‘I love you’ that’s followed by a ‘but…’. Like a magical ‘abracadabra’, these three words seem to contain within them almost boundless possibilities, and perhaps no one has demonstrated the sheer capaciousness of ‘I love you’ quite as deftly as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
With her future husband in mind, Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked herself ‘How do I love thee?’ and then she started to count. In the space of just fourteen lines, she came up with at least eight different ways. And, if we look more closely at these ‘ways’, it quickly becomes clear that her love is straining at the seams: it extends as far as it can in all directions (depth, breadth and height) and, at the end of the poem, it bursts beyond the very limits of life itself. So, rather than offering a precise calculation of the ‘ways’ she loves, the poem actually proves them to be countless and immeasurable. For an accountant, this would be an infuriating situation, but luckily her lover, the poet Robert Browning, understood. On the eve of their elopement, he wrote to her:
You will only expect a few words – what will those be? When the heart is full it may run over, but the real fullness stays within… Words can never tell you, however, – form them, transform them anyway, – how perfectly dear you are to me – perfectly dear to my heart and soul.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet and Robert Browning’s letter seem to go to the very heart of our experience of love. When we try to say exactly how we love someone, it’s difficult to sum it up. Our feelings can be so powerful, and so personal to us, that we struggle to put them into words. But that’s where poetry can help – for if one of the conditions of being in love is feeling somewhat lost for words, then perhaps one of the conditions of being a poet in love is a belief that the right words can and must be found. As lovers, the Brownings were consummate word-hunters. The sonnet above was just one in a sequence of forty-four on the same theme, and during their courtship the couple exchanged hundreds of letters. They were united by a shared desire to make the language of love their own – to reshape it and re-charge it to embody the full force of their emotions. ‘Say thou dost love me, love me, love me – toll the silver iterance!’ she implored in another sonnet. ‘Whole epics might be written,’ he avowed.
Whole epics have been written, and odes, ballads, songs and haiku too – as poets throughout the ages have sought their own words to capture anew this most infinite and individual of emotions. This book gathers together some of the best and most beautiful of their attempts to make sense of how love feels and takes you on a journey through a few of its myriad ways.
So, where to begin? The structure of this book was inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee?’, so it focuses exclusively on romantic love, but the ‘ways’ it counts are very different. The route I have plotted takes us from the thunderbolt ‘suddenly’ of love at first sight to the death-defying ‘eternally’ of love that endures for ever, and it includes many of the familiar landmarks of the romance that finds public recognition ‘with a vow’ and continues along the (sometimes rocky) road of ‘happily ever after’. But I also wanted to venture off in as many divergent directions as possible and to follow them through to their final destinations. I wanted to trace some of the private paths of love that we travel down, whether it be ‘secretly’ with an unspoken crush, ‘treacherously’ in an illicit passion, or ‘regretfully’ long after the relationship is officially over. All of these journeys are charted here, along with some more unexpected diversions, such as the ‘incurably’ of delirious obsession, the ‘bitterly’ of an affection that has coiled into acrimony, and the ‘greedily’ of insatiable desire. As well as traversing a varied emotional landscape, we will also roam widely through time and space, from Chaucer’s love-struck knights in the fourteenth century to Isobel Dixon’s irresistible ape today, and from Chinua Achebe’s love letter from Nigeria to Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Jamaican ‘dub’ poem and Leonard Cohen’s lyrics in Canada.
This inevitably makes for a somewhat tangled map, but as Shakespeare reminds us in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’. This book might be best approached as you would a ‘choose your own adventure’ story: you can skip ahead, rest in a lay-by, go into reverse, or stop and start again at any point – much like love itself. But wherever you begin, wherever you end up, and whatever happens on the way, I hope you’ll meet some interesting fellow travellers.
Given the intensely intimate nature of love, it may seem perverse to suggest that we’d want extra company. Three’s generally considered to be a crowd, especially if the third person happens to be a besotted bard, a pasty-looking swain, a wise-cracking broad, or a
doomed maiden intent upon watery self-destruction. And besides, who wants to think that anyone else has ever loved in the same way as we do? When we fall in love with someone, we discover things about them which strike us as uniquely adorable – and we respond in turn with what feels like unique adoration.
And yet, on either side of that heady spell of mutual rapture which transports two people to another world entirely, so many of the ‘ways’ of love are solitary. Think about the precarious period at the beginning of love when we’re beset by silent doubts, both about how we feel and about how the other person might respond; or the feverish agonies of unrequited devotion; the icy loneliness that creeps around the bed in the middle of the night; the heart-stab shock of betrayal; or the vertiginous sorrow of loss. The very essence, the very awfulness, of these moments is that we must experience them alone. Our sense of isolation at these times may seem absolute, but the right poem lets you know that someone else, somewhere in the universe, has once felt something similar – and survived long enough to write about it. In fact, for a poet, it seems that there is almost no greater spur to creativity than a spot of romantic frustration and wretchedness. It is far easier to concentrate on finding good rhymes and exquisite metaphors without the constant distraction of kissing and gazing, and some of the finest and most moving love poems in the language have grown out of desolation. So in this book you will encounter plenty of poems that are sympathetic to your suffering: they will wallow with you, fine-tune your fury, share your grief, and indulge your most extravagant revenge fantasies. But as well as offering companionship in your misery, there will also be poems that act like any true friend, to challenge your perspective, laugh you into a better mood, and billow your spirits.
Of course, poetry is not just for the broken-hearted; it is also for the newly infatuated, the wildly happy, and the calmly glad. When it’s all going well, the haziness of our emotions can be even harder to pin down in words. And we might not want to risk crushing such fragile bliss with leaden explanations. But poetry can dance where prose fears to tread. And, when lightness of touch is called for, a sensitive poem can have real and practical uses. It can serve as a discreet go-between during a tongue-tied courtship, to flatter, compliment and apply gentle pressure, with a subtlety and a steadiness we might have lost with the first glimpse. It can act as an aphrodisiac, to charm, seduce and ravish in words. It can be the icing on the cake of a wedding ceremony or a public celebration of partnership. It can spark a memory of the flames of passion and so reignite desire. And it can encapsulate an instant of pure bliss and hold it intact for eternity.
Love is a wonderful, wayward thing. It blinds us to reality, and yet it allows us to see with dazzling clarity; it plunges us to the very depths of despair, and yet it enables our hearts to soar. The poetry of love is diverse enough to encompass these contradictions and to find the beauty in love’s every mood. Whether joyful or melancholy, poetry is there to remind us why we fall for love – why we willingly lose our heads for it, entangle our limbs, and bravely bare our souls. W. H. Auden defined a poet as ‘a person who is passionately in love with language’, and when this language is infused with love itself, it sparkles. However we feel when we come to these words, they speak straight to the heart – like ‘I love you.’
A Note on the Poems
All the poems included here were either written in English or – in a few instances – have taken on a life of their own in their English translations. Beyond this, my aim has been to range as widely as possible, historically and geographically. The earliest poems in the selection were composed in the fourteenth century and the most recent are only just appearing in print; and the poets themselves come from all parts of the world, including Africa, the Caribbean, India, North America and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.
For ease of comprehension, older poems have been lightly modernized in punctuation and spelling, but in the few instances when modernization or standardization would completely alter the feel of the original or amount to translation (the Medieval English and dialect poems), glosses have been provided where essential and hopefully the imagination can fill in the rest. Where a definitive text has been established by editors (for example, Emily Dickinson), and for all modern works, the poems are reproduced exactly as published.
How do I love thee?…
Suddenly
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI
I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
Light
To touch was an accord
Between life and life;
Later we said the word
And felt arrival of love
And enemies moving off.
A little apart we are,
(Still aware, still aware)
Light changes and shifts.
O slowly the light lifts
To show one star
And the darkness we were.
SIMON BARRACLOUGH
Los Alamos Mon Amour
The second before and the eternity after
the smile that split the horizon from ear to ear,
the kiss that scorched the desert dunes to glass
and sealed the sun in its frozen amber.
Eyelids are gone, along with memories
of times when the without could be withheld
from the within; when atoms kept their sanctity
and matter meant. Should I have ducked and covered?
Instead of watching oases leap into steam,
matchwood ranches blown out like flames,
and listening to livestock scream and char
in test pens on the rim of the blast.
I might have painted myself white, or built a fallout room
full of cans and bottled water but it’s clear
you’d have passed between cracks, under doors,
through keyholes and down the steps to my cellar
to set me wrapping and tagging my dead.
So I must be happy your cells have been flung through mine
and your fingers are plaiting my DNA;
my chromosomes whisper you’re here to stay.
JOHN GOWER
from Confessio Amantis
Pygmaleon
I finde hou whilom ther was on,
Whos name was Pymaleon,
Which was a lusti man of yowthe:
The werkes of entaile he cowthe
Above alle othre men as tho;
And thurgh fortune it fell him so,
As he whom love schal travaile,
He made an ymage of entaile
Lich to a womman in semblance
Of feture and of contienance,
So fair yit nevere was figure.
Riht as a lyves creature
Sche semeth, for of yvor whyt
He hath hire wroght of such delit,
That sche was rody on the cheke
And red on bothe hire lippes eke;
Wherof that he himself beguileth.
For with a goodly lok sche smyleth,
So that thurgh pure impression
Of his ymaginacion
With al the herte of his corage
His love upon this faire ymage
He sette, and hire of love preide;
Bot sche no word
ayeinward seide.
The longe day, what thing he dede,
This ymage in the same stede*
Was evere bi, that ate mete
He wolde hire serve and preide hire ete,
And putte unto hire mowth the cuppe;
And whan the bord was taken uppe,
He hath hire into chambre nome,
And after, whan the nyht was come,
He leide hire in his bed al nakid.
He was forwept, he was forwakid,
He keste hire colde lippes ofte,
And wissheth that thei weren softe,
And ofte he rouneth in hire Ere,
And ofte his arm now hier now there
He leide, as he hir wolde embrace,
And evere among he axeth grace,
As thogh sche wiste what he mente:
And thus himself he gan tormente
Bot how it were, of his penance
He made such continuance
Fro dai to nyht, and preith so longe,
That his preiere is underfonge,
Which Venus of hire grace herde;
Be nyhte and whan that he worst ferde,
And it lay in his nakede arm,
The colde ymage he fieleth warm
Of fleissh and bon and full of lif.*
SYLVIA PLATH
Love Letter
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I’m alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn’t just toe me an inch, no –
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.
That wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter –