|
Dirda on Books
Valentines Day Special
Hosted by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2002; 2 p.m. EST
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda takes your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.
This week, in true Valentine's Day spirit, Dirda encouraged readers to submit their favorite love poems and passages in literature.
Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or describing his travels to, say, a P.G. Wodehouse Convention. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts -- just the sort of range you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism (1993).
These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. In the fall of 2000 Indiana University Press published "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments," a selection from Dirda's Book World columns. He hopes to bring out a companion volume soon.
Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He'd also like to spend six months in Florida writing a book that would become a runaway best seller, a critical success, and the hottest cinematic property of the year. A guy can daydream, right?
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Accra, Ghana:
My favorite romantic moment in fiction occurs near the beginning of Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez, when Florentino Ariza shows up at the funeral of his long lost love's husband, waits until all the guests have left, takes his hat off, and, in a voice "inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit," tells Fermina Daza that he has waited more than half a century to declare once more his eternal fidelity and undying love for her. Such a strange mixture of heroic patience and desperate haste.
I also love Book four of the Aeneid, where Dido's whole self is undermined by her love for Aeneas. At the end...
“...tum vero infelix Dido mortem orat.
Taedat caeli convexa tueri.
Then truly miserable Dido prayed for death.
She grew tired of the sheltering sky.”
Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on Books for Valentine's Day. Ever since last week--Oh, ok, to be honest, ever since dawn, or at least since 1:55 PM--I've been excited about today's program. Already true hearts have been sending little notes and kisses across the internet. Prof. Maitland yearns for Dr. Diver. Coco, the lounge singer, is making eyes at the moody writer in residence slowly drinking his way through the afternoon at the local bar. Austen yearns for Amarillo. Amor vincit omnia.
But on with the show.
Wonderful quotes, Accra. "heroic patience and desperate hastge"--ah yes. "The Sheltering Sky"--I wonder, did Paul Bowles take his title from the Aeneid?
Lenexa, Kans.:
Mr. Dirda, Favorite Valentine-Lit. (G-rated)
Probably linked to high school heartbreak, I've always been drawn to the UNREQUITEDS: the Heathcliffs, the young Werthers. Goethe gives Werther's last thoughts: "I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her all comes to nothing....Remember me when you look across to the churchyard and to my grave..."
A neighbor saw the flash of the powder and heard the shot. Moved? I also have a 20th century PG-rated selection. Game? Thanks.
Michael Dirda: I"m game. You can always send the others to my regular e-mail address: dirdam@washpost.com.
Unrequited love--But how do we tell requited from unrequited love? Like weight lifters, doesn't love ultimately aim at "failure"? We ask too much of the other, or the other asks too much of us. And yet we love...
Reston, Va.:
Michael,
You asked for favorite passages of love. Such a collection has to include the line from Donne, "Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name." Or as the prelude to love, try Keats, "I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful, a faery's child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild." Who would not fall in love with such a lady?
Michael Dirda: Ah, I do believe the Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall. My favorite Donne line occus in The Extasie--and you need context for its power: "Else a great prince in prison lies."
Reston, Va.:
I found these lines in a copy of the Saturday Review over 30 years ago, and they have stayed with me. I am not certain about the woman's name in the first line because I have replaced it in my mind with the names of several women over the years. But I think I remember the rest of it accurately. I don't know where the lines come from. Do you recognize them?
With Angie gone,
Whose eyes to compare with the morning sun?
Not that I did compare,
But I do, now that she's gone.
Michael Dirda: These are lovely. Several women over the years? Sometimes it's hard to know where love stops and torture begins. But yes,after the beloved is gone, everything that once made us happy,now makes us sad.
Hmmm. I must make this chat more upbeat. We can't have Liebestods on Valentine's Day.
Crofton, Md.:
Favorite romantic novel Fitzgerald's Tender
is the Night. Romantic poem. The Shakespeare
sonnets or anything by Keats.
Michael Dirda: Hard to argue with this. Tender is the Night--a favorite of mine too. Poor Dick Diver.
Cambridge, Mass.:
Michael,
In keeping with today’s Valentine’s day theme, I’m compelled to mention one of the most stirring depictions of a love triangle I have ever read. On your recommendation, I recently devoured Alan Garber’s THE OWL SERVICE. I was bowled over by Garner’s ability to allow the twilight world of ancient legend spill into the present day, brilliantly illuminating the tension between love and jealousy as well as the conflict between fidelity and selfishness. It is a novel for passionate people and it is at times entrancing, amusing, haunting, exhilarating, disturbing, and yes, very, very melancholy (like all human relationships, no?). Just an amazing book. “She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
I enjoyed it so much that I am now on the hunt the very best copy of THE MABINOGION available. Any suggestions?
Michael Dirda: Well, you should also read more Garner. Red Shift is an equally powerful and melancholy love story. As for the Mabinogion, there was an EVeryman translaltion from the WElsh by Gwynn Williams, but I believe somebody brought out a new version fairly recentlyh. A wonderful book.
Crystal City, Va.:
There is a lady sweet and kind
Was never face more pleased my mind
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.
Don't know who wrote this. The prolific Anon?
Michael Dirda: I don't know. Does anyone recognize this?
Russian Lit Guy:
Favorite romantic moments:
1. Kitty and Levin courting by drawing acronyms on the chalkboard (makes me cry with happiness everytime I read it. Tolstoy. Sheesh... what talent!).
2. The kiss in "The Kiss" by Checkov (masterful evocation of the mysteries of attraction, hope and delusion. AMAZING.).
Michael Dirda: Tolstoy, yes, he could write. I particularly love the epilogue in War and Peace that shows all the romantic couples who survive in dumpy middle age. That too is life.
Chicago, Ill.:
Hi Michael,
I wrote in a few weeks ago looking for a non-cliche love poem to read at my wedding. It is hard to find such a thing, but for your Valentine's Day chat, I thought I would submit my selection. It's Sonnet XIV from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. I think the Brownings' love story is wildly romantic -- you know, fleeing her repressive father, living in Italy, Elizabeth growing stronger only to die relatively young -- so I am all the happier to choose one of her poems. Here it is:
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.
Michael Dirda: Excellent--especially to have found a Browning oem other than "How do I love thee?"
Mumbai, India:
Michael
I come from India, the land of Ghalib and the greatest poetry in the world. Lamentably, not much of the western world is aware that some of the most sensitive, romantic and lyrical work emerged from there. Your thoughts?
An excerpt,
"Tere vaayde pe jiye hum to yeh jaan jhooth jaana
Ke khushi se mar na jaate, agar aitbaar hota"
Trans: We lived solely on the promise of your love, and yet convinced ourselves of it's fallacy. Perhaps, if we realized that you indeed did love us, the ecstasy of the realization would have killed us.
Michael Dirda: Alas, I know very little of classical Indian literature beyond having read around a bit in various anthologies. These days Rumi--not Indian, I know, but mystical like the extract you give--is supposedly the most popular poet in the world. Do you recommend any translations?
Towson, Md.:
Some of my favorite romantic lines come from Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning
" This is my last throw, my last gamble on the human heart."
"I love you as deeply as many years could make me/But less deeply than many years will make me."
and
"Do you not know? ... The moon is nothing more than a circumambulating aphrodisiac, divinely subsidised to promote the world into a rising birthrate!"
Okay, I've gotten over the dark brooding type. I want a sense of humor. Which leads, of course, to Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac. I come away with, not so much quotable lines, as an overwhelming sense romance.
Michael Dirda: Gosh, I haven't thought about The Lady's Not for Burning in 40 years--my 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Wright, played us a recording of the play. Thanks for the memories--and the great quotes.
"and yet I love her":
Quick internet search attributes it to two different 17th-century poets (Thomas Ford and another one), and says it is an early Scots ballad.
Take your pick!
Michael Dirda: thanks--technology to the semi-rescue.
Takoma Park, Md.:
There is an excellent anthology by Michael Blumenthal of marriage poems. Can't remember the name, but is easy to find. Lots of good love and semi-love poems there.
And who can forget Shakespeare's Jacques mocking the lover who would make a ballad "to his mistress' eyebrow?"
Michael Dirda: yes.
Heartbreak hotel:
Sappho on love:
At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.
Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.
Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
of dying.
Michael Dirda: Been there, done that. Who's the translator?
San Diego, Calif.:
Bleak thoughts for single people on Valentine's Day, from T.S. Eliot-Quartet No. 2:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Michael Dirda: And the fire and the rose are one.
Chicago, Ill.:
Nobody wants to hear unhappy love stories on Valentine's Day, but sometimes it seems like that's all there is. With the exception of poetry, it seems hard to find descriptions of stable, mutually rewarding love. Harold Bloom made an interesting point once -- if Shakespeare had allowed his comedies and "romances" fifth acts, the audience would have been forced to see couples like Orsino and Viola, Benedict and Beatrice, Rosalind and Orlando, and Miranda and Ferdinand shrieking at each other, annoying each other, fighting over the toilet seat, etc. Any thoughts?
Michael Dirda: yes--or we would have been given that epilogue from Tolstoy I mentioned earlier. I suppose that much that we call love, in a loose sense, might better be characterized as passion or infatuation. A friend once told me that that kind of hot desire can only last three years. There's even a term for this--limerance (sp?). Of course, married love or Darby and Joan affection, Folks Who Live on the Hill kind of love is what most people find in life, and probably really want. The other sort of incandescence is too hard to sustain--and still get any work done. And yet we miss that feeling of being alive in our very corpuscles. To fall in love is after a certain age the only way to feel young again. But it's a dangerous course.
Washington, D.C.:
Michael -- what is your favorite love poetry?
Michael Dirda: A hodge-podge: The ending of Randall Jarrell's "Woman"--"But be as you have been my happiness"; James Dickey's dark "Adultery"--"We have all been in room we cannot die in"; Archilochos--"If only it were my fortune to just touch Neoboule's hand." The passage in Portrait of the Artist when Stephen goes to the prostitute "His lips would not bend to kiss her." The love of Madame de REnal for Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black. THe tormets of Swann in love with Odette, a woman who was not even his type. Any of the dawn-songs collected in EOS, a study of the aubade in world literature.
Pentagon:
The lady sweet and kind, passing by is from Thomas Ford's Music of Sundry Kinds. The lines themselves are anonymous. They do remind me of the story Charles Foster Kane's accountant, Mr. Bernstein, tells of seeing a girl on a ferry pulling out as his ferry was pulling in. He was a young man and he saw her for only a few seconds, but not a day went by in the rest of his life that he didn't think of her. Love can do that.
Michael Dirda: Yes. Several writers have passages like that. Baudelaire's poem about the jolie Rousse--O toi que j'eusse aime! I suspect that men are more romantic in this way than women, who tend to be more down to earth, more interested in some kind of consummation than vague yearning.
Venus:
Gosh, but all of you people are bumming me out. Love is not depressing - it is life's one sure beauty. So celebrate it, even as you wallow.
Michael Dirda: Venus, tell us, O Goddess, why it's so hard to find happy love in literature or life? We are always getting ready to love, or looking back on love, but as a result the love is never quite there. Settled marital bliss, excepted.
Don't Forget Catullus!:
In one translation:
Come Lesbia, let us live and love,
nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again
but when our light has sunk into the earth,
it is gone forever.
Give me a thousand kisses,
then a hundred, another thousand,
another hundred
and in one breath
still kiss another thousand,
another hundred.
O then with lips and bodies joined
many deep thousands;
confuse their number,
so that poor fools and cuckolds (envious
even now) shall never
learn our wealth and curse us
with their evil eyes.
Michael Dirda: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus. . . They don't write em like that any more. Though actually a zillion poets have written exactly like this, largely because of Catullus. Who was it said that we woulnd't know about romantic love at all if it weren't for literature?
Fairfax, Va.:
Dear Mr. Dirda:
Nothing great -- no wonderful quote -- nothing sappy, but it says it all to me. I haven't had a new valentine for over 19 years, but I'm still young enough to remember past valentines as well as appreciate my current valentine.
"To every valentine I ever knew:
Having loved you once
I love you still."
Rod McKeun
Michael Dirda: thanks
RUMI and a correction for my friend in Mumbai, India:
First, the poetry of the Sufi mystical poet Jalalluddin Rumi has been translated well by ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL.
Second, the great Urdu poet Ghalib was born in Agra which is now part of India, however he was Turkish. Also, the language in which he wrote, Urdu, has been eschewed by India since that country was partitioned in 1947. Urdu is a native tongue of Pakistan now; India's main launguage is Hindustani and not Urdu.
Thank you for printing my clarification. Happy Valentine's day.
Michael Dirda: Many thanks.
Washington, D.C.:
My favorite:
You who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who were lost from the start,I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply felt landscape, cities, towers and bridges, and unsuspected turns in the path and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods -- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.
Michael Dirda: Hmm. This sounds as if you might have written it yourself, possibly in a diary?
Washington, D.C.:
Do you ever like seeing the film adaptations of good books? I am just a little ways into "Possession" and I hear it's being made into a movie. Not sure if I would want to see it; the book i spretty satisfying in its own right.
Since we're sharing passages and quotes, "Possession" includes this Robert Graves snippet:
She tells her love while half asleep
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stires in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despit the falling snow
Michael Dirda: Graves is a great love poet, by the way. See his wonderful poem "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" that ends with the line: "But nothing promised that is not performed."
San Diego, Calif.:
Don't be sexist, Michael! Women yearn as much as men for a platonic ideal of love, love lost, love unconsummated. Then just tend to vent their suffering in different ways. Think of Madame Olenska.
Michael Dirda: Oh, don't mean to be sexist, just slightly provocative and wondering. But point well taken.
Cali:
Hi Michael, Chatting with you makes my V-Day worthwhile. Love in middle age, by Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks:
We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are pain & what cures pain both.
We are the sweet cold water & the jar that pours.
I want to hold you close like a lute so we can cry out with loving.
You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.
Michael Dirda: I like this a lot. A friend has urged Rumi on me, but I somehow have this image of his verse as a bit hokey. But I've been wrong before. But he reminds me of anohter love poet: Cavafy. His loves were homosexual but his poems are universal with longing and regret.
Arlington, Va.:
My vote for most romantic overall novel: A Tale of Two Cities. "Tis a far, far better thing..."
Michael Dirda: Certainly Sidney Carton's gesture is hard to resist. And a far far better rest I go to than I have ever known. One hopes.
Takoma Park, Md.:
Don't know if this is quite literature, but my favorite love passage is in a B. Kliban cat cartoon. Two cats are sitting together on a fence in the moonlight. Caption:
"If I had two dead mice, I'd give you one."
What could be more romantic in context?
There's also the somewhat hokey "Placetne, magistra" between Lord Peter Whimsey and his soon to be wife Harriet.
Michael Dirda: Both these are terrific.
Venus:
First of all, "settled married bliss" is a contradiction in terms. Second of all, love's exquisite beauty is just so because the beloved is always out of reach. That is why, for example, the Sufi poets often write about love for the object of our passion, and love for the Deity, as interchangeable or at least comparable. The Deity is unknowable, and the beloved is unattainable. Ahh, the exquisite and beautiful pain of love. We are so blessed to be able to enjoy it.
Michael Dirda: Yes, but one can only stand so much pain, and then everything must get better (settled married bliss), or come to a tormenting and tormented conclusion. Is there no where known some bow or brooch or braid or brace to keep back beauty, beauty, beauty, from vanishing away? Just substitute love for beauty in the Hopkins line.
Southern Maryland:
Michael, I have long been a devoted reader of your Sunday columns and these on-line discussions; this is my first time writing in. For sheer beautiful rawness of emotion, one of my favorites is Edna St. Vincent Millay:
"Ebb"
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
Michael Dirda: Oh, that's just amazing.
Germantown, Md.:
I knew today's discussion would be focused on all things Valentine, but, if I may, could I ask a question to be answered next week?
I've always been successful in picking up fruitful suggestions, recommendations, notables and ideas both from our Dirdian host himself as well all the other auditors present so I'd like to try to tap into this well again.
I'm looking for books of heart-smiting sadness; books that carve away a piece of the reader's soul; books that you walk away from with a limp. Works of fiction so profoundly disturbing, hopeless or despair-ridden that your viewpoint of life and love and self is irrevocably altered. Something that makes D.M. Thomas's "The White Hotel" seem like a pick-me-up story.
Ponder it carefully. No maudlin tear-jerkers, no hackneyed soap operas, and no archetypical love tragedies; think above these things. Perhaps we could have a week to mull and ponder and make this the topic of next week's discussion?
Michael Dirda: A good theme--though we must do something a bit cheerier soon. I already have some thoughts for you. Let's take up Germantown's suggestion for next week. Meanwhile, back to V Day.
Washington, D.C.:
Not from a diary, it is Rilke.
Michael Dirda: I have lots of trouble with Rilke. John Berryman said he was a shit, and having read his biography I know what he meant. Some of the pomes are wonderful, but I do think he can be a little too metaphysical.
Favorite love poem:
My favorite love poem is Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" particularly its ending. If a guy wrote that for me I would be his for ever (or at least till we'd torn our pleasures with rough strife...)
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Michael Dirda: Haven't guys written that to women over and over and over? Carpe diem. Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may. You're not getting any younger. If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. Youth's a stuff will not endure.
I hate sap:
Hello Michael. May I address the issue of sappy writing that passes itself off as romantic? I am a 32 year old woman who absolutely hates sappy, soppy, pablum infused works such as "Love Story" (ugh), "The English Patient" (double ugh), and "Bridges of Madison County" (not enough ughs to go around). For a good love story give me "The Age of Innocence" or "Jane Eyre" or Donne's "Sunne Rising" or Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"). <Sigh.>
Michael Dirda: 32 is hardly the sere and yellow leaf. But yes, in matters of love it is hard to balance the sappy with the devotional, the amorous and the awful. Your mention of Jane Eyre did remind me of her sister's book and its great passionate line, by Catherine: "I am Heathcliff." That's love.
Cali:
Dickens as romantic? His "romances" are his big weakness, in my view. They never come off as convincingly as his satire, by half. I think he wrote in love stories just to fulfill convention and expand his word count-slash-paycheck.
Michael Dirda: Can't remember our allusion to Dickens. I agree that the Esther Summerson sections of Bleak House nearly wreck the novel--for the modern reader anyway.
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.:
On the lack of happy love in literature -- doesn't this have to do with the nature of the emotion -- the longing, the pursuit, the disbelief that the other might actually like you, the joy in sharing two mysteries -- that when the challenge is conquered, or lost, the emotion fades (unless the pursued is always a little elusive, and the challenge to the other remains.) Once the bear is dead, there is no more bear to hunt.
Michael Dirda: WHich is why Proust felt that jealousy kept love alive. ANd so we should be grateful for all the separations and quarrels that love brings: They ultimately keep love alive. It's one of those shark-like analogies, about always eating all the time or it dies. But if this is so: What is it that married folks have, after 30 or 50 years, if not love?
Washington, D.C.:
Hello Michael -- Great chat today. But I must take exception to the idea of Lord Peter Wimsey (note spelling!) being hokey, and to the idea that "settled marital bliss" is a contradiction in terms. I'm just about to celebrate my 20th anniversary, and can vouch that settled marital bliss can be as full of passion and sparks as you want to make it.
Michael Dirda: Happy to hear this.
Cali:
Upbeat note from ee cummings:
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
Michael Dirda: thanks
Washington, D.C.:
Hello, Michael, on this Valentine's Day. I am too shy to send you an e-mail so this anonymous forum will have to suffice. I think you're adorable.
Michael Dirda: Gosh.
Somewhere, USA:
How about Roethke:
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;/
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!
Michael Dirda: Oh yes. Roethke. Coming behind her for her sweet self's sake I am slave to a motion not my own. SIgh. ONce I knew much of this poem by heart. The mind goes. But it always reminds me of John crowe Ransom's great love poem: "The Equilibrists."
My favorite love poem:
Michael - My favorite love poem is Thomas Hardy's "Neutral Tones."
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
--On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Michael Dirda: This is one I need to reread later. THanks. Hardy as upbeat as ever.
Love:
My favorite love poem is a very strange poem called Villanelle by William Empson. It is slightly creepy, even humourous, but very beautiful.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
What kindness now could the old salve renew?
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
The infection slept (custom or changes innures)
And when pain's secondary phase was due
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
How safe I felt, whom memory assures,
Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
Michael Dirda: William Empson's poetry was the subject of my college honors thesis. I love this poem too. Yes, "My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you." Do you know his other great villanelle, the even more famous Missing Dates? "Slowly the poison the whole blood streams fills. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills."
Washington, D.C.:
We've made a great mess of love
Since we made an ideal of it.
D.H. Lawrence
Michael Dirda: yes.
Terra Bibliofilia:
I find very interesting such dueling literary accounts of love affairs gone wrong as:
(1) Mircea Eliade, -Bengali Nights- and Maitreyi Devi, -It Does Not Die-
(2) Claire Bloom, -Leaving a Doll's House- and Philip Roth, -I Married a Communist-
They give you a kind of Rashomon-effect, a different twist on the typical love story.
Michael Dirda: Interesting.
Love poem:
My favorite love poem is Hardy's "After a Journey" which is about the pain of a long lost love that is now reduced to "a thin ghost" that he "frailly" follows.
Hereto I come to view a Voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,
And the unseen waters' ejaculations awe me.
Where you will next be there's no knowing,
Facing round about me everywhere,
With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.
Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
What have you now found to say of our past --
Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?
Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?
Things were not lastly as firstly well
With us twain, you tell?
But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.
I see what you are doing: you are leading me on
To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,
The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone
At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,
And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow
That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,
When you were all aglow,
And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!
Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
The bringing of me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
Michael Dirda: More Hardy.
Story Hill:
Who has time for romance? I must send a warning to your faithful readers Michael. I am on a total jag reading the Dirda-recommended Patrick O'Brian stories of the British Navy, starring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (and inclduing their love interests). O'Brian wrote 18 of them before he died, and by book three I was already getting concerned about reaching the end of book 18. Its adventure writing, and he uses these wonderful shifts in scene or perspective to advance the plot and insert knowing jokes about the characters we've come to love. I like it so much and it demands my time so much that it feels like it must be bad for you, but in the end the characters and the writing have so much to distinguish them that I don't feel any guilt. Originally, I thought I'd read one a year, so as not to miss all the other great books I must get to. But after I started book two within two months, I thought I'd at least get a couple of other books in between each treat. I've now sunk to a new low in my addiction, for after spending a week between five and six advancing my course up Gass's "literary K2" The Tunnel, I waited all of two hours after finishing six to start seven. So don't start "Master and Commander," dear friends. You'll never read another author for a long long time.
Michael Dirda: Yes, you're not the first to succumb to O'Brian's storytelling power.
Pentagon:
Though I don't have the book in front of me, I recall that there is magic language of love spoken between and about Begoas and Alexander in Mary Renault's books. She really knew the feel of love, no matter what her preferences might have been. She also knew the rules. One of her characters tells Begoas, "Never be importunate. Never, never, never, never, never!"
Michael Dirda: Never be importunate--yes. Never be importunate.
Rockville, Md.:
Hi Michael --
My favorite love passage would have to come from Jane Austen's "Persuasion." Sorry for the length, but you can't just do half of this letter:
"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.
Michael Dirda: Wonderful. Persuasian, by the way, is my favorite book title.
Towson, Md.:
How could I forget,
"If all the world and love were young/
And truth in every shepherd's toungue...."
Michael Dirda: Well, it's clear we could go on for another hour, but it's time we all got back to work or our spouses and sweethearts on this V day. Next week we'll talk about the saddest books we can think of. But after that Il Penseroso stuff we have to move on to L'Allegro. Till next Thursday at 2, keep reading!
| |
© Copyright 2002 The Washington Post Company | 
