Written by Yunqin Wang
What is Love? Poets try to answer the question with one love poem and announce their “failure” by writing another after another… Our history is full of love poems, and yet our urge is still to sing about love, and to untangle the very idea of love.
On this first Valentine’s day in the time of a pandemic, we selected for you a series of love poems to relish in your bed, dining table, metro station... Some are romantic, some bitter, some mysterious, some lonely. O, how love has so many sounds, and so many shapes.
[love is more thicker than forget], by E.E. Cummings
In this bizarre little poem, love is compared to a hundred things, and yet the comparisons only reveal the impossibility to actually describe love… Written in a strict quatrain, the poem seeks to give a neat answer to love’s puzzle, but only inevitably comes out as another mystery.
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
Corona, by Paul Celan
Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in a letter to Celan that, “I have often reflected that ‘Corona’ is your most beautiful poem; it is the complete anticipation of a moment in which everything turns to marble, and remains forever.” One of my all time favorites, ‘Corona’, a postwar love poem, truly has the magic to make readers see a new world springing out of a pair of embracing lovers.
Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand.
We are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach them to walk.
Time returns into its shell.
In the mirror is Sunday.
In dreams come sleeping–
the mouth speaks true.
My eye moves down to my lover’s loins.
We gaze at each other and we speak dark things.
We love one another like poppy, like memory
we slumber like wine in the sea shells
like the sea in the moon’s blood jet.
One heart beat for unrest.
We stand at the window embracing.
People watch us from the street.
It is time people knew. It is time
the stone consented to bloom.
It is time it came time.
It is time.
The Privilege of Being, by Robert Hass
In ‘Corona’, the love between the embracing lovers is eternalized through the eyes of people watching them from outside the window. In this gorgeous poem by Robert Hass, it’s the angels who are watching the lovers. With this geometry formed among the “illiterate angels”, the man and the woman, Hass contemplates the idea of love, desire and union.
Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal
of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is
strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly
in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They
shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster
skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound
the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold
each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death
for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman
says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning
because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside
her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned
their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples
on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy
between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
Summer, by Louise Glück
There are countless of beautiful love poems by Glück. Some of my favorites include ‘Eros’, ‘From a Journal’, ‘Moonbeam’, ‘The Balcony’… But here, I’m introducing ‘Summer’ to be read side by side with Hass’ poem above. In ‘Summer’, we will drift along with the poet into a cycle of love. From the stage of passion to the later days of companionship, this journey, soothes and glows.
Remember the days of our first happiness,
how strong we were, how dazed by passion,
lying all day, then all night in the narrow bed,
sleeping there, eating there too: it was summer,
it seemed everything had ripened
at once. And so hot we lay completely uncovered.
Sometimes the wind rose; a willow brushed the window.
But we were lost in a way, didn't you feel that?
The bed was like a raft; I felt us drifting
far from our natures, toward a place where we'd discover nothing.
First the sun, then the moon, in fragments,
stone through the willow.
Things anyone could see.
Then the circles closed. Slowly the nights grew cool;
the pendant leaves of the willow
yellowed and fell. And in each of us began
a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,
of the absence of regret.
We were artists again, my husband.
We could resume the journey.
Claustrophilia, by Alice Fulton
Alice Fulton talks about love in a different tone. Written in a voice at times ironic and humorous, Claustrophilia juxtaposes everyday love with specialized terms such as “moxibustion”, “analgesia”, evoking the question of proximity and closeness in love relationships. How close can we get? How far can we be?
It's just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,
not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close
to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.
Nearness without contact
causes numbness. Analgesia.
Pins and needles. As the snugness
of the surgeon's glove causes hand fatigue.
At least this procedure
requires no swag or goody bags,
stuff bestowed upon the stars
at their luxe functions.
There's no dress code,
though leg irons
are always appropriate.
And if anyone says what the hell
are you wearing in Esperanto
—Kion diable vi portas?—
tell them anguish
is the universal language.
Stars turn to trainwrecks
and my heart goes out
admirers gush. Ground to a velvet!
But never mind the downside,
mon semblable, mon crush.
Love is just the retaliation of light.
It is so profligate, you know,
so rich with rush.
If you like Fulton’s work, here is another short poem called ‘Yours & mine’ which appeared in her first collection. It indeed captures one kind of distance between lovers, created by their different ways of loving, different ways looking after each other.
Yours & mine
Through your lens the sequoia swallowed me
like a dryad. The camera flashed & forgot.
I, on the other hand, must practice my absent-
mindedness, memory being awkward as a touch
that goes unloved. Lately your eyes have shut
down to a shade more durable than skin’s. I know you
love distance, how it smooths. You choose an aerial view,
the city angled to abstraction, while I go for the close
exposures: poorly-mounted countenances along Broadway,
the pigweed cracking each hardscrabble backlot.
It’s a matter of perspective: yours is to love me
from a block away & mine is to praise the grain-
iness that weaves expressively: your face.
New York Address, by Linda Gregg
If you are alone, or if you are walking in the New York sunset, or if your love is yet on the other side, I have this cup of Linda Gregg for you.
The sun had just gone out
and I was walking three miles to get home.
I wanted to die.
I couldn't think of words and I had no future
and I was coming down hard on everything.
My walk was terrible.
I didn't seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won't speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won't love.
Yes I will bless. No I won't close. Yes I won't give.
Love is on the other side of the lake.
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that.
And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.
Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.
I wait for the silence to resume.
I cannot live with you, by Emily Dickinson
I would like to end this love journey on a classic note with Dickinson’s I cannot live with you. In only a span of a poem, we traversed with the poet through life, death, and resurrection. Passion and anguish crush on your shoulder at the same time. Yet, in Dickinson’s love song, despair is not a closed room of darkness, but a door, a white substance.
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf
The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –
Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –
I could not die – with You –
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down –
You – could not –
And I – could I stand by
And see You – freeze –
Without my Right of Frost –
Death’s privilege?
Nor could I rise – with You –
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ –
That New Grace
Glow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye –
Except that You than He
Shone closer by –
They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –
Because You saturated Sight –
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise
And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –
And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
We wish you，on this beautiful day, as Auden wishes too, to be the more loving one.