Love Poetry Out Loud (15 page)

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.

 

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
.

 

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
.

W. B. Yeats

W
e 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.

 

THE COLD SHOULDER

Indifference can produce excruciating hurt. These two poems manage to convey its effect in all its iciness
.

 

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
.

Robert Frost

S
ome 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.

Emily Dickinson

A
fter 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 contentment, 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 —

 

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
.

 

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
.

 

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
.

Philip Larkin

S
ince 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.

Sylvia Plath

I
f the moon smiled, she would resemble you.

You leave the same impression

Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Both of you are great light borrowers.

Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.

I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,

Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,

Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,

And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abases her subjects,

But in the daytime she is ridiculous.

Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,

Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,

White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,

Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

 

With Friends Like You …

Even bright moonlight sucks the colors out of a landscape, which seems to be Plath's complaint about the reflected brilliance of her lover here — presumably her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The lesson for poets is simple: don't marry another poet
.

Carbon monoxide =
An odorless poison gas
.

 

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

Can ex-lovers stay friends? Can friendship continue between lovers? Poets keep trying to answer questions like these, but the answers remain ambiguous. In these poems, Robert Browning tries ignoring his feelings and putting on a civil public face, while John Updike entertains a moment of alienation in the privacy of a shared bed
.

Robert Browning

A
ll's over, then: does truth sound bitter

As one at first believes?

Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter

About your cottage eaves!

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,

I noticed that, to-day;

One day more bursts them open fully

— You know the red turns grey.

To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?

May I take your hand in mine?

Mere friends are we, — well, friends the merest

Keep much that I resign:

For each glance of that eye so bright and black,

Though I keep with heart's endeavour, —

Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,

Though it stay in my soul for ever! —

Yet I will but say what mere friends say,

Or only a thought stronger;

I will hold your hand but as long as all may,

Or so very little longer!

 

Second Thoughts

Victorian gentlemen were so polite! Here, the need to appear civilized forces the poet to bite back deeper feelings
.

John Updike

O
ne creature, not the mollusk

clamped around an orgasm, but

more loosely biune, we are linked

by tugs of the blanket and dreams whose disquiet

unsettles night's oily depths, creating

those eddies of semi-wakefulness wherein

we acknowledge the other is there

as an arm is there, or an ancestor,

or any fact admitted yet not known.

What body is warm beside mine,

what corpse has been slain

on this soft battlefield where we wounded

lift our heads to cry for water

and ask what forces prevailed?

It is you, not dead, but entrusted

at my side to the flight the chemical mind

must take or be crazed, leaving the body

behind like matériel in a trench.

The moon throws back sunlight into the woods,

but whiter, cleansed by its bounce

amid the cold stars, and the owls

fly their unthinkable paths to pluck

the velvet mole from her tunnel of leaves.

Dreaming rotates us, but fear

leads us to cling each to each as a spar

is clung to by the shipwrecked

till dawn brings sky-fire and rescue.

Your breathing, relaxed to its center,

scrapes like a stone on rough fiber,

over and over. Your skin, steeped

in its forgetting, sweats,

and flurries of footwork bring you near

the surface; but then your rapt lungs slip

with a sigh back into the healing,

that unpoliced swirling of spirit

whose sharing is a synonym for love.

 

An Imperfect Fit

Waking up in the middle of the night, while his lover sleeps and dreams, Updike finds both alienation and union in the trust of two people sharing the same bed
.

Mollusk =
A hinged shellfish, such as a clam
.

Biune =
Consisting of two combined in one
.

Corpse =
The imagery is that of World War I trench warfare
.

Chemical mind =
Going without dreaming sleep for extended periods produces imbalances in brain chemistry that lead to psychosis
.

Matériel =
War supplies
.

 

Go and leave me if you wish to
.

Never let it cross your mind
.

If in your heart you love another

leave me little darling. I don't mind
.

—“Columbus Stockade Blues,” Traditional

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

How many lovers have broken up only to get back together? That's the direction in which Michael Drayton's heading. But William Shakespeare suggests that you might as well keep walking, make a clean break and get on to the next thing
.

 

Doctor, Doctor!

“Physician, heal thyself!” the Gospel advises. “The heck with that, “the Elizabethan poet Drayton replies in this sonnet from
Idea.
“Heal me.”