Love Poetry Out Loud (6 page)

Alan Dugan

N
othing is plumb, level, or square:

the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

Oh, I spat rage's nails

into the frame-up of my work:

it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

but I planned it, I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can't do everything myself.

I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.

 

Reality Show

There wasn't such a thing as television broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, when Dorothy Parker held court at New York's Algonquin Round Table, but here's a love song that presages early twenty first-century cutthroat “reality shows” such as
Survivor, The Simple Life,
and
The Amazing Race,
all rolled into one. And it's just as real us any of them

Darby and his Joan =
Subjects of a ballad popular in England in the mid-1700s. “The Happy Old Couple.” by Henry Woodfall; they became proverbial examples of peaceful and dull married life
.

Dorothy Parker

S
uppose we two were cast away

On some deserted strand,

Where in the breeze the palm trees sway —

A sunlit wonderland;

Where never human footstep fell,

Where tropic love-birds woo,

Like Eve and Adam we could dwell,

In paradise, for two.

Would you, I wonder, tire of me

As sunny days went by,

And would you welcome joyously

A steamer? … So would I.

Suppose we sought bucolic ways

And led the simple life,

Away — as runs the happy phrase

From cities' toil and strife.

There you and I could live alone,

And share our hopes and fears.

A small-town Darby and his Joan,

We'd face the quiet years.

I wonder, would you ever learn

My charms could pall on you,

And would you let your fancy turn

To others? … I would, too.

Between us two (suppose once more)

Had rolled the bounding deep;

You journeyed to a foreign shore,

And left me here to weep.

I wonder if you'd be the same,

Though we were far apart,

And if you'd always bear my name

Engraved upon your heart.

Or would you bask in other smiles,

And, charmed by novelty,

Forget the one so many miles

Away? … That goes for me.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Poems answer and comment on one another. One of the most frequently answered is Christopher Marlowe's “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which crystallized some pastoral conventions of classical and Renaissance poetry. We've already seen twentieth-century poets Ogden Nash (
page 11
) and John Updike (
page 10
) answering Marlowe, but Marlowe's Elizabethan contemporaries, including John Donne and Sir Walter Raleigh, felt compelled to answer too
.

 

Philomel =
The nightingale
.

Gall =
Bile, the “dark humour.”

Sir Walter Raleigh

I
f all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherd's tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When rivers rage, and rocks grow cold;

And Philomel becometh dumb;

The rest complain of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields

To wayward winter reckoning yields;

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy bed of roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten;

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,

Thy coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move,

To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee and be thy love.

 

Real Shepherds Don't Wear Roses

The idea of a pastoral Arcadia where lovers frolic among the shepherds was a convention that even the classical authors admitted was sort of lame; the Roman poet Virgil introduced a tomb to the green fields of his pastoral poems. Raleigh's “reply” echo's Virgil's theme
, Et in Arcadia ego —
“I [death] too am in Arcadia.” But, if it weren't for that …

Kirtle =
Gown
.

 

Everybody's a Critic

Here's one side of a dialogue between two lovers, or a poet imagining such a dialogue, where the speaker is trying to paint a seductive picture with words, employing the traditions of pastoral hyperbole, and she's having none of it. If you were she, after all, would you want your thigh compared to the trunk of an apple tree?

Watteau =
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), French rococo painter of pastoral scenes
.

Slipper =
Watteau never painted a lady's slipper hanging in the sky. The speaker here has his rococo painters mixed up
.

Fragonard =
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), who
did
paint a slipper flying off a lady's foot, in
The Swing.

William Carlos Williams

Y
our thighs are appletrees

whose blossoms touch the sky.

Which sky? The sky

where Watteau hung a lady's

slipper. Your knees

are a southern breeze — or

a gust of snow. Agh! what

sort of man was Fragonard?

—as if that answered

anything. Ah, yes—below

the knees, since the tune

drops that way, it is

one of those white summer days,

the tall grass of your ankles

flickers upon the shore—

Which shore?—

the sand clings to my lips—

Which shore?

Agh, petals maybe. How

should I know?

Which shore? Which shore?

I said petals from an appletree.

 

NURSERY RHYTHMS

The rhythm of a poem can tell us a lot about its mood. A limerick's rolling meter (known as anapestic) fits its typically bawdy and silly subject matter. The following two poems have a similar bouncy, optimistic, childlike rhythm, like that of nursery rhymes, that touches lightly on love
.

 

Devon Maid =
Keats wrote a friend that “the [Devon] hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em—the Primroses are out, but then you are in.… The Women like your London People in a sort of negative way—because the native men are the poorest creatures in England.”

Junkets =
Dairy desserts set with rennet, a preparation used to curdle milk, derived from the inner lining of the fourth stomach of a calf
.

John Keats

W
here be ye going, you Devon maid?

And what have ye there in the basket?

Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,

Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?

I love your meads, and I love your flowers,

And I love your junkets mainly,

But 'hind the door I love kissing more,

O look not so disdainly.

I love your hills and I love your dales,

And I love your flocks a-bleating —

But O, on the heather to lie together,

With both our hearts a-beating!

I'll put your basket all safe in a nook,

Your shawl I'll hang on a willow,

And we will sigh in the daisy's eye,

And kiss on a grass-green pillow.

 

A Roll in the Hay

It is spring, and you are a young poet visiting the coast of Devonshire to take care of a sick brother, who may be dying of tuberculosis. So you get out of doors, and your thoughts turn to … well … not to your sick brother
.

Ye =
Notice how Keats uses this in the first stanza, when speaking directly to the girl, and not in the latter three, as his imagination takes flight. In early modern English, “thee” and “thou” were considered familiar forms of address, and “you” was more formal—the opposite of today's usage
. Th—
from the Old English rune ρ (“thorn”)—was often written as y. In Keats's time, in more isolated parts of England, such as Yorkshire and Devonshire, country folk still used the old forms of address. Try reading “ye” as “thee.”

Daisy's eye =
The sun (the day's eye's eye)
.

 

Flipping a Coin

Loves me? Loves me not? Here's a mature poet looking back on his youth and a time when he was falling in love with a woman he would pursue fruitlessly for years. Was it all worth it, he wonders? Is love ever not worth it?

W. B. Yeats

I
whispered, “I am too young,”

And then, “I am old enough”;

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.

“Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.”

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

And the penny sang up in my face,

“There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

That is looped in the loops of her hair,

Till the loops of time had run.”

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny.

One cannot begin it too soon.

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye

—W. B. Yeats, “A Drinking Song”

INFATUATION

“I only have eyes for you,” goes the song, describing the intense attraction that sometimes makes otherwise reasonable people take leave of their senses. Whether for a night on the town or a lifetime together, it's a passion worth capturing in words
.

 

Moral Blazon

One traditional form of love poetry is a “blazon,” a listing of the beloved's qualities. Browning puts a twist on the old formula by showing the moral effect her beloved has on her — he makes her a better person
.

Griefs =
Her love affair and secret marriage to the poet Robert Browning freed her from life as a homebound invalid
.

Lost saints =
The remembered deaths of her mother and brother
.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

H
ow 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 candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a 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.

Langston Hughes

I
could take the Harlem night

and wrap around you,

Take the neon lights and make a crown,

Take the Lenox Avenue busses,

Taxis, subways,

And for your love song tone their rumble down.

Take Harlem's heartbeat,