The poetry of love and its innumerable faces

There are many interpretations and expressions of love. When love appears as an emotion, people experience a strong magnetic force that draws them to their loved one.

Most lovers complain that they cannot adequately express what they feel. For lovers who are also poets, however, the situation is different, because poetry has the power to hint, explain, or lay bare the inexplicable and the intense.

This intensity of emotion is brought to life in a love poem through wit, passion, eloquent phrases, imagery, symbolism, and other poetic tools such as alliteration, assonance, rhythm, anaphora, metaphors, etc. similes and the like.

There are many types of love poetry in literature. The instant love poem deals with falling in love or falling out of love in a single moment. Dante Alighieri composed a love at first sight poem that expresses a lover’s feeling of being reborn.

The New Life

In that book which is

My memory. . .

on the first page

That’s the chapter when

i met you for the first time

The words appear. . .

Here begins a new life.

Another type of love poetry charged with immediacy and impulsiveness seizes the moment without caring what happens next. William Shakespeare says in “O Mistress Mine”:

What is love? It is not the afterlife;

Present joy has present laughter;

What is to come is still uncertain:

In delay there is no abundance;

So come kiss me, sweet twenty,

Youth is something that will not last.

The most commonly written love poetry, both by professionals and amateurs, is the tribute to love. Here’s a good example from Oscar Wilde:

To my wife – with a copy of my poems

I can’t write no majestic proem

As a prelude to my song;

From a poet to a poem

I would dare to say.

Because if these fallen petals

One seems fair

Love will make it float until it settles

in your hair

And when the wind and winter harden

All the land without love,

Will whisper from the garden,

You will understand.

Another type of love poem proposes to the beloved as Pablo Neruda does in Love Sonnet VII:

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,

and nobody saw the moon that bled in my mouth

or the blood that rose in the silence.

Oh Love, now we can forget the star that has so many thorns!

Then there are those poets who treat love philosophically. One of those poets is William Blake.

The clod and the pebble

Love does not seek to please itself,

Nor by himself does he have any care;

but for another he gives his facility,

And build a Heaven in the despair of Hell.

So bleed a little lump of clay,

trodden with the feet of cattle;

But a pebble from the stream,

Trined these meters are found.

Love seeks only the Self to please,

to bind another to his delight:

Joys in the loss of tranquility of another,

And build a Hell in Heaven despite.

Sometimes love is one-sided. Worse still, the loved one may not have a clue about the lover’s feelings. Walt Whitman expresses that in “To a Stranger” by writing:

Passing strange! You do not know

how long I look at you,

You must be the one I was looking for

Or was she looking

(It comes to me like a dream)

Sometimes lovers have to overcome some obstacles. Matthew Arnold says in Dover Beach:

Oh love, let’s be honest

To another! for the world it seems

Lie before us like a land of dreams,

so varied, so beautiful, so new,

It has no real joy, no love, no light,

No certainty, no peace, no help for the pain;

And we are here as in a dark plain

Swept away with confused fight and flight alarms,

Where ignorant armies collide at night.

Every once in a while, the beloved leaves the lover, and then, poetry sings sadly to memory or regret. Thus, for centuries, Sappho echoes:

I haven’t had a word from her

I honestly wish I was dead

when he left he cried

much; she told me this farewell must be

Hold on, Sappho. I go reluctantly.

I said go and be happy

but remember (you know

well) who you leave chained by love

If the lover is lucky, the loved one will leave a token when he leaves. Here is one of those Emily Dickinson poems.

I held a jewel

I held a jewel in my fingers

and he went to sleep

The day was warm, and the winds were prosaic

I said, “I’ll keep the twill”

I woke up – and rebuked my honest fingers,

the gem is gone

And now, a memory of amethyst

that’s all I have

The many faces of love have been playing hide and seek with the lover of poetry for millennia in ancient history when Solomon sang “The Rose of Sharon” to Emerson who urged us to “Give it all to love” to this day when modern day poets describe moments of epiphany and feelings of love in fragments, in concrete images and sound combinations obliquely and, at the same time, clearly.

Whenever we take a quick look, like all great art, love poetry turns out to be the most admired type of poetry that takes a human emotion and transforms it into something sacred, correct and spiritual. I remember reading love poetry when I was a teenager. Some of those poems remain in the memory after many years and their magic still remains.