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Years ago, when I was in my teens, I heard a story about a man and his
wife who perished—as thousands and thousands did—in the Irish Famine
of 1847. The story went like this: It was winter. The couple had left the
workhouse and walked back to their cabin in Carrigstyra in West Cork. They
died there that night. In the morning, when they were found, the woman's feet
were held against the man's breastbone. He had tried to warm her as she died.
The story stayed with me. When I was young, when I first received it, it was
simply an emblem of Irish history: one more episode of a terrible time. But
later, as I grew older, as I married and had children and began to understand
something about time, it ceased to be historical in my mind, and became
instead a dark love story.
I put that story—as the poem "Quarantine"—into the longer story of
the marriage poems which make up one part of this book Against Love
Poetry. I don't think I have ever been so concerned with or so attached
to poems as I am to this sequence. One part of this attachment is deeply
private. I have been married for thirty-two years to my husband, Kevin, to
whom the book is dedicated.
And over those years, without being exact in my feelings, I have grown less
and less easy with the conventions of love poetry. Over time, the fixed
object, the conventional complaints, the temporary delights which love poems
emphasize have seemed to me to have less and less to do with the complex
love and sheer ordinariness of marriage. Hence the title of this book and the
lines in "Quarantine" when I imagine how that man and woman were discovered
in the bitter cold of that Irish morning, beyond help, but not beyond love
or meaning:
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
My own unease with the conventions of love poetry has made me more alert to
the origins of the form, and also to the love poems which manage to break out
of convention.
The origins of the form explain much about its restrictiveness. Love poetry,
as we know it, began to be circulated in Europe after the Crusades of the
eleventh century. This was a continent caught in the aftermath of the age of
faith, of the wars of the Crusades, and of the worship of the Virgin Mary.
The European society of intellectuals and courtiers and poets was seeking a
form which reflected both military success and religious conviction, as well
as sentimental intent. Chivalry. Religion. Courtly convention. These elements
went into the making of the love poem. And the execution of these elements,
in the hands of ambitious poets, became almost a game: an intense choreography
of political and historic concerns, masked as personal feeling.
An example of this is the Troubadours, those poets from the south of France
who clustered around Poitiers in the twelfth century. They were sophisticated,
celebrated and political. They created music and poetry. Their love poems were
strongly shaped by the courtly love convention, itself an outgrowth of
chivalry. Women were unattainable in this sort of troubadour poem.
Disappointment was inevitable. The Virgin Mary was the ideal.
Other poets at this time shaped the convention of love poetry. And few more
than Francesco Petrarch who lived from 1304-1374. His celebrated sonnets or
Canzoniere were European best-sellers in their day. He states in them his
intent to say "how Laura lived and died." But again the theme was the
unattainable, the out-of-sight. The ideal. The sought-after. In one sonnet he
wrote:
A rain of bitter tears falls from my face
And a tormenting wind blows with my sighs
Whenever toward you I turn my eyes
However beautiful these poems—and many of them are—the conventions of
the love poem were already being set in a confining way. The idealized
woman—that shadow-species derived from courtly love and early chivalric
devotion to the Virgin Mary—was often at the center of them. Shakespeare's
sonnets. Drayton's. The court poems of Elizabeth's court. They all, to a
greater or lesser extent, drew on this convention of the unobtainable and
often cruel mistress.
Just occasionally, something breaks out of this mould. John Milton, in the
seventeenth century, who was often an unswerving and stern poet, wrote this
great, volatile love poem for his dead wife. One of the sources of its power
is its dialogue with the conventions of the love poem: the woman who is the
subject here is out of reach. But because she is dead, not because she is
cruel. This is a poem of lost love and also—hidden in the language—the
lost ordinariness of a true marriage.
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
The poems I find powerful—the love poems which stay with me like the
story in "Quarantine"—are often the off-beat situations of love, rather
than the conventional ones. But just occasionally, a splendid mainstream poem
defies the conventions. For instance, this wonderful poem from "Sonnets from
the Portugese" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 1846 she fled her confined
circumstances in London, her ferociously possessive father, and went to Italy
as the wife of Robert Browning. This poem celebrates the freedom and
discovery of the first years of her marriage. Once again it defies the
conventions by addressing them: the old religious roots of the love poem are
there but with an unusual twist: this is, after all, a woman speaking—and
with a different kind of reverence.
How 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.
The love poem has done better in the twentieth—and twenty-first—century
than at any time. It has come with a fresh force into a world which has
little feeling for the old courtly dance of convention and politeness. Or the
old, museum-like objectifications of women. I like to think that the
definitions of love poetry are expandable in our time as never before—the
marriage poem, the poem of dailyness, of faithfulness, of same-sex devotion.
All of these have expanded the conventions of love poetry. And I think the
good love poem should leave us with a question—the way
Robert Hayden's superb poem "Those Winter Sundays"
does. In fact, this is the sort of oblique, sideways love poem which would
once hardly have been considered a love poem at all. But which, in fact, adds
to the definition of all love poems. It is a chronicle of memory: the child
wakes in a winter dawn and hears his father lighting the fire, getting the
house ready. And the memory of the father's goodness and the child's
resistance makes this poem a strange and powerful love poem, of a kind that
widens our sense of what the form can do when it is detached from its
restrictive conventions. And the poem ends with that question which should
haunt every fine love poem:
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
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