How do I love thee? — not like that!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented poet (Sonnets from the Portuguese), but her best known poem, the sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” is not her best. I suspect it’s her most popular because of — let me count the ways 1. familiarity and 2. conventionality.  Here it is. It also appears in cross-stitching kits and greeting cards. It may be why, early on, some students learn to dislike poetry.

Most poets try their hand at writing a love poem.  Some describe love in the traditional vein employing flowery sentimentality. Nothing wrong with that. But some offer an unexpected, more realistic view of love, as in, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My Mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.” It gets its own post. 

John Frederick Nims’s modern poem “Love Poem” is about love, but it’s not the conventional Disney “it could happen to you,” hearts-and-flowers take that has, let’s face it, led to disillusionment for more than a few.

From the beginning Nims applies deprecating terms to his beloved calling her his “clumsiest dear,” who basically wrecks whatever fine things  (glass, linen,) she touches. Then he compliments her with, not a declaration of her beauty, but with her humanity, her care for less-fortunate people, drunks and refugees.

Cataloging her faults, the speaker says that his beloved is careless, unpredictable, and a nuisance to “taxi drivers,” those just going about their business, and then confesses that her real expertise lies in words, people, love, and wit — these he knows are superior traits which keep him and those who know her devotedly at her knees.

Despite the coffee stain on his “flannel,” the lipstick on his coat, and the “spilt bourbon” that symbolizes her tendency toward mishap, he characterizes their relationship as glorious in their “unbreakable heaven,” a place safe even from her.

In the last stanza in an image of delf-denial, he volunteers to study “wry music” to please her. And then in what I think is one of the most memorable images in all poetry, he says that should her “hands drop white and empty/ All the toys of the world break.” Toys symbolize the fun, joie de vivre — the loss that her death and her absence from his life would mean.

Nims’s lover has a realistic view, but it is arguably just as passionate as the conventional, “romantic” view — indeed, more so because it allows for faults and doesn’t expect conformity to a manufactured image.

The last stanza

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

In lieu of flowers . . .

Christmas? Long gone! Within two days of December25, store aisles bulged with all those lovely heart-shaped boxes,  teddy bears, red and white Jelly Bellies, and other mishmash in RED. 

But for many people February 14 is a day dreaded with the ardency afforded a root canal. Pressure! We have to make the day PERFECT. The gift, the reservations, the card, the flowers — make that — the roses.

Now we know how impossible to resist in this culture are the reciprocal gift-giving holidays. Even though we may feel that we, in fact, don’t feel it or see the point our minds being occupied with something else, we go along for the comfort of others: spouse, kids, friends. “What did he get you?” Status is attached to an appropriate response for both sexes. And independent thinker or not, no one likes the unanimous disapproval of a culture which asks so little really in its scores of special calendar days which usually imply purchasing things.

So we go along — Valentine’s Day!

But don’t get me flowers. You don’t want to earn my disrespect while attempting to secure my love. Or at least tweak it. Please think me worthy, if we’re going to do this, of something beyond the standard fare. And don’t confuse me with the grateful recipient of a Hallmark card, that well-known source of great poetry.

And I love chocolates, but the yellow box at the end of the grocery counter may make me feel as if you were buying the milk and suddenly remembered. And that red box you bought clandestinely marked “half off” was a Christmas red box, not a Valentine’s red box, but it was sweet. Well, not exactly sweet. The candy was also marked “dietetic” in deceptively small print.  It wasn’t your fault.

Clothes? Not that there’s anything wrong with your taste in day or night wear, but my taste being so undefined and in transition right now, I wouldn’t want you to spend time on a shopping trip. But I did enjoy the turquoise thigh-highs that year and hated parting with them as spring approached.

Flowers? I mean, roses? For clues, look around the yard. You will see the original boxwoods that came with the house and that Christmas tree we planted because we bought one with a root ball. Add two more oaks and that’s about it. Oh, yeah, I planted the four crepe myrtles for “summer color,” but they’re no maintenance.  Is it really good to give me as a symbol of our love, something doomed to die in five days while we look on?

May I speak honestly? We have to eat anyway, so good food is always a winner with me. Do we not enjoy our bi-monthly movie date nights? With over-priced popcorn and coke? Early and late, we know what we like — years of trial and error. Let’s don’t let something like yet another commerce-driven “day” ruin a good thing.