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.

Works every time

Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song” is a short poem that takes Homer’s original Sirens from the myth and gives one of them a modern voice. Recall that Odysseus’s men tie him to the ship preventing his hearing the irresistable song of the Sirens, which  lead to a listener’s death.

In a sarcastic but world-weary tone (”Alas”) the Siren/speaker is talking to a potential victim. He is listening and therefore cannot resist: he has heard the song. But what is this song? Notice how the Siren leads her victim down the slippery slope of flattery and damsel-in-distress cajoling to achieve her purpose. She whines about her outfit, her companions (there were three Sirens often depicted as birds,) and her desires to flee.  He falls like a rock. She finds the process effective, but boring. She is used to seeing men leap overboard “in squadrons” to get to her. It’s her life.

Atwood may be saying that the seduction process is so certain that it’s “boring.” And even though there are the “bleached skulls on the beach,” the happy candidate slated for death marches on to the lyrical song of the Siren, symbolic, of course, of the archetypal lure of the deadly female — the femme fatale.

Here’s a link. Give this one a read.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/siren-song/

Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and the new year

Yeats’s “The Second Coming” affords a grim look into a future in which the cumulative events of history have led to societal, spiritual entropy.  The initial image is that of a falcon spinning circularly out of control above the head of its master. Then Yeats catalogs distressing events that describe modern man’s condition. Anarchy, blood, the drowning of innocence. It’s a world where the “best” people have lost their spark, enervated rather than challenged by the pandemonium around them. The “worst” people, however, are passionate and intense.

The speaker answers his own reflections becoming rhetorical with what might be epiphany. “Surely the second coming is at hand.” It mimics Christians parodied as carrying their placards emblazoned with “The end is near.” But instead of Christ, instead of the Middle East, he visualizes a Sphinx and images of desert sands and birds, which symbolizes ancient Egypt, a far philosophical cry from Christianity.

Of course, anyone with even a casual brush with religious training immediately associates “second coming” to the second coming of Christ. Yeats intended that. But the speaker goes on to reveal that the 2,000 years since Christ’s birth, of Christendom, is coming to an end. In its place the pitiless nightmare symbolized by the now in motion Sphinz, “slouching” and “rough” is about to be “loosed on the world.” The world watches and waits. And it’s not looking good.

Adam Cohen writing an op/ed piece for the New York Times discusses the poem. He cites Jim McDermott, who titles a speech before the Senate “The Centre Cannot Hold.” The speech demands that President Bush make a stand on the war 2/07.  Many other allusions to the poem abound made by writers from Joni Mitchell to the Beatles to Chinua Achebe to writers for “The Sopranos.”

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?