...thoughts and expressions on and about LOVE...
I have been giving some thought to this word "love". Thought has taken me around to where I have already travelled this year. This discovery is, for me, both amazing and amusing. It is amazing because in the weeks and months as I have read and written, I had no idea I would be re-visiting where I thought I had once been so soon. It is amusing, because in re-visiting, I recognize that what I had been striving to both understand and write about, has now been given a different angle of approach. Around this circle I go again. Perhaps this only says that the circles of my mind are small!
I have been thinking about "love" - how it is thought of, how it is expressed in life, how it is written about in poetry, and how much it refuses to be locked into an absolute definition within the confines of these things called "words". For me, this idea that Coleridge had about prose and poetry, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry, that is; prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best order." says, I think, a lot in a small statement. It is a good mind image of the vehicle by which an essence - LOVE - that is larger than any one of us as individual human beings, has laboured long and intensely in the history of humans, to describe that which it cannot be limited by.
I'm moving backward to the pastoral, where the pastoral picture is about as close to perfect as we can imagine, but where there is a dichotomy between that and the reality of 'where the rubber hits the road' so-to-speak, for those who actually struggle and strive to survive in this picture. And yet we continue to connect with this picture as one which stirs good feelings inside.
I am moving backward to where Plato remarked that poetry was an image of an image, because we, as humans cannot see nor even imagine the whole of the "essential Form". Yet, we continue to hope to see or experience the real whole, when what we may see or experience if we are graced with this, are snippets of reflections in others, and perhaps nanosecond glimpses of something clearly that dwells behind a gauzy curtain. And I think it is in this hope which refuses to be denied, that poets have both gone up and gone down into places where many do not enter.
Just as the people in Plato's cave saw the reflections on the walls that appeared to be 'the real thing', these are accepted by many as the whole of what human life and love is about. The poet strives, however, to create something "in the best order" that expresses the 'real thing'. Through the aeons, with every generation that is born, humanity has flowed like a river passing by in front of one's eyes. Life as we know it personally, and as we observe it in others has begun we know not when and will end we know not when.
Sonnet 1 (Sonnets from the Portuguese)
I thought once how Theocritus had sung (1)
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; (2)
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
"Guess now who holds thee?"--"Death," I said. But, there,
The silver answer range,--"Not Death, but Love."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861
Norton p.856
(1) Theocritus Idyll 15 - a singer describes the Hours,
who have brought Adonis back from the underworld,
as "the dear soft-footed Hours, slowest of all the Blessed Ones,
but their coming is always longed for,
and they bring something for all men"
(2) Iliad Book 1 - Athena catches Achilles by his hair to warn
him when he is about to draw his sword against Agamemnon.
I am moving backward to see how long the pastoral and love have been connected with poets in their writing. I am moving backward to an impression that poets sometimes give, of being sad. I am moving backward to what poetry is about. This time around, the passenger riding in the poetic vehicle, is "Love". ((to be continued)
I have been thinking about "love" - how it is thought of, how it is expressed in life, how it is written about in poetry, and how much it refuses to be locked into an absolute definition within the confines of these things called "words". For me, this idea that Coleridge had about prose and poetry, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry, that is; prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best order." says, I think, a lot in a small statement. It is a good mind image of the vehicle by which an essence - LOVE - that is larger than any one of us as individual human beings, has laboured long and intensely in the history of humans, to describe that which it cannot be limited by.
I'm moving backward to the pastoral, where the pastoral picture is about as close to perfect as we can imagine, but where there is a dichotomy between that and the reality of 'where the rubber hits the road' so-to-speak, for those who actually struggle and strive to survive in this picture. And yet we continue to connect with this picture as one which stirs good feelings inside.
I am moving backward to where Plato remarked that poetry was an image of an image, because we, as humans cannot see nor even imagine the whole of the "essential Form". Yet, we continue to hope to see or experience the real whole, when what we may see or experience if we are graced with this, are snippets of reflections in others, and perhaps nanosecond glimpses of something clearly that dwells behind a gauzy curtain. And I think it is in this hope which refuses to be denied, that poets have both gone up and gone down into places where many do not enter.
Just as the people in Plato's cave saw the reflections on the walls that appeared to be 'the real thing', these are accepted by many as the whole of what human life and love is about. The poet strives, however, to create something "in the best order" that expresses the 'real thing'. Through the aeons, with every generation that is born, humanity has flowed like a river passing by in front of one's eyes. Life as we know it personally, and as we observe it in others has begun we know not when and will end we know not when.
Sonnet 1 (Sonnets from the Portuguese)
I thought once how Theocritus had sung (1)
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; (2)
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
"Guess now who holds thee?"--"Death," I said. But, there,
The silver answer range,--"Not Death, but Love."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861
Norton p.856
(1) Theocritus Idyll 15 - a singer describes the Hours,
who have brought Adonis back from the underworld,
as "the dear soft-footed Hours, slowest of all the Blessed Ones,
but their coming is always longed for,
and they bring something for all men"
(2) Iliad Book 1 - Athena catches Achilles by his hair to warn
him when he is about to draw his sword against Agamemnon.
I am moving backward to see how long the pastoral and love have been connected with poets in their writing. I am moving backward to an impression that poets sometimes give, of being sad. I am moving backward to what poetry is about. This time around, the passenger riding in the poetic vehicle, is "Love". ((to be continued)
posted by maggiesong at 5:56 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for your comment Dayzak...yes, I think it wonderful to think that love is greater than any one of the small parts of which the whole is composed. It's a huge thought that intrigues us as human beings because our nature is to capture and identify and classify and understand and master and then become professors of, believing that we have something definitive to say that would show us as quite brilliant. I like the idea that the best things in life seem to be those things we must continue to experience in diferent ways, think upon, and live out in the best way we know how to do.
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