Sunday 17 February 2013

poetry is ambiguous...

LOVE POETRY
from BBC Radio 4

For Valentine's week, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, explores the heady world of love poetry from first flush to final parting. She argues that love poems are the poems that continue to have the most profound and lasting impact on the general reader, and examines enduring images and themes across ages and cultures. In conversation with other love poets, Carol Ann celebrates the great poems of love and explores poets' responses to love's mysteries. Each of the five programmes in the series looks at a different stage in the development of a relationship. Today's episode focuses on the excitement of a first meeting and the headiness of early infatuation. Presented by Carol Ann Duffy.



Merciless Beauty By Geoffrey Chaucer

Your eyen two slay me suddenly;
    I may the beauty of them not sustain,
    So woundeth it throughout my hearte keen.

    And but your word will healen hastily
    My hearte’s wounde, while that it is green,
         Your eyen two will slay me suddenly;
         I may the beauty of them not sustain.

    Upon my truth I say you faithfully
    That ye bin of my life and death the queen;
    For with my death the truthe shall be seen.
         Your eyen two will slay me suddenly;
         I may the beauty of them not sustain.
         So woundeth it throughout my hearte keen.


Sappho 

He looks to me to be in heaven, that man who sits across from you and listens near you toy our soft speaking, your laughing lovely: that, I vow, makes the heart leap in my breast; for watching you a moment, speech fails me, my tongue is paralysed, at once a light fire runs beneath my skin, my eyes are blinded, and my ears drumming, the sweat pours down me, and I shake all over, sallower than grass: I feel as if I'm not far off dying. But no thing is too hard to bear. For God can make the poor man rich or bring to nothing heaven-high fortune.

D L Page (ed) Lyrica Graeca Selecta (1968), no.199 (translated by M L West).



The First Day by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it! Such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow.
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much!
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand! - Did one but know!


In Memory of Adrienne
21 Love Poems, By Adrienne Rich

XVII

    No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
    The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
    they happen in our lives like car crashes,
    books that change us, neighborhoods
    we move into and come to love.
    Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
    women at least should know the difference
    between love and death. No poison cup,
    no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
    should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
    not merely played but should have listened to us,
    and could instruct those after us:
    this we were, this is how we tried to love,
    and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
    and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
    within us and against us, against us and within us.


WHEN YOU ARE OLD: W.B. Yeats [1865-1939]

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire,take down this book,
And slowly read,and dream the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur a little sadly,how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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