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:
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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