One afternoon, just when the city seemed to be emerging from the first crush of the pandemic, I was cutting through Central Park after an appointment. “One day, I know, it will be otherwise,” notes the poet Jane Kenyon. As I type, he is still here on earth breathing. The buzz of meeting a friend for a drink now that we can once again meet friends for drinks, the student who wants to come by my (in-person!) office hours to “hang out and read poems,” my husband beside me as he sleeps. The past few years may have left us bruised-but are we done with life? I am still so into it.
Love poems help us celebrate the gift of being alive even-perhaps especially-during challenging times.
#CHOCOLATE BY RITA DOVE FULL#
Yet he admonishes the reader not to retreat from life but rather, “when the melancholy fit shall fall…then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.” His advice? Move through the world embracing its pleasures, hearts open, despite knowing full well we will lose our beloveds, will indeed lose everything, on this whole spinning beautiful earth. Keats knew immense suffering in his day-he lived through his generation’s pandemic and lost his mother and his brother to tuberculosis before succumbing himself at 25. Keats’s “ Ode on Melancholy” is an exquisite example. The most powerful love poems, I think, address the fact that we are here now and one day won’t be. Rita Dove’s “Flirtation” works a similar magic, reminding us that “My heart/is humming a tune/I haven’t heard in years!” The poem encourages us not to miss the world’s deliciousness: “Quiet’s cool flesh-/let’s sniff and eat it./There are ways/to make of the moment/a topiary/so the pleasure’s in/walking through.”
Everything is suddenly technicolor: “There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background from joy/to joy to joy, /from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom” Li-Young Lee writes, capturing love’s fleeting jubilance. The best love poems enact the hyperaware state of being alive we feel when we’re in love. When a poem is flooded with too much emotion, it becomes sentimental, even cheesy but when a poem risks nothing, it leaves a reader cold. For one thing, it’s hard to strike the right tone. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪs much as we may want-or need-to write a love poem, it’s often difficult to find a language that adequately expresses the way we feel.
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