A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Ballad of My Beautiful Lady

(*Depending on the speed of your internet connection, it may take a couple of minutes to load the first time. *)

"Passages IV" - Charcoal and acrylic by Elena Peteva. Now in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I fell in love with it, had my chance to acquire, vacillated, and by the time I decided ..... lost it. Both for its symbolism and my encounter with it as a love-and-life lesson on when heart and eye should out-vote the brain, there could be no other image more apropos.

"Love is the universal migraine" wrote Robert Graves in the poem "Symptoms of Love". And, like an actual migraine, it renders us paralyzed and wordless to describe: regardless of the stage (or state) of a "love connection"' we feel as though no one else has ever felt as we do. Since my first "migraine", poetry has been the palliative for its course. Exhilarated or despairing, elated or dumb-founded by an affaire de coeur, someone talented has expressed my feelings better, more vividly, eloquently, and passionately. My goal is to post one poem each day for a year as an exercise and meditation on the subject.

The poems come from a poetry collection accumulated over a life-time of marveling at the sometimes-madness-sometimes-misery of being in love but always always in awe of the mystery and hope, whether as the pursuer or the pursued.

In his poem "Amar" (To Love), which is posted here, Carlos Drummond de Andrade writes of the heart as being a bottomless reservoir of Love. He urges that we must continue to ladle it out, whether after a loss or when that Love has fallen on parched earth, because that's what we are meant to do - nay, we must do. No other poem speaks as much to me in encouraging that optimistic, hopeful view.

Part of my objective for the project is to see how re-reading, selecting, and commenting on so much "love poetry" would affect my own energy, spirit, receptivity, and capacity to love. It led - eventually- to a rumination about Love, which you can find here: “Talking About Love Is Like Dancing About Architecture” .

So, while you await the next lift-off, are already soaring or just barely crawling away from a crash, may these poems - by the gifted and the mad, the famous and the (somewhat) forgotten, spanning centuries and cultures - show you that your anguishes and ecstasies are shared and universal.

Intimations, Declarations, Persuasions, Celebrations, Separations, Desolation: these are the stages of a love affair, as characterized by Jon Stallworthy for his anthology of love poetry. I have followed the same protocol in tagging the poems here.

Harrison Tao
March 1, 2010

Since poets may be represented more than once, photos and biographical information will be only with the first posting of a poem by each. This site is quirky for navigating to a particular poet. They are listed in order of the number of their poems that I have selected.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Ballad of My Beautiful Lady

One reason I read poetry from other periods and countries is to have an affirmation that human emotions are universal across time and cultures. And to see whether the expressions by poets of that era and place "hold" across those distances. Reading this one, I try to remember that it was a popular love verse in the time of Colombus, and note that the victory of Christian Spain over Moorish Spain was still very recent. Distilled to the essence: the heart wants what it wants and accepts no substitutes, and that was true then, now, and for as long as humans exist.
------------------------------
Ballad of My Beautiful Lady

“My friend, my friend,
my beautiful lady married today,
she married a country peasant,
which caused me the most pain.
I think I shall become a Moor,
and abide by Moorish ways:
any Christian that I may see,
his life I’ll take away.”
“Don’t do it, my friend,
don’t lead your life astray,
of three sisters that I have,
I shall give you the most fair,
if you want her for a wife,
if you want her for your lady.”
“I don't want her for a wife,
nor want her for a lady,
since I could not enjoy,
the one I lost today.”
Anon. - Spain (before 1500)

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)