A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: The Silent Lover - Louis Simpson

(*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.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Silent Lover - Louis Simpson

Louis Simpson (1923 - ). I haven't read much of the recent Simpson, but have always liked his work and appreciate it more now. If it makes sense, in earlier years I wanted to be dazzled by a poet's visible command of the language, control of poetic forms, and the complexity in the imagery.

Now, I am also drawn to poems and language that is "simple" yet require more from me: to slow down, to reflect and allow my own experiences to inform my connection to the poem. I know some of it comes from reading Chinese poetry and some from being older. There is a richness to this one .....if you don't rush and let it meld with you.

It's a poem that goes with sitting on the porch of a beach house in the late afternoon sipping tea. Or, for myself, sipping a 20 yr. old single cask bottling of Highland Park and recalling the urban hike to its distillery on an overcast August day after the ferry ride from Aberdeen to Kirkwall….. and the memory nestled within that memory: my thoughts during that hike, which included the beautiful last line of this poem and how it can stand alone, a complete poem just by itself.

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The Silent Lover

She sighs. What shall I say?
For beauty seems to grow
In silence, when the heart is faint and slow.

Sing, sing…How shall I sing?
In silent eyes, where clouds and islands gaze,
The waves bring Eros in.

I think the rustling of her clothes
Is like the sea, and she
A wild white bird,

And love is like the sighing of the sand.
Louis Simpson - American

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