A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: The Surly One - Theodore Roethke

(*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.

Monday, November 22, 2010

The Surly One - Theodore Roethke

If this is the only Roethke poem you will read here, you'll be doing yourself a disservice. Pleeease "click" on his name on the left and check out the others! He has written some of the most dazzling love poems that I know: joyous, playful, with imagery that will surprise by their freshness. This one is short and, thus, might look simple and not worth a second read.... but take your time! Boil some water, and while the tea steeps let the lines loose among your emotional memories. You will be surprised at what they can stir up, if you let them. I like #1, perhaps because of my fondness for single malt whiskeys, as they evoke my chosen connection to Scotland. (However, unlike Roethke, I SIP, not slug them down to drown memories.) In #2, it's how he condenses so much truth in the last two lines.
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The Surly One

1

When true love broke my heart in half ,

I took the whisky from the shelf,

And told my neighbors when to laugh.

I keep a dog, and bark myself.

2

Ghost cries out to ghost –

But who’s afraid of that?

I fear those shadows most

That start from my own feet.

Theodore Roethke

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