A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: The Lark - Bernart de Ventadorn

(*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, June 8, 2010

The Lark - Bernart de Ventadorn

No assembly of love poetry would be complete without something by the Troubadors of the early medieval period. These writers of courtly ballads about love for unattainable women set the stage and tone for the notions of Romantic love that softened the edges of what was a brutal - and brutish - period. Bernart de Ventadorn (1148-1195, according to Ezra Pound's sources) was one of the best French troubadors and his ballads have survived to today. This one is not his best known, but I chose it because the translator from oc (a medieval Provencal language) to English is Pound, one of the great - and controversial - literary figures of the 20th century. Aside from his own poetry and essays and ideas about writing, Pound had a great interest in poetry from other cultures and times and brought those to the attention of English-speaking audiences through his translations.
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The Lark
transl. from Oc by Ezra Pound

When I see the lark a-moving

For joy his wings against the sunlight,

Who forgets himself and lets himself fall

For the sweetness which goes into his heart:

Ai! what great envy comes unto me for him whom I see so

rejoicing!

I marvel that my heart melts not for desiring.

Alas! I thought I knew so much

Of Love, and I know so little of it, for I cannot

hold myself from loving

Her from whom I shall never have anything toward.

She hath my heart from me, and she hath from me all my wit

And myself and all that is mine.

And when she took it from me she left me naught

Save desiring and a yearning heart.

Bernart de Ventadorn - French

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