In the History of Our Love - Yehuda Amichai

With this selection, Amichai solidifies his lead as the most represented poet here.  And deservedly.  (Do "click" on his name on the left column to see why.  You'll agree and also see the biographical information on an amazing life.)   In this one, the analogy used in the last stanza to convey connectivity and isolation is just brilliant.  It takes Donne's "no man is an island" a step further, and that is just a great finish to the earlier lines' riff on permanence/impermanence.  There is also no doubt that Amichai is writing from deep experience.  It's the voice of a man who has loved well, loved deeply and loved completely.... and, thus, knows also the weight of loss.  What's striking to me about Amichai's love poetry is how powerfully and passionately he can write about both that state of grace that is being "in love" AND its aftermath.  (Sadly, just calling it a "state of grace" defines it as being a finite interval.  And do all "states of grace" inevitably have a "fall"? ) I envy that ability to express joy and sorrow equally well, as my own best writing is skewered towards the latter....
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In the History of Our Love

                                    transl. from Hebrew by Ben and Barbara Harshaw

In the history of our love, always one is

A nomadic tribe, the other a nation on its own soil.

When we changed places, it was all over.

Time will pass us by, as landscapes

Move behind actors standing in their places

When they make a movie.  Even the words

Will pass by our lips, even the tears

Will pass by our eyes.  Time will pass

Every one in his place.

And in the geography of the rest of our lives,

Who will be an island and who a peninsula

Will become clear to each of us in the rest of our lives

In nights of love with others.

                                             Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

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

Song of Yue - Song Lian

Better known for his prose and role as a high court-official in the administration of the first Ming Dynasty Emperor, Song Lian was also charged with compiling the official history of the previous dynasty (Yuan).  This little poem comes by way of a small book of Chinese love poems edited by Qiu Xialong, about whom I've written earlier.  This streak of Chinese poems is not entirely intentional.  Tonight, I read poetry by Mary Oliver and several Brazilian poets looking for one that would be appealing, but was not successful.  

I chose this one for its perfect use of a pair of scissors to express separation and joining.  It's so simple, so elegant..... and written almost 800 years ago!  I am continually mindful of how emotional states know no boundaries of time or culture.  We yearn, we love, we mourn the same way, irrespective of time and place. 

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Song of Yue

                            transl. from Chinese by Qiu Xialong

It is not just a day or night that I have

missed you, Lord.

It is like a broken pair

of Bingzhou scissors –

one blade is far in the south, and the other,

far in the north.

When can the pair

be joined to cut out a wedding gown?

                                                    Song Lian  - Chinese 1310-1381

Reply to "Phoenix Hairpin" (to the tune of) - Tang Wan

This is the only translation I could find (from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry) of Tang Wan's poem in reply to her ex-husband Lu You's poem.  (See two postings below.)  There is something unsatisfying about it: I can't tell whether it's the poem or the translation.  Somehow, given how she must have felt, the fullness of her feelings doesn't come across.  There is flame but little heat and I can't believe that is how it was for her.  The sorrow of a love torn asunder, a love big enough to kill her less than a year after that meeting: it just doesn't come through strongly enough.  We know his broken heart lasted the rest of his life, another forty years, but that's what a great love will do. I wonder, if given the option of a short or long life after a loss like that, which would be the easier.  But we are not given that choice.  I know.

Addendum: Jan. 22, 2011.  Since no longer being able to add more poems after the fire of Dec. 21., I have been "visiting" poems whose physical copies burned.  I feel that I have done Tang Wan a disservice with my original remarks.  I see her sorrow now as so deep, so profound that it's past the stage of torrents of tears and words.  She is now at a place where what remains is the bleakness of the loss and a vocabulary of images as stark and limited as her life.  I remember reading somewhere that the purest truths are said in the shortest sentences and with the simplest of words.  (No, not Hemingway.)  Read with that in mind, I can feel her devastation in my marrow.  Contrast it with his, forty years after that chance encounter... and leave me a comment.)
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 Reply to “Phoenix Hairpin”  (to the tune of)  -  Tang Wan

Human relationships are short.

Human intentions are evil.

When rain accompanies evening, flowers fall easily,

but morning wind is dry.

Tearstains remain.

I want to write you my feelings

but I only whisper to myself, leaning against banister.

Hard!  Hard!  Hard!

We are separate.

Today is not yesterday.

My sick soul moves like a swing between us.

A cold blast from a horn.

The night is late.

Afraid of questions,

I swallow my tears and smile.

Hide!  Hide!  Hide!

                                                             Tang Wan - dates unknown, Song Dynasty ,

The Shen Garden - Lu You

 This is the poem that Lu You wrote forty years after the chance meeting with his beloved, Tang Wan, as described in the previous posting (Nov. 2nd).  The translation is by a very interesting person, Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese-born poet/professor at Washington University who writes in both Chinese and English, as well as translating T.S. Eliot (!) and others into Chinese.  Qiu is also the author of a detective story series set in modern day Shanghai: they are a great read as both social commentary and a good crime yarn.  I highly recommend them.  (The first one is called "Death of A Red Heroine" and this is a link to a review of it.)

As previously noted, translations are tricky business, even between languages from the same "family", like the Romance languages.  (As close as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are to each other, I've seen some terrible choices migrating a poem from one to the other.)  Going from a pictograph-based language like Chinese to English takes amazing skill and double sensitivity to intent and result.  Simply, it takes another poet, but a poet aware of his own ego, limitations, and biases.  Of the translations I have read, this one fulfills the task the best.

When revisiting the past by recalling a memory, nothing has aged.  Going back to a physical place, one must be prepared for the opposite, and the consequences depend on one's preparation and expectations.  In this poem, Lu appears to have been ready and thus not jarred by the changes: his tone is observational and accepting, not questioning or raging.  Someday, I hope to be that way myself about the past.
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The Shen Garden

                                    transl. by Qiu Xiaolong

I

The sun is sinking behind the city wall

to the sad notes of a shining bugle.

In the Shen Garden,

the pond and the pavilion appear

no longer to be the same,

except the heart-breaking spring ripples

still so green under the bridge,

the ripples that reflected her arrival

light-footed, in such beauty

as would shame a wild goose into fleeing.

II

It’s forty years since we last met,

the dream broken, the scent vanished,

in the Shen Garden, the aged willows

produce no more catkins.

I’m old, already turning into the dust

of Mount Ji, when I shed a drop of tear

at this old scene.

                                                      Lu You – 1125-1210

"Phoenix Hairpin" (to the tune of) - Lu You (Song Dynasty)

Lu You, one of the four great poets of the Southern Song Dynasty, was also half of one of the great Chinese love stories.  That story has: a childhood true love leading to marriage; a disapproving and jealous mother-in-law; lovers forced to split up; a bittersweet - and brief - reunion; and a tragic death.  All of it memorialized in poems - now almost 1,000 years old! - by the participants, poems that can be seen inscribed on the walls of the place where the key event occurred.  (No wonder the story has been made into at least one TV show...)

The love of Lu's life was his cousin, Tang Wan.  They had grown up in the same household and wedded when he was twenty, but married life lasted only one year, as his mother never liked Tang and forced Lu to cast her out and divorce, which he did out of filial duty.  Lu moved away to continue his studies and a career of many ups and downs whose focus was regaining northern China for the Song Dynasty.  (Lu You is known as the "Patriotic Poet" for his many poems - several thousand of  which survive - urging the unification of China.)

Almost ten years after the divorce, Lu had a chance encounter with Tang Wan and her new husband during a visit to the Shen Garden (in modern day Shaoxing).   Societal rules did not allow them to speak directly, but she received permission from the husband to have contact.  The sources I've read conflict on whether she sent a servant to him with wine or handed him the cup herself.  Regardless, it is said her eyes were brimmed with tears, that he got drunk on the wine, and then composed immediately this poem on a wall of the Garden.  

Later, Tang saw the poem and wrote one in reply, also on the wall.  And there the poems are today, side-by-side.


She died, many say of a re-broken heart, a year after that brief, public reunion.  She was only twenty-nine years old.  Twenty-nine years old.


In 1199, some forty years later, when he was seventy-five years old, Lu You revisited the garden and wrote two poems - "Shen Garden" - recalling the event.


This poem is in "Ci" form, which are meant to be sung.  A tune is selected first, to which words are then written.  It is not uncommon for different poets to use the same tune but write different verse to fit it.

I am a sucker for tragic love stories, hence the selection.  It takes no effort at all for me to dive into their pain.

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 “Phoenix Hairpin” (To the Tune of)
 
Pink soft hands, yellow rippling wine,
The town is filled with Spring, willows by palace walls.
The east wind is biting, happiness is thin,
heart full of sorrow, so many years apart.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

Spring is as of old; the person is empty and thin.
Traces of tears show through the sheer silk.
Peach blossoms falling, glimmering pond freezing,
The huge oath remains, the brocade book is hard to hold.

Don't, Don't, Don't!

                                                             Lu You -  1125 – 1210, Song Dynasty

 

Note: This poem also shows how hard it is to translate poems from Chinese.  The forms are SO different, each character's meaning so rich that it needs, in English, several words to explain.  The triple "wrong" meant that it was wrong for them to end up apart; wrong of his mother to drive her away; and wrong of him to obey mom and leave Tang. “East Wind” refers to his mother and the rules that made him obey her wishes.  He and Tang are the willows separated by the palace wall, ie. the rules that didn't allow them to talk directly.  The tears on the silk are her tears from their encounter.  The “brocade book” refers to his work and career.
 

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"Clean and Even Music" (to the tune of) - Emperor Li Yu

 Li Yu, the last Emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, only ruled for fourteen years, but during his reign, his support of the arts made his kingdom an important cultural center.   Personally talented as a musician, painter, and calligrapher, he is recognized for his contributions to a lyric form of poetry which the succeeding Song Dynasty further developed.  It was also a poem that caused his death at the age of forty-one, when he was ordered to drink poisoned wine by first emperor of the Song Dynasty, who had conquered and imprisoned him.  (Li's poem, to the tune "Beauty Yu", had been sung by the Song Emperor's own female court musicians!  Not hard to see how that could have annoyed him....)   I include here as it is a - real - killer of a poem....

Today is also the anniversary of my father's passing, eleven years ago. He suffered a massive heart attack and died in a hospital emergency room with me at bedside.   He was eighty-four years old at the time.  I chose the poem below because lamentation for a loss applies also to filial love.  And because the line about someone being so far away that not even a dream can reach them is particularly meaningful: he is infrequently now in my dreams, though I think of him regularly and keep his memory.  I miss him and am now more glad than mortified when I recognize him in how I speak or laugh a certain way sometimes.
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 “Clean and Even Music”  (to the tune of)

Since you left, Spring is half gone

and everything I see breaks my heart:

a chaos of plum petals falling by steps like snowflakes.

I brush them off and they cover me again.

Migrating wild geese bring me no word of you.

The road is so long that my dream cannot reach you.

The grief of departure is like spring grass

-- the farther you go, the deeper it grows.

                                                                       Emperor Li Yu (aka Li Houzhu “last ruler”)

And the killer poem:


"Beauty Yu:  (to the tune of)

 Will Spring blooms and autumn never end?
These memories are too much.
Last night east wind pierced my narrow tower again,
and I saw lost kingdoms in the clean bright moon.
The carved railings and jade steps must still be there,
though lovely faces must have aged.
How much sorrow do I feel?
Like river water in spring, it flows to the east.

Nameless Journey

An Israeli poet who immigrated to Palestine in 1935 when she was in her early twenties, Goldberg had a distinguished academic career at Hebrew University in Jerusalem until her death in 1970.  She wrote children’s books and translated European authors.  I don’t know much about her, finding this in an anthology of women poets.   I chose this image from ones available, as the years were not kind to her youthful beauty.

This poem has a long “runway” leading to the last two lines, which, at least for me, were a surprise at first reading.  The gender in the last line could be either.  In subsequent readings, it’s clearer that the trail to it was marked..  (Don’t cheat and skip to the end!).  This appealed to the same part of me that likes jokes with an unexpected punch line.  The “runway” also made for - like a good wine - a longer (emotional) finish. And the effect of more readings, like more sips of that wine, uncovers more of its depth.  (A Grand Crus St. Emilion like Château Le Dome would be right: like this poem, it’s better than its classification.) 

———————————————————-
 From Nameless Journey 

                               Transl. by Raman Commanday
                                             
II

My room is so small
that the days sneak in, humiliated.
I, too, live that way,
in the smell of smoke and apples.
At night the neighbors turn on lights
on the other side of the yard.
They shine quietly
through the branches of the tall birch,
through the windows facing me.
At night sometimes it is difficult to remember
that once
somewhere
there was my own window.

III

These have been weeks when no one
calls me by name, and this is very simple:
the parrot in the kitchen of my house
has not yet learned it.
People the breadth of the city
don’t know it.
It has no voice, no sound or note.
Days, I go without a name
in the street whose name I know.
I sit for hours without a name
before the tree whose name I know.
Sometimes I think without a name
of him whose name I don’t know.

                                                    Leah Goldberg
                                           https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bordeaux-wine-producer-profiles/bordeaux/st-emilion/le-dome/

The Embroidery - Harrison Tao

Today is the 20th anniversary of my mother's passing away from melanoma, and I am taking "license" to post my elegiacal poem to her.   We had a complex relationship strained by the clashes caused by the challenges of raising me in two Western cultures (Brazilian and American) so dissimilar from our ancestral one.  Regardless, my own maturing (and a good therapist) has given me peace and perspective.  She loved me as best she knew how (and could) in a life that saw huge transformations and losses, and where her own needs and dreams went largely unfulfilled.  My mother was a strong and passionate person who deserved an easier and more rewarding emotional life than she ultimately lived.  She died angry and "raging against the dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas).   Whereas I was perturbed at the time, I now view the witnessing of her last breath as a gift. I love her and I miss her.  

As I get closer to - perhaps - "seeing" her again, I focus on how much love and affection she showed her only grandchild, my daughter.   Here is a link to a longer commentary.
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The  Embroidery 
                                  to Lee Pik-Yuen (Lily Tao), 1916 - 1990

What song for a life of sorrows?

What sorrows steep within a tea?

What tea for partings without the proper song?

In less-than half the heartbeats you carried me within,

an obscene rebellion tunneling beneath the skin
collapsed all the familiar contours:

your body now a ladder of bones

in an emptying hospital room,

and the high-collar Shantung dresses,

slit-to-the-knee brocaded sheaths

of an abrupted youth and Shanghai sweets,                                                 

become an anonymous sheet

I would not let be pulled over your face.

So much was hidden already:

the kneelings by the carved chest

left in Brazil,

your tai chi-smooth splitting of the twin brass-locks

to raise the fishermen, the village,

the pavilion in the cloud,

to furlough from a scented darkness,

song-birds straining their silk threads,

two  dazzling butterflies

flightless, though unpinned.

Contemplated for a pot or two,

yet always re-folded, never displayed,

you always camphored it away,

the creases deepening

unsmoothable as the choices made:

strength to a weary husband,

solace from a tended rose-bush: 

yourself a muted nightingale 
in an unlocked cage.

Your face still now, 
moon-mottled and breath-less,

the eyes tranquil seas, finally,

this son, twice-born without a voice,

unfurls it now, pennant and shroud,

to sing you homeward

with words you would not recognize,

to return your ashes into steps.

Though there is no more pleasing,

I take the silence as approval:

I drink my fill, 

and call it tea.

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The embroidery seen in the first photo hung in the space (the cinder-blocks with the black strip) between the two windows - the two pieces of plywood - in my bedroom.  (The fire started below it along that wall.)  The first photo is the only evidence it ever existed.  So it goes.... 

Forever Parted: Graveyard. - Gu Cheng

Walking on East 41st St. just east of Fifth Avenue, this poem stared up at me as I stared down at my feet.  Embedded on the sidewalk, it’s one of 96 such plaques with poems and literary quotes selected in the 1990s and placed there on the two blocks leading to the New York City’s main public library - the one with the famous flanking lions.  

I couldn’t recall either the poet or the poem but it connected, as it had that very Chinese “voice” and language that is so appealing: deceptively simple in imagery yet complex in how it joined disparate ones.  I was intrigued, especially as his birth-year (1956) would make him my generation.  Was he a Chinese-American, born there or here, but writing in English? A Mainland Chinese still there (or here) translated into English?  Researching led to the unexpected.

First, the plaque needs to be updated: Gu Cheng (male) died on Oct 8, 1993, in New Zealand, hanging himself after having killed his wife with an axe.  They - her name was Xie Ye - had immigrated to New Zealand after leaving China in 1987, after he had become a literary celebrity following the end of the Cultural Revolution.  A prominent member of a group of modernist writers (“The Misty Poets”, a pejorative - meng dong - by the authorities meaning “obscure” or “hazy” ), his poetry was well-known and popular, his poems being both surreal and grounded in every day life and appealing to a generation tired and disaffected by the dullness and propaganda of official writers..  

A poet’s death, particularly one with the tabloid drama of a murder and/or suicide, will always add an * to their work, becoming an unavoidable filter or lens through which it will be interpreted.  I only knew the poem and the poem met my criteria for inclusion.

As for the poem itself, picture the poet, in loss and mourning, visiting the grave of the loved one, unable to use his medium and the tools of his trade to express…

Eight Sonnets - III - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950) didn't live long enough to see the feminist movement of the 60s, but conducted her life with the integrity of being her own person in a time when most women could not and did not, thus serving as a great role model for those that followed.  Born in Maine, "Vincent" (as she was called by friends) parlayed an early poem, with encouragement from her mother, into a scholarship to Vassar.  It was off-to-the-races then to a literary life as a poet and playwright in New York City, to Greenwich Village where she lived on the brink of poverty but with great zest.  Her fourth volume of poetry garnered a Pulitzer in 1923.  She continued writing poetry (and plays) for the rest of her career and was widely known through the many public readings she gave.  Though openly bisexual, "Vincent", was in an open marriage until her husband of twenty-six years died a year before her own.  This sonnet, the third in a group of eight, has always intrigued me by how it is set up.
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Eight Sonnets

III

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

                                                                                        Edna St. Vincent Millay

Level - John Koethe

John Koethe (1945 - ), educated at Princeton and Harvard, teaches currently in the Midwest, I think at U of Winsconsin.)  While we are almost contemporaries - he's just a bit older - I am not familiar with his writing, though he is not an unknown and has been recognized with fellowships and prizes.  His bio (click on his name) is a little sparse, but at least he has one on the Poetry Foundation website.  (Aside: one of my pet peeves about poetry - and visual arts - is how critics often interfere with a reader/viewer's experience by either interpreting too much and/or making it about HIS / HER experience and biases through what they write.  A case in point is the bio on Koethe in the "Innisfree Poetry Journal" from which come this quote:  "In language that is often discursive, often plangent, always mesmeric in its lyricism...".  Now, I think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I had to look up "plangent"!  Oh, wait.  It means ".. lamenting, often melancholy" and used chiefly in poetry/literature.  Hmm....  Next time academics and critics bemoan the state of poetry in this society, they might consider NOT USING WORDS THAT FURTHER SEPARATE THEM FROM A LARGER AUDIENCE!!! 
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Level

                                 A promise of so much to that is to come
                                 Extracted, accepted gladly
                                 But within its narrow limits
                                                               John Ashberry

Eventually, I’d hoped, I would please you.
I would call you the right names,
Bend with your gestures, remember your actions,
Extracting them gladly, but within real limits.

I see I was wrong. Shall I find you different?
Easy, supple, and without pain?
Or is energy part of the music?
I try. I am trying to ask you –

O the noises that cannot be touched!
The faces have passed me like a brown dream

For how can they change?
Always unbearably tender, and constant,
Like a house that is tender and constant.

You are like other people. There is
I suppose, no reason to want you
Unless desire itself is a reason, drawing us
Out of our kindness, leaving us terrified

Peace. Beauty, we know,
Is the center of fear, hammering,
Holding in a loose ring your purposeful
Dream – and you see them

Looking painfully into your face, though you know
They will never come back in the same way.

John Koethe

Nota Bene - Jean Garrigue

Another one by Jean Garrigue (see yesterday's selection, below).  I like its compactness and truths: short and truthful.....but not sweet.  A good description of love's emotional daisy-chain wherein we play all roles, sometimes simultaneously.
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Nota Bene

I’ll break your heart, A. said to me
You’ll break my heart, I said to B.
Both did, and still, is my ticker all that smashed?
We get over old wounds by acquiring new ones,
Said C. And thus I sustained all three.

                                                                     Jean Garrigue - American

Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold

Today and tomorrow (Saturday's) poems need to be read together, as tomorrow's is a poem "about" today's.  Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888) was one of 19th century England's best known social critics and poets.  He worked as an inspector of schools, but was also a professor of poetry at Oxford, and traveled fairly widely, including to America, to lecture on contemporary education and democracy.  Arnold's poetic legacy is more based on his place in addressing the intrusion - and effect - of all the societal changes in mid-19th century-onward England, than in poems that were purely "art".  He believed that poetry should reflect a philosophy.  (I believe a good poem helps us access emotions and understandings about ourselves and those emotions.)  Some regard him as the transition from Victorian Romanticism to Modernism.  But that's for literary critics.  I am not partial to him at all and actually learned of his poetry through tomorrow's poem by Anthony Hecht referencing this one.  "Dover Beach", written in 1867, has those literary allusions that were expected to be known and understood by readers.  It also has a self-pitying tone and understated emotion, which is what tomorrow's poem skewers.  It was very popular and has been cited by others in later creative works, including "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury.   The last lines of the last strophe (verse) are quoted often.  The best way to get the most from both poems (this one and tomorrow's "Dover Bitch") is to read this one first, then tomorrow's, then this one again.  (If you do, you'll qualify as actually caring about poetry and get a "Poetry Geek" pin - leave your email address in the "Comments"....)
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DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.


The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
                                                                                            Matthew Arnold - English

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

Four Songs - Tzu Yeh

 Some suggest that the group of 117 short poems known as the "Tzu Yeh songs" were authored by more than one person.  However, the compositional style of back-to-back couplets was new and suggest a single author.  As a "wine-shop girl", she would have been ".... trained in music, dance, calligraphy, history..." (Hamill), making her a very early precursor - by roughly 1,300 years - of Japanese "geishas".  I'm sure some doctoral student somewhere has done a cross-cultural comparison of female entertainers in ancient cultures - from the Greek hetaerae to "wine-shop girls" to geishas - and what was included in their range of offerings, from chaste to carnal.)  This grouping of Tzu Yeh songs first showed up in a compilation dating to the second half of the 4th Century A.C.E. (After Christian Era - the new "A.D.")  I've selected four of them for this posting: I may add others at another time.  (Sorry, no photo!)
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Four songs   

                                                  transl. from Chinese by Sam Hamill

The Lotus Lover

A green lotus on waves of transparent blue:

the flowers grow red and new.

You want to collect these lovely flowers?

I’ll give my lotus bud to you.

And End to Spring

Your leaving brought an end to spring;

longing burns through summer heat-waves.

Will I ever lift my dress for you again?

My pillow ever hold your lovely face?

A Smile

In this house without walls on a hill

the four winds touch our faces.

If they blow open your robe of gauze,

I’ll try to hide my smile.

Song

Winter skies are cold and low,

with harsh winds and freezing sleet.

But when we make love beneath our quilt,

we make three summer months of heat.

                                                                      Tzu Yeh - Chinese

Oxaitoq's Song - Anonymous Inuit

As I have noted with other selections, one of the great pleasures of reading poetry from other cultures and times is the universality of the emotions.  This anonymous song from the 1890s comes from the Inuit, the indigenous people of the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas of northern Canada, Alaska, and Greenland.  And it is just marvelous: short and pithy, yet emotionally translatable to any language.  It's stripped to the essential and exposing despair, sadness, dejection, truth, and just a hint of bitterness and anger.  And remember that, as the sea in those parts is the provider of sustenance and life, physically "..walking inland..." is heading away from it, to death.  In this case, she has driven him to emotional suicide.  And how familiar is that to those who have loved?
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Oxaitoq’s Song

Walking inland, inland, inland,

I am walking inland.

Nobody loves me, she least of all, so I walk inland.

She has loved only for the things I bring.

She has loved only for the food I bring.

                                                                             Anonymous - Inuit

Living In Sin - Adrienne Rich

Another by Adrienne Rich (bio info with earlier).  I love the line "By evening she was back in love again / though not so wholly...."  and how true it is that even the separation of just the working hours gives pause enough for reflecting - deluding? - ourselves that the bastard/bitch is a saint - though slightly soiled (and more so each day).  Or why retired couples sometimes find that, without that daily apartness, all the sins are magnified, sometimes beyond repair.  Yet, it does wear thin, especially if the man is as obtuse and self-involved as this one.  One pulls for the woman (girl? she seems young) to truly wake and leave, though we know she won't....
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Living In Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself –

No dust upon the furniture of love.

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

The panes relieved of grime.  A plate of pears,

A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

Stalking the picturesque, amusing mouse

Had been her vision when he pleaded “Come.”

Not that, at five, each separate stair would writhe

Under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

So coldly would delineate the scraps

Of last night’s cheese and blank, sepulchral bottles;

That on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

A pair of beetle eyes would fix her own –

Envoy from some black village in the moldings….

Meanwhile her night’s companion, with a yawn,

Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

Declared it out of tune, inspected, whistling,

A twelve hours’ beard, went out for cigarettes,

While she, contending with a woman’s demons,

Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

A fallen towel to dust the tabletop,

And wondered how it was a man could wake

From night to day and take the day for granted.

By evening she was back in love again,

Though not so wholly but throughout the night

She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

Lke a relentless milkman up the stairs.

                                                                               Adrienne Rich -  American

Never Give All The Heart - W.B. Yeats

Another by Yeats (bio with first one), in sonnet form.  Good/great sonnets are such marvels of writing.  I've never managed to write even a mediocre one, as the structural and rhyming demands are, to me, like putting on a slightly-shrunk fitted-sheet on a bed.  I can pull, stretch and force the sheet over three corners but never the last one....
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Never Give All The Heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
                                                                                      W. B. Yeats -  Irish

Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife - Sir Henry Wotton

 Sir Henry Wotton  (1568 - 1639) was an English writer and diplomat.  His life had many twists and turns, and though well-educated, it was not until his later years that he was free of financial worry.  (At one point, he declined the ambassadorship to either France or Spain because the personal cost would have impoverished him.  He chose instead to be Ambassador to Venice.)  There is no requirement that a poem be long in order to say express something meaningful.  This one - and a couple of others that will be here - are pefect examples.  Spousal love and loyalty are often given short shrift in love poetry - not much romance in a relationship that's "settled" - yet, perhaps even more so in this age of so many divorces,  they have their place and should be better appreciated....   As a bonus ("But wait!  There's more!" ), I am also including one of his best known poems, "The Character of A Happy Life".  Though the language sounds stilted to our modern ears, the observations are ageless (and accurate): we could do worse than heed them.
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Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife

He first deceased: she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died.

                                                                                  Sir Henry Wotton - English

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The Character of a Happy Life

How happy is he born or taught,
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his highest skill;

Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepar'd for death
Untied unto the world with care
Of princes' grace or vulgar breath;

Who envies none whom chance doth raise,
Or vice; who never understood
The deepest wounds are given by praise,
By rule of state, but not of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruins make accusers great;

Who God doth late and early pray,
More of his grace than goods to send,
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend.

This man is free from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.
                                                                                   Sir Henry Wotton - English