Love Poems

[Saffron]

we laugh at the same things.....That sounds tenuous, but I know it isn't.

Sounds like as good a foundation as any I can think of and from what I've seen the one that seems to hold the house upright the longest.

[realiz]

Saffron, I was just about to quote penelope and saw you had quoted the same. I'll do so anyways.

He makes me laugh....and we laugh at the same things..

Laughing can get you through some pretty difficult times in life.

I also agree with both your comment about sexuality being a life force and the comment that it can sometimes be a little overwhelming and blinding.

I've heard the comment that sexuality in a marriage is about 10 percent of the relationship when it is a present, but if it is missing it becomes 90 percent.

[Penelope]

Reading in Bed: by Diana Hendry

Best bonus of the solitary life
late hours, the stack beside the bed as good
as a new lover any night. But now
there's all the courtesies to do, of bed-
side lights and sex and sleep and who's the first
to shut up shop. Tonight it's me. Your thrill-
er, Scorcher, clearly is. I snuggle in,
conscious that you're close but miles away
(in Florida, to be precise). I lie
and listen as the turn of pages slows
down time. The hush-hush sound your thumb's rub makes
is like the lap of waves that lulls me off,
tucked up in self while you, on night watch, learn
whodunnit, why and when and worlds roll by.


I must say what struck me was, what clever word and line breaks this poet makes.

[Saffron]

Nice post, Penny. Reading the poem transported me completely -- I was lying in bed listening to my lover read as I drifted off to sleep.

[Penelope]

Saffron said: Nice post, Penny.

At last, you have called me by the name that my friends call me.

Are you watching this Thomas Hood.....

The Name of the Rose.....is what your friends call you.

Thank you Saffron....(I'm just wild about you)......xxxx

[Saffron]

Thank you Saffron....(I'm just wild about you)......xxxx

[Saffron]

I just came across this poem in Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. The first line reminds me of something DWill said to me once when we were discussing how or why people fall in love. On a first reading it is easy to read this poem as focusing on beauty as the attracting force, but I think there is more to it. The eyes watch and see what the person is like, how they are in the world.


So, through the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess.

And when they are in full accord

And firm, all three, in the one resolve,

At that time, perfect love is born

From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.

Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement

Then by this birth and commencement moved by inclination

By the grace and by command

Of these three, and from their pleasure,

Love is born, who with fair hope

Goes comforting her friends.

For as all true lovers

Know, love is perfect kindness,

Which is born- there is no doubt- from the heart and eyes.

The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it;

Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.

----Guiraut De Borneilh (ca. 1138-1200?)

[Saffron]

If we are going to have a thread devoted to love poems, Pablo Neruda must be mentioned. I only wish I could appreciate it in Spanish.

I do not love you as if you were a rose made of salt or topaz
or an arrow of carnations spreading fire:
I love you the way certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you like the plant that never blooms,
but conceals within itself the light of those flowers;
and, thanks to your love, the darkness of my body
houses the suffocating aroma that arose from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, when, or where from;
I love you straightforwardly, with neither problems nor pride:
I love you thus, not knowing how to love you otherwise

than this way whereby neither ‘you’ nor ‘I’ exist…
so close that your hand on my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes grow heavy when I tire.

[giselle]

Even in English translation there is a great deal of passion in Neruda's poems.

Leaning Into The Afternoons by Pablo Neruda

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

[Saffron]

I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love—put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.


I find this poem beautiful and tragic. It is tragic on several levels. The most obvious is expressed in the title, lovers that have not yet come together, some obstacle stands in the way or a love that can not be. A thought: or if the speaker is meaning love for God, than the speaker is not yet able to release into faith. The speaker of the poem expresses a yearning to be part of something beyond herself, to be apart of something bigger than herself. The longing to belong is a universal experience of human existence. I think for most of us it hits for the first time during adolescences, when developmentally we reach the stage that we really know in all of our cells, that we are completely alone in our own minds; we are in fact separate individuals. It is interesting that developmentally we reach this point of intellectual development right around the same time we reach sexual maturity. Nature offers us a way to psychologically rejoin - at least for a few precious moments.

The last aspect of this poem that I find potentially tragic, is the longing to loose oneself. I think we all occasionally want to loose ourselves in another person, but it is not a healthy way to be in the world for any extended period of time. This is my own association; I wonder if others have it too. The times when I have felt the intense desire to loose myself in another person have been the most difficult, painful or grief stricken moments of my life. Teasdale's poem churns up in me the most intense of life's feelings and urges. It seems to me, the last line of the poem is a plea, obliterate me (at least for a time), there by putting me out of my misery. Or maybe in a more positive light - Let me take from you the comfort of connection and physical contact of sex.