On Friday, love poetry will be hitting the big screen with the much-trailed
release of Jane Campion’s new period piece Bright Star. Taking
its name from the title and opening line of John Keats’s most famous sonnet,
the film dramatises the doomed three-year romance between a great Romantic
poet and a girl next door. Depending on its box-office success, it is likely
that Bright Star will do for sales of Keats’s love poetry what Four
Weddings and a Funeral did for W. H. Auden’s lip-trembler, Stop
All the Clocks.
Sometimes it takes a feature film to remind us of just how powerful and moving
poetry can be — and how central it is to our own experience of love.
Whether it strikes like a thunderbolt or dawns only gradually, the act of
falling in love brings out the romantic poet in us all. While we’re
generally content to admire the rustle of burnished leaves without being
tempted to scribble an ode to the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”,
it seems that the moment we first detect some stirrings of the heart, we
feel compelled to fling ourselves down upon the nearest sofa and take up the
quill. Given that, for most of us, our most recent literary endeavour will
have been an account of “what I did during the school holidays”, it’s hardly
surprising that any attempt to pour out our emotions on paper tends to
result in inky fingers, furrowed brows and a hollow sense of failure.
And being on the receiving end of a home-made verse can be just as mortifying.
A friend recently received a bouquet bearing the ditty: “Roses are red,
Violets are blue, I love your legs and what’s in between them, too.” The
romance duly drooped. No matter how good someone looks with their collar up
against the midnight rain, if they can’t think of a better rhyme for “thorn”
than “porn”, their dates are probably numbered.
The problem with love is that it so often leaves us at a loss for words. We
might feel too shy to speak, too happy to make sense, too sad to stop
crying, or simply too overwhelmed by the other person’s sheer loveliness to
dare describe it.
Indeed, this is how Keats felt towards his vivacious neighbour in Hampstead,
Fanny Brawne. In his first letter to her, he confessed: “I know not how to
express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a
fairer word than fair.” But what makes Keats more than just another
dumbstruck lover is that he didn’t stay silent. He searched for the right
words and the right images until he found them. Having been dazzled by
Fanny’s beauty, he transformed her into his “star” — the inspiration for
some of his most luminous verse and a guiding light during the most
productive years of his all-too-brief life. A true poet in love may spend
hours draped over the chaise longue in despair, but in the end he always
rises to the occasion. Which is why we often find ourselves reaching for
their efforts on occasions that matter to us — in weddings, in love letters,
break-up notes — as well as at funerals.
Although the customs, costumes and vocabulary in which the great love poems
were written may be worlds apart from our own circumstances, they continue
to resonate with us. Why? Because they’re saying something fundamentally,
unshakeably true about what love is, or at least what we want it to be. We
still try to believe with Shakespeare that “Love is not love/ Which alters
when it alteration finds”. We recognise the trill of joy that Christina
Rossetti captured in “My heart is like a singing bird”, and the ache of
desire that led Emily Dickinson to long for “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!/
Were I with thee!” And we understand the bleak desolation of abandonment in
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”.
But writing heartfelt love poetry isn’t the sole preserve of canonical poets.
You don’t have to be a cravat-wearing consumptive to find your voice. You
don’t even have to be consumed by a great passion. You just need to put
aside any notions about assuming flouncy poetic postures, and try to
remember, or imagine, how love actually feels. For the most common symptoms
of love (hyper-alertness to the other person’s presence; attention to the
details of what makes them special; an obsessive weighing of words) also
happen to create the perfect conditions for poetry to flourish.
So where do you begin? One of the easiest ways to make the abstract noun of
love seem a bit more graspable is by relating it to something concrete. This
could be a red, red rose (Burns), a summer’s day (Shakespeare), ice and fire
(Spenser), a sleeping head (Auden), or even a flea (Donne). It doesn’t
matter how ordinary your prop is, you just need to look at it anew and
describe the way that the presence (or absence) of love imbues it with
significance.
In Donne’s hands, a flea is more than just a pesky insect: it becomes a symbol
of the physical union he craves with his mistress and a cunning advocate for
his argument against chastity.
As with chat-up lines, the thing to avoid is a lazy cliché. The tender
invitation in Auden’s Lullaby contains a shock: “Lay your
sleeping head, my love,/Human on my faithless arm.” As pillow talk goes,
this is somewhat awkward. But poets such as Auden are trying to say how love
really is. They’re not settling for platitudes, but testing their (and our)
expectations about love against the reality. A good love poem aims to be as
faithful to that as possible.
You could argue that these — and all love poems — are essentially offering
answers to the question that Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked herself of her
future husband, the poet Robert Browning: “How do I love thee?” Her response
was to try to “count the ways”, but she limited herself to the 14-line space
of a sonnet. This is an excellent technical exercise, and even Barrett
Browning seemed to be running out of room a bit at the end. It encourages
you to focus on the qualities that make the other person individual, and
your feelings toward them unique. And, like a text message, it forces you to
value every single word, to analyse it for multiple meanings, and to load
your poem with as much authentic emotion as it (or you, or your beloved) can
bear.
What links Auden’s arm, Rossetti’s singing bird and Keats’s star is the
attempt to do poetical justice to what Keats called “the holiness of the
Heart’s affections”. And that’s why, like his star, their words still shine.
The author selected and introduced Penguin’s Poems for Love,
which is published on Friday at £20.
You see, it can only get better
Richard Price, poet
For my first love poem all I did was cunningly substitute “chemistry” for
“history” in a scribbled cover of the song Wonderful World
by Sam Cooke.
It was in chemistry at high school and the “experiment” worked: I got my gal,
even if the note was intercepted by the teacher, but I do hope that I’ve
become a little more creative since then.
I think we give and receive more poetry than we think we do. Text messages are
often little love poems that can be extremely exciting: the literal “buzz”
of a phone can create great suspense as we rush to check if it is from our
desired sender. When I receive special text messages I write them down: this
allows a new poetry to evolve farther on to an actual page.
Benjamin Zephaniah, poet
I wrote a love poem for a girl at school. Then I slightly reworded it and gave
it to another girl, then another and soon I had lots of girlfriends. I
remember one day they cornered me in the playground while I was playing
conkers. I told them I loved them all and they told me I couldn’t have any
of them.
Too many love poems are sloppy — I read them and I can almost guess what the
rhyme will be at the end of the line. I like the ones that talk about the
person’s faults. I still write poems for women. Some of them like it, and I
keep them coming, but some of them just say: “That won’t pay the rent.”
Kate Mosse, author
My husband and I met when we were 16. Unlike most teenage boys I knew, Greg
was a reader and a thinker and, almost from the very beginning wrote me love
letters; amazing meditations about the nature of life, love and the
Universe. Not poetry, so much as his own adaptations of lyrics from songs.
We went our separate ways at 18, only to meet ten years later on a train and
to take up where we left off. And because Greg lived in Paris the letter
writing started up again. We didn’t see each other for weeks at a time, so
waiting for the post was an essential part of the romance of long distance.
It was magical to have something to hold and read time and again. Writing
love letters, poems, cards and notes is the most romantic way to be unique
and personal. Words matter, always.
Tom Conti, actor
I dislike hearing poetry — especially read by “classical” actors who have a
hellish compulsion to invest words with their own meaning. There is no
greater power than the word on the page; just the author and the reader’s
imagination without the meddlesome middle man. My great sympathy goes out to
the blind in this regard — to those unskilled in Braille, at any rate.
I imagine that the successful love poem must be the hardest form to write. The
most painful form of course is silent worship: “Though I am nothing to her,
Though she must rarely look at me, And though I can never woo her, I love
her till I die.” Oh lorks!
Brevity in expression is, for me, affecting. Nowhere is this more powerfully
exemplified than in The Life That I Have by Leo Marks, written for
the girl he loved who was killed in an air crash on Christmas Eve, 1943.
Michael Rosen, poet
I once wrote someone a love poem and she read it slowly and carefully, looked
up and said, “Don’t tell yourself that you’re the first person to have
written me a love poem” — and walked out of the room.
There was a bloke I knew at university who received a love poem from one of
his ludicrously many girlfriends that included the line: “I ache for your
long white limbs.” He told us this and from then on we would quote this to
him at the least appropriate times, such as when talking about the likely
outcome of a cup final as with “I think Liverpool have got the edge and I
ache for your long white limbs”.
I once received a love poem from a French woman and I used to keep it tucked
inside a book of inventions that had never been manufactured, called Objets
Introuvables (literally, Unfindable Objects). As I was living
with someone else at the time, this had a kind of deceitful poignancy.
Hardeep Singh Kohli, writer
I spent most of my teenage years writing love poems to girls who never
received them — I did the classic thing of being too scared that they might
not feel the same way. I found out later, as it happens, they didn’t. For me
love poems represent a creative tension. In poetry I appreciate the absolute
economy of language, but when conveying love you want to shout it in as many
ways as possible.
I’m no Luddite, but I think a love e-mail or text has less of a “journey”. I
was once shouted at by a partner for not texting back straight away — I had
been riding my bike. This instantness is a problem. You can’t tape a text to
the fridge, you can’t hold it, and you can’t leave a trail of texts around
the house for a partner.
In your own write . . .
Send us your love poems and we will print our favourites in times2. Poems
should be no longer than 250 words. One entry a person. Send your poem, with
your name, to lovepoems@the
times.co.uk or Love Poems, times2, The Times, 1 Pennington Street,
London, E98 1TT by Monday, November 16.
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