Love inspires volumes of poetry every year — with a great spike in February as Valentine's Day nears.
Some of these poems are among the best poetry ever written, capturing our purest emotions, the essence of being human. Sadly, a lot more are terrible. The spectrum is sweeping. Love poetry, like love itself, is "for better or for worse."
One of the finest American love poems is by a single, celibate poet, Emily Dickinson. Despite that seeming contradiction between life and love, she describes the giving gush of love as well as it has been done:
It's all I have to bring today -
This, and my heart beside -
This, and my heart, and all the fields -
And all the meadows wide -
Be sure you count - should I forget
Some one the sum could tell -
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
More carnal and more humorous is e.e. cummings's "may i feel said he." Notorious for playing with punctuation and grammar, cummings wrote a good deal of love poetry, much of it frank and funny.
Below are the first two stanzas of the poem:
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
As I mentioned earlier, a great deal of love poetry is not good — in fact, it's terrible. It is the sort of poetry we wrote in grade school — early grade school.
It fills greeting cards. It is everywhere on the Internet. It is weak because there is a chasm between lofty, sought after emotion and flat language. Here is a sample of bad poetry:
kiss me and make the sorrowful pain go away
kiss me and tell me everything will soon be okay
kiss me and hold me tightly close to you
kiss me and whisper sweet words that are true
Why bad? For one thing, the poem is trite; it contains ideas we have all heard many times. Using the first word or image that comes to mind is always a bad idea; they come to mind because they are common currency, too easy. Also, the poem uses rhyme like a sledgehammer, introducing extra words and awkward phrases to get that matching sound — at any cost.
Worst of all, there is no mystery and no humor. Have you ever noticed how love seems a puzzle, a mix of unfathomable emotions? Or that, at the same time, it's also goofy? A combination of solemn and silly?
The above poem is in sharp contrast to Stephen Dunn's "The Kiss," which talks about love's most basic speech with a sense of both awe and fun. The poem closes with:
I was thinking this is intelligence,
This is the wisest tongue
Since the Oracle got into a Greek's ear,
Speaking sense. It's the Good,
Defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.
My favorite love poem is one not even billed as a love poem. It is "A Drinking Song," by W.B. Yeats, and, in six lines, it sums the tension between life and time that makes love possible:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
John Ronan is a Gloucester poet, served as the city's poet laureate from 2008 to 2010, and is host of the show "The Writers's Block" on Cape Ann TV.
