John Banville
I’ll pick a short one – Catullus.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
My favourite translation is by Peter Whigham. It takes a bit of licence with the literal meaning but it works:
I do not know. I only feel it, and I’m torn in two.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Roy Foster
Seamus Heaney’s love-poem to marriage, The Skunk, combines exile and erotica, moving from an American wilderness image reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, through the loneliness of separation, to end with an image that is intimate, sexy and very funny. It still makes me smile every time I read it.
The Skunk
by Seamus Heaney
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.
After eleven years i was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air
Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.
And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.
It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.
[ Valentine’s Day: Impress them with these love poemsOpens in new window ]
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Jessica Traynor
I’ve learned something new about myself these past few days, which is that I am not naturally drawn to love poems, but rather to poems about love gone wrong (I doubt I’m alone in this). Something in me resists the straightforward glow of good love, in poetic form, perhaps because its purity is so difficult to capture – the result can often be smug, or even worse, sentimental.
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Some of the best poetry in the world is written about complicated love, wrong love, toxic love, but in the spirit of Valentine’s Day I’ve tried to get over my own hang-ups and share that rarest of things – a good poem about good love; the kind of love that can shock us with its fluency, its ease (perhaps after years of bad choices). But now I’m talking about me, and not the poem, which speaks for itself in any case. Enjoy What I Didn’t Know Before by Ada Limón.
What I Didn’t Know Before
by Ada Limón
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged
beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after
the mother. A horse gives way to another
horse and then suddenly there are two horses,
just like that. That’s how I loved you. You,
off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
David Nash
I’m going to shoot straight and not be arch or subversive: the greatest poem to do with love that I know, or at least the first that comes to me, is The Couple, by Tomas Tranströmer. I don’t go much for romance, though there is even a little of it here, in setting out the expansiveness, even ghostliness, of human intimacy. Tranströmer – and his Swedish – leaves plenty of space for a reader to walk around in, so the effect is very much whatever you’re having yourself, but I personally like how the outside world absorbs, and is absorbed by, the inside world of a sleeping couple. Valentine’s Day is a kind of proof, I guess, of how we all covet that kind of closeness.
(I’d have chosen & Forgive Us Our Trespasses, by Sinead Morrissey, a perfect and devastating poem, but I figured I would go a bit easier on Love, especially on this, its birthday).
The Couple
by Tomas Tranströmer (my translation)
for a moment, before dissolving
like a tablet in a dark glass. Then lifts.
The hotel walls slide up into the night sky.
Love’s movements have let up and they are sleeping,
though the innermost thoughts still meet,
like two colours bleeding into each other
on the soggy paper of a child’s drawing.
It is dark and quiet. The city has drawn closer
and has blacked out its windows too. Houses approach.
They crowd in close, in wait,
an audience of expressionless faces.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Naoise Dolan
Pangur Bán waxes amorous about the purest love bond of all: that between a scribe and their cat. An anonymous 9th-century scholarly Irish monk, exiled by the Vikings to a German abbey, writes of a parallel struggle: his own to capture meaning in texts, and his cat’s to nab a mouse. To create a properly realistic depiction of feline behaviour, the poet ought to have had the cat unyieldingly seek the speaker’s attention and promptly skulk away upon obtaining it. But Pangur Bán remains a moving portrayal of the love wordsmiths have for our pets, the only creatures willing to witness our madness in full.
Renowned linguist Robin Flowers’s rhymed translation of the Old Irish is immensely charming in its own way, but I’ve chosen Seamus Heaney’s for its tingling word-choice.
Pangur Bán
by 9th-century scholarly Irish monk (translation by Seamus Heaney)
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.
More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse’s den.
Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.
Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.
All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.
With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.
So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.
Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Leontia Flynn
I never really got over reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I thought they would be pretty and instead discovered one man’s neurotic inner monologue annotated over 154 poems. It was like a single long poem, containing infinite mood swings. The jump from 129, an incredible anti-love poem, to besotted 130 is pretty funny, though they’re not really in order.
Also, what was going on? ‘Two loves have of comfort and despair’ ... ‘ ... Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken, /And my next self thou harder hast engrossed: /Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken; /A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed. (133). I did not know, but I wasn’t bored.
My favourite love poem is The Sun Rising by John Donne. Love threatens Shakespeare’s ego, for Donne it’s its own radical reality. His wife, whom he married against her father’s wishes when she was 17, bore him 12 children, and her name, Anne More, inspired Donne to much punning. Their marriage screwed up his career. I’ve realised I like love poems to be full-throttle, intense and clever. Love is serious.
The Sun Rising
by John Donne
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Stephen Sexton
Maybe it’s not a conventional love poem, and maybe it’s not a love poem at all, but what comes to mind when I think of a love poem is Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass. It’s a canonical American poem, first published in his second collection Praise (1979). It is sublimely lyrical and inflected with philosophies of language and ontology; what makes things things as opposed to being something else.
“All the new thinking is about loss”, the poem begins, in a mode of resignation more suited to the elegy than the love poem, one might argue. But all love poems are elegies, and all elegies are love poems, Michael Longley has said, himself a master of both modes. In Hass’s poem, the metaphysical and discursive tone soon gives way, via the “clown-/ faced woodpecker” and the trunk of a birch tree and a blackberry to the pleasures of the body and the senses.
“There was a woman/ I made love to and I remembered how, holding/ her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,/ I felt a violent wonder at her presence/ like a thirst for salt”. Like a thirst for salt! An enviable and immediate, nearly torturous simile. And thereafter the line which bridges two key ideas in the poem: the spaces between words and what we agree they mean, and those between people: “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances”. Behind this, of course, in the poem’s consciousness, is the idea of the word made flesh: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing”. And it’s with something like divinity that the poem approaches its erotic and ecstatic final line.
Meditation at Lagunitas
by Robert Hass
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
[ ‘Take your clothes off’: Poets reveal their favourite love poemsOpens in new window ]
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Edel Coffey
As a teenager, before I was ever in love, I basked in the melodrama of Charlotte Bronte’s intense love poems, but since experiencing melodrama in actual love, I find I now prefer the more reserved professions of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who wrote some of the first sonnets in the English language. As part of the court of Henry VIII, Wyatt’s poetry was necessarily coded, not least because it is suspected he was Anne Boleyn’s lover. Two particular favourites of mine are Who So List To Hunt, I Know Where Is An Hind and They Flee From Me, not just for their appealing language and rhythm, but also because they articulate both the intangible nature of love and the often chastening fallout of lust.
Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
They Flee From Me
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Eilis Ní Dhuibhne
I have plenty of much loved love poems. Dónal Óg, the song, is a strong contender for first past the post. Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, Sonnet 18, is one I often recite to myself. I love Thomas Hardy’s When I set out for Lyonesse. But for the most personal of reasons my top favourite is WB Yeats’s When you are old, inspired by Ronsard’s Quand Vous Serez bien vieille. My husband tucked it into a book he was giving to me in the early days of our relationship. I don’t think I took the words “when you are old and grey” very seriously, back then, but “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” is surely one of the greatest chat-up lines?
When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Declan Ryan
I realise most of my favourite poems are love poems, if I think about it, so it’s difficult to single one out. I always find something extremely moving in two poems from the second World War, Canoe by Keith Douglas and Goodbye by Alun Lewis, the matter-of-factness of Douglas’s opening line (which proved more or less correct) “Well, I am thinking this may be my last/ summer”, and Lewis’s slightly more lyrical farewell to his love, who’s just sewn patches on his battle-dress, its deeply touching “shilling in the gas” keeping them just-about warm in their rented room. And there’s Montale with his shoe-horn, O’Hara’s “too many cigarettes”, or Bishop, or Berryman’s sonnets, or Karen Solie’s Action at a Distance, Lawrence Joseph’s An Ancient Clarity Overlaid, and on and on. What to do about Louis MacNeice? But I think I’ll plump for Robert Lowell’s Man and Wife for its ability to navigate the creepily Oedipal start, and fit in a semi-bollocking, but also contain the line “clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve” which might be my favourite line of any poem. There’s the added bonus it’s addressed to one of my other favourite writers, Elizabeth Hardwick, and one can almost hear her southern invective, which he more than earned, and on more than this occasion ...
Man and Wife
by Robert Lowell
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
≈ ♥ ♥ ♥ ≈
Martin Doyle
“The love poem is the most important thing I do – the hub of the wheel is love ...” said Michael Longley, whose funeral was held on St Brigid’s Day. He generously gave me permission to reproduce in full his beautiful love poem, The Linen Industry, in my book Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place, chiming as it did with my motif of the North’s linen industry as a backdrop to the recent conflict. Whereas his poem The Linen Workers dwelt on the great hatred that led to the Kingsmill massacre, The Linen Industry is an exquisite celebration of love: intimate, allusive, playful – the white sheets of an attic bed reimagined as a bleach green, the processes of the North’s defining industry reconfigured as the circle of life. There may be “little room” among the machines but there is always space for love.
The Linen Industry
by Michael Longley
And laying our handfuls in the peaty water
To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks
That recall the skirts of an invisible dancer,
We become a part of the linen industry
And follow its processes to the grubby town
Where fields are compacted into window-boxes
And there is little room among the big machines.
But even in our attic under the skylight
We make love on a bleach green, the whole meadow
Draped with material turning white in the sun
As though snow reluctant to melt were our attire.
What’s passion but a battering of stubborn stalks,
Then a gentle combing out of fibres like hair
And a weaving of these into christening robes,
Into garments for a marriage or funeral?
Since it’s like a bereavement once the labour’s done
To find ourselves last workers in a dying trade,
Let flax be our matchmaker, our undertaker,
The provider of sheets for whatever the bed – And be shy of your breasts in the presence of death,
Say that you look more beautiful in linen
Wearing white petticoats, the bow on your bodice
A butterfly attending the embroidered flowers.
