Beyond The Casual Solitudes

      Reading former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's piece on love poems at Slate, I was drawn to turn to a poem by Wallace Stevens, "Re-Statement of Romance." There's a perfection of emptiness in Stevens' few love poems proper, though that emptiness is not the absence of feeling but the articulate transparency of it. Here's the poem:

Re-Statement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you.   Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

"So deeply by ourselves," a central notion to Stevens, and to more genuinely beautiful notions of Lerrrrrve. Something to remember on this day resplendent with clichés.

      The Doc, being the Doc, couldn't let this post go without offering another poetic persepctive on things, this time from W.B. Yeats, whose "The Hero, The Girl and The Fool" (sometimes called "The Hero, The Girl and The Fool By The Roadside") from The Tower (1928) warrants quoting.

The Hero, the Girl and the Fool

The Girl.   I rage at my own image in the glass,
That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it
It is as though you praised another, or even
Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;
And when I wake towards morn I dread myself
For the heart cries that what deception wins
Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go
If you have seen that image and not the woman.

The Hero.   I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

The Girl.   If you are no more strength than I am beauty
I had better find a convent and turn nun;
A nun at least has all men’s reverence
And needs no cruelty.

The Hero.   I have heard one say
That men have reverence for their holiness
And not themselves.

The Girl.   Say on and say
That only God has loved us for ourselves
But what care I that long for a man’s love?

The Fool by the Roadside.   When my days that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;

When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.

Indeed.   (To rewrite the old joke, faithful ain't nothing but a geyser.)   This cold blight will turns us all to fools and madmen.

      (You didn't honestly think the Doc was going to say something serious about love without giving it a good, swift kick in the teeth, did you? Tsk, tsk, tsk....)