There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no color, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.
To His Mistress Going to Bed
JOHN DONNE
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,
But a far fairer world incompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowry meads th’hill’s shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s angels us’d to be
Receiv’d by men; thou angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we eas’ly know,
By this these angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a midwife, show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
The Song of Solomon 2:1–17, 3:1–5
I am the rose of Sharon,
And the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns,
So is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
So is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight,
And his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
And his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples
For I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head,
And his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes, and by the hinds of the field,
That ye stir not up, nor awake my love,
Till he please.
The voice of my beloved!
Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains,
Skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart.
Behold, he standeth behind our wall,
He looketh forth at the windows,
Showing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me,
“Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
“O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret places of the stairs,
Let me see thy countenance,
Let me hear thy voice;
For sweet is thy voice,
And thy countenance is comely.”
Take us the foxes,
The little foxes, that spoil the vines:
For our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his:
He feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away,
Turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe
Or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now,
And go about the city in the streets,
And in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
The watchmen that go about the city found me:
To whom I said, “Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?”
It was but a little that I passed from them,
But I found him whom my soul loveth:
I held him, and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him into my mother’s house,
And into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes, and by the hinds of the field,
That ye stir not up, nor awake my love,
Till he please.
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
WALLACE STEVENS
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Variation on the Word Sleep
MARGARET ATWOOD
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
GALWAY KINNELL
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
It Is Marvellous . . .
ELIZABETH BISHOP
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
White Heliotrope
ARTHUR SYMONS
The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half-open, where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread;
The mirror that has sucked your face
Into its secret deep of deeps,
And there mysteriously keeps
Forgotten memories of grace;
And you, half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache;
This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Is scented with White Heliotrope.
Youth
OSIP MANDELSTAM
Translated by W. S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I
have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me
as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let
me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I
began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already
part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
BREAKING UP
GIRLFRIENDS ARE THE WORST,” said my son morosely, after learning that his high school sweetheart didn’t want to get back together with him after the summer. “She won’t talk to me, not even on the phone,” he said, shaking his head.
When I was his age, girls usually seemed to be the brokenhearted ones, chasing after some unavailable boy with hair down to his shoulders. Caught off guard by the idea that a teenage boy, rather than girl, would want to discuss a relationship and work through the issues, I quickly improvised some unconvincing maternal words of comfort. But we all go through the misery of breaking up. Even if we know a relationship isn’t meant to last, it is still painful when it ends. Emily Dickinson puts it best when she writes, “Parting is all we know of heaven,/And all we need of hell.”
These poems explore different kinds of endings. In “Unfortunate Coincidence,” Dorothy Parker describes a relationship in which both parties know they are only pretending to be in love, whereas Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “The Philosopher” was sent to me by a friend whose husband had been unfaithful.
My favorite metaphor for a past love affair is found in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s two poems “Well, I Have Lost You” and Sonnet XLIII. In both, she compares being in love to summertime. In Sonnet XLIII she writes, “I only know that summer sang in me/A little while, that in me sings no more.” Like summer, love is full and abundant, and when it ends there is a sense of loss, but also the implicit knowledge that we will fall in love again when the time comes around.
After reading many poems about breaking up, it seems that male and female poets tend to focus on different aspects of the end of a relationship. I doubt women will be surprised that men write more often about the loss of face and the loss of power, while women tend to write about the loss of self. In her poem “On Monsieur’s Departure,” even Queen Elizabeth I, who understood and exercised almost absolute power, is reduced to a pitiful female creature after she breaks up with a male lover.
The most extreme expression of the desire for revenge is seen in the legend of “The Eaten Heart.” The version here dates from a Middle English poem of the 1500s, but the legend appears in many cultures. The poem tells the story of a jealous husband who tricks his wife into eating her slain lover’s heart and then tells her what she has done. After that, she kills herself. Even metaphorically, human relationships don’t get much more twisted than that.
Hopefully, the world has become a little more civilized since then, and we can move through the stages of loss and grief that mark the end of a relationship in a more gradual and accepting way. Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story,” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “The End” both describe relationships in which eventually even the memory fades away. Then, we can understand what we
have learned and begin the search for love again.
Lilacs
KATHERINE GARRISON CHAPIN
When I met my lover
Lilacs were new,
He said, “I brought some lilacs,
Lilacs for you.”
I took them eagerly
Laughing in surprise;
He said: “They are pretty
Just like your eyes.”
I pressed the pointed blossoms
Close to my cheek,
And the smooth green leaves . . .
But I couldn’t speak.
How was I to tell him,
Spring being new,
How say: “It is the lilacs
I love, not you.”
Unfortunate Coincidence
DOROTHY PARKER
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
The Philosopher
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?
I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man on my mind?
Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?
From Summer with Monika
ROGER McGOUGH
away from you
i feel a great emptiness
a gnawing loneliness
with you