Scary poems, part one: "How Do I Love Thee …"

Of course I am way behind on my poetry. One poem a week …😏!
At least I have downloaded another batch of “classic” poems. Well. it’s not as if it was a race. Nobody here to beat me to it.

 

My first stab at it turned out interesting, though. I just committed to the first of the “Classic Love Poems” - a sonnet by Elizabeth Barett Browning which must be a big “classic” indeed as even I knew it already - because I thought it wouldn’t matter. Even though I am still IN love, I am not very much INTO IT just now. Not much into anything, I am afraid – which needs to change! And I was right, it didn’t (matter).

 

 

HOW DO I LOVE THEE? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth, and breadth, and height

my soul can reach when feeling out of sight

for the ends of being an ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of ever day’s

most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strife for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

smiles, tears of all my life. And, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

 

 

So – even if I had been into love, or poetry, for that matter – I wouldn’t have expected the random poem to be a success with me. Therefore my instant discovery NOT that it was a sonnet - I paid no heed to it until much later – but that I DIDN’T LIKE IT shouldn’t have come as a surprise. What surprised me, though, was the knee jerk reaction. Poems are usually beautiful, therefore difficult to dislike.

 

Not a promising start, but what I discovered almost at the same time is something I experienced time and again: POETRY MAKES MY MIND RACE. That’s why I always chose poetry when there was something at stake. For example, in my final exams at college I chose a poem – one of these boring “baroque” ones at that – my teacher was appalled! But I did good, as I knew I would, because I knew I could always squeeze something out of a poem. Or rather, as I find now, a poem can always squeeze something out of me …

 

So, I was like: Great! It’s exactly what I need. I already GOT a result.

 

But then followed the trying and always slightly annoying part because a poem usually makes my mind race in different directions. (That is what happened with Sonnet 5 at the beginning of my blog.) Now I have to run and catch these thoughts – or wait until they have settled a bit …

 

First of all: Where does the antipathy come from? The knee jerk reaction … I suppose it is because the whole thing sounds so … smug. So CONFIDENT. I used to feel pretty confident about love myself. Has this changed … ???  Another result! I didn’t expect poetry to be so efficient so fast when it comes to the “mind palace”. So good at forcing doors open I’d rather not go through … This poem, I realized, makes me feel HUGELY inadequate. And I want to know why.

 

Another thing I noticed, almost immediately as well, is something I was pleased with. Probably because I have started doing it myself recently. Basically, Barrett Browning was making a list. She was using her love to create this INVENTORY of her soul. Everything that was there, that had been important at the time, and how love had changed it. I experienced this myself: how love made me feel so sure about myself and about everything that is in my life. That everything suddenly seemed to be set in stone … I should be able to do it! Not a poem but an inventory. But it could never turn out like this. So complete … And so impersonal because, in my inventory, the person I am in love with couldn’t have been left out … I don’t know – but somehow this poem challenges me. Not in a good way.

 

Approximately at this point it became suddenly important that it is a SONNET. I don’t think I noticed this until I LISTENED to it again. I was too lazy to learn it – which I should have done! – but I listened again to Richard Armitage reading it – just very naturally, as if trying to retreat behind it, not “disturb” it in any way - which made come out the sonnet naturally. And made me realize why it is crucial that it is a sonnet.

 

What is a sonnet? This might suddenly get very philosophical, but I just mean that I realized how a sonnet “works”, and why it works in this way. It is not that something entirely different might have been invented for the same purpose. It is a random form that got canonized. A random invention that got chosen for being so good at what it does. In this case at solidifying content that is anything but solid – like the content of one’s soul. The inventory of someone’s love should be this LIMITLESS list – and the sonnet only consists of a few verses, kind of closing in on themselves through the rhyme scheme. But this potential for limitation is exactly its strength. Nothing can be added and everything that is in it must be utterly RELEVANT. And then – if it works – there is this COMPLETE world of meaning confined to this small space. The sudden realization HOW MUCH can be expressed with such a limited number of verses. A PERFECT sonnet always is this blissful aesthetic surprise and – if it expresses what many people feel – likely to become a “classic”.

 

These reflections on the status of the poem made me realize why my own “inventory” could never have turned out like this.

 

Of course there is no reason that it should because of the huge historical gap. But it isn’t that simple. I always had an issue with the Romantics – which partially consists in me being one myself. This is why the poem made me uncomfortable. I would never have said this about myself BEFORE I had the experience of love changing everything that was in my life. Pervading everything. The REALITY of making me feel the way I always wanted to feel. On the other hand, I am totally sceptical of any notion of absoluteness. Therefore I was always fascinated AND repelled by “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”. Only fiction can make us get so close to a state where we would never want to be in in real life. I think this was why I reacted so strongly to “Desperate Romantics” – the TV series. I found it genuinely threatening to raise this demand for absoluteness IN REAL LIFE. And, of course, it doesn’t work!

 

Now Barret Browning isn’t “aggressively” romantic in this way. Far from it. She is even rather rational about her feelings. Very solid. Do I want to be that “solid” myself? Probably part of me does. The part of me that makes inventories. I envy her having made such a good one … But then there is the part that just doesn’t BELIEVE in them. It would never work because I just cannot represent my soul in this way.

 

This was when I remembered another text that suddenly explained a central but until then totally unexplored part of my life to me. After having seen “A Single Man” with Colin Firth and being impressed, I read the novel and there I found this amazing bit about the soul being like the flood that comes in at night, filling everything inside us and suddenly making us connect with “everything”, making everything available. And that then retreats at daytime, leaving all these isolated tiny pools where nothing makes sense anymore. And I realized that this is how I experience my soul. Not as this solid content INSIDE myself which I have control over, and even less as this subconscious store of trauma and disease that has control over me, but as something that is mostly OUTSIDE … I never realized until now what a groundbreaking discovery this has been because THIS is what makes me able to CONNECT with “everything” without actually having to go there. This is why I finally ceased to feel limited and threatened by my limited expectations. But – as to everything that is great – there is a downside which I realized reading the poem: This way of experiencing and “using” the concept of the soul makes the content that should be most personal, that should be “me” more than anything, very impersonal. Which is not really how I WANT it to be.

 

Without being grafted to the soul in this way, love can never be this overwhelming, resonant, big thing that is even supposed to survive death. I take it that many people are feeling kind of like this. We WANT to have these big feelings about ourselves, but when people admit to being “romantic” or “sentimental” it always sounds as if they shouldn’t be. Know what - IF somebody can feel like this, I envy them their treasure! I am not glad that my love could never be this big, solid “sonnet thing”, but I also realized that it would be no use to me. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. MY love is much better for me, and it always was. It probably never was “more” than this: the perfect answer to a fundamental need. The centrepiece of my constant endeavours to IMPROVE MYSELF by connecting with something that is far beyond me.