Week 1: Shakespeare
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his
height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and
cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and
weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Week 2:To His Coy Mistress (Andrew
Marvell)
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Week 3: Anne Sexton—Love Poems
The Touch
For months my hand had been sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
But when I looked in it lay there quietly.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
The hand had collapsed,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into the fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.
And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand—just lonely for
something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won’t do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I’m no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won’t do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won’t do it.
he comes with the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.
The trouble is
that I’d let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.
Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingertips like a blood
clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come.
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
Week 4: Rumi
The intellectual is always showing off,
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away.
afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love
is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
The lover is always alone.
even surrounded by people;
like water and oil, he remains apart.
The man who goes to the trouble
of giving advice to a lover
gets nothing. He's mocked by passion.
Love is like musk. It attracts attention.
Love is a tree, and the lovers are its shade.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Week 5: Adrienne Rich: From 21 Love
Poems:
I
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
II
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carried the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
III
Since we're not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we're not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listened here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring
. At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Week 6: Henri Cole: Gravity and Center
I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run
away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique
gold,
devouring the thing I feel. I want the force
of attraction to crush the force of repulsion
and my inner and outer worlds to pierce
one another, like a horse whipped by a man.
I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.
Week 7: Rainer Maria Rilke—Letters to a
Young Poet 7, World Was in the Face of the
Beloved
Rome,
May 14th, 1904,
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has gone by since I
received your last letter. Do not hold that
against me; first it was work, then
interruptions and finally a poor state of
health that again and again kept me from
the answer, which (so I wanted it) was to
come to you out of quiet and good days.
Now I feel somewhat better again (the
opening of spring with its mean, fitful
changes was very trying here too) and come
to greet you, dear Mr. Kappus, and to tell
you (which I do with all my heart) one thing
and another in reply to your letter, as well
as I know how.
You see-I have copied your sonnet,
because I found that it is lovely and simple
and born in the form in which moves with
such quiet decorum. It is the best of those of
your poems that you have let me read. And
now I give you this copy because I know
that it is important and full of new
experience to come upon a work of one's
own again written in a strange hand. Read
the lines as though they were someone
else's, and you will feel deep within you
how much they are your own. It was a
pleasure to me to read this sonnet and your
letter often; I thank you for both.
And you should not let yourself be
confused in your solitude by the fact that
there is something in you that wants to
break out of it. This very wish will help you,
if you use it quietly, and deliberately, like a
tool, to spread out your solitude over wide
country. People have (with the help of
conventions) oriented all their solutions
toward the easy and towards the easiest side
of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold
to what is difficult; everything alive holds to
it, everything in Nature grows and defends
itself in its own way and is characteristically
and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to
be so and against all opposition. We know
little, but that we must hold to is difficult is
a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good
to be solitary; for solitude is difficult; that
something is difficult must be a reason the
more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being
difficult. For one human being to love
another: that is perhaps the most difficult of
all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and
proof, the work for which all other work is
but preparation. For this reason young
people, who are beginners in everything,
cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
With their whole being, with all their forces,
gathered close about their lonely, timid,
upward-beating heart, they must learn to
love. But learning-time is always a long,
secluded time, and so loving, for a long
while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude,
intensified and deepened loneness for him
who loves. Love is at first not anything that
means merging, giving over, and uniting
with another (for what would a union be of
something unclarified and unfinished, still
subordinate-?), It is a high inducement to
the individual to ripen, to become
something in himself, to become world for
himself for another's sake, it is a great
exacting claim upon him, something that
chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Only in this sense, as the task of working at
themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day
and night", might young people use the love
that is given them. Merging and
surrendering and every kind of communion
is not for them (who must save and gather
for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is
perhaps that for which human lives as yet
scarcely suffice.
But young people err so often and
so grievously in this: that they (in whose
nature it lies to have no patience) fling
themselves at each other, when love takes
possession of them, scatter themselves, just
as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder,
confusion...And then what? What is life to
do to this heap of half-battered existence
which they call their communion and which
they would gladly call their happiness, if it
were possible, and their future? Thus each
loses himself for the sake of the other and
loses the other and many others that wanted
still to come. And loses the expanses and the
possibilities, exchanges the approach and
flight of gentle, divining things for an
unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing
can come any more, nothing save a little
disgust, disillusionment and poverty, and
rescue in one of the many conventions that
have been put up in great number like
public refuges along this most dangerous
road. No realms of human experience is so
well provided with conventions as this: lifepreservers of most varied invention, boats
and swimming-bladders are here; the social
conception has managed to supply shelters
of every sort, for, as it was disposed to take
love as a pleasure, it had also to give it an
easy form, cheap, safe and sure, as public
pleasures are.
It is true that many young people
who love wrongly, that is, simply with
abandon and unsolitary (the average will of
course always go on doing so), feel the
oppressiveness of a failure and want to
make the situation in which they have
landed viable and fruitful in their own
personal way-; for their nature tells them
that, less even than all else that is important,
can questions of love be solved publicly and
according to this or that agreement; that
they are questions, intimate questions from
one human being to another, which in case
demand a new, special, only personal
answer-; But how should they; who have
already flung themselves together and no
longer mark off and distinguish themselves
from each other, who therefore no longer
possess anything of their own selves, be able
to find a way out of themselves, out of the
depth of their already shattered solitude?
They
act
out
of
common
helplessness, and then, if, with the best
intentions, they try to avoid the convention
that occurs to them (say, marriage), they
land in the tentacles of some less loud, but
equally deadly conventional solution; for
then everything far around them isconvention; where people act out of a
prematurely fused, turbid communion,
every move is convention: every relation to
which such entanglement leads has its
convention, be it ever so unusual (that is, in
the ordinary sense immoral); why, even
separation would here be a conventional
step, an impersonal chance decision without
strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously at it finds
that neither for death, which is difficult, nor
for difficult love has any explanation, any
solution, any hint or way yet been
discerned; and for these two problems that
we carry wrapped up and hand on without
opening, it will not be possible to discover
any general rule resting in agreement. But in
the same measure in which we begin as
individuals to put life to the test, we shall,
being individuals, meet these great things at
closer range. The demands which the
difficult work of love makes upon our
development are more than life-size, and as
beginners we are not up to them, But if we
nevertheless hold out and take this love
upon us as burden and apprenticeship,
instead of losing ourselves in all the light
and frivolous play, behind which people
have hidden from the most earnest
earnestness of their existence-then a little
progress and an alleviation will perhaps be
perceptible to those who come long after us;
that would be much.
We are only now just beginning to
look upon the relation of one individual
person to a second individual objectively
and without prejudice, and our attempts to
live such associations have no model before
them. And yet in the changes brought about
by time there is already a good deal that
would help our timorous novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their
new, their own unfolding, will but in
passing be imitators of masculine ways,
good and bad, and repeaters of masculine
professions. After the uncertainty of such
transitions it will become apparent that
women were only going through the
profusion and the vicissitude of those (often
ridiculous) disguises in order to cleanse
their own most characteristic nature of the
distorting influences of the other sex.
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells
more immediately, more fruitfully and
confidently,
must
have
become
fundamentally riper people, more human
people, than easygoing man, who is not
pulled down below the surface of life by the
weight of any fruit of his body, and who,
presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what
he thinks he loves. This humanity of
woman, borne its full time in suffering and
humiliation, will come to light when she
will have stripped off the conventions of
mere femininity in the mutations of her
outward status, and those men who do not
yet feel it approaching today will be
surprised and struck by it. Some day (and
for this, particularly in the northern
countries, reliable signs are already
speaking and shining), some day there will
be girls and women whose name will no
longer signify merely an opposite of the
masculine, but something in itself,
something that makes one think, not of any
complement and limit, but only of life and
existence: the feminine human being.
This advance will (at first much
against the will of the outstripped men)
change the love-experience, which is now
full of error, will alter it from the ground up,
reshape it into a relation that is meant to be
of one human being to another, no longer of
man and woman. And this more human
love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely
considerate and gentle, and kind and clear
in binding and releasing) will resemble that
which we are preparing with struggle and
toil, the love that consists of this, that two
solitudes protect and border and salute each
other.
And this Further: do not believe that
great love once enjoined upon you, the boy,
was lost; can you say whether great and
good desires did not ripen in you at the
time, and resolutions by which you are still
living today? I believe that love remains so
strong and powerful in your memory
because it was your first deep being-alone
and the first inward work you did on your
life.- All good wishes for you, dear Mr .
Kappus!
Yours:
Rainer Maria Rilke
World Was in the Face of the Beloved
World was in the face of the beloved--,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Week 8: William Carlos Williams: The Ivy
Crown
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.
Daffodil time
is past. This is
summer, summer!
the heart says,
and not even the full of it.
No doubts
are permitted—
though they will come
and may
before our time
overwhelm us.
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win! We do not
look to see
jonquils and violets
come again
but there are,
still,
the roses!
Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.
Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb's edge.
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.