She Walks in Beauty_ A Woman's Journey Through Poems - Caroline Kennedy [9]
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
Ever again my handkerchief
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