Again Thinking

Thinking of my own growth as a poet, I recognize a number of poems - my own and those of others - which define stages of my development. My poem Re:Love while falling in love with my wife, Ivy, was undoubtedly one.

One of the main preoccupations of any young person is undoubtedly love, whatever one understands by the term at any given point. Love is a difficult word to define and can be that which one feels towards an object or person for whom one feels more than a common regard, which itself is difficult to define.

For me, when I was young, love symbolized freedom, the ability to decide for oneself, to unbind the self from the mundane; but the experience of something is never the same as the anticipated intellectual appreciation of the thing.

For love can also be lifelong submission to the point of enslavement, with torment and hurt to follow. So how does one learn what love is?

When one reads the poets one gets the widest variety of experiences and contradictions possible. The whole matter seems irreal and confused.

So what is the truth of the matter?

The truth is that we have to learn to recognize love, to appreciate the validity of the other and come to terms with our own expectations.

No other is going to be exactly what we pictured in our minds and we are going to be very disappointed if we cannot grow with and learn the reality of the other, to have and accept less than our Platonic ideal of the ideal lover.

Poets teach us this by speaking their truth as they have lived it. And whether it is Dante going through Hell for Beatrice, the Sanskrit love poets talking to parrots about their faithless loves, or Shakespeare taming his Shrew, each has a lesson for us.

I believe my reading of Cattalus more than any other was a milestone in my life. What did I do with this precious knowledge? I fell in love and wrote a poem.


Re:Love

from first principles
painfully working the emotions
I learnt love
with almost quiescent content.

love, I learnt from stone faces
that cut sensitivity into anger
that grew within the mind, fences.

love, I learnt from steel-hearted poets
who had thrown flesh and blood
into other hearts and found, furnaces.

love I learnt from those who claimed
torn and bleeding and full of blame:
no soul born now emerged unmaimed.

love I learnt and thought I knew -
love failed, love torn, love possessed.
all these I felt and bore within the husk:
now the rain washes stone-faced memory
and poets of steel lie dead in books.
unmaimed I walk with you
untorn, unresentful and unpossessed.



From After the Hard Hours This Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975