Loving the Poetic

Speaking of poetry...today I went to my war crimes class, I was dragging, I didn't want to go, I would rather be in Rome, in France...anyway, what is important is that I did not want to go to war crimes. I was deadset on being a dreadfully inanimate and quietly pessimistic, but then I passed the bookstore close to my university..and what did my tired eyes see? A cart full of classical English poetry for sale on the sidewalk, dirt cheap. My eyes lit up...a smile crossed my weary face! I could deal with war crimes today (especially since I had tucked away a copy of Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" to read during class!). I made a mental note of what books were available and I would spend much of the lecture deciding which books I would waste my limited budget on.

They were less than $4 US dollars a book if you got five. Well, never being a person to pass up buying things I don't need for more money than I intended to spend, I partook of this fabulous one-time offer. The following titles are what I picked up: The Works of Andrew Marvell, The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, The Works of George Herbert, and First World War Poetry. The Shakespeare one is, admittedly, now the third copy I own, but I always seem to need Shakespeare with a sense of urgency so I have to keeping buying it! I thought I would put a poem on the page because I am a pretentious prick, because I enjoy it, and because I am still trying to crack the metaphysics of "being carried along" by love...I am trying to sneak up on poetry in prose!

"The Definition of Love"
Andrew Marvell

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne'er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsions tear,
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into planisphere.

As lines, so love's oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth blind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.