KOCHI: One of the most popular English poems on love is from WH Auden with the following stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be
Let the more loving one be me
With the power that only poetry, and maybe art to some degree, has to move people’s hearts, this particular stanza has been quoted in some version or another by lovers over the decades to talk about how they love and how much they love.
It is a potent thing to tell someone in whom you are interested that you don’t even want equal affection to be there between the two of you, and that you would happily be the more loving one should such reciprocity not be there. To be loving in such a way feels very special indeed.
One can imagine the scene very well: a star-struck lover looking doe-eyed at the star that so struck our poor lover, declaiming these lines with love and longing, and declaring that to just be allowed to love is enough, and to be loved back equally is not really needed.
Perhaps you have been there sometimes as well. It feels very special, a very sweet pain indeed, to love so dearly that it feels like we are in love with love itself, that we can feel what the poets are going on and on about when they are celebrating love as pure, innocent, tender and so on.
In this world, we imagine if our lover was to say ‘I love you,’ the only response possible is ‘I love you more,’ not even ‘Love you too!’
That said, when we are not in the throes of such affectation, it bears some consideration – how much of an unequal affection are we really okay to bear, and for how long? Would we be alright if we knew that the imbalance would be forever, and maybe never in the other direction? What if the imbalance was only guaranteed to get more and more pronounced to the point where there is hardly any affection at all coming our way? Would that still be something we want? Would we think it is healthy to continue to want to be the one who loves more?
Auden has an opinion just a few syllables later. The poem’s last stanza goes like this:
Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel it’s total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time
If this object of our affection were to get distant or even disappear, we are still likely to find life itself quite sublime. We will get over it, Auden thinks – even if it takes a little time.
Not too many people quote these lines. It doesn’t quite have the romance of saying that we want to be the more loving one, but it is worth holding with the same reverence. We will be ok even if there is no love and just total darkness.
(The writer’s views are personal)