Spring is in the air, and so is love. Valentine’s Day is around the corner and notwithstanding the moral police and the prissy prudes, love will have its day, a day when love can be expressed in unequivocal terms to those we truly care about. It is so difficult to talk about those we love whereas we have a hundred things to say about those we don’t. This is where literature and its bards come to our aid and we find ourselves quoting lines that speak to us directly.
The Bard of all times says in a sonnet: “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks/ But bears it out to the edge of doom.” My all-time favourite lines are from W B Yeats: “I have spread my dreams under your feet/ Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams.” In another poem, he says, “Yet one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
In The Anniversary, the metaphysical poet John Donne draws us to the immortality of love: “All other things to their destruction draw/ Only our love hath no decay/ This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday.” And Christopher Marlowe says, albeit to a vision of Helen, “Thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” I have yet to come across a more pristine expression of beauty. A good friend wanting to propose to the girl he loved gifted her a book, Of Human Bondage, and the flyleaf said. “Leading you to an overwhelming question...” Never has Eliot been set to better account. No doubt the question was answered in the affirmative.
In the initial years of love with all its hyperbole and metaphor, Shelley would come to the rescue: “The desire of the moth for the star/ the night for the morrow/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.” Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic, says true love is close to divinity: “I am ashamed/ to call this love human/ and afraid of God/ to call it divine.” As we get on in years and love has only ripened with the years, we have Walt Whitman’s words, “There we two content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.”
And yet while these lines resonate with their relevance across time, the best words are from oneself from the core of one’s being as when my husband said to me, “I miss you all the time, I miss you even while you are with me.” A paradox I thought at that time but with years I learnt all love is an eternal missing. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Sudha Devi Nayak Email: sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com