Woody Allen: bizarre spin

PENGUIN’S POEMS FOR LOVE
Selected by Laura Barber,
Penguin, Rs 899

“The three most beautiful words in the English language are not ‘I love you’ but ‘It is benign’.” That was Woody Allen being deliberately contrary. Even Allen’s bizarre and cynical humour doesn’t discount the poignancy of the three words that most people consider to be the most moving thing that one human being can say to another. It is as affirmative of life as the phrase that Allen puts up to compete with it. It is also true that the emotions the words, ‘I love you’, try to capture are actually ineffable because they are too complex and varied. Ordinary mortals stricken by that feeling called falling in love often stretch out for the writings of their favourite poets to find lines that adequately express their feelings. This volume brings together some of the best love poems written in the English language, but it does so with a difference, and this gives the book a different flavour.

This volume uses as its epigraph Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” In the space of 14 lines, she comes up with eight different answers to her own query. But it is evident that she is struggling since none of the answers seems to quite match her feelings for her future husband, Robert. At the end of the poem, her love transcends life itself: “Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,/ I shall but love thee better after death.” The moral, if one can at all draw morals from a poem, is that it is impossible to sum up the emotion called love.

This book is of course focused on romantic love and it proceeds in its selection under rubrics that are not too conventional. It begins with “Suddenly” — that love at first sight, which sceptics believe is impossible. Many poets thought differently. Take, for example, Sylvia Plath: “Not easy to state the change you made,/ If I am alive now, then I was dead.”

The volume proceeds then to “Secretly”. Wilfred Owen in “Maundy Thursday” apparently talks about “The silver cross offered to be kissed” and ends, devastatingly, with, “The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:/ And yet I bowed, yea, kissed — my lips did cling,/ (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)’’ In “Haplessly”, Yeats’s famous Wandering Aengus sings about the “glimmering girl” who had “faded through the brightening air” who he promises to find, “And kiss her lips and take her hands.” In “Incurably”, among other poems, there is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147: “My love is as a fever, longing still.”

Thus the poems move from “Impatiently” to “Superlatively” to “Persuasively” to “Passionately” to, of course, “Eternally”. But in between there are some categories that are not adverbially defined, like “The morning after” or “From a distance” or “With a vow” and “Forsaken”. Unrequited love is a special genre of love that produces a wonderful poem by Jackie Kay that begins thus, “I had been told about her./ How she would always, always./ How she would never, never.”

The organization of the poems under these various headings allows the editor and therefore the reader to see how poets captured love as passion, love as sorrow, love as longing, love as a source of inner strength, love as a dream and so on. W.H. Auden once described a poet as someone who is passionately fond of language. When that language receives the magic touch of love, it acquires an indefinable brilliance, which age cannot stale. Love poems or poems about love are as moving as the three little words, Woody Allen notwithstanding.