Episode 1 Season 4 The Complete Anatomy of a Love Poem

Maiya: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. I'm Maiya. And I'm here with my co-host, Joe, ready to kick off our fourth season of Beyond the Verse, which is very exciting for us. And as Valentine's Day is just around the corner, we thought it would be a great opportunity to look at love poetry through the ages. Now we'll be starting as early as 600 BC with poetry written by Sappho all the way through to the modern day with poets such as Carol Ann Duffy and John Cooper Clarke. Now, there's gonna be a whole host in between that too. We're looking at Burns Yeats, Dickinson, Neruda, García Lorca, and I am so excited to jump into this episode, but for now, I'm gonna hand over to Joe to give us a little bit of a rundown about the poems we're looking at today and the kind of brief evolution of what love poetry looks like across the ages.

Joe: Thanks Maiya. [00:01:00] Thank you to all of our listeners. We're delighted to have you back for season four and if any of you are new here, we're very happy to have you. And feel free to go and check out the back catalog. There are so many great episodes there for you to enjoy. So, as Maiya mentioned, we're starting right the way back in 600 BCE with the figure of Sappho, this iconic lyric poet of ancient Greece. We're gonna be moving forward from there and exploring the way that love poetry has evolved, both formally and in terms of its kind of thematic preoccupations. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the Sappho poem in a moment I won't dwell too long on that, but effectively, I. What I wanna do now is just go on a very broad chronology.

So love poetry changes a lot over the course of the centuries and indeed millennia. So it goes through the cycles from Sappho, as I mentioned, the 600 BCE, through the kind of Roman tradition. Poets like Ovid, Catullus, who are writing love poetry that is very performative. Poems are very witty. They're often ironic lovers are boasting, manipulating, looking to emasculate each other. it's a kind of very performative form of love poetry the next big shift in the western tradition, I suppose, probably [00:02:00] occurs around the Middle Ages. So we're thinking now between the 11th and 14th centuries, ce, we're now in the common era, and what we have there is the evolution of courtly love. Now, many of our listeners, I'm sure will be aware of this phrase. Again, performativity is very much at the core of courtly love. It's about great acts of devotion, great claims, Lovers willing to humble themselves in order to attain the affection of the person the poemis dedicated to. I suppose the next thing I would look to focus on would be the Renaissance and beginning, I guess in the 14th century in Italy, we're thinking now about marriage between love poetry as an idea and the form that will go on to define love poetry.

And that form, of course, is the sonnet. That, originates in Italy with Petrarch the sonnet tradition where love becomes associated with this particular form of poetry. We've done sonnet episodes in the past. I won't do well too long on it. and in the English Tradition that form is very much taken on by Shakespeare. And again, we'll come back to that Later on. Moving forwards a little bit later on, again, we have the 17th century. The metaphysical poets, again, we've talked about metaphysical poetry in the [00:03:00] past in a former episode, so feel free to go and check those out. And here we have kind of the. Philosophization, if such a word exists of love, poetry.

Love poetry is argument as a kind of intellectual pursuit. It's very argumentative and it's very interested in kind of teasing out concepts it feels to a modern reader. I think relatively contrived and inauthentic. As a love poems go and that word authenticity is a really crucial one because I think this is the yardstick by which we measure love, poetry and indeed love songs today. How authentic does it feel? Does it feel genuine? Does it feel real? And hopefully some of this conversation up to this point has shown you that that is a relatively recent yardstick. That is something that modern readers, modern audiences prize above all else, but not necessarily something that we can. Project back into the past as being the way that love poems worked 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, or even further in terms of, Further developments. Obviously over the last sort of 150 years, the dominant form of all poetry has been free verse in the West. So we moved away from traditional, formal, strict, [00:04:00] ways of writing poetry like sonnets, as I mentioned, doesn't mean that there aren't some, and we're gonna talk later on about maybe how Neruda is playing with that notion of the sonnet form. But I think if I was to kind of sum up those evolutions, aside from them being more formally fragmented, it would be that shift towards authenticity and a really interesting inversion of the historic desire to elevate love. And this is something we're gonna talk about, particularly when we get to the very modern examples. A lot of these poets who are writing in the last 150 years, or indeed some of them as recently as the last sort of 20, 30 years, are striving for a love poem that feels honest for the recipient, regardless of the fact that that might not be dramatic or elevated or particularly, worthy of praise in a broader context, the ordinary becomes something celebratory and is that more true than in the case of John Cooper Clarke's poem that we're going to discuss later on. So that is a very much whistle stop tour of the last two and. A half thousand years of love poetry. And as I've mentioned, if it's not obvious already, we could have done, an hour just on those evolutions. So There will be obviously variations within that, you know, it's not a straight [00:05:00] line. And there will be poets today who are writing sonnets and there were poets 300 years ago that were experimenting with, poetry with a more closely resembles modern free verse. But those are the kind of broad strokes of the trajectory. So Maiya, one of the things I wanna talk about before we look at those examples is what makes, a great love poem? and again, as I mentioned in that introduction. That definition I think, has shifted over the centuries and the millennia. But to you, what stands out as some of the, either the key qualities or the qualities that you find most interesting about this kind of nebulous genre of the love poem.

Maiya: Well, it's such an interesting one, Joe, so thank you so much for that overview. I think it's really gonna help to frame our conversation today. One of the things that I think is really worth noting is what you mentioned a moment ago, which is that we have this idea of what a love poem should be at its core, but that in itself is a relatively recent development.

If I say to you, love poem, you are thinking of doves, you are thinking of roses, you are thinking of these kind of outward shows of affection that often relate to the natural [00:06:00] world. But of course, this came along primarily with the romantic poets who were looking to create this intersection between the beauty of the natural world and the beauty of their loved ones.

Now, this, again, is so modern as far as love poems go, tracking all the way back to a poet like Sappho, one of the core explorations you'll see in that poem is that actually we have a lot of language around faith and the gods, particularly Aphrodite as the goddess of love.

Now, this is one thing that I find really fascinating as we're going to probably explore throughout this episode, is that you have a very marked difference from very early poems through to the modern day, and authenticity, I think is the word you use that really reflects this, is that many of these earlier poems are seen as worthy or in higher esteem in their own right.

It doesn't really matter who the recipient is. However, as we track through to the modern day, there are poets that I've read and loved because they use very specific language that really only the [00:07:00] recipient of that poem is going to understand. Now, when you take a poet like Sappho Who is writing kind of in the thro of this really beautiful language around what it is to be godly or God-like, you immediately have an elevation that accompanies this. So for me, what makes a great love poem in that sense is this real sense of worth and desire. And that tracks through absolutely clearly because of the language used there.

Whereas I think what makes a modern love poem great is so different to that. It is really cast aside from those more generic assertions, that to be loved is to be a wonderful person, a God-like person, someone who has honor instead modern love poetry. I think the closer we get to, let's say this year, 2026, you have these moments where.

You appreciate the imperfection of that person, and that is what makes it a brilliant love poem. Some of my favorite love poems that we'll talk about later in this episode have these moments of softness and clarity [00:08:00] because they're so specific, and I think that is one of the most wonderful things that this episode will do, is that you'll be able to tack yourself onto any of these poems because of something that you find that speaks to you.

Now, I realize that was a very nebulous answer for a very nebulous conversation, but I think great love poetry doesn't just have one definition. Of course, there is love poetry that is objectively great, but I think what makes love poetry so universal is that it speaks to so many people. Every single person loves.

Every single person has something that makes them feel the way these poems do. That is why time and time again, we consistently revert to poetry as a means of expressing love because it is an artistic form of picking those beautiful moments of nature, of gods, of the day-to-day goings of your life and to distill them into this really beautiful form.

And form is something that, varies throughout these love poems that we're gonna discuss today. So I'm very excited to get into it, but you can't just leave that sat [00:09:00] with me. I'd love to know for you, what makes a great love poem? 

Joe: Well, it's a great question. and I, think Your answer was fascinating and I think actually just to pick up on that. We've mentioned that word nebulous a couple of times. I think that hopefully one of the things we've done with this podcast and listeners will tell us if this is true, is we've tried to make the poetic conversation feel a little bit more accessible. there are so many people, a lot of whom, were switched off poetry at school, who have a very fixed view of what poetry is and often that it's not for them. That it's not something that they can enjoy or they can understand. And hopefully we've broken down some of those barriers and we'd like to continue doing that. But you know, I can picture A generation of, kind of adolescent boys, if I'm to stereotype, rolling their eyes at the idea of love poetry as an episode. And I think people come into this idea with the view that love poetry is a very specific thing. that it is a sonnet, that it is from a particular era, that it is using cliched iconography, things like doves and roses that you mentioned earlier on. And one of the things I wanna do in this episode is demonstrate the breadth. Of these love poems, you know, love poems can be [00:10:00] impassioned, but they can also be deeply reflective. They can look forward into the future. I mean, that Yeats poem we're gonna come to is all about projecting into the distant future, beyond the moment where youth and beauty have faded.

And that's very much in contrast to I think the view that the general public has of these love poems is that okay, they're all written by Shakespeare, they're all sonnets, and they're all saying that, the addressee is as beautiful as a summer's day. Well, actually what we're gonna do here is we're gonna express how these poems are as varied and as multiplicative as love itself. Love is not one thing. And so of course, the poetry that explores that love, does not take a single form or explore a single theme either. Now, before we go any further, and before I answer your question, ma, which I will do, we should define the scope of this episode. So when we talk about love poetry, we're not talking about. The love for a pet or a child. Or a country. We are talking about romantic poetry or certainly poetry that seems to, be related to romantic relationships. Whether or not those relationships are real consummated happy over continuing, that is all, fair game.

But we are [00:11:00] talking here about romantic poetry and I think that's important to clarify. I should also say at this stage that despite having mentioned him a couple of times, we won't actually be talking about any specific Shakespeare sonnets in this episode. And the reason for that is because regular listeners will know.

Maiyaand I did an entire episode already on Shakespeare sonnets and if anyone's interested in learning more about them, and I encourage you to do so, you can go and listen to that, to your heart's content. And lots of what we're saying. I'm sure will be relevant to that episode as well. So be fascinating maybe for listeners to enjoy them both, in sequence. Now, in answer to your question, Maiya, I'm not just avoiding it. I think that word I mentioned earlier on authenticity in a modern context is really key. but I'm interested in that thread of. Love poetry because like I said, a love poem today is going to be measured by different metrics than a love poem from 500 years ago. So what does unite 'em together? Because there is something we've grouped them together in an episode. It's not just that they're about love.

There must be something that unites them, that makes them great, across the ages. And for me, I think it's that relationship to the devotional. And you mentioned, and we're gonna talk now about the first love [00:12:00] poem, which is hymn to Sappho. And that word Hymn is the one I want to focus on because obviously a Hymn in a religious context is a religious expression of devotion. Devotion to a God, devotion to a divine figure. And I think when love poems evolve over the centuries and over the millennia, especially in a modern context, living in a more, secular societies in the West, the love poem has in many ways supplanted the hymn as the ultimate form of devotion. we no longer as often in the West think about, the world in strictly religious terms. Though of course the religious, context of the Western tradition, particularly Christian tradition, influences our language and the way we view the world. But i, wonder whether or not we can view the love poem through the ages as a secular hymn. The idea that the writer is willing to kind of supplicate themselves? Before something that they worship and in place of a God. What better way to elevate your lover, or the person you wish to be your lover, than to worship them in that vein, to show them that same level of devotion that [00:13:00] historically would've been reserved for Gods or for goddesses. And again, even in a poem like John Cooper Clarke's, we're gonna explore, which is ostensibly all about picking out small, mundane, domestic details. There is an element of the devotional. There is an element of the Hymn, like in those poems, and I think it's that sense of devotion. That is the central thread that underpins these poems. 

Maiya: Well, what is more romantic ultimately than someone noticing all of those small things about you. The things that you know, you walk through the world thinking that you are an individual person, and to have that other person pick out those small details, notice you be able to recognize the things that they love in you.

From that, I think it's one of the most simple ways to show devotion, as you mentioned, and I really love this idea that. We are able through time to track how love has been portrayed for years and years and years because that's one constant. Of course, we have a [00:14:00] history of all the loves in the world and that's just such a beautiful thing to be able to track and you know, I'm conscious it is Valentine's Day, so let's go romantic with it.

It's such a lovely thing to be able to take a poem such as Hymn to and see that kind of tracks through the ages. I mean, one of the poems I'd actually really like to touch on once we finally get round to talking about this poem is that there are modern interpretations of it that have actually changed the meaning very slightly , but they present a really similar, really candid sort of love that shows that poems like this are timeless.

And I find that such a wonderful way to make poetry like this accessible. And as you said, this is one of the main things that we try and do with this podcast is make poetry easier to understand because the way it is taught can be, you know, quite isolating in some ways and the poems that you look at can really not speak to you. So I hope that for new listeners that are joining us today, or for our regular listeners who have been here for the whole journey, that you know, you can go back through our catalog and find poems that you [00:15:00] really find interesting. And that can be the one thing that sends you down on a classic Joe Rabbit hole of going through all of these different poems by one poet or exploring a theme or exploring, a type of poetry. And that is how you learn to love and appreciate, the historic nature of some of these poems and how they can live forever. And before I go off into a, a rant about how romantic and beautiful all of this is, I think we should start with the poem. So Joe, would you like to do a reading for us?

Joe: I would love to. So as we mentioned, this is hymn to Aphrodite by the great ancient Greek poet Sappho Throned in splendor, immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, enchantress. I implore the slay me not in this distress and anguish, lady of Beauty hither come as once before thou camest. When from a father Thou hurts to my voice. Lamenting herds and chemist leaving thy glorious father's palace. Golden yakking. Thy chariot [00:16:00] far. The doves that bore the swift to the dark, some earth their coarse erecting, waving their thick wings from the highest heaven down through the ether. Quickly they came Then thou oh blessed goddess. All in smiling wreath thy face. Immortal bade me. Tell thee the cause of all my suffering. Why? Now I called thee. What? For my Madden heart, I most was longing. Whom Thou Christs dost. Wish that sweet persuasion now went over and leads to thy love my Sappho. Who is it wrongs de for though now? He flies. He soon shall follow. Soon shall be the giving gifts Who now rejects them even though now he love. Not soon shall he love. Even thou. thou wouldst not come then now, dear goddess, and release me from my anguish, all my heart's desiring grants thou, thou now to again, as aforetime [00:17:00] be thou my ally.

So Maiya, I really enjoy reading that poem and it's, such a beautiful piece of literature and we're So lucky. To have it I mean, anyone who hasn't listened to our episode that we did in a different Sappho poem right the way back in season one, I implore you to go back and check that one out. We talked a lot about How lucky we are to have these fragments ofSappho's work, and this is one of the longest perms of hers that we have surviving. We have barely a fraction of her, her total body of work. But Maiya, why did you want to talk about this poem?

Maiya: Well, thank you for that lovely reading. Joe. I think part of the reason I wanted to talk about this poem is it really lays the foundations for a lot of the language that we're going to see kind of replicated throughout some of these later poems that will go on to explore, particularly, as you mentioned earlier, this elevation of the loved one.

Now here it is very, very obvious that we're talking about A goddess, Aphrodite, the goddess of love in the Greek canon of Gods. Now Aphrodite is well known to be the most beautiful goddess.

It's often rumored that she [00:18:00] presents as the person that you would most be attracted to, the person that you most desire. So she has already this kind of shifting figure. But what really is important in this poem is that shifting figure comes into play. Aphrodite is not really the subject of this poem, though.

There are moments where we talk about her, her godliness. There are also parts where she's conflated with the real figure of desire. That's the poet. . Now I really want to focus on the first stanzaof this poem, and I'll just repeat it for listeners.

Benefit Throned in splendor, immortal Aphrodite, child of ze, enchanter. I implore these slay me not in this distress and anguish. Lady of beauty. Now you already have these kind of two very powerful forces brought into this opening stanza distress and anguish on the one hand, but also enchanted love on the other.

Now the very first word of this stanza is thrown [00:19:00] immediately we are given this implication of royalty, of riches, of wealth, of grandeur. And again, we have this kind of progression Where the recipient of this poem is elevated to a point of being godly, immortal, Aphrodite.

This love is not just a kind of moment of desire. It's something that stretches across the ages, and I love that there's this involvement bit by bit of a sort of magic, a distress and anguish that accompanies this love because of course, what we come to understand is that the speaker in this poem is a mortal.

The speaker in this poem is delivering a message to someone she sees as so vastly different to her, so much more elevated that there is a tension between the distance that is created between the mortal speaker and the God-like lover. Now what this serves to do is add a lot of power to the recipient of the poem.

Power is very much at play in this poem because [00:20:00] the power to choose the mortal speaker, the power to love back is granted in only small fractions. So the speaker is going through these moments of distress and anguish because they are unsure of the recipient's feelings.

They are unsure whether they are going to be able to grasp this. And for what is, I think, a very formative love poem. We are actually brought in a, a real sense of uncertainty here, which you wouldn't expect from our general understanding of what a reciprocal love poem looks like. I think opening this poem, this hymn with this immediate sense of tension only serves to create a much stronger feeling as we progress through the poem. But what do you think, Joe?

Joe: Well, I think you're definitely onto something and I'm so glad we're focusing on that opening of the poem because one of the things I love about this is how this poem, on the one hand, feels like it is this distant journey into the past. I mean, you know, it's so difficult for us to [00:21:00] envision the world in which Sappho is writing this poem, and that opening really represents that this invocation of the Divine muse.

I mean, it's typical of Homeric poems. The epic poems of Homer, the Odyssey, and theIliadbegin with these invocations of the muse singing in Mio Muse. The idea that the divine, it can speak through the mortal in order to create great poetry.

On the one hand, this beginning feels like such a dislocation from modern poetry, and from our modern lives, and yet there are elements of this poem that still feel strikingly modern, particularly the fact that the poem is autobiographical. Sappho appears as a character in the poem.

Her name is mentioned, which immediately puts me in mind of the kind of confessional poetry of the 1960s. I mean, Maiya and I have done an episode on Sylvia Plath and that involvement, that personal presence in the poem by name, by having herself in the poem, for me, it feels a lot more modern. It feels a lot more intimate. It feels a lot more immediate, and that tension, as my mentioned between on the one hand. The presence of immortal figure like Sappho, [00:22:00] alongside speaking directly to the immortal figure is one of the things that I think gives the poem's, potency, that sense that we are walking between differing worlds, the ancient and the modern, the divine, and the mortal.

And I think, it's such a masterpiece. And like I mentioned, anyone who hasn't listened to the other episode with Dylan Sappho, you know, go and do that because she's such a fascinating poetic figure.

Maiya: I couldn't agree more. And that divide between the mortal and the immortal, the earth and the heavens is nowhere more pronounced than in the third stanza. Yakking thy chariot fair. The doves that bore the swift to the dark, some earth their course directing, waving their thick wings from the highest heaven down through the ether.

Again, we are really adding to this sense of separation between what is the earth here construed as something dark, something lonely, something very simple as set against the heavens, which are the kind of epicenter of the love that we're exploring here.

One of the [00:23:00] techniques that Sappho brings into play here is, as I've said, bringing in the distress and anguish. But what this develops into is a sort of madness. This is a very classical callback, I think to a lot of the mythology that we see from the Greek canon and the epic poems we see when mortals fall in love with gods, but as a result, they are doomed to fail because of course, mortals do not have the life expectancy to keep up with a God or a goddess, nor do they have the kind of history of the immortal lives of these gods.

So we are already creating a story here without even looking at the, call that is being made to Aphrodite, the call that is being made to this lover, where you know that this relationship, this love, in a sense, may be doomed to fail. It has a sense of weight and gravity to it, and yet as we explore this poem, you come to understand that.

Even in spite of this, even in spite of the fact that the love may not last forever to the speaker, it is still worth it. We close this poem. [00:24:00] Come then now, dear goddess, and release me from my anguish. Even if this love is going to be momentary to the speaker, that makes it okay because the ability of this love to transform their life, even momentarily is so powerful.

Joe: I think that's a brilliant point, Maiya, there's, So much there that I wanna unpick. Lemme just go back to that, third stanza you were talking about, because I think one of the reasons it's a great choice to start with this permanent episode is there is so much of the love. Essence of love poetry contained within this, single Sapphic example. So you mentioned the doves and we've got kind of an icon there, the doves that carry Aphrodite down to earth. So already we've got one of the enduring symbols of love right up to the modern day. But there are other more subtle tropes of love, poetry that I think are also contained within that stanza, particularly this idea that love has the ability to transcend things. and again, what could, span the divide between earth and heaven. Well, it has to be love and Aphrodite is the embodiment of love. Her physical [00:25:00] passage from heaven to earth is a representation of the power that love has to transcend these boundaries. The impossible becomes possible through love.

And we're gonna talk about this in the next poem as well, but I also want to touch on that ending you mentioned because one of the other tropes of love, poetry, not always, but often, is that relationship between love and misery. Love and despair, love and anguish. In thispoemagain. Despite how distinctSappho's life is from the modern world, she strikes upon something universal there.

The idea that if you love as intensely as the speaker in this poem, loves the prospect of losing it is unthinkable, is akin to the worst misery imaginable. And that tension between how much joy love brings us and how fearful we are of losing it is something I think runs through all love poetry in the past kind of 3000 years.

But Maiya, before We move on to, Robert Burns, I know you want to talk a little bit about translation. And Sappho and how modern voices are changing the way that [00:26:00] this term is interpreted.

Maiya: Absolutely. One of the amazing, amazing translations of this poem is written by Patience Agbabi , and she has this very modern take onSappho's Hymn to Aphrodite, and here it is called Buzzing aphy. Of course there is colloquial language that's brought into this, but I actually really want to focus on that third and fourth stanza because here is a Agbabi's translation.

Your arrival is the tide ripple of dove's muscle rhythm through the club you lift high over sky's glow stick bright, throw down heavens to hip wind. The haters still come and you my avatar, CoverGirl superstar. Wait while I sulk. Quick blow kisses. When you text me back, spit me a wrap, girl. I need your reply.

Now, aside from being a brilliant poem, I think what this poem really signifies is that meaning can be carried through translation regardless of how you take the form of the words. One of translator's biggest issues is [00:27:00] whether they translate word for word, literally, or they get the essence of the text.

Now, of course, a Agbabi's choice is to get the essence of the text, but we still have this I interpolation of these doves of the tides. You have an evocation of a Greek island

She lived on the island of Lesbos, which obviously being an island is very coastal. Now. We consistently have through Sappho’s fragments elements of the water and the coast being brought in the mountainous regions and the sky, and I love that in Buzzin Aphy, this kind of retranslation, you have these images that are brought into a very modern day sense.

You have the tide ripple of doves through the club. I can immediately see this instead, as the ripple of bodies, whilst people are dancing, the darkness of the earth becomes the darkness of this club room. so Translation for me will always sit on the side of exploring meaning first, because here we have a [00:28:00] beautiful rendition of aSapphiclove poem. But the modern language in it still evokes the very same feelings I get when I read Hymn to is still a dedication to a single person. And you know, i'm just gonna throw in a few extra items of translation here.

The throne in splendor becomes a throne of metal bling instead of child of Zeus, we funking daughter of jagged skies and lightning. I Think this translation is so tasteful and so modern and so specific that what a Agbabi manages to show is this really beautiful mimicry of the original intention of this poem whilst making the poem very solidly, an individual poem in its own right.

Joe: I couldn't agree more. I mean, thank you so much for sharing that. I hadn't read that translation and it's. The thing I love about it is it captures that hallucinatory intensity, . of being in the th of love., Because we have a tendency to kind of talk about the past, whether it's art or history, to sanitize it and always think of it, as though we're wearing kind of metaphorical [00:29:00] gloves. What I love about this poem is that it gets into the depths of sapphos intensity. I mean, there's a burning feeling of love. She's imploring a goddess. She's begging on her knees for this love that she can't quite have or she's worried she won't have And the thing I love about that translation is in the midst of the club, the kind of press of bodies, that raw intensity is absolutely front and center in the poem.

You're right. You know, translation is such an art form and that, you know, I'd love in the future to, do an episode entirely on translated poems and the art of that translation 'cause it's such a fascinating rabbit hole. As, as the regular listeners will know that I enjoy. Shall we move on to our next poem?

A Red, Red Rose. And would you be willing, Maiya, to read the poem for us?

Maiya: I think we absolutely should. So this is A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns. Oh my love is like A Red, Red Rose that's newly sprung in June. Oh my love is like the melody that sweetly played in tune. [00:30:00] So fair art. Thou my So fair art thou, my bonnie lass so deep in love and I and I will love these still my dear. Till all the seas gang dry.

all the seas gang dry, my dear and the rocks melt with the sun. I will love these still my dear. While the sands o’ life shall run and fair. The well, my only love and fair. Well a while and I will come again. My love Though it were ten thousand mile. This poem has all of the trappings of what I would call a typical love poem, but I know, Joe, you are really keen to talk about the symbolism of the rose because of course, before this poem, do we really see the rose crop up as an item of affection?

Joe: It's a really good question, and obviously it's worth pointing out that, you know, flowers have long been associated as symbols of beauty. I mean, they are beautiful. It doesn't take a massive stretch for people to look at beautiful object and use it metaphorically, symbolically to represent beauty in other contexts.

But certainly we don't have many examples of something as. Clearly [00:31:00] identified with desire, with romantic desire than we do, in burns. His per, and particularly not only the type of flower, but the color of the flower. It's not a white rose, it's not a pale rose, it's a deep red rose. I mean that word red repeated in the title and indeed in the poem. And again, what I want to emphasize to readers who might be kind of rolling their eyes at this kind of symbolism is that every single cliche was at one point groundbreaking was at one point, fresh and original, because otherwise it wouldn't have become a cliche unless it captured something at the essence of something that previously had not been captured. And while we might think that Red, red roses are cliched and, be resigned to kind of the distant past, I'm sure some of us love red roses. And again, it's Valentine's Day coming up. Millions of them are going to be sold around the world in the coming days, but. For burns to see something about that color red, which is associated with lust, with burning intensity, with vitality. For him to identify that symbol and decide that it is representative [00:32:00] of the intensity, the burning desire he has for his lover, I think is something that, is worthy of praise rather than worthy of a derry eye roll. But Maiya mentioned earlier on, there are other kind of, tropes of love poetry that we see here. And actually I'm kind of more interested in many ways in those than I am in the obvious, title because I mentioned in the previous poem discussion that one of the things we see, throughout love poetry is this ability to transcend boundaries. And what we see here is an exploration of how love can transcend temporal boundaries, but also spatial ones. And if we look at the poem, towards the ends, the penultimate stands ends with the line, while the sands of life run dry. And again, the sands of life is of course a measurement of time. And what Burns is saying is that love has the ability to span lengths of time. But if we go to the end of the permit itself, the final line Though it were ten thousand mile, he's also emphasizing the ability that love has to transcend spatial boundaries, measurements of distance. And again, I [00:33:00] mentioned, this in, relation to the Aphrodite poem, in which a goddess is the person transcending those boundaries. Here, the goddess has been supplanted by love itself, whereas Aphrodite was the physical embodiment of love. As we move through the, centuries and indeed millennia.

This is of course, you know, much, much later, Robert Burns is the great Scottish poet writing in the romantic tradition. Around 2000 years later, the figure of Aphrodite has been replaced by the thing she represented in the first place. Love itself is now the vehicle that can transcend these boundaries.

And I love how many things that we take for granted in our language of love till the seas run dry red, red rose. I would walk a thousand miles and, you know, perhaps before I throw to you, Maiya, I can just, emphasize to listeners that, this poem I think is very much in dialogue with so many of the love poems and of course there's that very, very famous, great Scottish band, the Proclaimers, whose famous song I'm gonna be brackets 500 miles, the chorus reads.

But I would walk 500 miles, I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down [00:34:00] at your door. And I think it's impossible to read or listen to lyrics like that without working out kind of where does that trope of distance and love transcending distance love giving you the energy to walk a thousand miles and the kind of desire to do so. I think it's impossible to view that kind of trope without going back to look at poems like this from Robert Burns.

Maiya: What's really interesting, Joe, that I think you ask that question of what is it that makes love sustain in these situations? And I think this poem is actually a really wonderful example of this. And you see it crop up throughout poetry that follows this, but.

Often the individual, the love that they feel is sustained almost at the cost of the natural world around them. is almost as if the energy of the natural world is something that has to be pulled in order to keep the individual going. Here we have the seas running dry, we have the rocks melting with the sun, and you get this impression that almost for [00:35:00] one thing to exist, the other has to cease.

so this is maybe more of a question for our listeners. I'd love to know what they think. So please, you know, drop us a message on the forums. Drop us an email. I'm so interested to know whether the cost of love is something that is meant to negatively impact the world around them. Or if actually the raw energy of what is brought about by the natural world is simply the only thing that can fuel this love continuing.

Is it that love is elevated? From the natural world or is it that it's kind of leached off of the only other natural item that you can find around you? Because here, I think this poem reads that for the speaker, to desire their lover the way they do is the only thing that makes sense to them.

Aside from the seas and the rocks and the sands of life, there is this real balance between what is a progressive movement forward towards love, but also the exhaustion that kind of follows in the wake. And again, you know, maybe it does go back to the Sappho poem we were [00:36:00] talking about a moment ago where you cannot have love without the anguish of suffering it as well, because it's such a powerful emotion that it cannot stand alone.

Joe: I think that's fascinating and I think, it chimes with a really kind of troubling tradition in love poetry, or perhaps poetry in which contains famous levels or art that contains famous lovers. That sense of there being a kind of imagined scale with love on one hand and the horrifying nature of what people are willing to balance against their love in order to keep it, you know, think about the Iliad and, the,

Willingness to see thousands of men die at the gates of Troy, just so that one couple can be together.

Helen and Paris. think about Romeo and Juliet, of course, not a poetic example, but the literary one. Again, they're willing to take their own lives. They're willing to, you know, have friends and family members fight and die. so their love can be sustained. I mean, there is a really troubling, side to these great artistic portrayals of love where it seems as though the people who are in that relationship are willing to [00:37:00] burn Everything else down if only they get to bask in the heat together.

Maiya: And again, that chimes strangely against the opening of this poem. You know, we have, my love is like A Red, Red Rose that's newly sprung in. Most roses, flower and Jew. Most flowers bloom in the, summertime. So that is a very natural, very easy progression to take from this. My love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune.

Again, this is very simplistic. at the time this was written, music would've been as popular. To be able to play a simple note in tune would've been relatively easy, I want to say. But you have this progression from these things that are very natural, cyclical, annual, easy to these huge moments in which sacrifices are made.

so I find it very interesting that perhaps the idea is that this soft, sweetly blooming love doesn't really compare to the depths of the love that speaker feels. Maybe this soft, quiet love is judged. More harshly than it should be.

Joe: I think that's a really interesting interpretation, but I think to flip it on its head, actually, we could [00:38:00] view the, depth of that red color as foreshadowing of the lengths the speaker would be willing to go to sustain that love. You know, red not only has connotations of lust and desire, as I've mentioned, but also of rage of blood, of fire, and that notion that in order to keep this rose red and vital and in bloom, this speaker would be willing to run the rivers dry to burn everything else to the ground. I mean, again, we take so many of these images for granted now and the way in which they're use, and just while you were speaking that kind of, I was thinking about that relationship between red rose with love, but also with violence, with, burning love that can actually be monstrous and convert itself into something terrible.

And, you know, I was thinking again, of a musical example. It's worth remembering that, Robert Burns was writing in a musical tradition. he's writing in the folk tradition, and many of the echoes of this poem are to be found in song. I mentioned the Proclaimers. you know, the fair, the well at the end of the poem is, very popular kind of refrain that you see in folk songs of the 20th century. And this notion of the Red Rose as a symbol of both love, but perhaps also something more troubling, I think can be seen really [00:39:00] powerfully in, a song by Nick Cave, the great Australian songwriter where love actually consumes one of the speakers or certainly What they believe to be love, and they end up murdering their lover. And again, the tradition of love and anguish that I mentioned earlier on is also there's a kind of concurrent tradition that we're not gonna dwell on too long today because it is a Valentine's Day episode with love and violence, with love that drives people to do terrible things in the name of sustaining this imagined love that they think they're feeling. And the rose with its red color, with its associations with desire on the one hand and violence on the other, becomes this incredibly contested symbol. Is it a symbol of uncomplicated love, or is it actually a kind of troubling symbol of the lengths people are willing to go to sustain the feeling they have?

So just coming off the back of that, thinking about love, nature, and the relationship between the two, we're gonna go on to our next per, so Maiya,

what is our nextpoemand why Did you want to talk about it?

Maiya: So our next poem is Why Do I Love You, Sir? By Emily Dickinson, and I won't dwell on this poem for too long, because I think really the [00:40:00] core of this poem is actually rather than a relationship between, nature and the individual as something that either sustains or takes away. We instead have a correlation between the two.

And I'll just read a few lines from the poem. In the first stanza we have, Why Do I Love You, Sir? Because the wind does not require the grass to answer wherefore when he passed. She cannot keep her place. Here we have two lovers interpreted as the grass and as the wind.

Two very separate entities, and yet throughout all of time they are interrelated with one another. You have this kind of passive love that you know, as I mentioned earlier, this kind of soft and gentle love that is often left by the wayside for this more powerful and aggressive form of love here.

I think there's a really beautiful recognition of that Inbuilt innate love that you feel for people who you have been with for a very long time. It's not this sort of wildly passionate and destructive form of love, although of course in this poem we do [00:41:00] get mentions of being compelled and being contained instead.

I think the onus really sits on the reader to understand that this love is so natural to the speaker so inbuilt into the speaker that hear the wind construed as her lover forces her to move as he also moves. I do think there are masculine and feminine energies at play here. I will say that I think The grass and the grounding and the earthiness of that femininity is set against the kind of sky imagery, the wind, the lightning, the sunrise. But all in all, they really join together to create this really beautiful sense of an earth working in full harmony.

You know, the grass responds to the wind, the sun responds to the sky. It's a really harmonious piece of writing and I think it does kind of take a step away from some of the earlier poems you've mentioned because of that lack of anguish being compelled here, the speaker doesn't feel pain.

It is simply because he's sunrise. I love him. That [00:42:00] is the message of this poem and I, I'm curious to know your thoughts, Joe, on, you know, what message you think that sends to the reader. Why is this so different to the poems we've seen before,

Joe: It's a good question. I think, this is an interesting example of that shift towards, a, a more secular type of devotional poetry. Not to say that Emily Dickinson wasn't religious because she was, but that notion that love the thing you are worshiping is kind of something more innate, more natural.

It's less about heaven and earth and more about the things that we see every day, the sunshine, the grass beneath our feet, the wind through our hair, that sense that love surrounds us, that we are kind of encapsulated within, a form of love, I think is something that, is really common in love. Poetry, the idea that actually it's something you carry with you. It's not simply a person that you see sometimes and sometimes you are separated from, but it's something that regardless of that separation, that fit, that geographical separation, as I mentioned, love can transcend those boundaries. And in much the same way that we would talk about God being able to be everywhere all at once, love is carried with the speaker. But I think the thing I really like about this p and the reason I'm [00:43:00] so pleased you chose it is because again, Dickinson's images are original, they're striking, and yet they are in dialogue with these very ancient ideas that elements of the natural world, elemental forces can be avatars and often avatars for lovers. I mean, there is a very strong tradition in lots of different cultures that says the moon and the son are, husband and wife are a married couple.

We talked about that in one of our episodes previously. I can't remember which one.

you can go back to ancient Egyptian mythology and you see the figure of newt, which is a, the sky goddess and gab, the God of the earth, who were lovers, who are separated from one another, never again allowed to touch.

And the reason I'm touching on that is because we have to view love poetry. Like we do all poetry as a continuum. And we are in dialogue with the past just as our poetry and. Our writing will be in dialogue with future writers. every single Writer, every single artist, whether they are knowingly doing so or not, is. Writing into the canon and therefore shaping the canon and shaping the way [00:44:00] that things before them in the canon are going to go on to be viewed. I'm not suggesting that Dickinson was aware of ancient Egyptian mythology about the sky and the earth, but It almost doesn't matter. But we exist in a literary canon almost without realizing it. Our language is shaped by, the works of Shakespeare. The way we talk about love poetry is shaped by Sapphos portrayal of doves, burns', portrayal of roses. And even though we might not realize it. I mean, I would challenge any of our readers to read the Valentine's card, lucky enough to receive in a couple of days, or the one that you are writing, and just ask yourself, where do these images come from? Where do these tropes, these characters, these expectations that love transcends boundaries, that love is all around us. I mean, every song lyric, and in many ways I've mentioned songs a few times in this episode. I think, love songs are in many ways, the best way. To get that sense of how few of these ideas are being expressed for the first time and more that these ways of discussing love are variations on a [00:45:00] theme that goes back right the way back to Sappho

Maiya: So moving on very swiftly from those kind of portrayals of the sun and the moon, I'd really like to move on to When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats, one of his poems that really encapsulates the sort of later stages of love. Instead of that innocent, youthful, blooming passionate love, we here have a focus on a speaker who is kind of in the late stages of lamenting or mourning for a love that is about to pass him by.

And Joe, I'd love to pass this over to you to read and just get your thoughts on, the poem as a whole. 

Joe: I had love to, so this is when you are old by William Butler Yeats. When you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read

and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once and of their shadows deep. How many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love, false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim [00:46:00] soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face. And bending down beside the glowing bars, murmur a little slowly how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

So regular listeners to the podcast will know that I'm a huge admirer of William Butley Yeats, you know, won the greatest poets of all time, certainly one of the greatest poets of the last 200 years. And this poem, I think, is a really interesting example for this episode because it marks something of a shift but not a complete shift. And what I mean by that is up to this stage, we've been talking about poems largely that do elevate, that take their addressee and make them greater than they are, or kind of specify the details of the addressee that they wish to emphasize above all else. What I love about this poem is it begins to reverse that, trajectory by instead. Centering the poem on a moment in life after which physical beauty [00:47:00] has faded, after which what we perceive to be our prime, whatever that means, has faded, has gone. And the poem, as Maiya mentioned, is looking forward into the future. It's not the voice of an old man with an old, lover. It is the voice of somebody imagining their lover or the person they love. And I'll talk about that in a moment. As a much older woman after the kind of twinkle of her eye has faded, the beauty of her face, you know, and all of the things that happened with age wrinkling and, you know, changing an appearance. And I think it marks a really interesting transition because it's no longer Portraying the lover or the addressee at their physical best or at their most beautiful, their most vibrant. It's instead emphasizing the fact that. Love is powerful enough, again, to transcend the physical, to extend beyond, the fading of physical beauty because ultimately love is more powerful than that. It's Something more akin to a kind of relationship with a divine figure. And just like, a person who might worship a God that worship, that love for God doesn't fade with time because God doesn't fade with time. That is [00:48:00] the way that Yeats is casting, relationship now. I think there are a couple of things to mention. One that's not a full transition, as I've said, because he's actually just elevating a different aspect of love. he might be less focused on the physical and more interested in the, spiritual, but he's still elevating something about that. It's also really interesting because this is a love poem tinged with sadness. It was poem widely regarded to have been written for Maud Gonne, the woman that he was deeply in love with, but they never married. So ultimately, Yeats's poem is prescient in the fact that there is no certainty about whether or not these two people in the poemthe speaker and the addressee will actually be together. At the point, that he's imagining this woman, in fact, we know that they were not in real life. So that sense of, melancholy, I think that is tied to this poem is really interesting. It's very gentle. It's very slow, It's very melancholy, it's very beautiful. And those qualities. Are enhanced by the fact that you have a sense of unrequited love, a sense of lost love. A sense that this opportunity is going to pass [00:49:00] one or both of these speakers by.

Maiya: I think the strange thing with this poem is that you really do find some real sympathy for the speaker. I'm looking at that sort of middle stanza. How many loved your moments of Glad Grace and loved your beauty with love, false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.

the recognition from the speaker that yes, there is beauty, but that will fade over time. Yes, there is grace and manners and all of the things expected of a woman at this time that will also fade with age, and yet the pilgrim soul, the wanderer, the image of that soul as being something less tied to the person.

Something that in many ways kind of reigns and mortal because of course there are many different views on what the soul is and how it continues through life, even after death. There is a, tinge of loving that immortal soul. And yet the recognition really reflects back onto the speaker because you get this impression that he has sought something deeper.

He has [00:50:00] actively looked for something that sits far beyond just the physical appearance of that person. So I certainly find that, you know, the, the romance in this poem comes from that, real soft moment where you realize that this connection is far deeper than surface level. It's not love, false or true.

It is a love that is really tied so strongly to the person that they are inside, and you get that sense of loss because a pilgrim is never in one place for too long. The melancholy that is fed into that image of a pilgrim who is consistently wondering, almost implies that this person is bound to be loved by other people in the future too.

And of course, because this poem is future focused, it almost reflects back in that sense. You know, you are at a moment in time right now, but he recognizes that there will be great loves along the way. He's just grateful to have been one of them in the past. And it's such a beautiful, slightly mournful address for love that still maintains this?

illusion of [00:51:00] beauty. as we open this poem, you have a very concrete exploration of a library, someone seated in a chair, you know, an aged figure. But instead, we move through the poem to what is more abstract at the end. The personification of love, pacing upon the mountains and hiding his face amid the stars.

There is almost an absorption of the speaker into the natural world, a fading away of that person that they were. And yet, because of the way that, as we've discussed nature in many ways is immortal, it will last forever. That love almost sits within that soul and is absorbed into the world. So you are left with the question, which is, where does the love go? Does it ever leave? Does it go away? Does it fade? And I think in this poem, the answer is pretty clearly no. I

Joe: That's interesting. I always viewed those lines at the end of the poem as a slight knowing critique of other forms of love, poetry, the idea that Yeats poem begins. Kind of in a really quite mundane setting, a library, old woman, reading a book. I mean, it's [00:52:00] incredibly, non elevating. It's incredibly, mundane as i've mentioned. And I think those final few lines, you know, murmur a little sadly, how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars. The idea of pacing, brooding, hiding the stars, the imagery. I wonder why the Yeats is sort of saying that's what people say love poetry is. that's what other poets write about. Love poetry. But my love, is more subtle. my love is more enduring, but ultimately my love won't fully, my love will be with you in your home, in your library, you know, long after those other kind of would be lovers have gone away into their drama and into their kind of self eulogizing, if there is such a word. And I've always found that contrast really interesting. And again, it's impossible to be critiquing of. A cannon of love poetry without being in dialogue with that cannon. As I've mentioned, we have to view these poems in a continuum. You know, some of the poems we've talked about, which are very elevating, which are very concerned with the sun, the stars, the earth, the flowers. [00:53:00] Maybe Yeats is saying, that's fine for when you're young, but ultimately that's not the kind of love poetry that does sustain for decades, a relationship that will last into old age. 

Maiya: so fascinating. I Honestly, never read it the way that you've interpreted the ending. But I guess that's the joy of it, right? Is that you take so many different things from these poems. You know, I'd always seen the, hiding, the fleeing as love being tucked away somewhere safe, ready to be found at a later date, letting the reader know that it always remains there.

And I think part of that is almost the imagery of the library, the idea that you can take down this book, you can take down that memory. It's always going to be there, but it might not be the first thing you pick up on. And I think that's the visual that I always get in my head. But it's so fascinating to hear other interpretations of it.

Right Joe? I think it is time we move on to some more modern poets, and I know that we've got two Neruda poems that it'll be great to talk about.

The first one I'd really love focus on is One Hundred Love Sonnets Sonnet XVII. And this is Pablo Neruda. [00:54:00] Would you like to read the first answer for us?

Joe: I had love to. So the first answer of theNeruda poem reads like this, I do not love you as if you salt rose or to paths or the arrow of carnations. The fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved in secret between the shadow and the soul. Now, I absolutely love this per, I'm a big admirer of, of Neruda's work broadly.

And we're gonna talk a little bit, about him. cause Maiya has apoemshe wants to talk about as well. The thing I think is reasoning about this film, the reason I wanted to talk about it is because. This is that example of what I'm talking about, the deliberate rebuttal and rejection of the tropes of love, poetry, the tradition that goes back as far as Petrarch and Shakespeare and the sonnet form.

Perhaps even further, if we go back to the SAIC tradition of elevating language, the rejection of, you know, carnations, arrows, fire, salt, rose, and the. Preference for simplicity, the preference for authenticity. Dark things are to be loved, and, we can interpret [00:55:00] dark to be troubling, or we can just interpret dark to be private away from the bright lights. What Neruda is saying here is that for him, it's the, moments away from the spotlight that are the true source of romance. It's less performative. Albeit there is of a tension between talking about how love isn't as performative and real things are private. In a poem that was published, there is an innate tension there.

but this is typical of Neruda, that rejection of the explicit elevating tropes of love and preferring, his own more innately personal, darker, portrayal of, desire and love. You know, I know my, you're very interested in the portrayal of, nature in these poems as well, and I can't read the rest of the poem, but there is a line that I'm interested in, which is the line I love you as the plants that never blooms and what we have there.

I mean, there's so much going on there. First of all, we see this shift that maybe we're gonna talk about, in the Lord poem as well

away from the earlier portrayal of love in Aphrodite of something that comes from the sky. This is more in tune with the Robert Burns perm, which is that love is something that comes from the earth.

And again, as I [00:56:00] mentioned, we have to view this in the context of a shift towards secularism, over the past few thousand and indeed hundreds of years, that idea that love is not to be found in the heavens. Love is to be found on earth where we are. The difference, I think, between. the Robert Burns poem about the rose, and this one is of course, this flower does not bloom. And again, what we have there is a rejection of those tropes that burns is, is using so effectively in his poem. And I would just look to remind readers that so many of these poems are elevated by their comparison to others. You know, neruda's rejection of the flower in Bloom. It doesn't work unless we associate blooming flowers with love. There's nothing about it that seems original or striking. You have to view it in dialogue with that ongoing tradition. But Maiya, why were you interested in that portrayal of nature of

flowers and how does that link to the other Neruda sonnet we're looking at Sonnet XI.

Maiya: Well, I think particularly for that very reason is that this is a rejection of all of those things that we come to associate with a love poem, but it functions [00:57:00] off of the back of those rejections. As you say, if we did not have the history of the poems that we do, if we didn't have the images and the understanding of what constitutes a love poem, this poem would not read as a love poem because in order to reject something, it has to exist in the first place.

I find it fascinating that this sonnet particularly is built off of the back of those things because. When you come the final stanza this poem, and just to paraphrase, Neruda effectively says, I love you because I don't know any other way to love.

It's very internal, it's very self-focused. It's very, you know, self-possessed in many ways because Neruda speaker is taking all of the things that he thinks he should know about love and comparing them to his present feelings, and he's rejecting them one after the other, after the other. The idea that the plant doesn't bloom, I think instead offers this idea that. Love is not something to be found elsewhere.

It is not something to be taken from another in order to give, but it is rooted in your individual self. It comes from within. [00:58:00] And it is worth noting that this sonnet, uses an abundance of the I pronoun. I don't, I love, I love it repeats this time and time and time again. So it really centers the individual in the poem.

This is something that we don't really see that much throughout the previous poems we've talked about, because naturally the focus extends outward towards the person that is being spoken about, towards nature, towards myth, towards him. And I really find that not only is this a rejection of the stereotypical motifs and themes that we see brought about by love poems, but it's a rejection of the very.

Essence of the poem, and that's who it should be about. Because of course, to love, you have to experience love. You have to be the one to give love and display love. So the idea that, we have a very, very simplistic closing stanza for this poem. I don't know any other way to love you. I'm just telling you as it is, really comes across almost brash and a little bit arrogant.

And I think that's something we don't see because [00:59:00] arrogance obviously doesn't really sit well against elevating poems. But here arrogance comes across as confidence, as individualism. And I, find that so tactful, the way that Neruda sort of deals with these varying tropes in love, poetry, and yet still manages to find a rootedness a, a real sense of self-worth.

Even as set against this history of beautiful, flowery, lush, extravagant poems. This is, so different to that. And part of the reason I wanted to explore Sonnet XI as read against sonnet is because, you know, whether this is a word or not, the embodiedness of the individual. And just to read a few lines from Sonnet XI, because I, think this poem is wonderfully lyrical and intense and it has a level of magic to, it I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair, silent and starving. I prow through the streets. It moves on. [01:00:00] Dawn disrupts me. I pace around hungry hunting. For you. The animalistic elements of this poem are really the first time in this episode that we've come to see something that is more predatory, but also more passionate and exciting.

Before, of course, we've had all of these allusions to the natural world, but it's never been animals other than the few times that we use doves as a method of flight, as a method of elevating that individual. Here we have something that is kind of sleek, low to the ground and is actively looking for hunger.

This is where desire comes in so strongly through these poems and one of my favorite lines in this poem is, I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, there is an absolute consumption of the natural world here. All of the things that make love beautiful and delicate have been cast aside in order to portray this sort of all consuming, all powerful, all [01:01:00] fiery love.

And I think it's really worth mentioning that of course, yes, this isn't a hy in the traditional sense, but what else is all consuming, all powerful, all knowing if not a God here instead that godliness is inverted. it's put back on the individual and it makes it such a powerful exploration of what it means to have a passionate love, have a desire for someone, because whether this lasts forever or not, it burns white hot.

Joe: I think that's a brilliant piece of analysis, may, and I think it's so clever what Neruda is doing here because spoke about that relationship, between the poets and, you know, their tendency to elevate love. What he's doing actually is he's lowering love to place it on the same level as our most basic needs. I need to eat, I need to be warm, I need to sleep, I need water, I need to love, and he's reducing it to the kind of animal urge. In a way that is elevating it, it's kind of elevation via the back door. Almost, because he's [01:02:00] saying that love is as vital to our existence as hunger. in a world without society, in a world without language in the animal world, love still reigns supreme and there's this kind of, uncomfortable yearning. I mean, as you said, it's quite predatory, you know, he's, hunting this figure and there are lots of ways in which I wouldn't be recommending our listeners write this in their Valentine's card this weekend. And yet, as an example of love, as something base, as something you can't negotiate. With, it is, imperative that you have it. As imperative as it would be to eat and drink to survive, I think means it's a very worthy inclusion in our discussion of kind of portrayals of love through poetry.

Maiya: Absolutely. Because it doesn't have To have this kind of lush language, this flowery lightness to it in order to have meaning. There is a real sense of groundedness in that poem, and I think you make a very fair point instead of elevating, lowering it to your base instinct makes it so much more accessible.

And I think this is part of the exploration that we'll [01:03:00] probably cover as we close out this episode So many poems that are written kind of closer to our modern day, closer to 2026, you have a much more accessible way of entering these poems in a secular manner. I mean, consumption is something that I would love to do another episode on because love and hunger are so often joined together in poetry.

I mean, of the poems you'd also really like to talk about, Joe is Gacela of Unforeseen Love of Unforeseen Love by Federico García Lorca, and there is a line in this poem that closes out and says, the blood of your veins in my mouth, your mouth already lightless for my death.

Here we are bringing in that kind of original historic mythological anguish against love, but here it is all consuming. It is not outward, it is absolutely looking inward. Joe, talk to us about this poem and how it relates to our, Neruda poems because it's so stunning,

Joe: So anyone who's listened to previous, series of beyond the verse will know [01:04:00] that I've been trying to get us to talk about Federico García Lorca all this time in season four. We've made it, we've made it so well done to everybody. If you think I'm gonna stop talking about him, I'm afraid you're wrong. So Federico García Lorca García Lorca incredible. Early 20th century Spanish poet died in civil war, and I'm sure we'll get on to do an episode just on his work in the future. I would certainly love that. But for today, what we need to know about this poem is. it's a really uncomfortable, read. it's painful and it's an expression of the pain that love can cause. And again, not one that I'm recommending people write in valentine's cards, but I think we have to talk about this because we can't talk about love and love poetry without talking about, you know, throughout human history, expressions Of love between people of the same gender, between different classes, people of different ethnic backgrounds, has been frowned upon, has been forbidden, has been outlawed, has been punished. Federico García Lorca was a gay man, at a time where it was not, possible for him to be outwardly gay. And what we get in this poem, I think is a really strange [01:05:00] manifestation. Of some of those feelings of shame, of guilt, of yearning. There are images that are really troubling in this poem and we could talk about it for an entire episode.

So I'll try and just stick to some of the key points we have in the first and a reference to the dark Magnolia. Of your womb. So Immediately that sets up the idea that we are. dealing with a male, speaker perhaps and speaking to a, female recipient. The reference to the womb, the dark magnolia, is the type of flower, the darkness, I think probably is a reference to a kind of purplish color. Or a reddish color. But the reference to, the womb, I think we're talking here about blood, we're talking here about miscarriage, we're talking here about Abortion, We don't know exactly, what's being described, But this sense of something that doesn't grow, the sense of the kind of breaking down of the human body, the impotence, of course Federico García Lorca, as I said, was a gay man.

And, the knowledge that he would never be able to have children kind of haunted a lot of his poetry. And so I think despite the fact that the poem is ostensibly talking to a female figure, Lau's, homosexuality, [01:06:00] lau's inevitable yearning that he knew could never fully be realized, I think is absolutely present in that image.

And my mentioned that the end of the poem, we have this reference to. blood in the veins. That blood of your veins in my mouth. Your mouth already lightless for my death. Again, really troubling images. We kind of have the speaker here cast as a vampire figure. The blood is in their mouth, that sense that they are sustaining themselves and yet are barely alive, and I think it's impossible for us, to view a poem. Given what we know about Lorca and his private life in which he's speaking to this female figure, there is an inability to fully consummate this relationship. Or perhaps, this relationship is unable to yield one of the, you know, consequences of, sexual intercourse, which would be child, birth or children. That is not available to Lorca. The reference to the blood of the womb in the beginning of the stanza suggests that, and here at the end, we have this idea that Lorca is barely surviving off of the blood of this female figure because ultimately it might sustain him in the sense, but it doesn't keep him [01:07:00] alive. He's not fully alive. And I think that's the result of the fact that he's not able to live and love in the way that he wants to. So you. Know, it might seem like a strange inclusion, I think in this conversation where largely we've been speaking about, reciprocated love. You know, we haven't talked too much about, other forms of love poetry, but we are limited of course, by time. But I think the burning intensity of these lines a, is a great insight into law's poetic talent, but I think also speaks to the fact that there are countless people throughout human history in many lives today who are ostracized from romance, who from the kind of archetypes of love and the pain that that brings to not be able to express the way you feel for the person you love, I think is so present in this poem. 

Maiya: What a wonderful analysis, Joe. And you know, just as you were talking, it reminded me of another brilliant queer poet, Mary Jean Chan, and I read one of her poems, a few years ago now. I think it was in her 2019 collection Flesh. And what really struck me is that this motif of blood is one that recurs often in queer poetry. I mean, I'm thinking Danez [01:08:00] Smith Ocean Vuong. I'm thinking, Jericho Brown Blood is a carrier of many, many things and often that is a trauma. But specifically what I think l explores here is the idea that not being able to conceive naturally is an accusation levied against same sex couples time and time again.

They are unable to express what most people in history have deemed to be an appropriate relationship because it's focused on procreation. Mary Jean Chan's poem, is it's two forward slashes is the title of the poem, and it represents many things, primarily chopsticks in this poem and. There's a few lines in this poem I want to focus on that I think really feed into Locus poem, which are to the Chinese.

You and I are chopsticks lovers with the same anatomies. My mother tells you that chopsticks in Cantonese sounds like the swift arrival of sons. Of course, you have this focus on what is intentionally meant to represent a same sex couple transfigured [01:09:00] into something that shames them for the inability to produce sons, to produce heirs.

This is, of course, is an inherent focus on procreation from the parents in this poem. But as we explore the lovers in this poem, a very similar vein comes out and I, hope readers can recognize as I read quickly tonight, I forget, I'm bilingual, I lose my voice in your mouth.

Kiss till blood comes. So sorry, does not slip on an avalanche of syllables into sorrow. Again, we have this inordinate focus on blood specifically in the mouth. Now, for anyone who's ever bit their tongue, you know what blood tastes like.

It's that metallic off-putting taste . And what I think is a really beautiful, universal way of describing that sort of off feeling something wrong in the way that you are being portrayed by others. Is drowned out by the sheer volume of blood they are sharing, they are mingling. And this inability to speak their own truth becomes something that binds them together.

I think Lorca [01:10:00] does that beautifully. I think Mary Jean Chan does that beautifully. And you have this real sense that a motif that has been kind of levied against queer people for so long has been translated into something that offers them power, that offers these writers a moment to reclaim what is their true self. And I think that's really beautiful and I love to see how poets like this interact even across countries, across spaces, across time. Regardless, that was a, a very quick segue and I'm conscious of this being a very long episode and very worth it. But I do want to move on to a poem that we have brought up a few times in this episode already, which is, I wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke.

Now, Joe, where would you like to start with this? Aside from the wonderful Arctic Monkey song that covers this poem,

Joe: So I would definitely gonna come back to the Arctic Monkeys song, because I think it expresses something really interesting. We've been discussing about the relationship between love poetry and love songs, but I think I'm gonna dive in right at the beginning and, you know. Cars on the [01:11:00] table. I'm a huge fan of John Cooper Clarke. And I implore anyone who hasn't read his poetry or seen him on tv, he's a bit of a personality these days to check him out because he is not only hilarious, but he's a phenomenally, a talented poet in his own right. So the beginning of this poem opens, I want to be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust. I want to be your forward catina. I will never rust. If you like your coffee hot, let me be your coffee pot. You call the shots. I want to be yours. And I think you know, we've been talking about the journey that love poetry has been on and, how it's in dialogue with different love poems, but how there is an evolution over the millennia. I think this poem, which is first published I believe in the late, or no, the early eighties, I think 1982, I want to say, it's focus on domesticity, it's focus on the mundane and it really explicitly mundane. I mean, we had the evocation of, Yeats' addressee sitting in a, library and reading a book.

But compared to that, that still seems fairly elevated compared to vacuum cleaners and rusting cars [01:12:00] and brand names that Cooper Clark Relies on, we spoke about authenticity at the top of the episode. I think that is really at the core of what john Cooper Clarke's poem is doing it's focus on moments that traditionally don't feel particularly loving, that desire to be close to your lover. In ways that are so non-romantic, cleaning the house, complaining about rusts on a car. We have the sense of physical proximity you know, I want to be your Ford Cortina, the idea of one lover kind of being inside of the other. And we also have kind of the, comic images. I mean, you can imagine the recipient laughing. And. Again, I think one of the things that maybe we haven't spoken enough about with love poetry is that it can be very, sincere. It can be very austere as well. What Cooper Clark reminds us is that the people We love often are the people who make us laugh. And you can't read this poem, hear John Cooper Clarke reading this poem, or indeed, as Maiya mentioned, hear the Arctic Monkeys singing this poem without laughing.

And before I throw to Maiya, I just wanna touch on that, success of the song as has [01:13:00] been covered by the British Band, the Arctic Monkeys. I think as of recording, it's been listened to and downloaded or streamed over three and a half billion times on Spotify, and not even beyond the verse can compete with those numbers. But i'm curious about why a poem like that has been so successful, and why it's one of the most popular wedding songs, in the UK these days. But Maiya, do you have anything about the poem that you want to focus on? You know, Do you have an answer to that question? about what is it about John Cooper Clarke's focus on the kind of trivial domestic details that strikes such a chord with modern readers and listeners.

Maiya: I, I almost think it's that sense of eternity That accompanies so many of these images because even though yes, they're, they're incredibly domestic, what the poet is actually saying is that he's mending these images of domesticity into things that will last forever. A vacuum cleaner that consistently breathes in the dust.

One that you never have to empty A Ford Cortina, a car that will [01:14:00] never rust, and thus suggesting that it can go on forever and it will never age and it will never fall apart. A coffee pot that consistently keeps the coffee hot. I know these are very simple images, but what it really represents is that initial sense of, the gravity of love that we were talking about, the immortal of these small moments.

You know, I would actually like to flick later stanza of this poem, which is, I wanna be your electric meter. I will not run out. I wanna be the electric heater. You'll get cold without. These again, are very domestic images, but it's this sense that instead of nature being the thing to sustain the lover, the desired person, it's actually the other lover in the sense that love is self-sustaining in this poem.

Obviously the Arctic monkeys have done a great job in making it a really easily accessible song and a catchy one at that. I mean, millions of those listens were probably me, I'll be honest.

But I have to say That there is a real simplicity to the language [01:15:00] that Cooper Clark is using, and he has managed in no small feat to take things that are inherently unromantic. I mean, I do not want to talk about the Hoovering with my partner. I don't wanna do it. And yet, if I got a message that said, you know, I want to be your vacuum cleaner breathing in your dust, I want to be so close to you that I make your life easier day by day.

That's a beautifully simple way of saying, I love you of saying, I am here to make your life as easy as it possibly could be.

Joe: I think that's totally right. And I think the other thing it really strikes upon is the idea of love as action. And we spoke about this in one of the other love poems that maybe listeners will be surprised we haven't talked about today, which is, elizabeth b Brownings, how do I love the, cause we did a whole episode on that, so we haven't included in today's episode, but do go and check that one out about love as action rather than lovers words.

If you look at these things, this is ways in which Cooper Clark, the speaker, is making the lover's life better. They are doing [01:16:00] things, not just saying things about love. And that notion that love is something you do every day rather than something you simply talk about on big occasions, I think is one of the reasons that it's so enduringly powerful and so popular with real couples.

So moving on to our final poem, and it's been a long episode, I know, but hopefully you're still with us listeners, because we've really enjoyed, you know, the depth we've been able to achieve with this episode. But our final per, we're sticking with a modern poet, Carol Ann Duffy.

Maiya, tell us about the poemand why you've chosen it.

Maiya: I actually chose this poem to kind of close out this episode primarily because a lot of the poems we've talked about today are, about the individual, the poet, the speaker moving towards their love, speaking to their love. And I think this Carol Ann Duffy poem set apart slightly because. It kind of inverts that action.

We finish this poem with an understanding that the lover is actually the one heading towards the speaker. It closes, with the lines when morning comes. The [01:17:00] sun ardent covers the trees in gold. You walk towards me outta the season outta the light love reasons. I find that the emotions evoked from this particular, poem do sit at odds with many of the poems we've discussed before.

There is something that is less self-interested, less self concerned, and also offers a really unique exploration of what love could mean to the individual. Here, I want to note that the lover is walking out of the light. Towards the speaker, not towards the light. They're not bathed in the light.

They're coming from the light towards the speaker. And this is really important because I think when we talk about love poems, as we have done for, nearly an hour and a bit, we have this real focus on light and dark. You know, we've talked about love and struggle, love and desperation, love and despair.

And there is a suggestion that instead of love being one all [01:18:00] consuming moment of light, it can actually come to meet you in your darkest moments. The speaker writes from Darkening Hills, the night is empathy stars in its eyes for tears. now what Duffy does here is create an atmosphere that is kind of brooding, kind of, you know, quite dark and depressing.

And yet the memory of the light that is carried with the lover who is heading towards her is bringing this real sense of positivity. And I like that this poem offers that reversal, that instead of love being something that you have to engage with, you have to go out and grab it, is something that comes towards you.

I think it's a really beautiful way of exploring. You know, as I've said throughout this episode, those kind of softer moments. Those darker moments, because of course, not everyone has these moments of glorious love and is happy all the time. When you're with a partner, you fight.

When you are in love with someone who perhaps doesn't love you back or doesn't feel the same, you suffer [01:19:00] that. But here, the way that love is portrayed as someone who comes to greet you, the personification of something as simple as someone walking towards you, knowing that you are not alone is just really peaceful.

And I think it's a really nice end to the sort of arc of poems we've discussed, because of course, yes, love is about togetherness, but it's also about the way that it makes you feel when you are alone.

What a

Joe: a fabulous way of ending this really, really interesting episode of Beyond the Verse, and I'm sure listeners have really enjoyed it. And if there are any poems that we didn't get onto, you know, any of your favorite love poems, do feel free to get in touch with us to join our community@permanalysis.com, to sign up for a poetry+ membership.

to get exclusive member benefits. We have so much to look forward to over season four, and I really enjoyed the conversation we had today. The breadth of poets. We talked about the breadth of time, styles, themes, it was really, really instinct, but that is just a taste of what we have to look forward to in season four.

Maiya, tell the listeners what we're gonna be talking about over the coming [01:20:00] weeks.

Maiya: Well, without giving away all of our secrets, We have a very exciting runup of episodes to look forward to. Our next three are actually gonna be focused on a poetic movement. The images we are looking at, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and William Carlos Williams. After that, we'll be exploring the poet Laureate writing nations such as Irish poetry and some very famous poets in there as well, who I cannot wait to get my teeth sunk into.

But Joe, as for our first episode of our fourth season of Beyond the Verse, I think that was a lovely conversation. So thank you for having that with me. Can't wait for next time, but for now, it's goodbye from me.

Joe: And goodbye for me and the whole team@permanalysis.com and poetry +, happy Valentine's Day.