Love accepted! (tolerated) (interest accepted)
the door swings open
what a relief!
what a surprise! she accepts me!
(permit-show-love)
there's some hope!
you're so proud
My girl gave me her photograph,
shining with golden frame...
From dusk to dawn I kiss it,
and I keep it near me.
Swahili lyric
"I am the mistress of Prince von Schwarzenberg!"
purportedly shouted from a rooftop in 1828
by Jane Ellenborough (England 1807-81)
[He had reached] ...the time of life... when a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return...
Proust [SiL ]
"There was nothing physical between us, but I began to feel so certain that there would be, that I stopped worrying about it."
Ralph Pape "Soap Opera"
She's changed her mind, forgiven you your clumsy first approaches
How happy's that lover, who, after long years
Of wishing and doubting, despairing and sorrow,
Shall hear his kind mistress say, 'Shake off thy tears,
And prepare to be happy tomorrow.'
from Comes Amoris... The Third Book (England 1889)
'Like as a Huntsman'
Like as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chace forsook,
The gentle dear return'd the selfsame way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook:
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing meseem'd to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won with her own will beguil'd.
Edmund Spenser (193)
Seeing your own insufficiency has made you sufficient
you've finally fixed the faults that were bothering him
passed the test, straightened up
reached the top of the glass mountain
(all you had to do was stop trying so hard)
...It is my voice, mine, my own,
That makes you tremble there in the green gloom
Above me...
Edmond Rostand "Cyrano de Bergerac"
Yet of that treasure which at last they grant
None knows the value but the hearts who take;
The more hard-won, the more it doth enchant;
The prize, in love, is equal to the stake.
Nivernais (in Stendhal, 210)
He's seen your pain at his rejection, feels pity, mercy
For pity melts the mind to love.
John Dryden "Alexander's Feast"
If thou dost Love
mee I Love againe.
If my greife move
I love my paine.
17th C. lyric (191)
[Having learned of my love] She made me trust her, and this trust set loose a lion of desire.
Murdoch [Word Child ]
Partially accepted
(jealousy of others, how she spends her time when he's not there: Swann)
(It's too late: your love has died
(Going steady-- an invention of the 1950's)
She declares it publicly!
She'll marry you
"I got her letter this morning. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't come to the office-- I felt so happy-- I just lay on the floor-- I was simply bowled over by happiness-- I could hardly breathe-- I wanted to shout and sing but I felt too weak with joy-- I just lay there as if I'd been mugged."
Murdoch [Word Child ]
And he's going to marry Mary Ann, that's me!
He's going to marry Mary Ann!
Joseph Tabrar "Mary Ann" (19th C.) [Cole]
When he sees your love
he tries to take advantage of you
toys with you, strings you along
Without that visit... I would not have let myself believe in her interest, not felt again the complice beating of her heart with mine.
Murdoch [Word Child ]
He goes on an ego trip
he's devouring you
it grosses you out
Anger at his lack of commitment
(she sees his anger is just a proof of her power-- Swann)
Love not returned
In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.
French proverb
(Marriage without mutual love)
"I cannot ask her to be my wife just because she cannot be the wife of the man she wanted."
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 330)
One-way love renounced
I felt so often my love just irritated you.
Murdoch [Word Child ]
Accepting love
giving in
(he's irresistible)
Tring to be nice, help her grow
I only know
If a man loves me I love him,
If he dislikes me I dislike him.
Ping Hsin (China b.1900) "Remembering" [OB]
Giving in to lust
you know you shouldn't
but a trapdoor has opened
you can't hold on
you're falling
(no one will know...)
You may do in the dark
What the day doth forbid...
Thomas Campion "Hark, All You Ladies" (1591)
Weighing his qualifications
comparisons, unreal ideals
Did Crystal herself realize what her marriage would involve?
Murdoch [Word Child ]
Marriage as an escape from parents
[When she went out on a date] there would be an air, in spite of her gaiety, of the captive about her.
Brodkey "First Love and Other Sorrows"
Getting more than you bargained for
he made an effort, gave a lot
now suddenly he's just taking
she won my pity and now she's starting to take advantage of me
he's gotten his hooks into me, under my skin
the dark cloud of her longing smothers your vital spark
what am I gonna do?
once let in, can't toss out
All the time in her head
there's been this ego-drama going on
and as soon as she thinks she's got your interest
she tries to suck you in, co-opt you
Sadisms, lust
date rape
not responding to cool-it signals
distract
shout in ear
cause pain
...O tell me tell me
that you soe roughly tumble me downe,
as if you meant to kill me...
17th C. lyric (119)
Accepting several suitors at once
...she would never tell him until the last minute whether she would be able to see him, for, counting on his always being free, she wished first to be certain that no-one else would propose coming round.
Proust [SiL 176]
Playing the fish, hooking him good
...if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo...
W. Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet"
This second crystallization is almost entirely lacking when love is inspired by a woman who yields too soon.
Stendhal (48)
Demanding gratuities (Swann/ Odette)
using admirer for sex
Love can refuse love nothing.
12th C. Code of Love (love the lover... love the beloved)
Growing to love
it's precious to be loved
getting won over
Some pray to marry the man they love,
My prayer will somewhat vary:
I humbly pray to Heaven above
That I love the man I marry.
Rose Pastor Stokes (xx 1879-1933) "My Prayer" [PBQ]
"You think about him wanting you so much that he can say such things to you, and his desire for you becomes your desire for him."
Pape "Soap Opera"
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
Marcel Proust "Swann's Way"
He loves thee well who makes thee weep.
Spanish proverb [L'A]
You made me love you
(I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it)
Joseph McCarthy, Jimmy Monaco, 1913
Perhaps she was impressed by the force of my love; being thus impressed is as good a cause of real love as another.
Murdoch [Word Child ]
On the day when... she had gone up to him in her brown dress and silently given herself to him, on that day there took place in her heart a complete rupture with her former life, and a completely new, different, and quite unknown life began for her...
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 456)
'Psalm to My Beloved'
Lo, I have opened unto you the wide gates of my being,
And like a tide you have flowed into me.
The innermost recesses of my spirit are full of you,
and all the channels of my soul are grown sweet with
your presence.
For you have brought me peace;
The peace of great tranquil waters, and the quiet of
the summer sea.
Your hands are filled with peace as the noon-tide is
filled with light; about your head is bound the eternal
quiet of the stars, and in your heart dwells the calm
miracle of twilight.
I am utterly content.
In all my spirit is no ripple of unrest,
For I have opened unto you the wide gates of my being
And like a tide you have flowed into me.
Eunice Tietjens (xx 1884-1944) [Cole]
Love returned!!!!!
(immediately)
you get the sign right away
(the way she holds herself is enough of a sign)
you can touch her soul, it's bliss
This is the man I'm going to marry
Lovers, rejoice! your pains shall be rewarded;
The god of love himself grieves at your crying...
Beaumont and Fletcher "Cupid's Revenge" (1615)
"It's always been the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles..."
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 557)
Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of more serious talk, and as they forced themselves to find commonplace phrases they both felt the same kind of languor stealing over them; it was like a deep continuous murmur of the soul, dominating that of their voices.
Flaubert [MB 82]
After seven months of coldness as heartbreaking at the end as it was in the beginning, she said to him one evening: "Dear Joseph, I am yours."
Stendhal (220*, Fr. 170)
He turned his face away.
She bent timidly around till her breath stirred his curls and whispered, "I-- love-- you!"
Mark Twain "Tom Sawyer"
We never would have loved had not love struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other's answering
Sigh of unreasonableness--
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud.
Robert Graves "Under the Olives"
And she caught me in her arms long and small,
And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"
sir Thomas Wyatt "The Forsaken Lover" [MW]
Papageno: Pa- Pa- Pa- Papagena!
Papagena: Pa- Pa- Pa- Papageno!
Papageno: Are you all mine now?
Papagena: I'm all yours now.
Papageno: Now be my dear little wife!
Papagena: Now be my heart's delight!
Emanuel Schikaneder
libretto to Mozart's "Magic Flute" (tr. Lionel Salter)
Finally!
I can't believe my luck!
it's like Christmas!
gratitude
I wanted, but I doubted I deserved
...Nor yet I called her mine. How could I dare?
Mine as the sky the eagle's, when he floats
Amid its deeps! Mine as the sun of June
Is propertied by the cup he paints with gold,
Or morning by the birds, whose folded sleep
Her soft ray touches till it flower in song!
David A. Wasson "Love's Victory" [OOTH]
To you we thank, lovers that been here
That this man-- and never for to twin--
Fortuned have his lady for to win.
John Lydgate (128) (England 1370-1450) "Balade Simple"
More tenderly perchance than is my due,
Your spirit sees into my heart...
Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italy 1475-1564) [ILWL]
Deep in my memory was graved the trace
Of all I suffered since I saw thy face;
But now, Beloved, thou hast come to me,
I have erased the record utterly.
Dagh (tr. Khan and Westbrook)
Forget not, when the rest is wholly done
and all her splendors opened one by one
to add that she likes Henry,
for reasons unknown, and fate has bound them fast
one to another in linkages that last
and that are fair to see.
John Berryman (USA 1914-72)
'And Is It Night?'
And is it night? are they thine eyes that shine?
Are we alone, and here? and here, alone?
May I come near, may I but touch thy shrine?
Is jealousy asleep, and is he gone?
O Gods, no more! silence my lips with thine!
Lips, kisses, joys, hap,-- blessings most divine!Oh, come, my dear! our griefs are turned to night,
And night to joys; night blind's pale envy's eyes;
Silence and sleep prepare us our delight;
Oh, cease we then our woes, our griefs, our cries:
Oh, vanish words! words do but passions move;
O dearest life! joy's sweet! O sweetest love!
Anon. in Jones' A Musical Dream (1609) [Ault1]
I quake for wonder at your choice of me:
Why, why and why?
Robert Graves "The Visitation"
(Just momentarily) (it's just lust)
She's learned of your strengths, seen how others love you
she forgives you your crimes, welcomes you back
Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can't believe I see...
A hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree!
Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown
You're so happy
she's chosen you over all the others
Now sleep, and take thy rest,
Once grieved and paine'd wight,
Since she now loves thee best
Who is thy heart's delight.
Let joy be thy soul's guest,
And care be banished quite,
Since she hath thee expressed
To be her favourite.
James Mabbe "The Spanish Bawd" (1630)
...I believe the happiness of the Duke de Nemours, when Madame de Cle`ves confessed her love for him, was greater than Napoleon's at Marengo.
Stendhal (209)
"What's the matter with him today? What does he look the conquering hero for?"...[He] had grown enormously significant and important in his own eyes...
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 392)
...I go about murmuring, 'I have made that dignified girl commit herself, I have, I have', and then I vault over the sofa with exultation.
Walter Bagehot (letter to Elizabeth Wilson, Nov. 22, 1857.
They married in 1859 and lived happily till his death.)
Willie is my child, he is my father
Joni Mitchell "Willie"
He is a genius of love
Tom-Tom Club "Genius of Love"
"I feel I would like to give birth to him."
Brodkey "Sentimental Education"
You are strengthened to bear anything
(Levin in Anna Karenina goes to a government meeting and sees it as a
charade acted from pure love.)
Though it rains,
I won't get wet;
I'll use your love
for an umbrella.
Japanese folk song
...a fluid all-conquering confidence was still making me feel benevolent and full of power.
Murdoch (Black Prince 132)
If your love is mine, I feel so uplifted and so determined that nothing can be degrading to me.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 324)
...before the prow
The gamesome foam goes dancing, and the wake
Grows white behind: so love and love's delight
Swelled to uplift me on their wide expanse,
While all the winds of promise blew me home.
David A. Wasson "Love's Victory" [OOTH]
It is a far cry from the man who sadly reminds himself, "She hath forsworn to love" to the one who exclaims at the pinnacle of his happiness: 'Come what sorrow can!"
Stendhal (129-30)
True love makes a heaven of hell
True love makes a heaven of hell a heaven of Hell.
17th C. lyric (267)
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Shakespeare (286)
When you are combing your hair,
tying it up in a tuft for me,
I feel there is no dying,
when you come and talk about yourself.
Swahili lyric
When two love one another,
they forget all their troubles,
they can do no wrong in each other's eyes,
their love always wins.
Swahili lyric
With each other as beloved,
If only we sleep together,
Then, though like threshed reeds
Things go wrong, let them go wrong--
If only we sleep together.
prince Ki-nashi-no-karu (453 AD)
Love keeps out the cold better than a cloak.
Anonymous [L'A]
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
Sigmund Freud "Letters"
She brings you luck
Open doors of heart
you can see it in her eyes
gazing deep and long, read inwards, evaluate intimately
(Western Grebe)
this gaze soothes the inwards, sufflates the soul,
you feel it for days after
In the seventeenth century, the whole intent of lovers was said to be "to get babies in each other's eyes"; a "baby in the eye" is that diminished reflection of one's self in the iris on another's eye.
Jessamyn West
'Starlight'
"Look up," she said; and all the heavens blazed
With countless myriads of quiet stars,
Whereon a moment silently he gazed,
And drank that peace no trouble ever mars.
Then looking down into her face upturned,
Two other stars that did outshine the rest
Upward to him with such soft splendor yearned
That all her secret was at once confessed.
Then he with kisses did put out their light,
And said, "Oh, strange, but more, dear love, to me
Are thy pure eyes than all the stars of night
That shine in heaven everlastingly!
Night still is night, with every star aglow;
But light were night didst thou not love me so."
John W. Chadwick [OOTH]
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
e. e. cummings (USA 1894-1962)
Thy mirror am I!
Mushafi (India 1750-1824)
(tr. from Urdu by Khan and Westbrook)
Mutuality of tenderness (creak creak)
[radio link, empathy]
synergy
discharge of capacitance
the lover's face: faraway look in her eye
We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.
saint Bernard of Clairvaux (France 1090-1153) Letters
"She could take the whole world and just put it away somewhere, on the other side of the door, and the world didn't matter anymore. The world could not touch us or tell us what to do or make us feel guilty about what we said or what we did."
Ralph Pape "Soap Opera"
Look through mine eyes with thine, True wife,
Round my true heart thine arms entwine;
My other dearer life in life,
Look through my very soul with thine!
Tennyson "The Miller's Daughter"
Take my heart; I shall have it all the more;
Plucking the flowers, we keep the plant in bloom.
Edmond Rostand "Cyrano"
We did not speak one word,
For the beating of our own hearts
Was all the sound we heard.
Richard Monckton Milnes (xx 1809-85) "The Brook-Side"
When he looked at her it often seemed to him that his soul rushed out to her, flowerd like a wave around the contours of her head and was drawn down into the whiteness of her bosom.
Flaubert [MB 229]
'My True Love Hath My Heart'
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given.
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:
There never was a better bargain driven.
My true love hath my heart and I have his.His heart in me, keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him, his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own:
I cherish his, because in me it bides.
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
sir Philip Sidney (251) [gender convention]
But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (letter to Sophia Peabody,
April 17, 1839. They married and lived happily ever after.)
Has not the old earth passed away from us? --are not all things new?
Sophie Peabody (Am. 1811-71)to NH, December 31, 1839.
Yet everything that touches us, you and me,
takes us together as a bow's stroke does,
that out of two strings draws a single voice.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian 1875-1926) "Lovesong"
(tr. M.D. Herter Norton [OLR])
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
Kuan Tao-She>ng (China 1262-1319) [OB]
...slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
Alfred Tennyson (225) (sap!)
I feel shattered but at the same time I feel quite calm.
Murdoch (Black Prince 282)
Fields of heaven
company of the gods
honeymoon
timeless bliss
ecstatic out-of-body sleep-trance
(vision of future >> deja vu?)
At the time when we come into the garden, thou and I...
The stars of heaven will come to gaze upon us...
Rumi (xx 1207-1273)/\ [ILWL]
There are two births: the one, when light
First strikes the new awakened sense;
The other, when two souls unite,
And we must count our life from thence:
When you loved me, and I loved you,
Then both of us were born anew.
William Cartwright (England 1611-43)
"To Chloe" (c1636) [Ault2]
Your love pervades my body
As wine pervades water when
Wine and water mingle.
Egyptian c1200 BC (tr. Pound and Stock)
Nightingales in the plum tree,
Deer in the maples
Me and you:
fish and water.
Japanese folk song
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
John Milton (93) (England 1608-74)/\ "Paradise Lost"
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-- and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
Oh wilderness were Paradise enow!
Omar Khayyam "Rubaiyat"
(Tr. by Edward Fitzgerald, English 1809-83)
I believe myself that romantic love is the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer. In the relation of a man and a woman who love each other with passion and imagination and tenderness, there is something of inestimable value, to be ignorant of which is a great misfortune to any human being.
Bertrand Russell (England 1872-1970)
"Marriage and Morals" (blahblahblah)
A lover cannot be sated by the enjoyment of the beloved.
12th C. Code of Love
We are not the first,
people long ago began it.
Swahili lyric
I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved...
John Donne "The Good-Morrow"
I was made of honey and fudge and marzipan, and at the same time I was made of steel.
Murdoch (Black Prince 280)
Only to dance together in triumph of being together
Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
Shining and touching,
Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.
D.H. Lawrence (200) "Fronleichnam"
Love has great sweetness
if it strikes both sides
Swahili lyric
...Love's greatest delight: that happy state of being perfectly natural with the beloved...
Stendhal (94 "...and of not listening to what
is said to him.")
...And lovely laughter leaps and falls
Upon their lips like madrigals.
Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish 1850-94)
"The Difference" [OOTH]
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.
Christopher Marlowe (232)
"Corinnae Concubitas" (touch wood, damn ye!)
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
Anatole France (France 1844-1924)
"Nothing is as selfish as new love."
Women and Love
Love is an egotism of two. [egoisme a deux]
Mme. de Stael?
Sensitivity to sensitivities
looking through her eyes-- empathy, telepathy
identical twins
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Robert Frost (USA 1875-1963) "The Telephone" [OBAV]
I lookd upon my true loves eye
look'd smil'd and spake thus loveinglye
like to your eys Or like to mine
Our hartes in Motion may Combine
If that eye moves this moves as oft
to the same point with the same thought
if one eye they both are fix't
In single Contemplation mixt,
Soe shall our hearts one Joy pertake
& with your greife my heart shall ake.
17th C. lyric (174)
"Why did you not come to dinner? ...I'm astonished at the clairvoyance of lovers: she was not there."
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 141)
...feeling that she was looking at him, he turned around, smiling.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 487)
He maintained that he and Mme --- were two souls quite outside the common run, who should understand each other at a glance.
Stendhal (100)
"You even resemble me, I feel I'm looking into a mirror." I had the strange feeling that as I was speaking these words I was speaking through her, through the pure echoing emptiness of her being hollowed by love.
Murdoch (Black Prince 339)
Though Alps and Ocons bould devide
the shepeard from his sweetharts side
Love has a trick, a pritty Art
to Cary love from hart to hart...
17th C. lyric (335)
Within my heart I feel Thy joy arise...
Amir (tr. Khan and Westbrook)
...the simplicity of gesture and bearing, the deep earnestness, the look which expresses the precise nuance of feeling so exactly and so candidly...
Stendhal (96)
...enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.
Nathaniel Hawthorne "The A of the B"
'The Pregnant Comment'
Opening one day a book of mine,
I absent, Hester found a line
Praised with a pencil mark, and this
She left transfigured with a kiss.When next upon the page by chance,
Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,
And whirl my fancy where it sees
Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,
Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,
Still young and glad as Homer's verse,
"What mean." I ask, "these sudden joys?
This feeling fresher than a boy's?
What makes this line, familiar long,
New as the first bird's April song?
I could, with sense illumined thus,
Clear doubtful texts in Aeschylus!"Laughing, one day she gave the key,
My riddle's open sesame;
Then added, with a smile demure,
Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure,
"If what I left there give you pain,
You-- you-- can take it off again;
'T was for my poet, not for him,
Your Doctor Donne there!"Earth grew dim
And wavered in a golden mist,
As rose, not paper leaves I kissed.
Donne, you forgive? I let you keep
Her precious comment, poet deep.
James Russell Lowell [OOTH]
Talking
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me-- toll
The silver iterance!-- only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence, with thy soul.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (England 1806-61)
"Sonnets from the Portuguese" XXI
(Iterance means repetition)
"...you don't have to explain anything to each other, you guess each other's thoughts."
Flaubert [MB 124]
Playing
(switching clothes)
Mutual vows
Sweetheart, I beg you to renew and seal
With a not supererogatory kiss
Our contract of 'For Ever.'
Learned judges
Deplore the household sense 'interminable':
True love, they rule, never acknowledges
Future or past, only a perfect now...
But let it read 'For Ever', anyhow!
Robert Graves "For Ever"
You are mine, I am yours,
of this you must be sure.
You are locked
within my heart,
the little key is lost:
there you must remain for evermore!
(Germany 1160) (tr. P. Dronke)
"See, it's like this: I think that what you look for in another person, finally, is something... which lets you know this person will go the distance with you. That they will be there for you, that they will not collapse when you... need all their strength. And of course you silently make the same promise to be there for them... to go the distance."
Ralph Pape "Soap Opera"
"No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and I'll never marry anybody but you-- and you ain't to ever marry anybody but me, either."
Mark Twain "Tom Sawyer"
First touch
(postponing first touch)
squeeze hand
The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of hands between you and your beloved.
Stendhal (104)
...the very essence of his being seemed to flow down into that moist palm.
Flaubert [MB 104]
"I dearly love him, but I cannot bear to touch him." This is a denial of love, for love loves to touch.
Jessamyn West
Does a woman live more acutely and completely in her body than a man does in his? Is she less divided than he? Less alienated from her body? Is touch more deeply experienced by her? ...In the night she awakens to kiss the flesh he touched, and to wonder.
Jessamyn West
...His hand, with gentle care,
Did wound me in the side,
And in my body all my senses died.All things I then forgot,
My cheek on him who for my coming came;
All ceased, and I was not,
Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them....O burn that burns to heal!
O more than pleasant wound!
And O soft hand, O touch most delicate...
st. John of the Cross (Spanish, 1542-91) [ILWL]
Smile-DPROX
open heart
souls approaching, feeling out each other's intimate inner spaces
Then, like the moon which emerges from among the clouds, the concealed woman begins to radiate her hidden vitality and relinquish her fictitious countenance before the man.
Ortega (144)
Tentative touches
touch possession first
accidental touches
adolescent games of keepaway
read responses-- stiffening
don't touch head
arms are safe
Hugs
*[Moo] reflex in infants
bear hug
side-by-side
Rubbing noses, etc.
gazes lock
moving close
skewing noses
I held Manon in such close embrace in my arms, that we occupied but one place in the coach.
Abbe Prevost "Manon Lescaut"
Kiss
love's first kiss
(postponing first kiss)
risk of refusal
kiss of marriage
They hadn't kissed then, nor did they kiss each other for several days afterward. It was a tacit confession that they suspected the presence of passion, and in such cases, if one is at all practical, one stands back, one dawdles, one doesn't rush in to confront the beast in its lair. Or to put it another way, one doesn't go tampering with the floodgates.
Brodkey "Sentimental Education"
Sensitivity of lips
expressiveness of muscles
symbolism of eating
(Germany has 30 words for kiss)
(swapping spit-- no longer gross)
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Leigh Hunt (England 1784-1859) "Rondeau"
Put your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above:
Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?
Samuel Ferguson (103) (Ireland 1810-86)
"Cean Dubh Deelish"
What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve:
The sure, sweet cement, glue and lime of love.
Robert Herrick "A Kiss"
A kiss, when all is said, what is it?
...'tis a secret
Told to the mouth instead of to the ear.
Rostand "Cyrano"
...those two melting rubies...
George Wither "A Stolen Kiss"
...this concentrated intensity of pure joy, this sudden white-hot rapturous pressure of lips upon lips, being upon being.
Murdoch (Black Prince 277)
'Socrates to Agathon'
My soul, when I kissed Agathon, crept up to my lips,
As though it wished (poor thing!) to cross over to him.
Plato (tr. Dudley Fitts)
But my heart burnes; I cannot silent be.
Then, since, deare life, you faine would have me peace,
And I, mad with delight, want wit to cease,
Stop you my mouth with still, still kissing me.
sir Philip Sidney "A Nobler Exercise"
Soul meets soul on lovers' lips
Shelley
'Eden'
When I kiss Eve
all the clothes dance
and all the boys jump up on to the roof
And
do you know what the dinner does?
The dinner comes down from the big school
then it lays itself on the tables
and eats itself up
Do you know what the plates do?
They gather themselves up
they go to Mrs Herd
they get into the washing-basin
they wash themselves
and they put themselves back on the shelves
And
do you know what the pictures do?
They come down
throw the old ones in the fire
then the crayons get out
pull out a piece of paper
they draw another picture
then the cellotape comes out of the cupboard
and sticks the pictures up
And
do you know what the school does?
The school pulls itself down
and builds itself up into a churchWhen I kiss Eve
magic-stuff comes
out through our mouths andDo you know what the plants do?
They all die
then the seeds in the bag
come into the garden
then they pop into the ground
And
do you know what the trees do?
They spring themselves down and die
the seeds walk about
in the mud
and the wind comes along and blows over them
and grows up into apple trees and
cherry trees grow up
then some sunflowers came
and tulips came
and roses came
And and
do you know what the lights do?
They come down
the bulbs go to the shop
to buy another bulb
Do you know what the piano does?
The piano plays itself and
all the toys jump
and play with themselves
And
do you know what the sky does?
All the sky jumps down
in the night it did
the sun fell the wind dropped
and half the world fell down and
all the flies were dead
and all the wasps were dead
no more flies and no more wasps
And
And
And
do you know what the plates do?
They gather themselves up...
Sean Thomas, son of D.M. Thomas (age 4)
I belong still to your race
Of warm mouth and bone.
Gregory Grigson (201) (xx 1905- )
"Bibliotheca Bodleiana"
Dolphins nibble, cats nip
dogs nuzzle and lick, chimps press lips
nipple-sucking reflex
[article]
Crimond out of bed was not a kisser or cuddler. He did not waste the electricity of passion by continual contact.
Murdoch "The Book and the Brotherhood" (179)
Voices softer, higher, slower
breathing, purring, drawling
diminutives
Embrace, swaying
(vestibular signal-- rocking cradle)
slow-dancing (arose after 1900)
pelvis lock-- shifting gears-- lust
the scene switches into slo-mo, open mouth
drooping lids, dreamy face
(no big smiles)
breathing deepens
Keep on movin' in
Keep on tunin' in
Synchronize rhythms now...
Kate Bush "Feel It"
He lifts you in his arms
Her bosom heaves
she invites you up to her apartment
it's warm and smells nice
your cock swells in anticipation
tittilation
making out
bundling
'To Call Up the Shades'
One candle is enough, its gentle light
will be more suitable, will be more gracious,
when the Shades come, the Shades of Love.One candle is enough, tonight the room
Should not have too much light. In deep revery,
all receptiveness, and with the gentle light--
in this deep revery I'll form visions
to call up the Shades, the Shades of Love.
C.P. Cavafy (tr. Keeley and Sherrard)
Chimp male just right out displays his erection,
even flicks it up and down
It may be easier
for a woman to give in to a man she doesn't care about
than to one she does
(more to lose perhaps)
("I couldn't understand how a friend could also be a lover. Instead of
sleeping with him, I slept with his friends, boys I didn't even like..."
see above)
Suppressing urges
responsibility-- pregnancy
good girl, bad girl
so easily given, this precious gift
(what's wrong with a degree of romantic anticipation?)
Q: Is it good for romance to live together before marriage?
Barbara Cartland: No! No! No! ...a girl who sleeps about before marriage is putting her whole future in jeopardy.
Presuming willingness, asking, expecting equity
Finding the key
the galeodes kaspicus turkestanus spider male wins
instant submission
by touching a certain spot on the female's belly,
which she's defended murderously
Signalling readiness, bedroom eyes
Canada goose-- dipping head under water and tossing water over her back
A wise woman should never surrender for the first time by pre-arrangement-- it should be an unexpected good fortune.
Stendhal (215)
You give yourself to him
you're her first
he's a virgin
(postponing lovemaking)
Nakedness
nipple as erotic focus
(small large, pink brown, flat erect)
Legs part
making love, slow, quick
There should between true lovers be
An excellent immodesty.
Alan Porter (xx 1899-1942)
"A Plea that Shame Be Forgotten"
What is sweeter than the human body?
Two human bodies as they rise and fall.
What is sweeter than two loving bodies?
There is nothing sweeter at all.
Adrian Mitchell (237) (xx 1932- )
"Calypso's Song to Ulysses"
What did your body say to mine
deep in velvet night's delight?
William Rose Benet "The Dust Which Is God"
When naked both, thou seemest not to be
Contiguous, but continuous parts of me:
And we in bodies are together brought
So near, our souls may know each other's thought
Without a whisper: yet I do aspire
To come more close to thee, and to be higher.
sir Francis Kynaston (24) (xx 1587-1642)
"To Cynthia on her Embraces"
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
Allen Ginsberg (USA b.1926) "Song" (1954)
Four arms, two necks, one wreathing;
Two pairs of lips, one breathing;
Two hearts that multiply
Sighs interchangeably...
In Weelkes' Airs (1608) [Ault1]
'i like my body'
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more
i like your body. i like what it does
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slow stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbsand possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new
e. e. cummings (date)
The stag approached her; she ran away; he chased her; she stopped and came to him; rubbed her whole length along his ribs from fore to hind end; made as if to mount him; he turned to mount her; she ran away; he chased; she stopped; he mounted and served her. When he was sliding off she kicked up her heels, hit him in the belly, and ran away. He roared and followed her again; she came to him and rubbed herself along each side; licked his muzzle, walked under his chin, throwing back her head, licked his sheath for a moment, made as if to mount him; he turned, mounted and served her again.
Fraser Darling (xx 1903-79) A Herd of Red Deer
Sex then reveals itself as the great connective principle whereby we overcome duality, the force which made separateness as an aspect of oneness at some moment of bliss in the mind of God.
Murdoch (Black Prince 217)
Loss of estrus in humans may mean sex has become more a communicative than a procreative act
Sex
sexual skin
full-body contact
discharge of capacitance
cooling of hotspots, warming of cold
scents
"In bed I feel safe, secure, natural, cut off from the responsibilities
of life."
A wall in her collapses
she's wide open
Hunger and anger of all being
Will wake again, and dark foreseeing.
Now these rest by murmuring springs
Of single blood that in them sings.
William Rose Benet "The Lovers"
Self-consciousness, excitement
good sex, disappointing sex
passionate hungry desperate
variations
performance anxiety
communicating desires
inexperience (Victorian censorship of sex manuals)
impotence
mechanical sex, boring
biological outlet, hygienic sex
(vibrator as aid to orgasm)
Where had she learned that depravity (corruption), so profound and so artfully concealed that it was almost intangible (immate'rielle)?
Flaubert [MB 240]
The Pill, birth control
shotgun weddings
stock market exhilaration
VD
interruptions
Folklore belief that sexual abstinence increases creativity
(Chopin letter 1835)
ritual functions that require abstention:
shamanism
lucky lady
Sleeping together
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms.
Yeats "Lullaby"
The whole world shines
I wish we could go on sleeping together,
Like this, to the end of eternity.
Egyptian c1200 BC (tr. Pound & Stock)
I be her angel brightly a-drest,
Watche'n her slumber while she do rest.
William Barnes "My Love's Guardian Angel"
(not quite in context)
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Robert Burns "Sweet Afton" [MW]
(Waking up together)
Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new...?
Brian Wilson (USA b.1942) of The Beach Boys
Redonning your armor, rebuilding your walls, facing the world
Calling afterwards [important!- Merser HI]
In passionate love, intimacy is not so much the perfect happiness but the last step on the way to it.
Stendhal (104)
Species that die after mating,
after egg-laying:
squid, salmon, honeybee drone
female eats male: mantis, orb weaver spider
Anxiety-- he could walk in at any moment
guilt (even within marriage)
Their illicit pleasure has been fulfilled.
They get up and dress quickly, without a word.
They come out of the house separately, furtively
And as they move off down the street a bit unsettled,
it seems they sense that something about them betrays
what kind of bed they've just been lying on.
C.P. Cavafy "Their Beginning" (tr. Keeley & Sherrard)
Looking at him, she felt her degradation physically and she could not utter another word. He felt what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has deprived of life.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 161)
...she was wondering why for others, Betsy, for instance (whose secret liaison with Tushkevich she knew about), it was all so easy, while for her it was so agonizing.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 198)
When she thought of her son and his future attitude to the mother who had given up his father, she was so terrified at what she had done that she no longer reasoned, but like a woman, only tried to reassure herself with false argument and words...
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 201)
Blame
(madonna's a whore)
...making [her husband] responsible for everything bad she could find in him, forgiving him nothing because of the terrible thing she had done to him.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 201)
Mutual love concealed from society
discretion
fear of discovery
Who knows not how to conceal knows not how to love. Love disclosed seldom endures.
12th C. Code of Love
Did the others understand what they saw? Could they decipher the secret code of signs and glances?
Nizami "Layla"
Ignoble pairings, adultery
parents, church, convention, propriety
Children of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
Wm Blake "A Little Girl Lost"
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door
Wm Blake (142) "The Garden of Love"
He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulty, exposed as they were to the eyes of the whole of the particular world in which they lived, of concealing their love, of indulging in lies and deception.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 195)
Parents would disapprove [Winter's Tale]
parents have chosen another (2 Gentlemen of Verona)
legal husband, legal wife, children
jealous exes-- boyfriend, girlfriend
Leander's father knew where he had been,
And for the same mildly rebuked his son,
Thinking to quench the sparkles new begun.
But love, resisted once, grows passionate,
And nothing more than counsel lovers hate...
Christopher Marlowe "Hero and Leander" (sparkles!)
"God, how I live in misery
Since I'm beaten night and day
for my sweetheart's sake!
But the more my mother beats me,
the less will she ever take
my wild thoughts away!"
(France 13th C.) (tr. P. Dronke)
A charming girl of sixteen was becoming too fond of a handsome young man of the same age, who used to make a practice of passing beneath her window every evening at nightfall. Her mother invited him to spend a week with them in the country. It was a bold remedy, I admit, but the girl was of a romantic disposition, and the young man a trifle dull; within three days she despised him.
Stendhal (230, Fr. 65)
...the eternal bugaboo of respectable families: the shadowy, pernicious creature, the siren, the fabulous monster dwelling in the depths of love.
Flaubert [MB 250]
In Colardeau's [version of Lothario], Calista's father arranges for Lothario to be assigned to a long and dangerous expedition.
Stendhal (254)
In affairs of love, young people's hearts are generally much wiser than old peoples' heads.
Henry Poor, a young lawyer in Maine in 1840 [HH]
They turn your picture to the wall
Possessive parents (losing my baby)
...how strange it had seemed to think of [her] as a wife for anyone-- his little daughter.
Wood Rittenhouse (USA c1885) [HH]
Arguing
"Fatal passion! Have you yourself never felt its force? Is it possible that you, with the same blood in your veins that flows in mine, should have passed through life unscathed by the same excitements?"
Abbe Prevost "Manon Lescaut"
Closing out others
...Levin resented Dolly's remark. She could not understand how sublime and beyond her it all was, and she should not have dared to mention it. "She is a nice girl" were such ordinary, such common words, so out of tune with his feeling.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 405)
Certain people who know that we are much together often insult me about you. I listen to them calmly, disdaining to answer them but their least word tumbles my heart about like a bird in a storm.
James Joyce (letter to uneducated Nora Barnacle,
August 29, 1904)
No, No! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of ether;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness...
Ezra Pound "A Virginal" [MW]
Drainpipes climbed to windows
smuggling letters
calling from payphone
Love knoweth no law.
John Lyly (England 1553?-1606) "Euphues" (1579)
Where there is love there is no sin.
Montenegrin proverb [L'A]
A woman belongs by right to a man who loves her and whom she loves more than life.
Stendhal (246 Fr. 104*)
And, though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them....
Thomas Campion (107)
"My Sweetest Lesbia" (1601, after Catallus)
We were young and gripped by the awful compelling force of physical love.
Murdoch [Word Child 122]
Love laughs at locksmiths.
George Colman the younger (xx 1762-1836) [HH]
Someone sees you together
tattletale
the gossips spread the news
the whole town knows by nightfall
loveletters intercepted
office romance
pearls/ swine
Let those who talk, talk,
let them go on spreading rumors.
Why is our love so strange for them?
For me it is a miracle.
Swahili lyric
Feigning love for some other
(being mistaken by the beloved)
lies, suicide [Romeo and Juliet]
Lovers' Leap
Majnun won fame as a lover, for he carried love's burden as long as he lived.
Nizami "Layla"
Love renounced
"I won't be able to give him a family" (age, sterility)
He tried to force himself to stop loving her, but as soon as he heard her footsteps he would feel helplessly weak, like a drunkard at the sight of liquor.
Flaubert [MB 244]
'Psyche with the Candle'
Love which is the most difficult mystery
Asking from every young one answers
And most from those most eager and most beautiful--Love is a bird in a fist:
To hold it hides it, to look at it lets it go.
It will twist loose if you lift so much as a finger.
It will stay if you cover it-- stay but unknown and
invisible.
Either you keep it forever with fist closed
Or let it fling
Singing in fervor of sun and in song vanish.
There is no answer other to this mystery.
Archibald Macleish (USA 1892-1982) [MLP]
'Eternity'
He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Wm Blake
It's too intense
She couldn't help thinking that what she was with comparative strangers was much pleasanter than what she was with Elgin. With him she was capricious, untruthful, often sharp-tongued, giddy with emotions that came and went, and while one emotion might be ennobling, having six or seven in the space of an hour was undignified and not decent at all.
Brodkey "Sentimental Education"
Public announcement
It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.
Muriel Spark (New Yorker, July 10, 1965)
We stood together, side by side, rooted
In the iron heart of circumambient hills,
Parents to a new age, weeping in awe
That the lot had fallen, of all mankind, on us
Now sealed as love's exemplars.
Robert Graves "Iron Palace"
Reactions
ostracism
"I've flung convention to the wind [in coming here to visit Anna], but other strait-laced people will give you the cold shoulder until you are married."
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 530)
Her friends lecture you: "Be good to that woman-- she means a lot to us."
You have to get married
she says you're the father
Confessions, admissions, dropping masks
(timing)
By this confession [of the duration of my love] you will see I am past all disguise with you and that you have reason to be satisfied with knowing as much of my heart as I do myself.
Dorothy Osborne (letter to Wm Temple 1653)
He had made up his mind from the very first to tell her two things, that he was not as pure as she and, secondly, that he was not a believer.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 413)
Ultimatum: marry me or it goes no further
social pressure: so are you going to marry her, or what?
Pronoun change-- I >> We
Two places >> one place
(pooling utensils, appliances: doubles)
Ready for marriage? (for remarriage)
(statistics-- 90% of men marry by age 27)
saying no to all the others
...all the women of the world
For you I will refuse.
possibly William Hunnis* (England d.1597)
"A Nosegay Always Sweet" (c1576) [Ault1]
One should not think about it too much when marrying or taking pills.
Dutch proverb
[Proverbs against marriage-- Oscar Wilde]
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; but what they do not we are told expressly, that they neither marry nor are given in marriage.
Jonathan Swift (England* 1667-1745)
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Fear of marriage
"the last night of my girl life"
loss of freedom
legal, money complications
lawyers-- contract
end of pleasant courtship
setting date, backing out
(I love you but I can't commit forever)
Superstitions
not seeing the bride before the wedding
something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
Nerves
(Gogol: groom jumps out window)
"...I am not worthy of you. You cannot possibly consent to marry me. Think it over. You have made a mistake."
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 447)
Wedding
formality of 19th C American wedding
(crying at wedding)
father hands daughter over to care of another man
beauty of the vows
throwing the bouquet
carry the bride over the threshold
honeymoon
To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part...
The Book of Common Prayer
Love is the flower, marriage is the fruit.
Finnish proverb [L'A]
Investments in building relationship
"Falling in love" ...has about the same relation to love as the idea for a story has to the ordeal of its writing. Every man is a hero far from the bayonet; every woman is a heroine of love until she starts practicing that arduous craft...
Jessamyn West
Security- supportive to weaknesses
shared burdens
sensitive to hurts, to insecurities
soothing, compassionate
(dyadic biological healing mechanism)
women more supportive
crises: loss of parent
...and in her arms to forget all his cares.
Stendhal (240, Fr. 93)
Tell me something good
Tell me that you love me
Rufus
Love does not "assume" responsibility. Love is responsible. This is its nature; it cannot be otherwise. When one is conscious of "assuming" responsibility, one acts dutifully, or conscientiously.
Jessamyn West
Button up your overcoat
When the wind is free
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me.
De Sylva/ Brown/ Henderson
For two weeks she didn't leave me for an instant. She didn't shut an eye all that time. She nursed me with a skill and devotion such as no woman has ever shown for the most loved of men!
Prosper Merimee "Carmen"
He reproached himself for having forgotten Emma {who was ill]... as though all his thoughts belonged to her and he could not stop thinking about her for a moment without being guilty of stealing something from her.
Flaubert [MB 183]
During her illness he had learned to know her thoroughly, to see into her very soul, and it semed to him that he had never loved her before.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 421)
No woman, no shed no tears
No woman no cry
Bob Marley (Jamaican 1945-81)
Spending time, sharing, investing, equity
shopping for furnishings, for house
getting settled
house >> home (It takes a heap o' living)
Western grebes gather weeds together for their nest
(female breaks off just before this critical point 97% of time)
sight of finished nest triggers hormones
in ring dove, in mouthbrooder
...there are few women who do not take deep pleasure in the idea of making rooms into a home... I cannot believe... that the man who gives a woman a fur coat has any of that complete pleasure that a woman who opens the door of home in the evening to reveal to a returning man the gift of an orderly home and a nourishing meal experiences, gifts that gave her pleasure to make that are an extension of her personality, of her very body.
Jessamyn West
He now savoured for the first time the ineffable delicacy of feminine refinements (l'inexprimable delicatesse des e'le'gances feminines)
Flaubert [MB 229]
'Madonna of the Evening Hours'
All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired
I call: "Where are you?"
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet.
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down.
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.
Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet, Te Deums of the
Canterbury bells.
Amy Lowell [OBAV]
'A Light Left On'
In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find a light left on,
Falling on silent flowers,
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere,
Had been away for hours.When we came home together
We found the inside weather.
All of our love unended
The quiet light demanded,
And we gave, in a look
At yellow walls and open book.
The deepest world we share
And do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.
May Sarton (USA b.1912) [MLP]
'Home Comfort'
And at night the Septette of Beethoven,
And grandmother by in her chair,
And the foot of all feet on the sofa
Beating delicate time to the air.
Charles Kingsley [OOTH]
Housepride may have contributed, at times, towards the saving of many women.
Murdoch (Black Prince 86)
Taking walks, watching a fire
someone I can talk to
sharing your day
talking about everything, deep things
About what affairs soever he go,
He must show her all his mind;
None of his counsel she may be kept fro,
Else is he a man unkind.
Nicholas Udall (England 1505-56) (c1553) [Ault1]
In Italy, one can always tell the beloved everything that comes into one's head; in fact one has to think aloud. There is a certain state of mind, resulting from intimacy and from frankness responding to frankness, which can only be reached in this way.
Stendhal (162)
He sat thinking and writing and all the time he never ceased for a moment being joyfully conscious of her presence.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 485)
The more she got to know Vronsky, the more she loved him.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 467)
Perfectly natural behavior and intimacy can exist only in passionate love, for in every other kind one is aware that a rival may be favoured.
Stendhal (265, FR. 159)
Like man and wife who nightly keep
Inconsequent debate in sleep
As they dream side by side.
Robert Graves "Full Moon"
'Love'
Doubt not our love--
A phoenix bird,
Which neither cries nor flaps its wings,
Yet is alive.
Yosano Akiko
Whom we love best, to them we can say least.
English proverb in John Ray
Preserving each others' secrets
There's a charming Irish folk-belief that husband and wife should never
speak the other's first name (calling themselves Mr. O'Reilly and Mrs.
O'Reilly instead) for fear the fairies will hear the love in their
voices and, realizing their value, steal the beloved away.
By figuring on the ground,
I can draw a line to the stars;
Though intimate with her soft body,
I can't fathom my lover's depths.
Sixth Dalai Lama
"It's all a jungle-- but maybe at least if you're married, it's a private jungle."
Women and Love
A marriage is a very secret place.
Murdoch (Black Prince 44)
Kisses as communication
cool chaste
hasty brisk smack
melting hungry
The moth's kiss first!
Kiss me as if you made believe
You were not sure, this eve,
How my face, your flower, had pursed
Its petals up; so, here and there
You brush it, till I grow aware
Who wants me, and wide open burst.
Robert Browning "The Moth's Kiss First"
(Parents' place?)
rights of privacy and possession
Dancing
strutting, going out
solicitude of man for woman-- matching her pace
one blazes the trail, the other follows
being seen together
travelling together
pride
...in new places the people we love appear to us somehow new, too.
Proust (letter to Louisa de Mornand, 1904)
Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (xx 1751-1816)
Embarrassment in public
He resembles George Harrison of the Beatles
(But he wears his hair
Tied in a small bow at the back).
I love him, but it embarrasses me
To walk down the street with him...
James Rado (b.1939) and Gerome Ragni (b.1942)
"Frank Mills" from Hair (196x)
Being on time
gentlemanly manners
treat her like a lady
Future plans
getting attached, coming to trust
investing your ambitions in him
Lance would talk to me for hours about the plans he had to build a star-shaped house that he had designed.
~I didn't know anybody who had dreams like that, and more than anything I wanted to live in his star-house with him.
The 100th Boyfriend
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
Antoine ("Four-Eyes") Saint-Exupery (France 1900-44)
Education, growth, maturity, sensitivity, taste
vulnerable side
chopsticks, classics
Decisionmaking
negotiation, compromise
decisive, wishy washy
...the youthful spouse's need to take control, his reflective anxiety about the future, his calmingly classified commitment.
Murdoch (Black Prince 324) (actually "I felt none of...")
Master-servant
love, honor, and obey
s&m, Blue Velvet ("Hit me!")
control/ out-of-control
suffer faults
worshipful
I hunted you for my pleasure,
I caught you for my desire,
I bound you for my joy,
Your wounds have made us one.
Mechthild of Magdeburg [ILWL]
I got a brown skin woman
With her front teeth crowned with gold
She got a lien on my body
And a mortgage on my soul.
Tommy McClennan (USA 1908-62?)
Sharing wife to cement friendship (Inuit of Arctic)
Rubbing off
he's a new person
born again
[Taming of Shrew]
changed, different
(sparkle gone?)
'Sonnet VI'
Chasten your fears, I have not been destroyed,
All that was in me once is living still;
Only I know there was this slender void,
This threading vein through an unconscious hill.
Empty of you, it nourished every part
With nothingness, and I was none the worse.
Filled with you suddenly, it is the start
Of older riches than I can rehearse:
Joy like a hidden river that no stone
Ever is worn away by where it runs;
Peace in the darkest passages of bone,
And buried light as from a hundred suns;
With tolerance, that sweetens as it flows
This blood whose red remembers late the rose.
Mark Van Doren [MLP]
With how benign intent
Rememberest thou my breast,
Where thou alone abidest secretly,
And in thy sweet ascent,
With glory and good possessed,
How delicately thou teachest love to me!
st, John of the Cross [ILWL]
A week ago; and it seems like a life,
and I have not yet learned to know myself:
I am so other than I was, so strange,
grown younger and grown older all in one...
Augusta Webster "The Happiest Girl in the World"
Levin had changed a great deal since his marriage; he had become patient... so many serious aspects of life had been revealed to him which because of his thoughtless attitude to them he considered unimportant before...
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 643)
He never argued against her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was becoming her mistress more than she was his.
Flaubert [MB 240]
...his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference:
Yet in the long years liker they must grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words...
(or vice versa)
Tennyson "The Woman's Cause" [OOTH]
Love diminishes the delicacy of women, and increases that of men.
Jean Paul Richter [L'A]
The woman's influence is, especially, atmospheric and, for that reason, ubiquitous and invisible.
Ortega (120)
Sharing toothbrush
pet names
Families, pets, friends, politics, humor
stepkids
I cannot stand the shows so instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
Murdoch (Black Prince 30)
The assertion made by a happy marriage often alienates...
Murdoch [Word Child 7]
Money
talking about money
Labor
cooking, cleaning
defending the nest
fight for her honor
(Helen of Troy)
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boast two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her...
Robert Browning "To E.B.B." [OOTH]
I punch the clock, but it's okay
I love a girl who takes my breath away
Declan McManus (England b.1954)
Reasons for parting
off to work! (no! call in sick!)
privacy
"go away for now"
Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us;
And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;
Long before October returns,
Seas of blood will have parted us;
And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love
in mine!
Emily Bronte (1818-48) [ELP]
...he had to have an occupation and an interest apart from his love to help him refresh himself and have a rest from the emotions that agitated him so violently.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 186)
Duty
Love must have wings to fly away from love
And to fly back again.
Edwin Arlington Robinson "Tristram"
Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
Richard Lovelace "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"
(I smell a rat...)
Force (Layla and Majnun)
...Layla's parents kept their daughter at home. They guarded her carefully and saw to it that Qays [Majnun] had no chance to meet her. They kept the new moon hidden from the fool...
Nizami "Layla"
Parting without ever having touched, kissed, consummated
Time apart
she goes away
wish you could quit this stupid job
(lonely puppy on a leash, outside the grocery store)
loneliness, depression, restlessness and worry
(what might happen to him?)
peck on the cheek in the front seat
Fair, gentle lover, how ill you endure
your great ache for me, out on the salt sea...
from "Chansonnier du Roi" (France 13th C.) (tr. Dronke)
It was a strong hour the hour of his departure!
Stendhal (248, Fr. 114)
(from the correspondence of Richardson)
Kiss me and take my soul in keeping,
Since I must go, now day is near.
"The Wakening" John Attye's First Book of Airs (1622)
My Love bound me with a kiss
That I should no longer stay;
When I felt so sweet a bliss
I had less power to part away...
Thomas Campion "Kisses" (1591) [Ault1]
'A Farewell'
With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My very Dear
Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear.
It needs no art,
With faint, averted feet
And many a tear,
In our opposed paths to persevere.
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There's any hope, it is so far away.
But, O, my Best,
When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nursling Grief,
Is dead;
And no dew blurs our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies,
Perchance we may,
Where now the night is day,
And even through faith of still averted feet
Making full circle of our banishment,
Amazed meet;
The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet
Seasoning the termless feast of our content
With tears of recognition never dry.
Coventry Patmore [ELP]
Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet"
When we are parted, let me lie
In some far corner of thy heart,
Silent, and from the world apart,
Like a forgotten melody.
Charles Hamilton Ai:de (1830-1906) "When We are Parted"
'Last Night'
Only last night
I saw my darling;
Why should I long for her
Again this morning?
Hitomaro's collection (8th C)
...he felt so restless without her and so impatient a desire for the time to pass quickly till next morning when he would see her again and have her as his own forever, that he dreaded like death the fourteen hours which he would have to spend without her.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 405)
...the constant thought of Odette gave the moments during which he was separated from her the same peculiar charm as those in which she was at his side. ...like a pet animal... he would stroke and fondle it, warm himself with it...
Proust [SiL ]
That sweet thought which love oft sends me.
Stendhal (173, from the 12th C. Provenc,al)
Le'on now seemed taller, handsomer, more charming, less distinct, although he was separated from her, he had not left her: he was still there, and everything in the house seemed to retain his shadow.
Flaubert [MB 107]
He evoked her presence with all the strength of his desire and his memories.
Flaubert [MB 223]
...he hopes her heart can hear three thousand miles
Joni Mitchell
O you who on the road of Love pass by,
Attend and see
If any grief there be as heavy as mine.
Hear me and then consider: am not I
The keep and key
Of all the torments sorrow can combine?
Dante "Vita Nuova", on Beatrice's absence
...often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
John Donne (48) "A Nocturnal"
See that building, which, when my mistress living
Was pleasure's essence,
See how it droopeth, and how nakedly it looketh
Without her presence...
(c1627) [Ault2]
"A Well-Wishing to a Place of Pleasure"
...when every morning I wake up, I look for you, it seems to me that half of myself is missing...
Gabriel Honore de Mirabeau (France 1749-91)
(letter from prison to Sophie de Monnier, c1780.
When he was finally released, their love had cooled.)
When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea.
Edward Bulwer Lytton (xx 1805-73)
"When Stars are in the Quiet Skies"
What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?
How shall I charm the interval that lowers
Between this time and that sweet time of grace?
Frances Anne Kemble (xx 1809-93) "Absence"
Would God that it were holiday!
That with my Love I might go play;
With woe my heart is weary;
My whole delight is in her sight,
Would God I had her company
Her company...
Thomas Deloney (England 1543?-1607?)
(1597) [Ault1]
Blow, northern wynd,
Send thou me my sweeting
(270) (c1300)
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
16th C. lyric [ELP]
Would that I could learn to fly and come to you and make obeisance to you.
Taus to Apollonius (Rome* 2nd C.)
Darling, be home soon
John Sebastian
Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
a long, lonely time.
Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much,
are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love,
God speed your love to me!
Hy Zaret and Alex North "Unchained Melody"
Prayers, telepathic blessings
"All I now ask of Providence is, to vouchsafe me strength enough to reach her presence, and after that, to dispose as it pleaseth of my future fate, and of my life itself. Beyond that, I have no prayer to utter."
Abbe Prevost "Manon Lescaut"
If, in the distance, he espied tents and campfires, he was attracted like a night-moth, as if they were secret signs sent out by his beloved.
Nizami "Layla"
If a gust of wind sweeps by, or a cloud sails past in the sky, he believes them to be greetings from her and he thinks he can inhale her scent. He recites his poems, hoping that the wind or a cloud will carry them along to his beloved.
Nizami "Layla"
Telepathic summons
"...it seems no less
Than that all circling winds and waters press
To bring me tidings how your life is led;
And I could hear the whisper of your name
Around the world..."
James T. McKay (xx ) "The Whispering Gallery" [OOTH]
Imagining what she's doing
at this particular moment
"When the clock strikes midnight, think of me!"
Flaubert [MB 164]
Exiled in some brilliant salon, I used to watch the magnificent clock for the exact moment when she would be leaving her lodging on foot, even in the rain, to visit her friend.
Stendhal (129)
Mrs Lenin standing for hours at a certain spot on the square outside the prison so he may catch a glimpse of her
Appeals to the jailer
Loveletters (songs)
talking on the phone
(her tender, happy face, leaning into it)
Majnun gets a letter from Layla and tears off his clothes, dancing and
whirling until he collapses unconscious.
Judge not my passion by my want of skill:
Many love well, though they express it all;
And I your censure could with pleasure bear,
Would you but soon return, and speak it here.
Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea (xx 1661-1720)
"A Letter to Daphnis" (1685) [ELP]
Born of pain and longing, their song had the power to break the unhappiness of the world.
Nizami "Layla"
And dost not thou think that to know particulars of thy health, and how thou spendest thy time, are pleasing subjects unto me, though thou hast no other business to write of?
Charles I (England 1600-49)
(letter to Henrietta Maria April 9, 1645)
...I shall suffer very much if I don't get a line or a book from you from time to time, or some other proof that you think of me.
Emilie Bardach (xx 1872-1955)
(letter to Ibsen, Feb. 7 1890)
...the first glance to see how many pages there are, the second to see how it ends, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering over each phrase and word, the taking possession, the absorbing of them, one by one, and finally the choosing of the one that will be carried in one's thoughts all day, making an exquisite accompaniment to the dull prose of life.
Edith Wharton (USA 1862-1937)
[Antony] had frequently at the public audience of kings and princes received [from Cleopatra] amorous messages written in tablets made of onyx and crystal...
Plutarch (Rome c66)
citing charges urged (and probably invented) by Calvisius
(tr. Dryden and Clough)
He did not need to think out what to say. How long had they grown in his heart, his love and his pain! Now he brought them out from the depths like a diver, spreading the precious stones before himself in the light of day, and stringing them together to a necklace of letters, of words, of points and curves and flourishes. Stone by stone he thus composed an image of his grief.
Nizami "Layla"
I am yours, however distant you may be!
Your sorrow, when you grieve, brings grief to me.
There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me,
There sings no bird but calls your name to me.
Each memory that has left its trace with me
Lingers for ever, as if part of me.
Nizami "Layla"
You go mad with pain
from fear she'll meet someone new
change her mind, close his heart
someone will poison her against you
A flame burns in my heart, a flame beyond measure, which has turned my being to ashes... His heart had suffered shipwreck... everything that binds human beings had fallen away from him... He was a prisoner in the land of love, and no one could bring him back.
Nizami "Layla"
Will I see you
In September
Or lose you
To a summer love?
Sid Wayne
Someone has instilled in you a mistrust of my words and feelings; everything seems suspicious to you-- and there's nothing I can do about it, nothing at all.
Anton Chekhov (Russian 1860-1904)
(letter to Olga Knipper, Sept. 1, 1902)
...I wondered with anguish whether I would ever see her again...
Murdoch (Black Prince 292)
The memory starts to fade
the inner link breaks
it's your own fault
you've failed to maintain her memory
Absence lessens half-hearted passions, and increases great ones, as the wind puts out the candle and stirs up the fire.
La Rochefoucauld
Finally she comes back
(just for a short rendezvous?)
Expected Time of Arrival
he's late, you're frantic, furious
weak in the knees
[Studying] "the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway timetable..."
Marcel Proust [SiL]
...Go faster! Use the reins and whip!
Bring me to Pompeii, where my sweet Love lies!
Pompeian graffiti (tr. Dronke)
The closer he came to his goal, the more his heart became drunk with Layla's scent, the louder his ears perceived the sound of her voice, the clearer his eyes recognized her face in mountains and valleys.
Nizami "Layla"
So, I shall see her in three days
And just one night, but nights are short,
Then two long hours, and that is morn.
See how I come, unchanged, unworn--
Feel, where my life broke off from thine,
How fresh the splinters keep and fine,--
Only a touch and we combine!
Robert Browning "In Three Days" [OOTH]
...he heard the sound of very, very rapid light footsteps over the parquet floor, and his happiness, his life, his own self-- his better self, which he had sought and yearned for for so long-- came rapidly toward him.
Tolstoy (Anna Karenin 410- IV:15:2)
Happy reunion, hugs and kisses
love returns full force
[Turgenev- Smoke, Litvinov >> Irina-- unrequited love]
...tears, --yes; and the ache here in the throat,
To know that I so ill deserve the place
Her arms made for me...
James Whitcomb Riley "When She Comes Home" [OOTH]
Sharing hard times brings you closer together
crises outside
In the year that's coming on, rich in joy and sorrow,
We shall light our lamp, and wait life's mysterious morrow.
William Ernest Henley [OOTH]
"In the Year That's Come and Gone"
Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,--
No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew...
Richard Hovey (xx 1869-1900) "Love in the Winds"
Fair or foul-- on land or sea--
Come the wind or weather,
Best or worst, whate'er they be,
We shall share together.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed (xx ) "The Newly Wedded"
Pregnancy, eggtending, birthing, nursing
tender fathers during pregnancy-- sharing childbirth
children
inheritance of parents' love for each other
even greater love
(prettier than her mother)
innocence
The child is neither the father's nor the mother's: he is the personified union of the two and is a striving for perfection modeled after flesh and soul.
Ortega (41)
And they lived happily ever after...