Straight from the Heart

It is not only necessary to love,
it is necessary to say so.
— French proverb

There’s no better day to wallow in the agelessness of romantic emotion, perhaps no more wonderfully expressed than by some of the most exalted figures in world literature. I remembered a small treasure of a book (still in print) called Love Letters – An Anthology of Passion, which celebrates what’s now lamentably a lost art, with its colorful detailing of the amorous correspondence between an assortment of famous writers, artists (and other lesser-known personages) — complete with reproductions of the original letters, inserted into envelopes, seals and all. Just a handful of excerpts:

You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.-– Poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne, October 1819

Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings.-– Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to his fiancée, Valeria Arsenev, November 1856

You have lifted my very soul up into the light of your soul, and I am not ever likely to mistake it for the common daylight.-– Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, August 1846

Places that are empty of you…are empty of all life…-– Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, February 1870

Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.-– French writer Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846

Lofty sentiments for sure, but I’ll stray a bit from the literary luminaries and end with an entry that’s short and to the point, and charming in its simplicity. It’s a note, circa 1840, from one Prince de Joinville, a French adventurer, to an actress, Rachel Felix, on seeing her for the first time:

Where? When? How much?
Her reply:
Your place. Tonight. Free.

Notes on a Classic

Henrik Ibsen has always been one of my favorite playwrights and, for whatever reason, I recently remembered and decided to re-read one of his pieces that always kept a place in my literary thoughts: the impeccably concise and supremely structured Ghosts – first staged 130 years ago in of all places, the United States (specifically Chicago, Illinois, in May 1882). Its themes reverberate as strongly now as they did when I read it in younger years.

Henrik Ibsen

It is Ghosts that’s based upon that famous line we’re all familiar with, “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” And Ibsen, already having given us an early prefeminist icon with his character of Nora in A Doll’s House, followed that up with Helene Alving here – a woman whose realizations about the verisimilitudes to be found in freedom (“the joy of life”) may appear quaint now, but were quite revolutionary at the time. (As were many of the topics addressed in the play, from premarital sex to venereal disease and assisted suicide. In England, the work was greeted as “An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged.” And that was one of the kinder reviews.)

So many truths, so little time: it’s still a wonder how Ibsen manages to navigate 30 years in the mere 12 hours that are the basis of the play; the decades are melded together by incredibly crafted expositionary dialogue that seamlessly moves the story forward while at the same time taking it back. The scene settings, with their dreary backdrop of rain-washed Norwegian fjords, create the perfect atmosphere for the dark drama taking place on the stage.

I guess what resonates the most philosophically (again, not a novel concept, but consider the context) is the theme of repression as the perpetrator of all that chokes the human spirit, as true then as it is now, as is the idea that it’s more or less impossible to escape those legacies that we are at a loss to change (as the character of Osvald says to his mother Helene, “I didn’t ask you for life…I don’t want it – take it back again!”)

And it is Osvald who utters that beautiful line at the end of the play, the devastating entreaty, “Mother – give me the sun.”

Magnificent literature – and perfect for a rainy day.

Of Plums and a Poet

Reading the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams over the past weekend, I realized a deeper affinity on the part of the great American poet for an edible I thought he had only immortalized in his imagist masterpiece of 1934, “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Self-portrait, 1914

Some still debate whether the “plum poem” is really nothing more than a glorified post-it note left on a refrigerator, but I’ve always thought  “Just to Say” captures more mystery in its mere 28 words than many full-length novels. With striking simplicity, it almost implores us to create our own backstory for the circumstances behind what appears an otherwise uncomplicated communication, all the while poetically brilliant in its alliteration and sensual (“so sweet”…”so cold”) use of description.

The peripatetic plums of Williams’ imagination appear again in the stark and haunting “To a Poor Old Woman”:

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

And from the lovely “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” with its triadic line breaks (W.H. Auden once called it “one of the most beautiful love poems in the language”) comes another, albeit brief, appearance:

There the pink mallow grows
                and in their season
                                  strawberries

and there, later,
                                  we went to gather
                                                       the wild plum.

I don’t know if it all quite qualifies as a significant motif, but those plums sure were responsible for some magnificent poetry…