Love's Song - An Enquiry

Every poplar, as you pass it,
Sings a moment in the wind
Which is in it, and each one, at that moment —
Love — is the oblivion
And the memory of the other.

It is just one poplar — love
That is singing.

- Juan Ramon Jimenez, untitled poem
from Eternidades (transl. H. R. Hays)

A poplar tree sings in the breeze: Love. Each consummate and annihilate the other. Out of great solitude, greater surprise. This enquiry reads poetry as the song of the startled, blossoming god called Love. The poem is more than love, more than poplar, wind, the moment, oblivion, memory, more than the other. The poem is the name of what it creates: love’s song.

* * *

No beauty not looked for: you need a subtle eye. Art means sighted by Beauty. To see with the eyes of love is to see love fluttering in the leaves of a poplar tree. To find Eros in every startled locus. The lover and the artist knows, as Heraclitus, “If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not discover it; for it cannot be tracked down and offers no passage.” When my heart’s soil is fertile with love, then I see a poplar tree blooming the wind.

***

Love’s epiphany: first, a restless flutter. My skin skittish as a colt. Birds and crickets hush, the sun ebbs into shadow. A heavy stillness. Then a blazing shaft out of nowhere fiercely penetrates. I, naive Psyche, ravished. Suddenly I see, I hear: one poplar singing. Suddenly the blazing sword at the gates of paradise transforms into a dove.

Rilke looked up one day in a window, and an ordinary sight became a vision:

It’s because I saw you
leaning out the ultimate
window that I knew
and drank my whole abyss. . .

Was your one gesture
proof of a goodbye so grand
that it turned me into wind
and dropped me in the river?

- “The Windows #10” (transl. E. Poulin)

Nothing can be the same. The poem changes my life. Oblivion and memory: o burn, burn in the Other. The poplar tree: love. Her branches charm me into the sweetly blazing coil.

* * *

Beauty’s rapture. Roused to passionate music. How delightfully the shaft sears my flesh. My mouth startles open: music hurls out. Poetry shouts. To praise is to make love; communion is a paean. Wind in the poplar tree, wind the breath of song, wind the lovers choiring a tempest of flame. “Affirmation, as a substitute for union, belongs to Eros.” (Freud)

Because Orpheus praised, all creation gathered around. Listened. Heard. Rilke’s Orpheus sang Gesang est Dasein — the closest English translation is, “song is being in the world.” Song is being in the poplar tree, being in the wind, being in the moment. Song is being in love. Praise is the paradisal embrace.

* * *

Not a thought: the song tore from my lips. Carl Jesperson, the comparative linguist, placed love’s song ahead of its name. “Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts.” Each word first a shout, a shock.

The passionate threnody is both manic and mantic. Love is a predator, stalking every safe haven. Diotima warned Plato, “Eros is a great daimon.” His fire-tipped arrows sting with obsession, mirth, and frenzy. Thinkers fear desire’s drowsy wood: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” (Wittgenstein) Sorry. Wrestle this angel and you will lose. Love conquers all. Recognition — love singing in the poplar tree — is precognition. The shrieks of the sibyl burst from the temple long before the priests emerged with the oracle — did we wait for Their sanction? Did not our hearts know when we first heard the god’s caterwauling song shred the air?

* * *

Not the poplar, not the wind, not the river, not the sun. Those are love’s masks. Not the ripe fruit, not the fire in my beloved’s eyes. Not the beloved. Not even love: not anything: for only what is wholly Other can ignite dry eyes into recognition. Not the poem; it is only a paper ladder held against eternity. Not the poet, he only sows the dragon’s teeth. Not the furrow that opened when I turned the page to read this poem. What does bestow, then? Who knows. It lurks behind the mask of love, a silence staring between every note of the song.




Wind. What rustles? Winged Eros. Wind the chariot of breath inward racing with shock, wind the passion that sings, chimes, flutes, choirs, roars. Wind the song that hallows the land. Spirit animating stillness to praise.

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-waiver
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

- Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

The poem teaches words to fly. A primal affinity of poet and bird. Hermes, wing-footed god who fashioned the first lyre, Eros of the golden wings born from the primal egg, the old Irish poets with their tuion or “singing robe” of woven feathers. Words of love lift and carry me to far lands deep within the moment. Love soars: wind in the polar tree.

* * *

Love the redeemer. The moment the poplar sings in the wind is an omphalos: here god touched earth and sprinkled gold over a handful of dust. Transformation: the words shed their droll and profane patter. Grace means that for one moment the silence deigned to speak. “Poetic writing consists in letting the Word resound behind words,” said Gerhart Hauptmann; Valery called it “strange discourse, as though by someone other than the speaker and addressed to someone other than the listener . . . a language within a language.” Poetry is grace, the god who startled straw into silk:

So that speaking
May be as generous
As kissing

To merge bather and river
Crystal and storm-dancer
Dawn and the season of breasts
Desires and the wisdom of childhood

To give to woman
Meditative and alone
The form of caresses
Of which she has dreamed

So that desert may be in the shadow
Instead of being in
My
Shadow

- Paul Eluard, “Painted Words”


* * *

Love sings: O only for one moment. Wild ponies gallop and disappear. The poem is one passionate moment: only one. I enter it, thrill, thrall. All boundaries disappear. A tide of sweet oblivion waxes warm and eternal. More I would not savor. Could not survive. So sing a moment, sweet wind. Touch me. Then go.

He who binds himself to joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

- William Blake, “Eternity”

It is not the blossom but he who blossoms who returns. So walk on, then, son of autumn, return to the silence, and believe song is where the wind walks.

* * *

Art’s empty bed. “With beauty you have to live (and die) alone.” (Jimenez) Creation is a solitary song, but is love? Does the Beloved ever truly arrive within these reefs of flesh and bone? As I grow older, even the beach is formidable, fortified with scarred nouns and hobbled verbs. Rilke says love can go no further between humans than when “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.” O to do that, even for one moment. Again: no love not truly Other.

I’m going to the boats of solitude
where a man takes refuge at night

in this pure refuge
nothing moves faster than the dream

mountains rivers and holy trees
protect the road of the lost men
and a single rhythmic breath warms the shadows

and among those beings called by desire I am free
and I caress the darkness as a branch caresses the water.

-Homero Aridjis, untitled poem (transl. W.S. Merwin)

Wind blows in the solitary poplar: is loved. Oblivion and memory: Forget the beloved. Love the wild world.

* * *

Void, emptiness, silence: ineffable. Indigo silk of solitude and death. Song rises, peaks, descends back into silence. Wind softens to a flutter then disappears. Love lets go and sinks back under the cerulean oil. Even departure is a return: alone and enveloped. Oblivion and memory. Water’s song.

To the bridge of love,
old stone between tall cliffs
eternal meeting place, red evening —
I come with my heart.
My beloved is only water,
that always passes away, and does not deceive,
that always passes away, and does not change,
that always passes away, and does not end.

- Jimenez, untitled poem (transl. H. R. Hays)


* * *

So why do I resist the silence? Restrain the mystery? Still the urge? To build a life is to fear the wildness outside. Culture’s bulwarks rise upon the energy of refusal. Amulets against the ineffable: crucifix and sleeping pill. Flee the fated encounter.

But love always wins. Silence haunts the vacant hours, pours back over sleep, fades my loved ones into shadow. Silence is Thalia, first of the Muses, buried in the earth. When I flee her I fling myself at the sun; eventually I tire and fall back to surda Thalia, silent Thalia. Thalia’s bed surrounded Shakespeare’s Prospero; her mystery was the one secret not found anywhere in his magic books. Auden remarked,

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
that this world of fact we love
Is insubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

- “The Sea and the Mirror”

How I betray love with these words. Silence is an angel I will never wrestle to a fall. The poem snatched from silence lasts for a breeze and is gone. Drown the book and staff.

* * *

In Welsh myth, the boy Gwydion drank the three drops of power from the vat the witch Cerridwen had brewed for a year. Enraged, Cerridwen chased the youth. Gwydion changed himself into a hare, but Cerridwen became a greyhound and loped close. He ran toward a river and jumped into a trout; the witch changed into an otter and nipped at his flashing tail fins. Gwydion leapt high and flew off as a bird; Cerridwen grew the long wings of a hawk and swooped out of the water. As her talons grazed his feathers Gwydion dived into a pile of winnowed wheat and hid in a grain. Cerridwen landed in the shape of a hen and pecked through the wheat until she found the grain and swallowed it. The witch carried the grain in her belly for nine months, giving birth to a beautiful boy. Cerridwen fell in love with the baby and could not bring herself to kill it, so she wrapped the baby in a leather bag and set it on the sea. At Hallowe’en the bag washed ashore. The poet Taleissin crawled out. This is his song:

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.
I have been a narrow blade of a sword;
I have been a drop in the air;
I have been a shining star;
I have been a word in the book;
I have been a book in the beginning;
I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half;
I have been a bridge for passing over threescore rivers;
I have journeyed as an eagle;
I have been a boat on the sea;
I have been a director in battle;
I have been a sword in the hand;
I have been a shield in fight;
I have been a string of a harp;
I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of water;
there is nothing in which I have not been.

The poem is a handful of words stolen from the silence. Love is mercy, changing it back and forth through the mirror. Metamorphosis is metempsychosis. The god swims through the world like wind in the poplar tree.

* * *

Love and Death: twins. “If they did not make a procession for Dionysos and sing a paean to the penis, they would act most shamelessly. Hades is the same as Dionysos for whom they rave and celebrate their rites.” (Heraclitus) Sleep and catatonia and death: poetry’s filial brood. Orpheus received his enchanted lute from Persephone’s willow-grove. Rilke’s Eurydice, the young dancer Vera Knoop who died suddenly, mixed death and love together in the poet’s song:

And it was almost a girl and came to be
out of this single joy of song and lyre
and through her green veils shone forth radiantly
and made herself a bed inside my ear.

And slept there. And her sleep was everything:
the awesome trees, the distances I had felt
so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:
all wonders that had ever seized my heart...

- Sonnets to Orpheus 1.2, transl. Stephen Mitchell

Love dies. Autumn comes. Silence returns. Western seas swallow the dying sun. The moment passes. Imperial solitude returns. All is silent. Or is it? There, deep in the water: does the torch still sing? “In Luna’s water Sol is hidden like a fire.” (Jung) Will love return?

Can vows and perfume, kisses infinite
Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
After being plunged in deep seas and profound.
Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite.

- Baudelaire, “The Balcony” (transl. F. P. Sturm)

Drinking songs: Love forever delayed by oblivion and memory. Just cannot let go. Longing’s spike, spinning me like a love song round and round my ravished heart. Passion wounds: the Latin root is passio, nailed Christlike to the burning poplar tree.

How shall the wine be drunk, or the woman known?
I take this world for better or worse,
But seeing rose carafes conceive the sin
My thirst conceives a fiercer universe:
And then I toast the birds in the burning trees
That chant their holy lucid drunkenness,
I swallowed all the phosophoros of the seas
Before I fell into this low distress.

- Richard Wilbur, “A Voice from Under the Table”

So sing of loss, sing long and late. For a long winter I bellowed the lyrics of that Roxy Music tune: “I will drink my fill/until the thrill is you.” Believing words had magic. I was wrong. Love’s wasting sickness is the flame we cannot live with or without. Never let go. Die of the embrace.

* * *

Eros weaver of myths,
Eros sweet and bitter,
Eros bringer of pain.

- Sappho (transl. Guy Davenport)

The poem: love’s story. Recognition as recollection. Aesthetics as resurrection. Hephaestus engraved the singing world on Achilles’s shield. Eros is the stele, the burning brand that smote these words onto the page.

Who devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

- T.S. Eliot. “Four Quartets”

Love returns again and again, soldering desire and terror. Each time the barb ruptures, the heart raptures, a shout: I am so alive I could die. Love’s eternal cycle: immolation, recognition, affirmation, wet obsessions, elevation, transformation, sublimation, annihilation, resurrection. God sings: Love. The song is all. End the reading, start your singing.

* * *

Every poplar, as you pass it,
Sings a moment in the wind
Which is in it, and each one, at that moment —
Love — is the oblivion
And the memory of the other.

It is just one poplar — love
That is singing ...