Finnegan's Wake:I haven't read it, but then, I don't actually want to.Yep. That pretty much sums it up.

Love--I particularly and fantastically have always loved Pablo Neruda's words of love. While tirelessly infinite when discussing the finite I find his touching use of language easy, if not far too beautiful. I know, on this day of a saint I will never meet, I have found a love that has allowed me to be lost without caring what the end of the road will be--I care only about the hunt, the journey, and the hand I will hold on my way.Happy Valentine's to all,KateSonnet XXVPablo NerudaBefore I loved you, Love, nothing was my own;I wavered through the streets, among objects:nothing mattered or had a name:the world was made of air, which waited.I knew rooms full of ashes,tunnels where the moon lived,rough warehouses that growled Get lost,questions that insisted in the sand.Everything was empty, dead, mute,fallen, abandoned, and decayed:inconceivably alien, it allbelonged to someone else-to no one:till your beauty and your povertyfilled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

Sex Without Love, Ferlinghetti, +1Sex Without Love--Sharon Olds How do they do it, the ones who make lovewithout love? Beautiful as dancers,gliding over each other like ice-skatersover the ice, fingers hookedinside each other's bodies, facesred as steak, wine, wet as thechildren at birth whose mothers are going togive them away. How do they come to thecome to the come to the God come to thestill waters, and not lovethe one who came there with them, lightrising slowly as steam off their joinedskin? These are the true religious,the purists, the pros, the ones who will notaccept a false Messiah, love thepriest instead of the God. They do notmistake the lover for their own pleasure,they are like great runners: they know they are alonewith the road surface, the cold, the wind,the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-vascular health--just factors, like the partnerin the bed, and not the truth, which is thesingle body alone in the universeagainst its own best time.The below, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, From Coney Island of the Mind, has been translated into 20 languages.cast up the heart flops over gasping lovefoolish fish which tries to draw its breath from flesh of airand no one there to hear its death among the sad busheswhere the world rushes by in a blather of asphalt and delayChet Baker's Funny Valentine's about's what's going on with me now, sometimes.

Nice ... thanks WW.

Well, at least you got a good story challenge out of the day.

That's really moving, Kairo -- thanks for posting it!

Infernal DesireI WANDER all night in my vision,Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping....I too pass from the night,I stay a while away, O night, but I return to you again, and love you.---------Those are two segments from papa Walt's 'The Sleepers' the second part is what immediately struck me as I thought of love in poetry. though I might not know why.I thought some more on the subject and dragged my milkcrate of records out of the closet. From therein I withdrew my Cummings records and put him on. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. oh wait... "sweet spring is yourtime is my time is ourtime for springtime is lovetimeand viva sweet love"(all the merry little birds areflying in the floating in thevery spirits singing inare winging in the blossoming)lovers go and lovers comeawandering awonderingbut any two are perfectlyalone there's nobody else alive(such a sky and such a suni never knew and neither did youand everybody never breathedquite so many kinds of yes)not a tree can count his leaveseach herself by openingbut shining who by thousands meanonly one amazing thing(secretly adoring shylytiny winging darting floatingmerry in the blossomingalways joyful selves are singing)"sweet spring is yourtime is my time is ourtime for springtime is lovetimeand viva sweet love"-eddie estlin cummings therewrit.The sentiment, at least, is positive. Oh love is sweet and a song and he conveys it more within his many images, pages and ideas. There's the sexy car poem... probably lacking on the love front. And 'anyone lived in a pretty how town' is a heartrending fable. If you really want to think about it you could mention Roland Barthes' 'A Lover's Discourse' or even you could mention Kierkegaard ... if you can pronounce it.But you're better off to look through Gregory Corso and Frank O'Hara ... love is found in the poets ... why is that?Actually now that I've gone on too long I recall Angela Carter's 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman' which may portray a truer portrait of love than any poem. Where the power of love kills and distracts ... the body can keep living long after love has killed you.

CombinedI like my poems about love, although they usually have a doomed ending.I like Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare thee to a Summer's day". It is cheesy, but the kind of thing you wish you had the guts to say to people you like.I like the lines in Under the Bridge that say "At least I have her love, the city she loves me"And there's a movie called Italian for Beginners that is Danish.I guess maybe because it's in subtitles you have to pay attention closely but they capture the magic of relationships pretty well.I guess combine all this and you get a good love sonnet or something.

Great additions, Mindbum. Good call on Corso, yeah, he wrote some good ones. I was already thinking about Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" (as well as Plato's "Symposium". Haven't read Barthes, though -- I will try that one.

Shakespeare and Chili Peppers ... that's my kind of mix. Thanks Andeh.

CoquettishRoguish: yes I'm also fascinated by that reception of the 'natural interaction', called love, often disguised for human, seemingly conscious eyes as in that quotation from Shakespeare -- but then, the world of today seems (only seems) more complicated, and there are changes over times and age. I'd like intellectual streaks (Sartre, Beauvoir, Nin), revolutionary ones (Kollontai), with the wisdom/solidarity of everyday life (Saroyan), the often rough trade overlay of society's context (Carver, also, partly, House of Leaves), contemplative and wished for, when all is achieved, and said and done, and time on our hands (Ammons, Purdy, Sagan). The reality, yes reality weave of Finnegan's Wake, Jamelah, adapt its melange to the fierce colors of today. Views on love as hard work (Algarin), a bit of actuality and irony (Garp, Woody Allen, Wolfe).I also keep on being carried away by myriads of Rock lyrics, Kinks, Doors, Jefferson Airplane -- Miracles which can be correlated to reality, since youth's burning the liquor of satisfaction, melting together, the trial for consistence between knowledge about hormones and giving in to wicked dangerous romanticism, emotions, Love reign / rain o'er me (Who), declare teleonomic biofunctions and social care and roles, and still fall, fall -- or better off with age and sympathies cool nectar / bitter remedy (and renewal), sharpening the eye once more in sweet consolation.But above all, the voice of Kerouac in Big Sur: "the irrational mortal loneliness is ... raised up like a sacred urn to heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love" "nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love""in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstraction"... giving expression to that old natural circle, but as well comprising hesitation, social functions, and that implicit yearning for transcendence, transdurance, the (ab)solution for / from original sin (rem. Baudelaire, cp. Neruda, Hikmet) in love, in a Catholic-tender-sensual-meditative-ecstatic way that thrills me, resounds in me: all my experience and sensations. I think that in our present societies we still have much to change to be able to address love in such a way, to make it a collective ritual liberating force, and there are even intensely regressive forces at work, romantic and idealising rigidity, power motivation, possession - beyond rational balance and fair social responsibility.Longing for the final blurring of lines, of frontiers like in that Midsummer Night's Dream, the game of existence, reaching out, converging, forgiving in older age even, give us some peace, insight, in time, for mortal sins.

Song of Solomon, old boy...Levi, your enthusiasm for Shakespeare is contagious. You have an appreciation and understanding of the Bard which I admire.For my reply, I've chosen some excerpts from the Song of Solomon:He says, Oh, that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is oil poured out She says, If I met you outside, I would kiss you, and none would despise me. I would lead you and bring you into the house of my mother, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I would give you spiced wine to drink, the juice of my pomegranates. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me! He says, Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies... Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine.She says, With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am sick with love behold, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills...like a gazelle, or a young stag.Now, that's some Old-Testament-school Valentine! I must say, I like the Bible, even if I do cuss and smoke.As much as people want to be logical, sometimes we experience magic that can't be explained. It's been said that in order to love, we have to have free will. Otherwise, we would be like robots. But because we have free will, we can make mistakes. But because of love, we can be forgiven for those mistakes. This demonstrates that love has a lot of 'buts'. That is logical, because I love buts.

Jamelah, that Finnegan is a nice boy. And stable. Very stable.

Excellent poem choices. I like them both.

Neruda and PetrarchIn a workshop I am currently taking we are studying the works of Pablo Neruda and asked to write a poem that riffs off of his early but most famous works on love, a subject I find very difficult to write about.While reading, I was struck by how the conventional tropes of love poetry dating back to the troubadors still pervade the modernist works.So I choose a canzone from Petrarch that picks up the theme of being shipwrecked by love:Passa la nave mia colma d'oblioPer aspro mare, a mezza notte il verno,Enfra Scilla et Caribdi; et al governoSiede l signore, anzi l nimico mio.A ciascun remo un penser pronto et rioChe a tempesta e l fin par ch'abbi a scherno;La vela rompe un vento humido eternoDi sospir, di speranze et di desio.Pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia de sdegniBagna et rallenta le gia stanche sarte,Che son d'error con ingnorantia attorto.Celansi i duo mei dolci usati segni;Morta fra l'onde e la ragion et l'arte,Tal ch'incomincio a desperar del porto.My ship laden with oblivionPasses through harsh seas at midnight in winterBetween Scylla and Carybdis, and at the helmSits my lord, rather my enemy.At each oar a thought hasty and cruel That scorns the tempest and the end;The sail and a wet, eternal windOf sighs, hopes, and desires break each other;A rain of tears, a fog of disdainDrenches and loosens the already tired ropesWhich are made of error entwined with ignorance.Hidden are my two usual sweet stars;Reason and art, dead among the waves,Such that I am beginning to despair of the port.

Last PoemThere is one love poem that makes me shake. It was written by the French poet Robert Desnos. He was arrested for resistance activity during the Nazi occupation, and sent to Auschwitz. In 1945, a few days after liberation, Desnos died of typhoid fever in Theresienstadt. On his body they found a revision of a poem Desnos had written to his wife years before. These words are among the last he ever wrote.I have so fiercely dreamed of youAnd walked so far and spoken of you so,Loved a shade of you so hardThat now I've no more left of you.I'm left to be a shade among the shadesA hundred times more shade than shadeTo be shade cast time and time again into your sun-transfigured life.

Love songsTalking about love I can't avoid in first place love songs. Some of them old love songs that I know since a long time. I love these somehow bare-direct love songs:-- Seminare by Ser' Gir'n-- Canci'n del pinar by Fandermole-- Love by John Lennon-- Meu bem, meu mal; Queixa, Surpresa by Caetano Veloso-- Puente by Gustavo Cerati(There are more...)

I also found Neruda and some lines by Petrarca great.

beautiful!

does it for me, Bill.why bother to write love poetry when these rhapsodies sing and have sung us for so long

utterly sadwhat's to say?

Oh, man. That is heavy with no doubt as to the honesty of it.

I'm wondering what Jack meant when he said, "Nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love." What does it mean to you? I'm just curious.

Tristran and IsoldeIn the story, Isolde is promised to be married to King Mark, who sends Tristran to fetch isolde. Since it's an arranged marriage, Isolde's mother makes a love potion so that Isolde will not be in a loveless marriage. However, on accident, Tristran and Isolde, thinking the love potion is wine, drink it and instantly fall in love. Isolde's maid finds out, and says to Tristran: "you've drunk your death." And he replies (paraphrasing): "if what you mean by my death is the love I have for Isolde, that is my life. If what you mean is the penalty I shall suffer when Mark finds out (beheading), I willingly accept that. But, if what you mean by my death is eternal damnation in the fie pits of hell, I accept that too."

Nice one ...

Songs of Solomon, Reprise.The Songs of Solomon are wonderful earthy parts of "the Bible". They have staying power in my mind, too.