On St Valentine's Day, the idea of romantic verse as wishy-washy, namby pamby stuff is reinforced by the cards we send to loved ones – but we can do much better than that, writes ALAN O'RIORDAN
THE WESTERN concept of romantic love is arguably the most influential idea in history. And it was just that: an idea, invented by poets in the south of France in the 11th century. According to the courtly love tradition, the troubadour is always a mixture of ardent and abject, the woman idealised, her whims his to be obeyed.
This dynamic was shaped by feudal society, but has nonetheless persisted to our own times, permeating popular culture and etiquette (it’s ladies first, after all) to such an extent that we think it’s natural, instead of the product of the world’s dominant culture.
As the invention of a poet, it is fitting that in millions of St Valentine’s cards, people will today be turning to verse in order to express romantic sentiments. Sadly, however, if we had an international court for crimes against poetry, today would be its busiest. The world is alive with the sound of people abusing verse, reducing poetry from a noble and difficult art to baby talk and nonsense: “Roses are red, violets are blue/ It’s Valentine’s Day and I love you.”
Surely we can do better than this? Poetry, even romantic poetry, should not be sentimental, treacly goo. As Yeats wrote:
“I said ‘A line will take us hours maybe
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better to go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement or breakstones
Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all of these, and yet,
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen
The martyrs call the world’.”
And yet, despite what Yeats is saying, and that love is poetry’s widest theme, we have, it seems, an image of romantic verse as wishy-washy, namby pamby stuff. An exasperated Ogden Nash was moved to write, in a verse that should be read by anyone who doesn’t get a card today:
“St Valentines Day is a Broadway Day
A day of reeking loves,
When they stuff the marts
with bleeding hearts
And goddamned twitteringdoves.
O crooner’s day, O swooner’sday,
O day of versicles vile,
And the tear in every smile!
Marshmallow whip and mailing lists!
Meringue of exhibitionists!”
Another line from Nash pinpoints the problem with the poetry of the day: “But Valentine became the patron/ Of the maid who’d rather be a matron.” What Nash abhors is the regressive, infantile sexlessness of popular love doggerel.
Now, there is plenty of erotic verse that is honest and earthy, yet not romantic. Take John Donne for example:
“Thou Angel, bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite:
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.”
Depending on your woman, this will do nicely. It is adult, playful and witty. But such verse is not romantic. Not because of its frankness, but because the bawdy male poet displays a different kind of coyness to that he tries to coax his mistresses out of. It is a coyness of emotion – a poet’s unwillingness to give of himself to an equal. We must wait for the Romantic period to find a kind of poetry that represents the modern ideals of love (at least the ones held every other day but this one): a description of the meeting equals, of “esteem enlivened by desire”.
Percy Shelley, in his Discourse of the Manners of Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love, argues that interpersonal communion – intellectual, imaginative and sensual – gives sex "a strength not its own". Communion gives sexual union for the Romantics a permanency which sets it off from the transient, repetitive and joyless unions of the libertine (while also maintaining the primacy of marriage's social function, but that's another story). Shelley had a good model in the tristesse of the libertine: Byron. His letters reveal his scorn at the latter's "sickening vice". By his own account, Byron had "at least 200 of one sort or other" in two years in Venice. Shelley's approval for his reform is telling: "He lives with one woman now [Countess Guiccioli], a lady of rank . . . to whom he is attached, and who is attached to him."
Certainly Shelley idealised sex; in Dublin, he was repelled by the lewdness of John Philpott Curran. But today is supposed to be a day for such idealisation. Pre-Victorian society had a bawdiness to match our own sexualised world, but at least Shelley’s response to it retained a humane idea of romantic love and sexuality. The other response was the Victorians’ hypocritical prudery, a body-denying puritanism which our so-called romantic verse still retains.
Our popular conception of Romantic poetry is a bowdlerised one. Judging from the cards I read in shops this week, it is not Shelley or Byron who have a legacy, but early John Keats with his cloying sentiment and eroticised faeries:
“Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair;
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamybreast,
Are things on which the dazzled senses rest.”
We are in the realm of “poesie” with this stuff – exalting the delicacy of woman and her innocent purity. Why do we think we can send the like of it to hard-nosed modern women? What the mature Keats offers is much more telling: an dramatic expression of perplexity, of opposites uneasily united in a volatile yet potentially enriching way:
“We might embrace and die; voluptuousthought!
Enlarge not to my hunger, or I’m caught
In trammels of perverse deliciousness.”
And so, he could write two years from his death, very useful verses for the Valentine’s plagiarist:
“Though one moment’s pleasure
In one moment flies,
Though the passion’s treasure
In one moment dies;
Yet it has not passed.”
No nymphs here, but instead verse inspired by the very much flesh and blood, “bad and good”, inescapably real Fanny Brawne. We turn to the bit o’ poeming when we want some romance, but we seem to have recoiled from the expression of desire and any connection with reality. Love is neither a verb or an object in flimsy Valentine’s verse. It is a cutesy abstraction. But if the history of love poetry shows us anything, it’s that a consenting adult wishing to do what consenting adults do need not present the prospective consenting adult with the verse equivalent of a cuddly ’ickle teddy bear.