… all the very best love poetry is addressed by men to women – and not the other way round. A woman cannot praise a man’s beauty because manly men are not beautiful.
I had a friend who specialized in writing love letters. Since he was constantly falling in and out of love, he gained considerable expertise in this profession. He became so adept in the art that rather than seeking the company of the lady who had infatuated him, he actually looked for excuses to go out of town so that he could write to her. And even after receiving favourable response, the best he could do when in her company was to read out drafts of letters he intended to write to her. It was no surprising that after having a surfeit of being compared to a summer’s day or how she walked in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, the lady in question sought the company of males whose words of praise were reinforced by action. My friend felt terribly let down, penned a few more letters chiding her for being unfaithful to him and turned his attention to other starry-eyed lasses.
I only saw a few of these epistles addressed to a lady who had preoccupied my friend’s mind for sometime and was not able to compare their contents with his earlier or later compositions addressed to other women. He had a sizeable repertoire of love poetry but I am pretty certain that much of what he wrote to one lady must have been repeated to the other. I came to this conclusion from the opening gambits he made at cocktail parties. A hardy perennial was culled from Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world which seems
To lie before us like land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, no light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
This was often followed with lines from Shakespeare’s Othello:
If after every Tempest, come such calms,
May the winds blow, till they have waken’d death:
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus high: and duck again as low,
As hell’s from Heaven. If it were now to die,
T’were now be the most happy. For I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That no another comfort like to this,
Succeeds in unknown fate.
If the lady happened to have long hair, there was always T. S. Eliot’s memorable little piece about weaving the sunlight in the hair, holding flowers in her arms and so compelling his imagination for many days and many hours and disturbing his midnight cogitations and his noon’s repose.
I bring all this up because of a sudden revelation that all the very best love poetry is addressed by men to women – and not the other way round. A woman cannot praise a man’s beauty because manly men are not beautiful. Furthermore, dwelling on a man’s physical aspect would expose a woman to the charge of being a wanton or a slut. How then is a poor woman to tell a man that she loves him except by repeating the three words: I love you or I miss you?