Love's Alchemy

So - love. Here's the thing, we feel love in so many ways, for our parents, our siblings, our friends and then the 'real' one - our lovers. And yet is that true? Are they all really different, some more worthy than others, some more deeply felt. I would argue - no. Love seems to me to be felt as deeply for mother as a lover or a friend if the love is real.


It is a strange part of our humanity, to love. And yet, animals love, grieve, mate for life. So maybe not a human-specific trait. It's hard to tell because poets write of it to try and understand what this emotion is; philosophers (whose very name means lovers of truth) endlessly analyse love as a weakness or try separate carnal  love from the more acceptable spiritual. It is alright to love if you don't make the beast with two backs in the process. But how can that be right - if you have loved and completed that love in bed - it is pretty special. A lot better than a one night stand.


And yet, and yet my first true love was dead some three hundred years before I was born. John Donne the poet. When I was young I loved his poetry of seduction and wit: as I grew older I loved his poetry of religion and seduction, of God, and wit. No man has ever or ever will have the glamour or mind to match the one I met in Donne's poetry. I remember at university in America the professor asking us of "The Flea", "Would it have worked with you?"and me saying,"My clothes would have been off before the second stanza." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrSGRWTOzQ


Now, you see it returns to sex - yes I would have gladly slept with Donne. He would have charmed me into bed and charmed me out of it again. But, now that I am past all thatI find his arguments with God, his wit and fear as he grows older make meI love him more for his self doubt and frailty of faith because I share that with him. I want to love God and trust him and have blind faith, but I question and reason and then return to Donne and find the answer again. 



HOLY SONNETS.

XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you

As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,

Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 

---

Source:

Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I.

E. K. Chambers, ed.

London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 165.

---

So, this is my declaration of love for Donne. Other times, other lovers, but the first was the man who taught me to "go and catch a falling star..."