Come, let us be friends, you and I, E’en though the world doth hate at this hour; Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.
Come, let us be friends, you and I, The world hath her surplus of hatred today; She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh, Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.
Come, let us be friends, you and I, And love each other so deep and so well, That the world may grow steady and forward fly, Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.
About This Poem
“Come Let Us Be Friends” appears in Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s poetry collection Clouds and Sunshine (The Cornhill Company, 1920). In Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (G.K. Hall, 1988), American journalist and associate librarian, Ann Allen Shockley, remarks that Fleming “has been unnoticed as an early novelist and poet of the twentieth century. Her books were not mentioned in Jet’s brief historical capsule about her. She is remembered more for her social and civic contributions than for her writing. […] [A]nd despite the energy she poured into community work, she managed to write songs, plays, musicals, skits, short stories, and essays. She felt that her writing would be better, however, if she were able to improve her mind. Thus, she tried to strengthen her educational background by taking correspondence courses, particularly in creative writing.” In the anthology Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2006), author and editor Maureen Honey notes that “although [Fleming’s] poetry never made it into journals of the Harlem Renaissance, she exemplifies many of the movement’s tenets in her determination to combine political, intellectual, and creative work as a way to move the race forward.”
About the Poet
Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, born on January 10, 1875, in Charleston, South Carolina, was an activist and a writer. She also became the first African American teacher in Brooklyn’s educational system. Fleming authored a novel, Hope’s Highway (The Neale Publishing Company, 1918), and a poetry collection, Clouds and Sunshine (The Cornhill Company, 1920). She died on January 5, 1963.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free all I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock they stay together for the rest of the day (what a day) I go by to check a slide and I say that painting’s not so blue
where’s Lana Turner she’s out eating and Garbo’s backstage at the Met everyone’s taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park’s full of dancers and their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we’re all winning we’re alive
the apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun they moved a day too soon even the stabbings are helping the population explosion though in the wrong country and all those liars have left the U N the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest not that we need liquor (we just like it)
and the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining
oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much
1961
About this Poem
“Steps” is from Lunch Poems, a book of poetry by Frank O’Hara published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, number 19 in their Pocket Poets series. The collection was commissioned by Ferlinghetti as early as 1959, but O’Hara delayed in completing it. Ferlinghetti would badger O’Hara with questions like, “How about lunch? I’m hungry.” “Cooking,” O’Hara would reply. O’Hara enlisted the help of Donald Allen who had published O’Hara’s poems in New American Poetry in 1960. Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, “Between 1960 and 1964 O’Hara and I worked intermittently at compiling Lunch Poems, which in the end became a selection of work dating from 1953 to 1964.”
The poems in this collection contain O’Hara’s characteristically breezy tone, containing spontaneous reactions to things happening in the moment. Like “Steps,” any of them appear to have been written on O’Hara’s lunch hour. The poems contain numerous references to pop culture and literary figures, New York locations, and O’Hara’s friends. One common theme is a desire for personal connection, whether the one-on-one connection of two friends or two lovers or a broader connection to strangers, in the face of tragedy, for example.
O’Hara’s “Steps” is an ode to New York City in the 1950s. It captures the city’s energy, diversity, and humor in a series of vivid vignettes. The poem walks the reader through various scenes in New York City and alludes to a wide variety of places and people. The poet begins by describing waking up and getting out of bed. This is followed by references to Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, and the Seagram Building.
O’Hara makes jumps between images that are sometimes hard to understand but that work to help readers interpret the ever-moving chaos of New York City that the poet cared so deeply for. The poem moves quickly from one image to the next, creating a sense of urgency and excitement. O’Hara uses everyday language and pop culture references to make the city feel both familiar and surreal. It also reflects the social changes of the time, as well as the city’s role as a hub of creativity and culture.
Compared to O’Hara’s other works, “Steps” is more optimistic and straightforward. It lacks the irony and darkness of some of his other poems and instead celebrates the simple joys of life in New York City. The poem’s brevity and lack of punctuation contribute to its sense of immediacy and spontaneity. The reader is pulled along by O’Hara’s enthusiasm, sharing in his experience of the city. “Steps” is a love letter to New York City, capturing its energy and beauty in a way that is both personal and universal.
About the Poet
Francis Russell “Frank” O’Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara became prominent in New York City’s art world. O’Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
O’Hara’s poetry is personal in tone and content and has been described as sounding “like entries in a diary.” Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O’Hara’s poetry is “urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny” containing “material and associations alien to academic verse” such as “the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends.” O’Hara’s writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.”
Sound the flute! Now it’s mute! Birds delight, Day and night, Nightingale, In the dale, Lark in sky,— Merrily, Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.
Little boy, Full of joy; Little girl, Sweet and small; Cock does crow, So do you; Merry voice, Infant noise; Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.
Little lamb, Here I am; Come and lick My white neck; Let me pull Your soft wool; Let me kiss Your soft face; Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.
About the Poem
In the poem, “Spring,” the poet introduces a vivid picture of spring’s beauty clamped with springtime activities. The speaker happens to be a little child. The sound of flute welcomes the spring season and so does the other merry sounds after the long silence of winter. The child bids to play the flute and Nature seem to embrace the child’s request. The Nightingale and Skylark welcomes the spring followed by other birds and crow.
Blake spoke of the Skylark, the Nightingale, the little boy, the little girl, the lamb and the crow. The first five characters in the poem perfectly portray the theme of innocence, but this is not so with the crow. We don’t usually consider a crow to be an angel of innocence. The second stanza is actually an illustration of the happiness. Both the little boy and the little girl are happy. All are happy and merrily welcomes the season of spring. The third stanza stands as a unified joyful welcome. By introducing the character of the lamb and creating a bond with the child, the poet actually wishes to welcome the Spring universally.
Blake’s last lines again to understand the implied meaning. Notice the last line, “Merrily, merrily, we welcome in the year.” He replaces the word “to” with “we” in the third iteration of the line above. Blake does it in the best way, uniting the little boy with the lamb, for a purpose. Mark, he has devoted 8 lines out of 27 to create the bond between the lamb and the little boy. Is it only to welcome the Spring (or the New Year) together or something deeper?
Spring’ may be thought as a rendering for the children. The expressions are akin to lullabies yet the poem possesses inner significance. The very anonymous opening lines “Sound the flute…” signifies the breaking of the dark silence of the night and marks the onset of the Spring after the deep Winter slumber.
The poet dedicates the entire third paragraph to the lamb, considered as the highest symbolization of Innocence. The child (the narrator of the poem) says, “Let me kiss your soft face;” makes the reader think of the inner implications of the lines. William Blake closely attenuates his thought of innocence with age! To Blake, everything is young and playful. He seems to be parallel with Mark Twain’s idea of aging – “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
About the Poet
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God,” or “human existence itself.”
Ah! sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire, And the pale virgin shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves and aspire; Where my sunflower wishes to go.
About the Poem
‘Ah! Sun-flower’ by William Blake is a multi-layered poem that depicts a weary sunflower, tired from counting the sun’s progress. Despite seeming quite simple, this poem is fairly complicated. There are numerous different possible readings, and it is likely that most readers will come away with different interpretations of what the sunflower is supposed to represent. In the second stanza, after explaining that the sunflower is “weary of time,” the speaker says that it wants to join the “Youth” and the “Virgin” in what is presumably Heaven.
Blake’s mysterious “Ah! Sun-flower” suggests that life itself is a state of longing. The poem’s image of a sunflower reaching towards the light and warmth of the sun evokes the human longing to be reunited with God in heaven. In this interpretation of the poem, life on earth is a journey back to God’s loving embrace.
About the Poet
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God,” or “human existence itself”.
Migraines have their say By Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Whitney cottage, Hermitage Artist Retreat
You could write about the windows all nine of them. You could write about
the gulf, red tide strangling Florida’s shore, the opaque eyes of dead fish
caught in the algal bloom. You could write about the sky—long as a yawn, sky blue
chasing cerulean away, stretched wisps of white determined to be the canvas
for another sunset showstopper. But the body has its own narrative in mind. Neurons hustling
pain blank out any page. No writing can be done when an electric snare corrals the brain. No ear
searching for song while one temple pulses an arrhythmic lament. Mercifully there’s triptan,
a black curtain over this inflammatory act. Strike through today, uncap the pen again tomorrow.
About this Poem
“I was diagnosed with migraines at thirteen. Before the breakthrough of triptans for treatment, I had to lie down for roughly three days in darkness with an ice pack. Now, with medication, when a migraine arrives, I only lose half a day to a full day to the pain. To have a migraine while attending an artist’s retreat felt like a special kind of theft of the time I had arranged away from work and family. I wanted to capture the tension between the migraine’s will and my own, how I sought to find inspiration in a darker moment.”—Teri Ellen Cross Davis
I have my first appointment with a new provider at the Headache Clinic this morning, so I thought this poem would be appropriate. I miss my former provider. She and I had a good relationship, and she seem to really understand my migraines. She listened, talked about stress and outside influences that were affecting the frequency of my migraines, and was not afraid to have me try new treatments. I thanked her one time for never giving up on trying to relieve my chronic migraines. She said that migraine treatments were a lot of trial and error. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. It was all about finding the right combination. I really hate that she moved away, and I have been without a provider there since October.
I hope I like this new provider. I like the two nurse practitioners who have been administrating my Botox treatments, and I hope I will be able to say the same for this new provider. I seem to have finally found a treatment plan that is working fairly well, so I hope I’m kept on the same regimen as I have been on for the past six months. The Botox plus the Qulipta seem to be help as a daily preventive medication and Anaprox, naratriptan, and/or hydroxyzine (the combination changes according to the severity of the migraine) usually help for acute/abortive treatments of individual migraines.
About the Poet
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is a Black American poet and the author of a more perfect Union (Mad Creek Books, 2021), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Haint (Gival Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She was a Cave Canem Fellow and currently works for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in. I have learned to repeat these words to myself whenever I feel stuck.
Fear rustles mantras out of my body. I have risked a motherland. Why not also seduce the foreigner who implores nativity if loneliness can be broken and shared?
♒︎
When Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical debuts on Broadway in April of 1968, it becomes the first production to include a nude scene with its entire cast.
Around the same time, Star Trek has popularized the phrase, Where no man has gone before.
Our bodies contain elements of outer space. So that when we’re naked we are gazing at the universe.
♒︎
The night of my second panic attack, after getting released from the hospital and determined to change my mental health’s course, I dream of a nebula in the shape of an octopus, holding an astronaut in each tentacle. From my perspective, the cosmonauts feed on all my arms.
♒︎
No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions. Mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation.
♒︎
In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, plurality overtakes singularity. History becomes bored by its self-referentialism. Triangles burrow into single lines. Equal signs collapse on the spikes of other equal signs.
In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, we give birth to information and information delivers us. I make a fist and my fist speaks in four languages. Letters enter me and suddenly I experience flavors few before me have.
In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, gender is a tree is a building is a cloud. It is anything that hasn’t been said. The truest instinct one listens to more and more.
About this Poem
“Literature on mental illness, written by queer and trans BIPOC authors, is hard to come about. Adding to that unique legacy, this excerpt is part of a longer piece about mental health, queer love, pop culture, and decolonial worldmaking. I am interested in the various connections between the individual and what we gather under the umbrella term ‘collective.’ As you read this excerpt, play The 5th Dimension’s version of the medley ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ and imagine what a better tomorrow might look like.”—Roy G. Guzmán
About the Poet
Roy G. Guzmán was born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida. They received an MFA from the University of Minnesota.
Guzmán is the author of the full-length collection Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) and the chapbook Restored Mural for Orlando (Queerodactyl Press, 2016). The recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2016 Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, among other awards, Guzmán is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative studies in discourse and society at the University of Minnesota. They live in Minneapolis.
If you can remember the cold war, you’re too old for me. —Grindr profile
Because you’re twenty-two, and in your prime, you silently refuse to date, or “date.” When war was cold, I had a lovely time.
I messaged you and sent a shot of grime, then shot some more. It must have been too late. Because you’re twenty-two, and in your prime?
Perhaps. I’m shifting like a paradigm. And all the new assumptions formulate as if our war were cold. A lovely time:
I’ll exercise my stock, internal rhyme— the currency is yours to circulate. I’m forty-nine; my interest rate is prime.
Suppose that poverty is not a crime. Suppose you more or less accommodate, like war. When cold, we’ll have a lovely time.
Perhaps you’ll click on me in wintertime. Proximity is constant; so is fate. Was I twenty-two? Before my prime the war was cold. I had a lovely time.
About this Poem
“When I read this epigraph on a Grindr profile, I laughed, dryly, and then wrote it down in my notebook. When I returned to it, the villanelle just sort of wrote itself. This poem is in conversation with, and takes a few gestures from, an uncollected villanelle, ‘Complaint,’ that I published in 2002.” —Randall Mann
About the Poet
Randall Mann is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Deal:New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), as well as Proprietary (Persea Books, 2017) and Straight Razor (Persea Books, 2013). He lives in San Francisco.
A Note about Villanelles
The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. Besides sonnets, the villanelle is my favorite poetic form.
Rules of the Villanelle Form
The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.
History of the Villanelle Form
Strange as it may seem for a poem with such a rigid rhyme scheme, the villanelle did not start off as a fixed form. During the Renaissance, the villanella and villancico (from the Italian villano, or peasant) were Italian and Spanish dance-songs. French poets who called their poems “villanelle” did not follow any specific schemes, rhymes, or refrains. Rather, the title implied that, like the Italian and Spanish dance-songs, their poems spoke of simple, often pastoral, or rustic themes.
While some scholars believe that the form as we know it today has been in existence since the sixteenth century, others argue that only one Renaissance poem was ever written in that manner—Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle,” or “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle”—and that it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the villanelle was defined as a fixed form by French poet Théodore de Banville.
Regardless of its provenance, the form did not catch on in France, but it has become increasingly popular among poets writing in English. An excellent example of the form is Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
Contemporary poets, such as Randall Mann, have not limited themselves to the pastoral themes originally expressed by the free-form villanelles of the Renaissance and have loosened the fixed form to allow variations on the refrains. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is another well-known example; other poets who have penned villanelles include W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney, David Shapiro, and Sylvia Plath.
Let it come, let it come The day when hearts love as one.
I’ve been patient so long I’ve forgotten even The terror and suffering Flown up to heaven, A sick thirst again Darkens my veins.
Let it come, let it come The day when hearts love as one.
So the meadow Freed by neglect, Flowered, overgrown With weeds and incense, To the buzz nearby Of foul flies.
Let it come, let it come The day when hearts love as one.
About the Poem
The longing in these verses is palpable; maybe Arthur Rimbaud was hoping for a little harmony in his relationship with Paul Verlaine. Whatever the true story may be, it certainly expresses that feeling after a difficult stretch in a relationship when you’re hoping to finally see the light.
About the Poet
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born October 20, 1854, in the small French town of Charleville. His father, an army captain, abandoned the family when he was six. By the age of thirteen, he had already won several prizes for his writing and was adept at composing verse in Latin. His teacher and mentor Georges Izambard nurtured his interest in literature, despite his mother’s disapproval.
Rimbaud began writing prolifically in 1870. That same year, his school shut down during the Franco-Prussian War, and he attempted to run away from Charleville twice but failing for lack of money. He wrote to the poet Paul Verlaine, who invited him to live in Paris with him and his new wife. Though Rimbaud’s moved out soon after, as a result of his harsh manners, he and Verlaine became lovers. Shortly after the birth of his son, Verlaine left his family to live with Rimbaud.
During their affair, which lasted nearly two years, they associated with the Paris literati and traveled to Belgium and England. While in Brussels in 1873, a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. Verlaine was imprisoned, and Rimbaud returned to Charleville, where he wrote a large portion of Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). The book was published in 1873 in Brussels, but the majority of the copies sat in the printer’s basement until 1901 because Rimbaud could not pay the bill.
Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry in a span of about five years, concluding around the year 1875. His only writing after 1875 survives in documents and letters. In his correspondence with family and friends, Rimbaud indicates that he spent his adulthood in a constant struggle for financial success. He spent the final twenty years of his life working abroad, and he took jobs in African towns as a colonial tradesman.
In 1891, Rimbaud traveled to Marseilles to see a doctor about a pain in his knee. The doctors were forced to amputate his leg, but the cancer continued to spread. Rimbaud died on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven. Verlaine published his complete works in 1895.
In Alabama Stars hang down so low, So low, they purge the soul With their infinity. Beneath their holy glance Essential good Rises to mingle with them In that skiey sea.
At noon Within the sandy cotton-field Beyond the clay, red road Bordered with green, A Negro lad and lass Cling hand in hand, And passion, hot-eyed, hot-lipped, Lurks unseen.
But in the evening When the skies lean down, He’s but a wistful boy, A saintly maiden she, For Alabama stars Hang down so low, So low, they purge the soul With their infinity.
About the Poem
“Stars in Alabama” appears in The Crisis, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1928). In Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer(The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), literary biographer Carolyn Wedin Sylvander writes, “‘Stars in Alabama,’ in The Crisis in January 1928, contrasts in three stanzas the passionate heat of noon cotton-fields with the pure holiness of the Alabama night. [. . .] The first lines are again repeated as evening returns. Fauset has moved through this poem from personal feeling to a quietly effective comment on passion and its context.” In “The Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” published in The Harlem Renaissance (Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), Maureen Honey, former professor of English and director of women’s studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, remarks, “While poets looked to natural settings in general for space in which to savor the abandonment of confining roles, night was sought most frequently as it was a time when the objectifying gaze was covered by sleep and the freedom to be at one with the darkness could be safely enjoyed.”
About the Poet
Jessie Redmon Fauset was born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey. She grew up in Philadelphia and attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She received a scholarship to study at Cornell University, where she was likely the first Black female student, and she graduated with a BA in classical languages in 1905. After college, she worked as a teacher in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
In 1912, Fauset began to write for the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, which was cofounded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. After several years contributing poems, essays, and reviews to The Crisis, Fauset became the journal’s literary editor in 1919, moving to New York City for the position.
In her role as literary editor, Fauset introduced then-unknown writers, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer, to a national audience. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes writes, “Jessie Fauset at TheCrisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity, and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”
Along with her poetry and short fiction in The Crisis, Fauset published several novels known for their portrayal of middle-class African American life, including There Is Confusion (Boni and Liveright, 1924) and Plum Bun (Matthews & Marrot, 1928). She also edited The Brownies’ Book, a periodical for African American children, from 1920 to 1921.
Fauset left The Crisis in 1926 to teach French at a high school in the Bronx. She married Herbert Harris, a businessman, in 1929, and they lived together in New Jersey until his death in 1958. Fauset then returned to Philadelphia, where she lived until her death on April 30, 1961.
I scarce believe my love to be so pure As I had thought it was, Because it doth endure Vicissitude, and season, as the grass; Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.
But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense, And of the sun his working vigor borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
And yet no greater, but more eminent, Love by the spring is grown; As, in the firmament, Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown, Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, From love’s awakened root do bud out now.
If, as water stirred more circles be Produced by one, love such additions take, Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make, For they are all concentric unto thee; And though each spring do add to love new heat, As princes do in time of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.
About this Poem
“Love’s Growth” was originally published in Poems (John Marriott, 1633), the first comprehensive publication of John Donne’s poetry. In the poem, Donne examines the true nature of love and finds that it is mixed stuff, a mixture of both physical and spiritual elements. True love is both of the body and the mind, and to prove his point Donne gives a number of arguments and brings together a number of most disparate and varied elements. In “The Muse in Donne and Jonson: A Post-Lacanian Study,” published in Modern Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Fall 1991), Mark Fortier, a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, writes (commenting on the last four lines of the second stanza), “The relation of poet and Muse is contrasted, derisively, to the relation between real lovers, which is Donne’s true subject. Where real love is complex and organic, love of the Muse is unreal, devoid of complexity, devoid of life. Love of the Muse is inactive: those who love, do; those who can’t, call on the Muse. Paradoxically the poetic ego identifies itself, at least here, with those who can. There is an estrangement from the Muse, an inability to sympathize with those who value her. To a large extent this will be the primary relationship between the poet and the Muse throughout Donne’s work: the poet never feels close to, never values his own Muse, although sometimes he can respect the Muse of others.”
Donne says that love is not a personification nor is love made of pure and simple elements that have sustaining and life-giving properties. Rather, it is a mixture of different elements, both spiritual and physical. The abstract nature of love is why it affects both the body and the soul. It causes both spiritual and physical suffering. It does cure not because it is the quintessence, but on the homeopathic principle, of “like curing the like.” It cures all sorrow only by giving more of it. Love is neither infinite nor “pure stuff,” but has a mixed nature like grass which grows with spring. Though like the grass in this respect, love is different from it in another way. While the grass loses its life and vitality with the winter, there is no such loss in the power of love. In this respect, it may be likened to taxes levied in an emergency, but never withdrawn even when the emergency is over.
About the Poet
John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.
Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew’s day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne’s personal relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrine that defined Anglicanism. At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets.
In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting in Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne’s father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.
This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife died in 1617 at thirty-three years old shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life.
In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In his later years, Donne’s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox, John Donne died in London on March 31, 1631.
Joe
The Closet Professor 