Changing the tone a little bit today, I’d like to share Poem XXVI from A.E. Housman’s The Shropshire Lad. The gentle rhythm and straightforward rhymes belie the complexity of the underlying emotions.
I’d love to hear your reactions.
The half-moon westers low, my love, And the wind brings up the rain; And wide apart lie we, my love, And seas between the twain. I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie; And oh, so sound you sleep, my love, You know no more than I.A sonnet today. Shakespeare.
Love, he says, is constant: unchanging even in the face of change, unfaltering even in a raging storm. It is a fixed point of reference even when it it is undervalued.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Love might be butterflies and daisies to many people, but to me – and apparently to Shakespeare – it’s a rock.
