Everybody loves a lover: a pantoum[1]
Poetry is the art that belongs to its readers. Poets gaze at and glaze over their love objects. The boys in my neighbourhood caress the black poodle’s vagina and later dress up in their sisters’ colourful dresses, before touching themselves. Such literary pedigree.[2] From the first it was foretold that love should turn on itself, huffing and puffing. As Byron intones, ‘I have not loved the world, / nor the world me; / I have not flatter’d its rank breath…’.[3] Shakespeare reckons his girl, compared to a summer’s day, ‘art more lovely and more temperate’;[4] while Donne, the finer wit, insists a past lover’s ‘subtle wreath of hair’ be left tied about his entombed wrist, designating her both a keepsake and ‘manacle’.[5] For indeed, love is invert, a speculum. Today, we exchange sexual organs as once we exchanged gossip and fashion choices. I may gaze at you, my heart may swell, yet I cannot take you all in: thought and image turn quickly vaporous. I have loved an emanation, like Byron’s ‘all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes’. Or, like Donne, I pretend I want it all, everywhere: ‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, between, above, below’.[6] Opposites no longer attract; we inhabit a coagulum, noses held. Everybody loves a lover, quavers Doris Day, another misappellation.[7]
notes
[1] The song was a release of Doris Day (1958) and The Shirelles (1962). Pantoums use the second and fourth lines of each stanza as the first and third lines of the next. They usually contain four stanzas.
[2] The song's genesis includes a comment made to Adler by his lawyer: ‘You know what Shakespeare said: “All the world loves a lover?"’ In fact, this was a misattribution of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Wikipedia).
[3] Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, III, st. 113.
[4] Sonnet 18.
[5] ‘The Funeral’.
[6] ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’.
[7] The American actress and singer born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff (1922- 2019). Listen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOTzC-0xg0&list=RD3FOTzC-0xg0&start_radio=1