O Tell Me the Truth About Love

Nowhere in the U.S. does public transit have as much of a flavor and as much of a life of its own as in NYC! The sights - sometimes heartening, sometimes heart-rending, the sounds - sometimes sweet and enthralling, often times deafening, and the smells... oh the smells! Rarely are those anything but nauseating! :)

Amidst all this are the people... the quintessential New Yorkers - People who refuse to make eye-contact, lest you are one of those freaks who lurks in Central Park at night, are crushed up against others who need but the smallest of excuses to lapse into an animated discussion about that book you are reading!

Faced with such contradictions, it would be hard to imagine a curious person like me doing anything but people-watching... Alas, this breed of humans doesn't take too kindly to being stared at! Which kinda limits my options...hehe. So often times, I pick my poison - between catching up on my reading and listening to the latest podcasts, I usually have my 50 minute commute pretty well covered! :) But sometimes I just don't feel like doing either, and it is then that I keep myself busy by intently reading the subway signs and advertisements!

Anyway, recently I was pleasantly surprised to see the following lines from W.H.Auden's "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" posted in one of the subway cars:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose,
Will it knock on my door in the morning
Or tread in the bus on my toes,
Will it come like a change in the weather,
Will its greeting be courteous or bluff,
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

You can find the full poem here.

Now I am not a big fan of Auden's work, but I must admit that I have always liked this one quite a bit. So I asked around... and realized that this was a part of the MTA's "Poetry in Motion" campaign, a 15-year old partnership between the MTA and the Poetry Society of America (PSA). Starting in 1992 with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats, and "Let There Be New Flowering" by Lucille Clifton, each year the MTA and the PSA jointly select poems that are displayed in subway cars and buses either in full or as excerpts! You can find some of the past poems here. What a brilliant idea! Nothing like a smart verse or two to brighten up one's commute - for once, I think, a bureaucratic policy seems to be doing more good than harm! :)

Brown Penny... Never Give All The Heart!

Love is such a funny funny thing - one minute, it makes you want to jump up in glee... the very next, it makes you want to whack the hell out of a piñata! Hehe! :)

Was just looking over some poetry by Yeats and I came across a perfect example of this phenomenon... Here are two poems - In the first one (Brown Penny), Yeats urges us to go out there, not waste another moment, and immerse ourselves into the glorious thing that is 'love'! And in the next one (Never Give All The Heart) he warns us against throwing caution to the wind when we fall in love - as his own personal heartache taught him, if you love completely, it will simply come and bite you where the sun don't shine! Haha!:)

Brown Penny

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Never Give All The Heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.