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.

If thou must love me...

Some days, your heart just wants to scream out aloud... but lacks the words it needs to do it with. On some other days, you even manage to get a few words out, but they just seem so hollow... so strangely inadequate... And you wonder - if I can feel it in me, throbbing away with such great passion, why then can my brain not find that same power in the words it chooses?! (Stereotypically speaking, us men-folk are purported to be the most frequent offenders of this kind - how often we are blamed for not being able to verbalize what's truly running in our heads and our hearts! Hehe!:))

Now I am a markedly talkative bloke - you leave me in a room with some close friends and I could yap on till kingdom cometh! Hehe!:) This verbal constipation that I just mentioned is not my natural state of existence, so to speak! However, when you look at it in all honesty, it's not all that incongruous... Blessed is the one who speaks 'coz he has something to say... more often than not, we speak 'coz we can't bear the silence... And finally when we do have something to say... something truly important... truly significant... we are faced with a unique burden - how do I say it so that what comes out of my mouth is what's running in my head!?

Now don't get me wrong; this isn't merely one's fear of the 'foot-in-mouth' syndrome... I think, it's more along the lines of, "If this means so much to me that I can't bear to exist another moment without sharing it with you, how do I get it across without losing any of the intensity, the emotions, the pathos?”

It's at times like these that I keep going back to the poetry of the yesteryears. Now mind you, most of these poets were total nuts with train-wrecks for personal lives... Frequently they were suicidal... sometimes they were just sociopathic! But maybe since everything else in their lives sucked so bad, they ended up working wonders in the one area they picked to excel in - literature! Aah, what words... what thoughts... Sometimes, it feels like Browning and Shelley and Yeats and Keats traveled through time, just to peek into my heart... and then went right back, and put my feelings down on paper, in a style far better than any I could ever manage!

One such example is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 14 - "If thou must love me, let it be for nought"! For years I have tried to knock this idea into several peoples' heads... but never have I managed to do it with such class! Hehe!:)

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.