Genevieve Lebaron
• How do I love Thee?
• Seeing the Unseeable

Sage Ricci
• Think Like William Stafford Does
• On Robert Sund's "There is No Exile Where the Heart is Pure

Shaun Johnson
• Maxine Kumin's "Flying"
• Gary Snyder's "This Poem is for Deer"

The feeling of love, as a fundamental human emotion often associated with complexities in language, has been exploited in poetry over the ages. Many love poems can be reduced to cliché romantic verse employing relentless metaphors and symbolism such as roses and hearts. How then is it possible, for a poet to successfully manipulate language to describe love, passion that our species revolves around, in an original and effective way? A poet can profess his notions of love by specifying the details surrounding his relationship, such as the time and place, to achieve a unique depiction of love that is as timeless as the feeling itself.

In Philip Metres’ “Ashberries: Letters”, the poet is writing from Russia to his wife in the United States. Metres uses the idea of time in this poem as a device to demonstrate that physical distance can actually bring two people closer together, furthering their characteristic of being in love. The poet voices his frustrations with instantaneous communication methods, like telephones which cause the distance to seem empty and cold, and praises older forms of communicating, like letters, which can warm distance with their tangibility and timelessness. The poem parallels the relationship of the lovers to the maturation of Ashberries, red berries that ripen with every frost, in that it grows sweeter over time.

Metres gracefully uses place as a backdrop. Against this backdrop, he dissects his urges to love and picks apart his feelings about his wives’ distance by detailing the circumstances of his surroundings. In so meticulously painting the Ashberries and describing their evolution throughout his stay in Russia, Metres creates vivid images that enhance the depiction of his relationship and notions of love. Along with the physical description of the Ashberries come descriptions of seasons, of places in Russia where they grow, and of people that pick the berries with him; these images are skillfully manipulated to support the poet’s more abstract ideas of his feelings towards his wife. “My teacher/ says they sweeten with frost, each snow/ a sugar.” This metaphor is much more effective than if Metres were to simply state, “I love you more and more every day.”

The poet describes the distance separating him from his lover as something helping to ripen their relationship, as the seasons do the berries. He is saying that the lovers gain new knowledge and compassion towards one another with every letter, in ways that are discouraged by the informality of telephone communication, and can even be lost in the hustle of everyday life. “When the phone at last connects to you, I hear/ only my own voice, crackle of the line.” Letters hold a clear sense of promise to their recipient, they can be reread countless times, are a concrete reassurance of communication. “They bear across/ this land, where I find myself at a loss—/ each word a wintering seed.” Metres is using the importance of letters as a method to convey the importance of patience and sincerity in long distance relationships, again dissecting a specific piece of his relationship through the study of the effects of time.

“Frontis Nulla Fides,” by Sharon Olds, is another poem that explores a focused angle of love through the consideration and depictions of time and place. In this poem, Olds is describing her husband, who the reader can infer is deceased, as though he was a precious landscape. “I knew and did not/ know his brain, and its woody mountain/ casing…I had my favourite pores on its skin,/and the chaos, multiplicity and/ generousness of them was like/ the massy stars over the desert.” By using this complex description of a landscape, Olds adds many layers to her love of her husband, far more than if she were to say, “I loved and knew every detail of his body.” By incorporating a description of place, Olds is able to accentuate in detail not only her love to her husband but also dissect her knowledge of his body, the part of him she is most familiar with.

This poem is distanced from its subject, as though the poet has been long removed from her husband, which is accentuated by the presence of time throughout the poem. By incorporating the time into her descriptions of love, Olds makes it clear that that the relationship has too stages. The first being the initial period of love, when the husband was alive and the two were happily married, and the second being the reflection on that period, when Olds is questioning the degree to which the relationship was truly genuine. She describes what she remembers of her husband’s body in the utmost detail, but allows the reader to see that time has helped her question her knowledge about what truly functioned in his head. Like a landscape, she is unsure whether she truly understood what went on beneath the surface. “Now I can see that his eyes/ were sometimes hopeless and furious,/ but as I saw them—and he seemed to feel them—/ as lakes, one could sound them and receive no sense/ of their bounds or beds.” Without the presence of time, the distinction between the stages would be difficult to make.

Olds’ poem, like Metres’ denies the universal instantaneous nature of love poetry. Neither of these poems is romantic, in its immediate sense. Each poem explores love as a slow, undying feeling that is suspended over a long period of time. This enables each poet to go beneath the surface of love poems, ones that usually boil down to lust-filled descriptions of a partner. By focusing on the act of staying in love rather than falling in love, each poet has delved far from the cliché of love poetry. It is uncommon for someone to write about love from the perspective of staying in love over time and distance, or staying in love through death.

Both Olds and Metres use the word love once in their poems. Olds, in the clarification of the literary level to her poem, “I feel that ignorant love gave me/ a life.” Metres, in directly addressing his wife, “Love, I live for the letters/ I must wait to open.” Neither poet says directly to their spouse, “I love you,” yet the idea of each poem as a love poem in some form is entirely clear. These poems are therefore successful as love poems through the exploration of the poet’s love, as it exists in one moment in time and place. By balancing love between the details of the abstract idea of time and the immediate idea of place, the poets are able to craft poems that explore the subtleties of love and relationships. The complexity of love as an emotion is dissected, and the clichés of love poetry, avenged.