"Law Like Love"

I’ve started flipping through my burgeoning collection of poetry books, but nothing's really called out to me except for the first poem in another Mary Oliver book that I borrowed from the library, and since I just wrote something about Oliver, I decided to look back over the samplers instead. Alternately skimming and reading the post-war sampler again, I was struck by how much I liked W. H. Auden’s “Law Like Love” on second reading. The first time, as I recall, only the last stanza out to me. It sounded so incredibly cynical about love that my internal skeptic could barely contain its glee. But I had a whole sampler to finish reading, after all, so I continued on without reading the poem a second time.

Coming back to it now, I think I like it because Auden’s tone throughout the whole poem (at least, in my opinion) seems subtly pessimistic. It seems to me like he’s calling out society; we always act like we know how things are, like we’re right, like we’re good, when in reality we don’t and we’re not. The last line is what really seals it for me. “Like love we seldom keep.” It sounds almost scathing. I suppose you could read it as a reference to loves lost, but my gut instinct is to read it as a reference to how fickle people can be—an accusation rather than a lament. When I first read the poem, without really stopping to think about it, I took it as a quaint observation of how everyone defines things differently, using the example of both love and the law. But I think there’s actually this subtle undercurrent of cynicism going on. The way I interpret it, law isn’t necessarily what we think it is, and neither is love. We build up these grand ideas about these concepts, romanticizing and idealizing them, but in fact they aren’t quite so grand as we imagine. The law isn’t perfect, and neither is love. Both are flawed, unstable, and ultimately unreliable. That’s my take, anyway.

I think the form of this poem also makes it really effective. It’s not so repetitious that it gets boring, but it’s not so formless as to be uncompelling. His language is understandable and clear, and it sounds to me like the way people actually talk. Also, it’s kind of fun to read out loud; it helps you see the differences between the stanzas and the different people in them. Furthermore, I just like the comparison between love and the law. I think it’s very clever.

Hugo, Poetry, and "A Birthday"

This weekend I watched Martin Scorsese's Hugo, and I have to say, I was really impressed with the film as a whole. For the first ten minutes, I thought, okay, this could either be really confusing or really dumb, but once we passed the ten-minute mark and they got into story development, I seriously enjoyed it. One aspect of the film that I really liked was its portrayal of the arts, movies and literature in particular. I have a memory of hearing Hugo described as Scorsese’s love letter to the movies, and he certainly  pays the most attention to Méliès and the old films. However, there was a great romanticization of books as well. Hugo’s friend Isabelle is a book fanatic; she and Hugo take several trips to bookstores/libraries throughout the movie, and there are some recurring books that hold sentimental value for them.

Poetry gets one brief mention in the film, and it’s when Isabel and Hugo are caught by the Station Inspector. This is a potentially dangerous situation, and Isabel tries to distract the Inspector from suspecting Hugo of troublemaking. One of the ways she does this—in fact, I would call it her last resort—is by reciting a poem. It seemed clear to me that her intent was to freak him out—and he acts freaked out, cutting her off quickly, pretending to like the poem even though he obviously didn’t, and then letting them off the hook. That was really intriguing to me. It was like, movies are beautiful, and books are beautiful, and poetry is… alarming? Hmm.

Anyway, so, with the magic of the internet, I looked up the poem. It's Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday." My first thought upon reading it was that it reminded me of Victorian Era poetry, so I looked up Rossetti on Wikipedia and immediately realized that I'd done so before—when we read her poetry in the Victorian sampler. I really, really liked her poems that were in the sampler; in fact, looking back over the Victorian sampler, I would say she was my favorite poet in it. Life is full of such strange coincidences.

This poem, "A Birthday," is all right, but I like it less than "Song" and "Echo." It's a little too sickeningly romantic for my tastes. I think it's mostly the last two lines that bother me: "Because the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me." I look at that and I think, "Geez, woman, the birthday of your life? Are you trying to say that you're only really living because you met this other person, this romantic interest? How stupid can you get?! You should be living for yourself, not somebody else!!" Urgh. I might be able to handle the romance if it weren't so seemingly connected to the reason for her existence. She's practically negating the whole of her experience up until that point. And I mean, celebrating and being happy is all fine and dandy, whatever your reason. But holy fudge muffins, Christina, if you put so much stock in this other person to make your life worthwhile, you're setting yourself up for serious problems.

Besides that, I guess the poem isn't bad. She has a good voice; I like her clarity and her word choice. So maybe if it had a different message—at least, as I interpreted it, anyway—I might have liked it better.