Some people find it difficult to bend their hearts to the preaching of poems. Perhaps, there is a gene within the heart that gives a tune when poetic strings are fingered. Perhaps, some just have the eye for it but allow raiders to cart away its valuables before it reaches their brain, or perhaps, some just have the ear for it, and can only make sense of it from a symphony of a harrowing voice urged on by a litany of instrumentals. In the spirit of valentine, I want to share this with you:
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the hurrying
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I read this poem as a teenager, and I found it very exciting. It captured the scenic state of my hormonal mind as I searched for myself and aimed to spruce my identity and longing with a suitable mate.
Coyness. Haaa. This word paints a form of sacredness on the persona of a beloved. For me, it reads as ‘puzzle’. A coy lady is a lady in my mind begging to be unravelled. The first five lines resonate with my feelings even more as time is of the essence in the unravelling of things. It did also help that while the narrator alluded to the Ganges, I would ruminate on this poem every time my bus travels over the Nile. I particularly regurgitate this poem on the bridge where the White and Blue Nile meets, and one of my strongest memories is walking atop this bridge with my beloved to the glare of a full snowy moon.
The next few lines of the poem focus on carpe diem, the idea that life must be lived to the fullest without contemplating the consequences. It highlights that state of man where he is completely drunk in the idea that he can’t survive without embellishing the sights of his lover. Of course, these embellishments metastases to a soft place that becomes hardened quite easily. This doesn’t mean and has never meant that a man is driven by lustful hunger.
Perhaps, to understand this poem further, one must deconstruct the meaning of coyness. One may be forgiven for thinking that the narrator is being brutish or patronizing. However, when a lady is pretending to be shy or modest in an alluring way, it can be very ‘exasperating’. A coy mistress is the type, in my opinion, that sends you mixed signals and when you don’t appear to be passionate or ‘on top of her matter’, she increases her charm, aim them at you unmistakably, and ensures you get the message. When such a lady succeeds in planting the seeds of attention, she inflames the fruit of her labour and then toils with your emotions when they become fully invested in her. So while a woman may be coy to a certain extent, to be fawned over or wooed proper, there is a time she must address the emotions piling up at her doorstep.
This poem could also allude to a type of woman known to be torn or trapped between two contrasting men. The brutish forceful one, and the unfortunately romantically reserved one, like the character in this poem, who can only express some form of brutishness through his ink. For example, a coy woman would be Rose in the movie Titanic if she chooses to ignore and act upon the exothermic nature of her relationship with Jack. But as the movie revealed, the death of Jack embodies what I perceive is the length the narrator of this poem is willing to go if his feelings were reciprocated.
Bringing up something that alludes to death, I particularly philosophize on the line ‘The grave is a fine and private place’. While I know the narrator did not mean to warn, this line acted as a caveat, a Lover’s beware message that links my mind to another popular quote, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorned’. For me, these two lines beat one ethos into my mind, do not make promises you cannot keep’. Talking about promises, this meant that if I told my lover that I will set your skin on fire, then this meant I needed to gobble down the Kama Sutras. The fear of failure soon became the fuel and a quest to become a perfect gentleman. Now when I read ‘The grave is a fine and private place’ I simply tell myself; this was another way to say ‘Till death do us part’.
For a poem that urges youth to enjoy the pleasures of life before death, this poem drastically dwells on the impact of death itself on love. Perhaps, this reminds us that love dies, or perhaps, all that is done in youth must not be regretted but taken to the grave. I love this poem because its erotic energy is authentic and it peters out into the dread and questions of a hopeful but cautious lover, that is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
Ahmad Holderness is medical doctor who writes long-form and short-form poems (haiku). Some of his poems have appeared on Entropymag/Enclave, TSSF, Praxis Magazine, Village Square journal, Frogpond, Chrysanthemum, The Mamba, Creatrix, Acorn, and Haiku Presence. He was shortlisted for 2017 and 2020 Babishai Haiku Awards. He nurtures a dream to prescribe poems as pills.
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