A Prayer of Love

Aphra Behn was one of the first professional female writers, famous primarily as a dramatist. She has some poetry to her name, including a three stanza piece called, “On Her Loving Two Equally.” Like the other love poems and songs I've written about this month, it's in first person, but that's where the similarities end. This poem has two characteristics that set it apart. First, the speaker is torn between two suitors, not serenading one. Second, the speaker is a woman.

The two men in question are Damon and Alexis. The first stanza suggests neither could have caught her eye without the other, and the second stanza says when she's with one of them, she thinks about the other. There's no indication she loves one more than another, as the poem starts off with the lines,

How strongly does my passion flow,
Divided equally twixt two? (1-2)

The speaker never tells us much about either man, save putting them in contrast with one another: the only reason Damon had managed to subdue her heart (3) is Alexis had already done some wooing (4). Alexis couldn't prove his love (5) without Damon's aid (6). The two are both in competition and indebted to each other. The speaker gives no indication to the forms of their relationships, how they met, how they fell in love, or how Damon or Alexis see, or even know about, each other.

There's any number of things that could be read into Behn's vagaries. The poem could be about how love...

• ...is fickle, as she has to decide between two men. She invokes cupid's aid at the very end.
• ...is something beyond control, even something divine or supernatural. She calls cupid “though mighty winged god” (13).
• ...is blind. She's willing to go either way. She just wants someone else to make the decision for her.

But being vague about the men is the least of her creative endeavor. The last three lines indicate she's in a dilemma that will have negative consequences:

But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take?If Damon, all my hopes are crossed;Or that of my Alexis, I am lost. (16-18)

If she ends up with Alexis, she’ll be denied her hopes. If Damon, she’ll be lost. Or maybe it means that being with Damon will ensure her hopes will be gained. If Alexis, she will find herself, but there’s little in the text to suggest that.

There are only a few things the poem makes sure: she loves two men equally, she can't make up her mind, and so she turns elsewhere, well aware of the consequences.

Behn's poem, in the end, is a prayer, and a prayer, regardless of your belief system, is an appeal to something beyond your own faculties and abilities. People pray to divinity because they need or want something they can't get on their own, and so seek the favor of another who can, who (depending on your belief system) may not even need you. In the end, I think love itself is like that, and I think that is part of the issue the poem is addressing. The kind of romantic, passionate love the speaker of the poem is dealing with isn't the kind to be divided and shared. It's personal and meant for a single other person. Love like this is asking someone else to do for you what you can't do for yourself.

It's like Waller's “Go Lovely Rose”: doing everything that you can, and then putting your faith and your heart in the hands of another.

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Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. "On Her Loving Two Equally." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 860-861. Print.

More Than Skin Deep

I want to talk about a love song, actually two love songs, one with substantial derision and another with substantial respect.

The one I respect is pretty obscure; it's called “Proofreading Woman.” It's a song by the Rockbottom Remainders, which was a rock group formed by novelists and writers, featuring, among others, Stephen King, Amy Tan, and, the singer of this song, Dave Barry. You can find a few performances of it on Youtube, and while this one is the best, none of the recordings are really great. 

I discovered this song years ago when I was on a Dave Barry kick. Like Barry himself, the song's cheesy, and meant as a joke. It is also one of the best love songs out there. It addresses traits and characteristics beyond those love songs usually address. 

Love songs tend to be either abstract or focus on how beautiful a woman is, and sometimes, they're flattering.

Then there’s the song for which I have substantial derision: Bruno Mars' “Just The Way You Are.” It sounds like it's a good, positive, affectionate song about how, with all of a woman's beauties and flaws, she's still someone important to the singer of the song. In Bruno Mars' song, he sings about:

Her eyes
Her hair
How beautiful she is
How he compliments her beauty
How she asks if she looks okay.
How he feels when he sees her face.
Her smile
Her lips (and how he would kiss them all day if she'd let him)
Her laugh (which is sexy)
How he'd never ask her to change
How she's perfect

Mars' song is, first of all, about a hot girl with a sexy laugh who may be a little bashful, but is still preoccupied with her appearance. The line about how he'd kiss her lips all day “if she'd let me” always strikes me as creepy and suggestive in all the wrong ways.

“Just the way you are” is a woefully superficial song and suggests the woman is too. There is no commentary on her skills, abilities, talents, or intelligence. She could be a doctor. She could have a debilitating drug habit. She might know all of Shakespeare's work by heart. The only words she recognizes may be her own name. We have no idea. Bruno doesn't tell us. It just doesn't seem like he cares. On the one hand, this makes the song marketable and popular because it operates under two popular assumptions: women care about being beautiful and women want to be told they're beautiful.

I'm not going to say there's anything wrong with being beautiful or complementing a woman's beauty, but a man whose main preoccupation is on whether or not he's with a hot chick isn't a man worth being with.

Hence my immense appreciation for “Proofreading Woman.”

The very first lines riff on the very heart of these other love songs:

Some men like a woman with a beautiful body,
Some men like a woman with a pretty face,

Nice body, nice face? We've heard that before. The difference here is the song sets up the expectation of a reversal. The next lines are:

But I like a woman with a big vocabulary, And every single little comma in place. I'm in love (he's in love) with a proofreading woman!

She's intelligent and possess a skill.

She fixes up plays, She fixes up novels, She fixes up books full of poetry,

She's accomplished professionally and in a variety of ways. Different genres require different proofreading skills, and she's well versed in several genres.

Just as how Bruno left us not knowing how talented or capable the woman is, Dave Barry lets us know this is a competent, intelligent woman with a specific skill set she uses professionally. With no lyrics to give any idea as to what she looks like. There’s no hint, no inclination. But her beauty doesn’t matter. If it did matter, it would be in the song. The song is more preoccupied about the kind of woman she is, not the kind of woman she looks like.

She even gets a voice. In a situation involving another man. She gets to speak for herself. In part of the song Barry sings 

A handsome man fell in love with my woman.
He tried to take her away from me.
He said, “Hey baby, I'd like to really know ya.”

In each recording that I've heard, the music pauses here, and a woman, I believe it's Amy Tan, responds,

“Frankly, I'm not attracted to men who split their infinitives.”

He probably doesn't even know what split infinitives are. The point, though, is not only is this woman worth serenading because of her intellect , but she has the opportunity to speak for herself. She's not just an object to be desired, nor one to be defended or held back, she can speak for herself.

On the other hand, how many women want be serenaded about what wonderful proofreaders they are? The song has limited appeal, and, given that it was written and performed by a bunch of professional writers and not musicians, it can be hard to give it great critical fanfare from music connoisseurs. If nothing else, though, it's worth stopping and thinking about the songs and poems and what it is they celebrate. Do they celebrate a significant other's skills, talents, intelligence, capabilities? Or how beautiful they are?

Ask yourself just how skin-deep do the love songs and poems you enjoy go?

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Works Cited

Barry, Dave. "Dave Barry Sings 'Proofreading Woman'." YouTube. Google inc., 24 Apr 2010. Web. 9 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jMJ0k2tSxE>.

Mars, Bruno. "Bruno Mars - Just The Way You Are [OFFICIAL VIDEO]." Youtube. Google inc., 8 Sep. 2010. Web. 9 Feb 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhCEhWiKXk>

Simple Symbols of Love

Ah, February. a short month punctuated with varying shades of red and pink hearts; bare-bottomed, infantile archers; and a continuation of the winter holidays binge eating. There’s still plenty of sugar to go around.

And poetry, lots of poetry.

Poetry and literature about love is as common as carbon, so... why not do a few romantic poems these four weeks of February.

Love is a difficult thing to represent or describe, which is why we have a proliferation of certain colors, shapes, and pictures to represent it. We use these colors and images to try to shape and define this abstract concept. Love is so profound, and yet so common, we use these images because they symbolize something significant.

Imagery and symbolism, like lovers, go hand in hand. It's possible to have one without the other, but you usually find them in tandem. Sometimes we see symbolism as trying to dig out the author’s deeper meaning behind symbols and images, and we expect symbolism to be deep, profound, and elusive. Not all symbolism has to be so elusive, though. Sometimes, it’s as simple as the symbols of love.

The poem I want to discuss is one of these simple ones. It appears in anthologies and classrooms. I don't think there's anything deeper or more profound in it than its being a love song. Edmund Waller’s “Song” or, as it is more commonly known, “Go Lovely Rose.”

This poem is special to me. I don't have any great romantic attachments to it, but it makes for a beautiful song, and I sang it in my high school choir. It's simple, sweet without being saccharine, and invokes simple, beautiful imagery of a single, impermanent, significant rose.

Roses are simple, delicate, beautiful, and when the speaker of the poem says, “Tell her...when I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fair she seems to be” (2-5) the speaker addresses the rose and tells the rose to tell the woman he is wooing how he compares the rose to her. The poet relies on the symbolism of the rose, and yet, tries to imbue it with his own symbolism. Roses are common in Western culture as a ubiquitous symbol for love. Giving a person a rose will send a very different message than sending them columbines or poppies, because there's something delicate and romantic in a single rose.

What the speaker of the poem is trying to do is take the collective, societal symbolism of the rose and individualize it – personalize it. He does this by addressing the rose itself about its own symbolism, but he adds to it in the process. He suggests the rose's beauty would have been “uncommended” (10) had it bloomed in a desert. He suggests beauty is beauty whether it is recognized or not. For the speaker, the rose isn't just a beautiful flower symbolic of love because convention says so. He encourages this added symbol of the barren desert as a way to encourage her to “suffer herself to be desired,/And blush not so to be admired” (14-15). The speaker isn’t content to accept the rose as a symbol in and of itself, but mingles the symbolism of the rose with the image, and thereby the symbolism, of the desert to make it as unique as his love.

He then reminds us, and the rose, that the rose will die, regardless of whether it bloomed in a desert or not. There’s a departure from the romantic. Roses don’t symbolize death, and love poems don’t usually end on a note of “and we’ll die some day.” He doesn’t forget that he’s dealing with a plant that lives and dies and not just emotions and abstract symbols. He knows the rose won’t last long, a fine detail vendors don’t mention, but he’s not going to shirk from the truth, and is going to use it to his advantage. In short, to say they should take advantage of “how small a part of time they share” (19).

The speaker takes the rose, relies on the rose’s traditional symbolism, and develops upon that symbolism to make it his own. Which is what we do with love.

Romantic love has kept writers of every sort employed for centuries, each one wringing some new significance, form, model, or moral from it in order to delve deeper into this ubiquitous emotion. I mean, Nicholas Sparks has published 17 novels, and the rose has remained a symbol of love for centuries. Edmund Waller wasn't doing anything new here but his piece does say something about the nature of love and our relationship with it: we try to make it personal.

In a culture where people can build careers on the serialization of romance, and yet, it's something abstract. We can't put our finger on it, and its different for everyone. So the speaker of this piece finds himself in a plight not unlike that of most every person who has fallen in love. He has so many ways to convey this love, but he wants to do something unique.

It isn't just a poem about a man wooing a woman nor is it just about how roses are symbolic of romantic love. It's about how we take these symbols of love and breath new life, new love, into them.

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Works Cited

Waller, Edmund. "Go Lovely Rose." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180684>.

Waller, Edmund. "Song." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 1006-7. Print.