...Solace

[sotto voce]

There's comfort in words when you miss a loved one.


...praying for the souls on the Gulf coast...

 

[sotto voce]

January 27, 1918

My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well. I am fast shut up like a little lake in the embrace of some big mountains. If you were to climb up the mountains,
you would see me down below, deep and shining - and quite fathomless, my dear. You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.

I love you - I love you - Goodnight. Oh Bogey, what it is to love like this

Katherine Mansfield, writer, to John Middleton Murray

 

[sotto voce]

Love
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And in Life's noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within ;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulse's beat ;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft I bless the Lot that made me love you.

 

[sotto voce]

May 12, 1869

Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for this priceless treasure that is confided to my life-long keeping.

You cannot see its intangible waves as they flow towards you, darling, but in these lines you will hear, as it were, the distant beating of the surf.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), American writer, to Olivia Langdon, his future wife.

 

[sotto voce]

Sunday 19th

My beloved angel,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

As for my heart, there you will always be - very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me.

I rise up every moment saying to myself, Come, I am going there Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation

Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders' threads.

O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talk to you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful.

Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself she is mine Ah The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday

Honore de Balzac, French writer, to Evelina Hanska, a Polish countess, June 1836.

 

[sotto voce]

Confession
by Frantisek Halas (1901 - 1949)

Touched by all that love is
I draw closer toward you.
Saddened by all that love is
I run from you.

Surprised by all that love is
I remain alert in stillness.
Hurt by all that love is
I yearn for tenderness.

Defeated by all that love is
at the truthful mouth of the night.
Forsaken by all that love is
I will grow toward you.

 

[Cathleen]

Oh, I'm loving this idea sotto. Thanks for adding it here.

 

[sotto voce]

 

[midwestyankee]

I received this from someone who remains very, very special. I thought that I would honor the start of this wonderful thread with something that has a special place in my heart.

i carry your heart with me
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
- e.e. cummings

 

[sotto voce]

Hi Midwest

I read that poem for the first time a few days ago! Thanks for including it here.

 

[midwestyankee]

Hi Midwest

I read that poem for the first time a few days ago! Thanks for including it here.

You're quite welcome.

 

[sotto voce]

Life in a Love
by Robert Browning

Escape me?
Never—
Beloved
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear—
It seems too much like a fate, indeed
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed—
But what if I fail of my purpose here?

It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again,—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,No sooner the old hope drops to groundThan a new one, straight to the selfsame mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed

 

[sotto voce]

I've fallen in love with Pablo

Love Sonnet VII
by Pablo Neruda

Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns

That is why, when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

that geysers flooding from deep in its vault;
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock & scald.

 

[sotto voce]

Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

 

[sotto voce]

background from a poetry website

"The story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is one of literary tragedy...

Keats met Fanny in November of 1818 and fell instantly in love with her, to the dismay of both her family and his contemporaries. The couple became secretly engaged soon after. However, in the winter of 1820 Keats became very ill. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Keat's health progressively declined and in a final effort to save his own life, he moved to Italy. In 1821, at the age of 25, he was laid to rest. Buried with him, close to his heart, was an unopened letter from Fanny.


Wednesday Morng. [Kentish Town, 1820]"

My Dearest Girl,

I have been a walk this morning with a book in my hand, but as usual I have been occupied with nothing but you: I wish I could say in an agreeable manner. I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy. 'Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you: yet with all this devotion to you I cannot persuade myself into any confidence of you....

You are to me an object intensely desirable -- the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. I am not the same to you -- no -- you can wait -- you have a thousand activities -- you can be happy without me. Any party, anything to fill up the day has been enough.

How have you pass'd this month? Who have you smil'd with? All this may seem savage in me. You do no feel as I do -- you do not know what it is to love -- one day you may -- your time is not come....

I cannot live without you, and not only you but chaste you; virtuous you. The Sun rises and sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclination to a certain extent -- you have no conception of the quantity of miserable feeling that passes through me in a day -- Be serious Love is not a plaything -- and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience. I would sooner die for want of you than ---

Yours for ever
J. Keats

 

[sotto voce]

To Fanny Brawne:

I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me.

I have a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving ....I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be
martyr'd for my religion - love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My creed is love and you are its only tenet - you have ravish'd me away by a power I cannot resist.

- John Keats

 

[sotto voce]

This is my favorite of all the "famous" love letters I've found so far. It's so poignant.


August 21, 1853

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me.

I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a storm cloud.

On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank.

Gustave Flaubert, French writer, to his wife Louise Colet

 

[AppleBiter]

Beautiful idea, sotto.

I'll share some of my own work, if no one minds.

I've already published "Carry On" which is about loss (& in my sigline). These poems were about the same person. He was one of my best friends, I had known him since we were three years old. He died when we were both at the tender age of sixteen. You'll have to forgive me if the poems are a little juvenile and perhaps not so well put together . . . I wrote them in the few months and years following his death. Anyway, here are my poems in memory of B.

The Depth of Loss

Paralyzed by pain, I struggle to breathe
As phones ring and cars pass by around me.
It's a pause -- a jolt to a sudden stop.
It's having the core of your soul ripped out.
Ebony blankets once sunlit skies
As bitter cold sweeps in, unannounced.
I stand in fear and in shock . . .
Naked to the bitterness of the cold,
Helpless against the ripping of my soul,
Still . . . and with only my broken mind
Left to scramble together some ounce of pseudo-sanity.
Everyone sees, yet no one knows
And I am lost, raging, alone with my thoughts.

Sixteen

Have you any clue what it is to watch the sun fade to black;
To feel your heart descend, like rain from the sky?
Do you know what it's like to feel your soul scream
As your eyes dim -- forever -- from staring at a blank wall?

Can you sympathize with an emptiness that slowly eats away at your mind?
Or waiting, in vain, to see that face at your doorstep to tell you it's all right?

I know what it is to scream and cry into the open air
Only to hear your own pathetic echo as a reply.

I understand what it feels like when a cup of coffee can break you down
And letters and pictures become your most treasured possessions.

I've written that letter that I can never mail
And called that number to hear that voice a thousand times,
Forgetting, somehow, that it's silent forever.

"Friends forever" isn't much of a comfort
When you're so far away, not even my pain can reach you
God knows I've tried.

A black casket and some daisies on a mockingly bright June day
And this is supposed to be good-bye?

No one should feel this way.
Especially not twice.
I'm so afraid.

 

[sotto voce]

I understand what it feels like when a cup of coffee can break you down...

I'm so sorry, AB, for your loss. I didn't lose any close friends when I was that age, but our high school class did lose a boy who fell from a cliff into a quarry, and it was a shock to everyone, because you feel so distant from death at that age.

I love original work, especially poetry. Thank you for sharing yours

 

[sotto voce]

It's difficult tonight.

Must be the barometric pressure, and how it reminds me...

 

[midwestyankee]

Another bit of doggerel from this old dog:

As one
We were
As one
We are
As one
Will be

 

[sotto voce]

Heya Midwest, are you ducking under Katrina? I hope you're not in harm's way.

Romance is never doggerel in my book.

 

[midwestyankee]

Heya Midwest, are you ducking under Katrina? I hope you're not in harm's way.

Romance is never doggerel in my book.

Thanks. I am 1,000 miles north of danger from Katrina.

 

[sotto voce]

I wish you were here, baby, and that you were singing this to me like a confession. But to quote Rome, "Did you expect him to pluck a harp for you? He's a soldier."

Maybe I did. It would have been the merciful thing to do, since I'd surrendered long ago~


Cat People

(Giorgio Moroder/David Bowie)

See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Colder than the moon
It's been so long

Feel my blood enraged
It's just the fear of losing you
Don't you know my name
Well, you been so long

See these eyes so red
Red like jungle burning bright
Those who feel me near
Pull the blinds and change their minds
It's been so long

Still this pulsing night
A plague I call a heartbeat
Just be still with me
You wouldn't believe what I've been thru
You've been so long
Well it's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
with gasoline
putting out fire
with gasoline

See these tears so blue
An ageless heart
that can never mend
These tears can never dry
A judgement made
can never bend
See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Just be still with me
You wouldn't believe what I've been thru

You've been so long
Well, it's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
with gasoline
putting out fire with gasoline

 

[sotto voce]

Thanks. I am 1,000 miles north of danger from Katrina.

Since she's a 1000 mile-wide storm, that puts you smack dab in the middle of--CANADA!

I'm glad you're safe.