I Hate Love Poems (Mostly)
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
There is a particular species of loss that arrives through accretion. That which is the slow burial of wonder beneath the accumulated sediment of understanding. I used to like love poems. I don't anymore. Mostly.
The qualifier matters. It trembles there at the end like a hand that reaches back toward something just as the body moves forward. "Mostly" is the word we use when we've learned something we wish we hadn't, when knowledge has made us lonelier but cannot be unlearned.
I remember the first time I encountered Neruda's "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." I was sixteen, and it felt like someone had finally articulated the enormousness inside me, that wild hydraulic force that seemed too large for the reality of daily life. The poem was a permission slip. It said: Yes, this bigness is real. Yes, you are right to feel devoured by it.
But alas, here is what no one tells you about love poems when you are sixteen: they are written in a language that has not yet experienced translation. They speak in the grammar of intensity, and intensity (we learn this slowly, reluctantly) is not the same as intimacy.
When philosopher Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity," she was not writing about love poems, but she might as well have been writing their eulogy. Because what I have come to mistrust in love poetry is precisely its inattention. The way it so often transforms the beloved into a landscape, a weather system, a cosmic event. The beloved becomes anything but a person: actual, difficult, separate.
Mary Oliver, who spent her life writing poems of fierce attention, understood this. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" she asked; and the question refuses to romanticise. It insists on the beloved's autonomy, their life as distinct from the lover's desire. This is one of the poems I still return to. One of the exceptions that populate that haunted word: mostly.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has demonstrated that the brain processes metaphor differently than literal language. Turns out, metaphor lights up regions associated with sensory experience. When Neruda writes of doing to me what spring does to cherry trees, my brain briefly believes in blossoming. But here is a crueler truth: metaphor can short-circuit actual seeing. We feel we have captured something profound when we have only made a beautiful arrangement of evasions.
What I have come to want from poems about love (when I want them at all) is not the architecture of longing but the archaeology of actual connection. Not the moment of falling but the long, unglamorous work of remaining. Not the beloved as muse, mirror, or metaphor, but as the irreducible mystery that another consciousness always is.
There are poets who do this. Wisława Szymborska, with her ironic precision: "Nothing can ever happen twice. / In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice." Here is love acknowledged as the unrehearsable thing it is. Love is clumsy, unrepeatable, resistant to the smoothness of craft.
Or Jack Gilbert, writing in "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart": "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite." This is a love poem that knows what love poems cannot do. It bows before the inadequacy of its own medium.
James Baldwin wrote that "love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." This is closer to what I want now. Not the mask of the poem itself, beautiful and carefully constructed, but something that would willingly shatter its own form in pursuit of truth.
Perhaps what I'm describing is simply the movement from romanticism to realism, from the aesthetics of intensity to the ethics of attention. Perhaps it is only that I have loved and been loved enough times to know that the experience bears little resemblance to its representations. The gap between them is not a failure of poetry but a testament to experience's excess, its refusal to be contained.
And yet. Mostly.
Because there are still moments when a poem arrives like a hand in the dark. When Rainer Maria Rilke writes, "I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world," I feel it. Not the beloved made ornamental but the self made strange and large by love's gravitational pull.
Or when Audre Lorde insists, "We were never meant to survive," I understand this as the deepest love poem: the recognition that to love under conditions that deny your existence is an act of radical transformation, that survival itself becomes a form of poetry.
What I am trying to say is this: I have not outgrown love poems because I have outgrown love. I have outgrown love poems because I have grown into love. Into its difficulty, its dailiness, its demand that we see clearly rather than beautifully. Most love poems fail this demand. They choose beauty. They choose the crystalline arrangement of words over the messy sprawl of actual feeling.
But some precious few do otherwise. They risk formlessness. They choose the beloved's reality over the lover's fantasy. They practice Weil's attention, that rarest generosity.
These are the ones I keep. The ones that populate the country of mostly, that small persistent nation that refuses annexation by certainty.
Maggie Nelson writes in Bluets: "Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color... But if I say that I fell in love with a color, rather than with a person, you may begin to wonder about the nature of this love."
Yes. Wonder about it. Wonder about all of it. The nature of love, the nature of poems, the nature of our need to transform one into the other. The wondering is more honest than the answering.
I used to like love poems. I don't anymore, mostly. But in that mostly lives everything I still believe about beauty: that it must be hard-won, that it must acknowledge what it cannot say, that it must be generous enough to admit its own insufficiency. If this resonated, subscribe below.
MELAKA
2024