Love and poetry
How this special day became popular in Fiji
‘For al be that I knowe nat love in dede,
Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre, Yet happeth me ful ofte in bokes rede’
Of his miracles, and his cruel yre; Worry not, you haven’t suddenly lost your ability to read, nor did I fall asleep on my keyboard at the close of a long workday.
IT’S just written in Middle English, a predecessor to the English we speak today. What you read a moment ago is part of a poem, written in the 1300s, about finding love on St Valentine’s Day. Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, ‘The Parliament of Fowls,’ is believed to be part of the reason romantic love first became associated with February the 14th.
Here’s a more accessible translation of the earlier extract.
For although I know not Love indeed
Nor know how he pays his folk their hire,
Yet full oft it happens in books I read
Of his miracles and his cruel ire. Poetry and romance have been lovers, maybe for as long as the former has existed.
So, I suppose it is fitting that St Valentine’s Day’s transition from feast day to lovers’ day was, at least in part, due to a poem. February 14 was originally a day of feasts in honour of Saint Valentine, supposedly a clergyman who secretly performed marriages in a time when marriage had been outlawed by a cruel ruler. Valentine’s Day has now become the day we celebrate romance thanks, perhaps, to Chaucer’s poetry.
The poem is not, however, a love letter to a sweetheart. It is, in its basest form, the story of a poet who has never been in love hoping to learn its secrets.
He is guided, in a dream, to a paradise in the heavens where on St Valentine’s Day birds of every kind gather to find their mates. Chaucer connecting St Valentine’s Day to love likely marked the beginning of the transition in the significance of February 14. A transition that took the next several hundred years to find itself where it now stands.
By the end of the 1800s, what we now see as the day of heart shaped cakes, musical cards and red roses had been popularised in the UK and US.
In Fiji, it took a while longer still. As recently as the 1970s, our newspapers bore nearly no hint of the holiday. Maybe a lone ad from a dance club at most.
But over the next two decades, it seems the people of Fiji slowly came to fall in love with Valentine’s Day.
By the 1990s Valentine’s Day stories were making the front page of The Fiji Times.
Businesses were boasting themed sales and competitions. The public had taken to expressing their feelings in the newspaper’s classified section.
A front-page article by an Iva Tora in The Fiji Times of Wednesday February 14, 1990, said the holiday was “catching on”.
“The tradition of St Valentines is catching on here in Fiji, according to two of sales assistants at the Morris Hedstrom,” the article read.
“More people are buying Valentines Day cards now than in previous years,” sales assistant Mashirah Khanam had told reporters.
But just ahead of the curve, in 1989, some anonymous artist had written a poem.
“ALL the world doeth think of love when birthday comes around. Flowers and candy come in waves and songs of love resound. Looks of love and thoughts of love like sunlight fill the hours, Cards and poems fall everywhere in sweet and ardent showers. So, Valentine is so wonderful, much more to be born on, When heart is sending love in flowers and songs and sonnets.”
The poem, published in the classified on February 14, bore no names but was printed with a picture. Was this the artist or the muse? Who was it that shared their birthday with the day of Saint Valentine’s death? Was the poem written for one’s own birthday or that of a loved one? Perhaps there was no muse at all?
While Valentine’s Day messages through newspaper classified aren’t quite as popular today, poetry remains the language of love. With the day of lovers having just passed us by, I’ve no doubt there were still those few mad romantics that spent sleepless nights putting pen to paper to send their darlings a poem.
There are always a few mad romantics left in the world. If you are among them, perhaps poetry is for you.