That legacy of loss
Love is part of our make up, our genetics, our existence, our direction. Our sanctity, our salvation and our desperation. It can give us reason to breathe, or, it can drive us to breathing our last. For as long as mankind has looked and seen and felt, we have been the beneficiary or the victim. Or both.
It cuts, it ignites, it stains. We are the harvesters of whatever is thrown or blown our way by Eros, Cupid or Venus, that thing that remains impossible to tame, to predict and sometimes to understand. Difficult to fight, a joy to behold. It can warm the soul, launch the ship, blossom the bud, and at the same time twist the heart into a fierce unyielding knot of torture.
We sing about it being a crazy little thing, how we can’t buy it, the power of it, it being all we need. Love is the drug, love is the answer, it is the battlefield. And in the end, when the heart’s battery beats it’s last and the sun dips or disappears, is that it? When one of us is gone and the other left holding on, what then? How then, do we experience that love? Surely it cannot be possible to live the deep interpersonal affection when alone. It may be lost or dim down to the point on the chart somewhere between faint and forgotten, unless somehow, we capture it.
But how is it captured? How are all the emotions and electricity it had generated, held?
Shakespeare did so hundreds of times with testimonies to love and loss in his sonnets and plays. Or the complexities of the heart in the novels of the Bronte’s. Rubens and Rembrandt countless times on canvas, or who would not be moved by Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’. But a work I have chosen to exemplify the total intoxification and consequence of love is a piece by our own William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).
The poem ‘Memory’, in 34 words, perfectly paints and frames the legacy of loss. Yeats takes a mountain of carbon and compresses it into a beautiful small diamond. The rollercoaster ride of romance, with it’s inevitable ending, is contained in a single written ache.
Memory
One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
Would any animal or creature leave a lifelong imprint in mountain grass? Of course not. It is the poem’s single metaphor. Logic and life and more importantly, time, should cure all indentations. But that’s his very point. To the captor, in whatever the art form, logic, life and time do not apply, and they certainly provide no cure.
In six short lines, with a simple a,b,c,a,b,c rhyming scheme Yeats has said it all. Can you imagine just for a moment, a poet of his stature and depth, stepping back from the page and dropping the pen, after so few words, and being satisfied that here, he had said just enough? That he need add no more.
Yeats is declaring that he’ll never stop loving the woman and witnesses and endures that nothing in human life is forever – like life itself. The words are gentle and almost innocent, without any rage or anger, as tender as soft blown grass, but yet behind the tenderness, lies a devastating loss. He wrangles with the truth that he is now left without, and there will never be, a moving on. Only the total permanence of what was and remains chiselled into his very fabric.