Celebrations

"I gently touched her hand: she gave / A look that did my soul enslave; / I pressed her rebel lips in vain: / They rose up to be pressed again. / Thus happy, I no father meant, / Than to be pleased and innocent…"

Sounds pretty contemporary, doesn't it? But it was composed in the 18^th century by some anonymous poet-in-love. Celebrations of man and wife abound in love poetry. There is always a choice, if one undertakes to travel into the realm of rhyme, between an explicit implications and, naturally so, complications of the loving-and-loved situation. One can choose according to taste. The following Madrigal comes from the seventeenth century:

My Love in her attire doth show her wit,

It doth so well become her;

For every season she hath dressings fit,

For Winter, Spring, and Summer.

No beauty doth she miss

When all her robes are on:

But Beauty's self she is

When all her robes are gone.

Probably, after Shakespeare's sonnets had been written there was little left to say for poets. That's why writing about love is actually a blend of joy and hopeless surrender; the surrender to the disquieting thought that everything worth saying has most probably been said before you were born. Yet the 20^th century poets successfully proved that celebrating the beauty of the beloved will never grow out of fashion. One such poet was Archibald MacLeish (1892-1972), an American author.

He won his reputation for his lyrical poetry. After World War I, in which he served as a captain in the artillery, MacLeish returned to teach in the Harvard Law School. Subsequently, he felt teaching to practice law in Boston, but gave up a successful practice because 'he could never believe in it'. He wanted to write poetry. In 1923 he left for Paris with his wife and children in order to submerge himself in the literary atmosphere of that city. In fact, he dated the beginning of his life from the year 1923. The success of his three volumes of poetry written there was assurance that his decision to turn from law to poetry was a wise one. The lasting value of his poetry rests upon a lyrical gift and a phrasing of rhetoric which is his alone.