Indian verses about intimacy, a quiet moment of grief and ‘the bard of the toxic relationship’: experts from around the world pick their favourite literary lines evoking lust, ardour – and obsession. It’s a long away from Hallmark.
W Somerset Maugham knew better than almost anyone that love is a destructive as well as a creative state, that it wages as much harm as it does good. He is the bard of the toxic relationship, and The Painted Veil, about a man who loves a woman so much he drags her into a cholera epidemic in the hopes that one or both of them will die, explores the point at which love shades into hate and obsession.
“I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you.” (From The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham)
I always cry at Wuthering Heights. The first true love I knew was Lucy for Aslan. But if we are thinking romantic love I remember bawling when Michael Tolliver loses his lover, Dr Jon, to Aids in Tales of the City. His big beautiful heart was broken and only the residents of 28 Barbary Lane understood.
“His friends were awfully solicitous these days and he often felt enormous pressure to be visibly happy in their presence. The reborn joy they sought in his eyes was something he would never be able to fake.” (From Babycakes by Armistead Maupin)
I think there is something quite darkly frank about Lovesong by Ted Hughes, with the opening line “He loved her and she loved him/ His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to”. There is a dark yet hypnotic tone to the poem – with love as its shadowed warrior. The idea of love being a ghost which haunts us all to our bones and dreams.
“In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs/In their dreams their brains took each other hostage/In the morning they wore each other’s face” (From Lovesong by Ted Hughes)
Amit Chaudhuri, editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature and author of Odysseus Abroad
The greatest Indian love poetry is synonymous with subtlety and sophistication rather than with just romantic self-expression – in other words, its craft and aesthetic perform a task that’s akin to the oblique and unexpected ways in which arousal works. Perhaps the best examples from ancient India available in English translation are Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s teasing, compressed, and near-perfect versions of the short poems that comprise the Gāthāsaptaśatīof Sātavāhana Hāla. As Mehrotra says: “Written in Mahārāshtrī Prākrit, the Gāthāsaptaśatī(‘700 Verses in the Gāthā Form’) or Gāhākōsō (‘A Treasury of Gāthās’) is perhaps the earliest anthology of secular Indian verse, and dates from the first to second century.” These brief poems record every nuance, register, and mood known to lovers and lovemaking, and are, as a result, an unparalleled study in how humanity constantly both dissembles and reveals itself during moments of intimacy. Here are two examples:
“At night, cheeks blushed/With joy, making me do/A hundred different things,
And in the morning too shy/To even look up. I don’t believe/It’s the same woman.”
“He finds the missionary position/Tiresome, and grows suspicious/If I suggest another./Friend, what’s the way out?”
Hephzibah Anderson, author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex and BBC Culture books writer
For me, this line by Haruki Murakami perfectly captures love’s giddy, greedy, transformative zeal. And on multiple levels, what’s a great love affair but one long, impassioned conversation?
“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.” (From Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami)
These are words uttered by Michel, the ten-year-old narrator of this tale by Alain Mabanckou. He’s generous, kind-hearted, carefree, and those words melted my heart the first time I read it. They signify the purity and joy of first love.
“I’ll keep you in the castles I’ve got in my heart too, where no one can harm you” (From Alain Mabanckou’s Tomorrow I’ll be Twenty)
Stewart O’Nan, author of West of Sunset, a novel about F Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood
From its imagistic style, I believe Zelda wrote this part of the article which appeared in Esquire in 1934, the height of the Depression. By then she’d been in and out of mental hospitals for more than four years. The piece recalls their travels as a married couple, the places they stayed and how they felt. This section comes from 1931, the last time they visited France. Even as she notes the good gone times, there’s still romance here, a last fragile hope.
“We went to Annecy for two weeks in summer, and said at the end that we’d never go there again because those weeks had been perfect and no other time could match them. First we lived at the Beau-Rivage, a rambler rose-covered hotel, with a diving platform wedged beneath our window between the sky and the lake, but there were enormous flies on the raft so we moved across the lake to Menthon. The water was greener there and the shadows long and cool and the scraggly gardens staggered up the shelved precipice to the Hotel Palace. We played tennis on the baked clay courts and fished tentatively from a low brick wall. The heat of summer seethed in the resin of the white pine bath-houses. We walked at night towards a café blooming with Japanese lanterns, white shoes glowing like radium in the damp darkness. It was like the good gone times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs. Another night we danced a Wiener waltz and simply swep’ around.” (From Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number– by F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
Edward Hirsch’s A Treatise on Ecstasy stays with me because of its pairing of a passion for books with burning ardour for the beloved. It’s an exalted poem, drawing on a profound spiritual tradition anchored by writing, and infusing intimacy with a lover with all the heat and force of the deepest, holiest form of study, of close reading, of blazing adoration and gratitude. And for all this joining of reading and worship and sex and love, Hirsch is also being mischievous and witty, reminding us that humour is a necessary element in love, and that the interplay of body and mind is always mysterious.
“Touching your body/I was like a rabbi pouring/over a treatise on ecstasy/the message hidden in the scrolls.
I remember our delirium/as my fingers moved backwards/across the page, letter by letter,/word by word, sentence by sentence.
I was a devoted scholar/patiently tracing the secret/passages of a mysterious text./Our room became a holy place
as my hands trembled/and my voice shook/when I recited the blessings/of a book that burst into flames.”
(A Treatise on Ecstasy by Edward Hirsch)
Syrian poet and diplomat Nizār Qabbānī is one of the greatest 20th-Century writers about love in Arabic, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish expresses love for a nation in poems like A Lover from Palestine. In terms of pre-Islamic poetry, Persian Ghazal – as written by Saadi and Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammed Hafiz Shirazi in the 13th and 14th Centuries – invokes melancholy and longing. There’s a huge tradition of Arabic love poetry and at some point love poetry is elevated to Sufi which is divine love; love for God. The 8th-Century female Sufi poet Rābiʿah al-Adawiyya was one of the first to set forth the doctrine of divine love. The story that inspired Eric Clapton’s song Layla, the legend of Laylâ and Majnûn, is about a poet who goes ‘love mad’, and is read both as erotic longing and a mystical tale. In Persian tradition the ultimate expression of love is when the object is no longer just a woman or a man – instead, the love encompasses the entire world; it’s a divine love.
“His love was chaste and pure as heaven:/But by excess to madness driven,/Visions of rapture fill’d his soul;/His thoughts sublime despised control” (from the version of Laylâ and Majnûn by Nizāmī Ganjavī; translated by James Atkinson)
I love this poem by Jaan Kaplinski, translated by Sa Hamill, from the collection The Same Sea in All of Us (1990). Dana Paramita is a Buddhist term for giving; giving, and taking, it seems to me, is what love is. A merging.
“From this/Red fragrant strawberry/I brought you/In the evening after dusk
Coming home after mowing/There remained only/A gentle red glow
We see/We remember/Between sleep/And waking
(Dana Paramita by Jaan Kaplinski; translated by Sa Hamill)
This is not really an expression but a story about love. In the story, from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the character Ofoedu tells his two friends that Ogbuefi Ndulue of Ire village is dead. The friends agree that it is strange that there had been, as yet, no drum announcement of the prominent (titled) man’s death. He was the oldest man in his village, and the fact that no drum announcement had sounded was a significant omission. In the conversation that ensues, Ofoedu explains why there was no announcement.
“Ozoemena (Ndulue’s first wife) was, as you know, too old to attend Ndulue during his illness. His younger wives did that. When he died this morning, one of these women went to Ozoemena’s hut and told her. She rose from her mat, took her stick and walked over to his obi. She knelt on her knees and hands at the threshold and called her husband, who was laid on a mat. ‘Ogbuefi Ndulue’, she called, three times, and went back to her hut. When the youngest wife went to call her again to be present at the washing of the body, she found her lying on her mat, dead.”
As the conversation continues, one of the friends reveals, “It was always said that Ndulue and Ozoemena had one mind. I remember when I was a boy there was a song about them. He could not do anything without telling her.” (From Chapter Eight of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart)
For me, the fact that Ozoemena went to verify that Ndulue had indeed done this thing – dying – and her response, dying as well, indicates a great deal about love and devotion in a narrative (and culture) that appears to be mostly about male violence and changing cultures.
This line comes from Tang Xianzu’s preface to his 16th-Century play Peony Pavilion. The play is one of Chinese literature’s most moving testimonies to the power of qing, a term that can mean ‘love’, but also ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, and, in the context of the play, the life force. For after the heroine dies of lovesickness, and the lovers pursue their passion in dreams, she returns to life and they consummate their love.
“[That] which cannot be within the realm of reason simply has to be within the realm of love.” (From Tang Xianzu’s preface to Peony Pavilion; translation by Wai-yee Li)
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