Wednesday
Julia, my wife of 47 years, turns 70 today (I follow in four months), so here’s a Christina Rossetti sonnet to celebrate our relationship. I like how it gets at the way love grows stronger over time. The poet has a friendly debate with her loved one about who loved earliest, who loved deepest, and whose love is most solidly grounded. She concludes that “weights and measures do us both a wrong,” however, because, with time, their loves have become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable:
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love:
Rossetti’s first epigraph, from Dante’s Paradiso, is Dante hoping that his poem about the love that is Paradise, albeit just a little spark, will prompt other poets to do the topic full justice. Petrarch, menwhile, points to how, in the presence of love, all else falls away. In other words, once love has been sparked, we are lost in its immensity and all our previous quibbles fall away.
That’s what it’s been like to be married to this wonderful woman I met in college. The early debates appear utterly irrelevant in the face of “the love which makes us one.:
A great flame follows a little spark.
–DanteAll other things, all thought must go,
And only Love remains there with you.
–Petrarch
I loved you first: but afterwards your love
Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song
As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove.
Which owes the other most? my love was long,
And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong;
I loved and guessed at you, you construed me
And loved me for what might or might not be –
Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong.
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love:
Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’
Both have the strength and both the length thereof,
Both of us, of the love which makes us one.