Although Valentines Day is still a few days away, I decided to examine some love poems, hoping to see what inspires such lyrical prose, what variations love poems come in, and how the writers use different techniques to evoke an incredibly powerful emotion (The next few blogs will progressively look at love from different perspectives). I took the first step in this journey by looking at what other writers said about love. The result, a poem called “He Whispers” by Anna Akhmatova’s, found in a book titled “Love Poems”, a collection of poems from all time periods and by various writers. Akhmatova lived between 1889 and 1966, so this poem is relatively contemporary. In this poem, Akhmatova captures the almost annoying dedication that comes with love:
He whispers: ‘I’m not sorry
For loving you this way-
Either be mine alone
Or I will kill you.’
It buzzes around me like a gadfly,
Incessantly, day after day,
This same boring argument,
Your black jealousy.
Grief smothers-but not fatally,
The wide wind dries my tears
And cheerfulness begins to soothe,
To smooth out this troubled heart.
According to a government website, in 2004 surveys classified approximately 68 percent of crimes as “crimes of passion”. In short, crimes of passion are crimes that result from jealousy. The committer claims that they are so in love with a person that the only way to keep that person to themselves is through death. This type of crime goes back as far as history, and is probably one of the more popular themes used by Shakespeare. So then, my question is what drives a person, a person tragically in love, to the sort of jealousy that ultimately ends any possibility of happiness? Furthermore, how can one define love; if “I did it for love” then love is an action, and actions have driving factors and initial emotions. Multiple definitions may not result in a definite answer, but perhaps a search for an answer will construct a some permanent way to define such a dynamic part of humanity.