Songs of the unblind Cupid

Chapter 3: LOVE.

Open in WeRead

About This Book

A sequence of lyrical poems examines love in its many guises—passion, longing, joy, pain, idealized devotion and sensual desire—using vivid natural and musical imagery (flowers, vines, a violin, birds) and concise narrative vignettes. Voices shift between exuberant celebration and mournful reflection, probing youth, aging, fidelity, and redemption while sometimes invoking religious or mythic motifs. Language emphasizes intense sensory detail and rhythmic cadences that blend tenderness, eroticism, and ethical questioning. Short pieces range from playful satire to solemn consolation, together forming a compact, imagistic survey of romantic feeling and its contradictions.

LOVE.

Love is but a great desire—

Coarse, refined, or low, or higher;

Love is like the leaping fire,

Warmth and light, or scorchings dire.

Love gives blindness, insight plain,

Worth or weakness, loss or gain,

Sweetest pleasure, saddest pain,

Thrilling heart, or bursting brain.

Love is pureness, love is lust,

Brutal rape, or restful trust;

Grants full freedom, or says “Must,”

Lifts aloft, or drags in dust.

Love is what the nations need,

Love has made the nations bleed;

Love of all things holds the seed,—

Love the flower, love the weed.

There is then a lower love

Nobler souls will rise above;

To the passion that is higher,

Wiser souls will aye aspire.