Poems of Love, and Coffins?

A friend of mine is getting married in October, and she asked me to read a poem at her wedding. Since she first brought this up a month ago, I've been flipping my way through anthologies trying to find something just right.

I spent this afternoon at Borders skimming the pages of every love-themed anthology I could find (and there are a lot of them). I kept thinking I was hitting gold: I'd start reading, and the poem would be aurally enchanting yet plainspoken, passionate yet safe for church, modern yet without ennui, and romantic without being too flowery. I'd be ecstatic, and a lump of triumph and wedding-time goodwill would start to balloon in my throat--

And then I'd hit the last stanza. Gah! Each poet had to slip something unpleasant in there at the end. Sometimes he left me with a surprise ending that savaged my belief in happy marriages, or she would mournfully reveal that her lover was long gone and that nothing, especially love, could ever last.

The most common trick, however, was to end with death. Not the death of one of the lovers, per se, just the mention of death. Even a hint was enough to kill (har!) my interest. Poets are always going on about how love can stand up to age, decay, and mortality, but that means that they end up writing an awful lot about death when they claim to be writing about love. For example, take Shakespeare's oft-quoted Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

The opening is gorgeous, iconic: "love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." Beautiful! It's about the steadiness of love, how it never wavers--fantastic marriage material! But Shakespeare just has to stick in those unsettling images of the "bending sickle" and "the edge of doom." These images don't really embody the joyful mindset I'm going for; I don't want anyone watching that wedding to see sickles looming over the flower arch.

Or how about Kenneth Rexroth's Songs of Love, Moon, & Wind? It's a gorgeous little book of translations of Japanese lyrics, each of which is brief, imagistic, romantic, and as refreshing as running your hand through a cool creek. After skimming the table of contents, I naturally flipped to the following poem:

Married Love
By Kenneth Rexroth
 

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

Perfect title, terrible poem for my occasion! I was willing to give the unexpected metaphor a try, to let the clay have its chance--and then he drops the "one coffin" on us in the last line. Kenneth, just like Shakespeare, you are not helping!

This happened so frequently that I started to look for the catch in each poem. This, in turn, got me thinking of how rare it is to find a poem that is a perfectly sincere expression of love or joy or praise. I think this is because poets don't really write out of pure emotion like Wordsworth argues. We write out of complication, which means that if we write about our emotions, we pick ones that have been somehow perverted, thwarted, or made to fail (which is why so many of the love anthologies included special sections on loss and lovers' quarrels).

To me, conceiving of a poem isn't like sitting down to express myself, it's more like scratching a mental itch. I sense something strange or paradoxical or just plain tangled up in my head, and I have to figure it out on paper. I don't know if that's how other poets do it, but I do know that finding a wedding poem for my friend that is beautiful, meaningful, and positive will be a challenge.

But at least I get to read a lot of great poems about death in the process.