Friday 7 November 2008

"Wine that turned to Vinegar"

To have loved, to have kissed
And- oh, God!- to have missed
The completion of Love!
To have turned to one
As the only sun
In one's sky above
And to find that his beams
Had merely in dreams
Their radiant light.
What so deep as the woe
Of those who did know
The joy of the height.
A more powerful thing
Than the broken wing
Of a bird that soared,
Is one driven by fate
To return with hate
Where she once adored.



Marie Stopes... of course! 1909

5 comments:

? said...

Wonderful...I love this.

The Not-so-Spotless Mind said...

She was one crAzee lady but it is very good... i like when i stumble across these things in my notepads that I forgot i found!

Old Fogey said...

NSS - she has only herself to blame - who is this 'only sun in one's sky above'? Men will always let you down. They are built that way - just as women are built to dream of them too high. none of us can live up to it. But don't worry too much. A woman always seems to elude a man's grasp.
OF

The Not-so-Spotless Mind said...

"Only sun in one's sky above" is Kenjiro Fujii I think. She was very impressed with his academic achievement knowledge, gentleness and sensitivity. They had debates about philosophy, literature and the world. They met whilst Marie was in Japan from 1907 to 1909 whilst doing some paleobotanist research. However, he was Japanese, an atheist and married, which was not compatible with Marie's status in England or her family's expectations of her.

She must have written this poem after coming home in 1909. She wrote a series of poems about love at this time and the consensus amongst Stopes's biographers is that these poems were love poems for Kenjiro. I guess it didn't work out eh?

Haha, men will always let women down and we will always believe you to be paragons of our dreams. It is just human nature.

Shoshanah Marohn said...

That is one lovely poem.