“I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.”
Emma Darwin to her husband, Charles, c. February 1839, as quoted in Deborah Heiligman’s Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Holt, 2009), a National Book Award finalist
February 13, 2012
Emma Darwin to Charles – Valentine’s Day Quote of the Day
February 13, 2009
Valentine’s Day Poems for Straight or Gay Lovers, Including Couples Getting Engaged or Married on Feb.14, With All the Words Online
Two poems that aren’t usually thought of as Valentine’s Day poems contain lines that would suit longtime lovers, including engaged and married couples.
Robert Browning’s classic “Rabbi Ben Ezra” begins:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” isn’t a love poem but a meditation in verse on the life of the 12th-century scholar in its title. But countless lovers have inscribed its famous first two lines, both written in iambic trimeter, onto the flyleaves of books or Valentine’s Day notes and cards. And all three would work for straight or gay couples. The full text of the poem appears online at Bartleby.com.
Another classic with lines that would suit gay or straight couples is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation from the German of Simon Dach’s “Annie of Tharaw.” It includes the rhyming couplets:
Oppression, and sickness, and sorrow, and pain,
Shall be to our true love as links to the chain.
As the palm-tree standeth so straight and so tall,
The more the hail beats, and the more the rains fall, —
So love in our hearts shall grow mighty and strong,
Through crosses, through sorrows, through manifold wrong …
Though forests I’ll follow, and where the sea flows,
Through ice, and through iron, through armies of foes.
“Annie of Tharaw” sounds less sophisticated than many contemporary poems, in part because of its anapestic meter, commonly found in children’s poems such as “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” But Dach’s words may speak more directly than some of their modern counterparts to couples facing serious illnesses such as AIDS. Their sentiments implicitly ratify and amplify the “in sickness and in health” of wedding vows, so they would also suit anniversaries. The full text appears online at Litscape.
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
February 11, 2009
Three Pick-Up Lines to Avoid If You Want a Date for Valentine’s Day
In an age of hookups and friends-with-benefits, Valentine’s Day can inspire an atavistic craving for an old-fashioned date. If you’re looking for one, some pickup lines won’t help your cause, Caroline Tiger says in How to Behave: Dating and Sex: A Guide to Modern Manners for the Socially Challenged (Chronicle, 2006). Tiger suggests that you avoid:
1. Are you free tonight, or will it cost me?
2. Is it hot in here, or is it just you?
3. I’m going outside to make out. Care to join me?
There, now don’t you feel better-equipped to face the gym and bar?
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
January 30, 2009
Good Valentine’s Day Poems for Children With All the Words Online
More than a dozen poems appear in 'Valentine's Day'
Ages 4–8
At a certain age children love to know secrets, and Valentine’s Day lets them show it. An example: The following two out-of-copyright lines appear in “To a Baby Boy,” collected in Songs and Other Verse, by the American children’s poet Eugene Field (1850–1895):
Who I am I shall not say,
But I send you this bouquet
Children could attach the lines to a bouquet — or to a drawing (or sticker collage) of flowers — for an easy-to-make free card.
Ages 9–12
Tweens and older children may be embarrassed by overtly romantic sentiments, yet still want or need to send Valentine’s Day cards. The complete works of the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton (1563–1631) include four out-of-copyright lines that might be sufficiently neutral:
Muse, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now delines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day’s Saint Valentine’s.
Teenagers
Teenagers who believe they are desperately in love can find many appropriate poems online. Among the best-known: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s iambic pentameter sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43), which begins:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
This much-parodied poem has become a cliché to many adults but doesn’t sound trite to teenagers hearing it for the first time (and might inspire some to have fun writing their own parodies). The same goes for the lyrics to that Beatles’s toe-tapper, “When I’m Sixty-Four”:
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.
You can hear Paul McCartney singing this one on YouTube by searching for “When I’m Sixty-Four” + “lyrics” (though I’m not linking to it because I’m not convinced that any versions of the song on YouTube are legal).
Other good poems and ways to celebrate the day appear in Ann Heinrich’s Valentine’s Day: Holidays, Festivals, & Celebrations (The Child’s World, 2006), illustrated by Sharon Holm, and other books.
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
February 14, 2008
Valentine’s Day Quote of the Day on Love (Anne Enright, ‘The Gathering’)
“There are so few people given to us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given to us to love and they all stick.”
Anne Enright in her novel The Gathering (Grove/Atlantic, $14, paperback), winner of the Man Booker Prize for fiction www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
February 12, 2008
Do Love Stories ‘Give Love a Bad Name’? Quote of the Day (Jeffrey Eugenides)
“Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.”
Jeffrey Eugenides in the introduction to the new My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro (Harper, 587 pp., $24.95) www.harpercollins.com, which he edited, as quoted by Moira Hodgson in “The Puzzle of Love,” the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9–10, 2008 online.wsj.com/article/SB120251134693455033.html?mod=2_1167_1.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
