Love Song

 

Love Song
By Williams Carlos Williams

Sweep the house clean,
hang fresh curtains
in the windows
put on a new dress
and come with me!
The elm is scattering
its little loaves
of sweet smells
from a white sky!
Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.

The famous American  poet in this beautiful poem pleads his lover to set aside the daily chores and join him to indulge in love and celebrate the moment when the whole nature is bursting with intoxicating ‘little loaves of sweet smell’.

I loved the sense of urgency (come with me!) and tempo of the poem. There is a sweep of energy and imagery which are almost seductive. One can visualize the linen curtains billowing in a breeze, a woman in a white dress rushing to immerse in the burst of fragrance from black branches of the elm tree.

This is a hyper charged love poem.

 

 

Autumn Love
“A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune”

by Li Ch’ing-chao

trans. Kenneth Rexroth (renowned American poet)

Search. Search. Seek. Seek.
Cold. Cold. Clear. Clear.
Sorrow. Sorrow. Pain. Pain.
Hot flashes. Sudden chills.
Stabbing pains. Slow agonies.
I can find no peace.
I drink two cups, then three bowls,
Of clear wine until I can’t
Stand up against a gust of wind.
Wild geese fly over head.
They wrench my heart.
They were our friends in the old days.
Gold chrysanthemums litter
The ground, pile up, faded, dead.
This season I could not bear
To pick them. All alone,
Motionless at my window,
I watch the gathering shadows.
Fine rain sifts through the wu-t’ung trees,
And drips, drop by drop, through the dusk.
What can I ever do now?
How can I drive off this word —
Hopelessness?

I  read today this poem in the small collection of "Complete Poems" by Ching-Chao Li. How beautifully the poet captures with evocative images the loneliness and hopelessness after a possible break up from her lover!

Li Ch’ing-chao (1084–c.1151) is universally considered to be China’s greatest woman poet. Her life was colorful and versatile: other than a great poet, she was a scholar of history and classics, a literary critic, an art collector, a specialist in bronze and stone inscriptions, a painter, a calligrapher, and a political commentator. Li is reputed to be the greatest writer of tz’u poetry, a lyric verse form written to the popular tunes of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279). Her tz’u poems are fill of lucid imagery, refined and highly suggestive.

Source: Complete Poems by Ching-Chao Li (Author), Kenneth Rexroth (Translator), Ling Chung (Translator)