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Monday, August 05, 2013

Love, Poetry and Prose

Some people love only when they are sure that they would be loved back. Is this love selfish? Is it impure? Can love be impure in any case? No one knows about it; everyone talks about it. Especially all these clichés- sonnets. Are there even enough words to contain the enormity of love?
Was Pablo Neruda as fierce a lover as a poet?  Did his woman feel the same pain, ecstasy, fear and longing as we do when we read one of his poems? Who is to say that he was not an erotic lover, not even a romantic but a simpleton and his poems were only a catharsis of his lonely heart?
Can a heart that has never loved, feel the longing for a comforting caress of the lover?  Yes, through poems, I suppose.
But what is the real feeling that is felt when two people are actually in love? Do they feel any different from- Tonight I can write the saddest lines-? What do they feel? How do they feel? If it is any different from poetry can it be penned down?
‘Avoid writing love poems’- A poet has himself advised. Are poets even the right species to seek advice on a phenomenon like love? Half of them are divorcees and other half bachelors. This decision of love cannot be influenced by such unsettled men.
Some might say poetry although marginalizes yet glorifies love. Poetry seduces words together to simplify love. It makes more people fall in love by its rhyme and helps them to forget their everyday prose. Poem is an expression of love to help the common man understand how he feels. I find this argument baseless.
Can poetry describe that penultimate moment; the one just before- two lovers depart. The moment that you desperately want to prolong even if amounts to selling a part of your soul to buy another second. Can poetry justify the act of sacrificing your best for the whim of your lover?
Poetry cannot even tell for sure whether the tension that two lovers feel in their first embrace is like ebbs and flows or more like waxing and wane. Only prose can dare where poetry ends. Prose is what poetry claims to be.
Think, whether the first word that every writer wrote to express something that could no longer be contained inside him- was it intended for a poem or a prose? And what if the first words of all poems put together form a prose and not poetry. If ‘l love you’ is a poem; I, You and Love in between, is a prose.
Love- it has to felt up your spine and out of your brain. Love should better be left alone, to be expressed through prose.