So: to the marriage of true minds, impediments were admitted. Love was not love, and altered. Someone stopped counting the ways in which they loved. Love was once like a red, red rose – and now there’s been a freak heatwave, and everything has wilted. Fear not! Nobody knows heartache like poets. Here are words from wise women to soothe the pain of love lost.
She Is Fierce
If it was an unrequited infatuation:
Remember that we all weave ourselves fantasies every day, and forgive yourself. The most mundane of commutes can be enlivened by falling in love twelve times on the way, with the sweep of someone’s hair or the kind crinkles round their eyes. Idle daydreams make the world a little lighter. Read Carol Ann Duffy’s joyful ‘Dear Norman’ – about how she recasts the newspaper boy as an intrepid pearl diver – and remember not to take your own invented love stories too seriously.
If you thought they were something they weren’t:
Seek out Edith Nesbit’s ‘Among His Books’ (yes, she of Five Children and It and The Railway Children fame, who knew about complicated affairs, since she had a tempestuous personal life with her husband Hubert Bland. They both had affairs and Hubert had children with other women, some of which Edith brought up as her own.) This one’s also a great poem for jilted bookworms as the narrator takes comfort in his books,
‘For these alone, of all dear things in life
Have I found true.’
The abandoned husband hugs to himself
‘… the dear memory of what, you know,
You never were.’
If they thought you were something you weren’t:
Find solidarity in the words of two of the women associated with the racy Victorian Pre-Raphaelite artists – Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. Christina was the sister of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth was his model and muse and, later, his rather neglected wife. Despite producing hundreds of pictures of Elizabeth, Dante Gabriel frequently found his head turned by other – how shall we put it? – inspirational women. Both poets wrote scathing verses about how he obsessively idealised Elizabeth while ignoring her actual talents and desires. In Christina’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, the hundreds of images he created of Elizabeth show her ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’, and Elizabeth’s own poem ‘The Lust of the Eyes’ is a clear-eyed condemnation of her husband’s worthless worship.
If they were unfaithful:
There is a wealth of wonderful poetry by women on this subject – if you’ve been cheated on, or been a spurned mistress, take heart in the fact that many of the world’s wittiest women have endured the same fate. Dead Love by poor old Elizabeth Siddal is another indictment on Dante Gabriel’s wicked ways. The predicament of the Other Woman has also been immortalised in poetry: Stevie Smith’s shady Sir Rat is never going to leave his dreadful Duchess in ‘Infelice’.
If you’re star-crossed:
Victorian poet Alice Maynell campaigned for an end to slavery and cruelty to animals, among other causes, had eight children, and still found time to write journalism and poetry. But evidently she knew the pain of love that must be denied. Her poem ‘Renouncement’ is both beautiful and heart-breaking and there’s comfort in knowing you’re not the first couple that – for whatever reason – can’t be together.
I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the thought that lurks in all delight— The thought of thee—and in the blue heaven’s height, And in the sweetest passage of a song. Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright; But it must never, never come in sight; I must stop short of thee the whole day long. But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, And all my bonds I needs must loose apart, Must doff my will as raiment laid away,— With the first dream that comes with the first sleep I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.
If you were dumped:
The world’s first professional writer, Aphra Behn, had clearly been the victim of a savage dumping in her time – see her poem ‘Love Armed’:
‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed’.
It seems there were plenty of faithless lovers around in Victorian times, too, to judge from poems like Mary Webb’s wonderful ‘Why?’ which has a frankly agonising second and final verse – this is one for the wallowing days:
‘Why did you with strong fingers fling aside
The gates of possibility, and say
With vital voice the words I dream to-day?
Before, I was not much unsatisfied:
But since a god has touched me and departed,
I run through every temple, broken-hearted.’
It’s just over, ok?
And of course Dorothy Parker has something spikily brilliant to say about it. She always does. Two-Volume Novel is short enough to fit on the bathroom mirror, as is Yrsa Daley-Ward’s beautiful and blistering Heat. For something longer to wallow in, there are few better evocations of the dreariness and exhaustion of heartbreak than Hera Lindsay Bird’s ‘Watching six seasons of the Nanny while my long-term relationship slowly fell apart’ – find it in her excellent collection Pamper Me to Hell & Back.
Moving On
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is gently heartbreaking but it does imagine acceptance. Nikita Gill’s gorgeous ‘Venus’ – hear her read it here – is one to learn by heart. The last word, though, has to go to Sara Teasdale.
‘Let it Be Forgotten’
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.
Ana Sampson is the compiler of She is Fierce: Brave, Bold and Beautiful Poems by Women (Macmillan)