LOVE LETTERS

NTNU ENGLISH CAMP!

Professor Goodwin
3 July 2024
A History of Love Poetry
◦ Love is one of the most powerful human emotions, and love poems have been around since time
immemorial. In fact, the oldest poem in this genre is over 4000 years old and was discovered in the
19th century in the town of Nippur, located in present-day Southern Iraq. After 70 years spent
lying in a Turkish museum drawer, the poem was finally translated as ”Love Song for Shu-Sin”.
The poem, etched into a clay tablet, was discovered by archaeologists.

While the author of “Love Song for Shu-Sin” is not known, it is believed that this love poem was
recited by one of the Sumerian King Shu-Sin's brides. King Shu-Sin ruled the nation from 2037 BC
to 2029 BC, and the poem was both a love poem and what was known as a “sacred rite”. Each year,
the king would have to recite the love song and symbolically pledge his commitment to the goddess
Inanna. The reciting of these sacred poems ensured prosperity and fertility for the year ahead and
was thus a good omen for the Sumerian nation
The Love Song for Shu-Sin (2000 BCE)
◦ Bridegroom, dear to my heart,

Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,

Lion, dear to my heart,

Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.

◦ You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.

Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,

You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.

Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.

The Song of Songs
◦ Prior to the discovery of this piece of poetry, it was
commonly believed that the Bible's Song of Solomon
was the oldest recorded love poem. While it reflects on
the romantic and intimate relationship between a
couple, many believe it to signify a greater love between
God and his disciples.
◦
https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/song-songs
Gaius Valerius Catallus (84-54 BCE)
◦ I hate and I love ◦ Odi et amo.
Why, you may ask? ◦ quare id faciam,
I do not know.
◦ fortasse requiris?
But, it happens.
And I burn. ◦ nescio, sed fieri sentio et
excrucior.
ODI ET AMO by Catullus
◦ The Roman poet Catullus was born sometime around 84 BCE to a leading equestrian family
in Verona and died around 54 BCE in Rome. About 116 of his poems survive to help
endorse his reputation as the finest lyric poet of his generation, one whose expressions of love
and hatred (odi et amo) continue to influence poets today.

In 25 of his poems he speaks of his love for a woman he calls Lesbia. Her identity is uncertain.
She was probably Clodia Metelli, the sexually rapacious wife of a celebrated bore, Quintus
Caecilius Metellus Celer, a Roman consul, and the sister of the notorious Publius Clodius
Pulcher, a politician and gangster not averse to using intimidation and violence like a Latin
Godfather. Ten years older than the poet, she had many lovers among whom Catullus was
merely one. Despite her infidelities, the ardent poet could not walk away. One of the most
celebrated and probably the most translated of his poems (85: Odi et amo) expresses, in two
taut lines, the range of his emotions.
 Li Bai 李白 (701-62)
◦ Li Bai’s life is documented extensively in the almost
one thousand poems attributed to him. Considered
one of the most important poets of the Tang
Dynasty, Li Bai's work has influenced poets and
artists across the world, including Ezra Pound,
Gustav Mahler, Ha Jin, and Gary Snyder.
◦ American poet Ezra Pound’s interpretation of Li
Bai’s “Parting at Changgan” ( 長干行 ) is called,
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
◦ At fourteen I married My Lord you.
◦ While my hair was still cut straight
across my forehead
◦ I never laughed, being bashful.
◦
I played about the front gate, pulling
◦ Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
horse, ◦ Called to, a thousand times, I never looked
back.
◦
You walked about my seat, playing with ◦ At fifteen I stopped scowling,
blue plums.
◦ And we went on living in the village of ◦ I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Chōkan:
◦ Two small people, without dislike or
suspicion.
The River-Merchant’s Wife
◦ Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed
◦ You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of
swirling eddies,
◦ And you have been gone five months.
◦ The monkeys make sorrowful noise
overhead.
◦ You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the
different mosses,
◦ Too deep to clear them away!
◦ The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
◦ The paired butterflies are already yellow
with August
◦ Over the grass in the West garden;
◦ They hurt me.
◦ I grow older.
◦ If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,
◦ Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
 Shakespeare Sonnet 18
◦ Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
 Shakespeare Sonnet 129
◦ The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
◦ Is lust in action: and till action, lust
◦ Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
◦ Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
◦ Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
◦ Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
◦ Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
◦ On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
◦ Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
◦ Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
◦ A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
◦ Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
◦ All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
◦ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Types of Love
◦ EROS: Romantic
◦ PHILIA: Platonic, For a close friend
◦ AGAPE: Selfless, for everyone around you
◦ STORGE: Familial, for child or parent
◦ PHILAUTIA: Self-love
◦ PRAGMA: Mature love
◦ LOVE FOR a hobby, a pet, a place, an occupation
◦ LOVE For an idea
Abu Muammad Bin Hazm (994-1064)
◦ I would split open my heart
with a knife, place you
within and seal my wound,
that you might dwell there
and never inhabit another
until the resurrection and
judgment day — thus you
would stay in my heart
while I lived, and at my death
you too would die in the
entrails of my core, in
the shadow of my tomb.
Before You Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
◦ Before you came,
◦ And the sky, the road, the glass of
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.
Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison,
of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of
flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.
◦ (1911-1984)
wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in
which
the sky, the road, the world keep
changing.
Don't leave now that you're here–
Stay. So the world may become like
itself again: so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just
a glass of wine.
PHILAUTIA: Friendship
STORGE
Storge is a familial love, especially between parents
and children. In Robert Hayden’s poem
“Those Winter Sundays” , the narrator reflects on
everything his father did for him that he took for
granted, proving actions show love just as much as
words do.
 Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
◦ When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
◦ Sundays too my father got up early
◦ and slowly I would rise and dress,
◦ and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
◦ fearing the chronic angers of that house,
◦ then with cracked hands that ached
◦ Speaking indifferently to him,
◦ from labor in the weekday weather made who had driven out the cold

◦ banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. ◦ and polished my good shoes as well.

◦ I’d wake and hear the cold ◦ What did I know, what did I know
splintering, breaking.
◦ of love’s austere and lonely offices?
PHILAUTIA: Self-love
LOVE AFTER LOVE

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows
you by heart.

-- By Dereck Walcott
Love Haikus
◦ The deep rolling waves ◦ Don’t weep, insects-
Are attracted by the moon ◦ Lovers, stars themselves,
Their love never dies ◦ Must part

◦ David Wood ◦ Kobayashi Issa

Sources
◦ https://www.themagentahornet.com/catullus-love-poetry.html
◦ https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/on-translating-li-bais-parting-at-changgan/
◦ https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/03/evolution-love-poem
◦ https://www.lovetoknow.com/quotes-quips/love/11-love-haiku-poems-
express-your-feelings

◦ Handouts: Haiku writing, acrostic writing, some poems like Li Bai,

Shakespeare
Langston Hughes (American)
Love
Is a high mountain
Stark in a windy sky.
If you
Would never lose your breath
Do not climb too high.
Pablo Neruda (Chile)
Sara Teasdale (American)