100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  The poem’s combination of intensity and formal control reflects both Wordsworth’s character and his behavior, which were, as his friend Henry Crabb Robinson put it, “that which became a man both of feeling and strength of mind.” As a thinker, Wordsworth was composed and confidently declared: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.” This statement is so definitive and forceful that it is easy to forget what he went on to say—that “the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears.” From a vantage point achieved by the passage of time, the poet can contemplate past emotion, examine and articulate it. By reliving it in memory, the poet can also express the rawness of the feeling as if experiencing it anew, thereby combining the immediacy of emotion with the perspective of intellect.

  Wordsworth’s editing choices show how his intellect focused his emotions. For example, in the first version of this sonnet he wrote, “I wished to share the transport,” but later amended it to “I turned to share the transport,” which changes an aspiration into an action, an abrupt pivot toward the missing companion, the lost daughter. I see the speaker physically turn to where he thinks she is, and then realize that she has no vital physical being anymore.

  Wordsworth also changed “long” to “deep” in the third line. To be “long buried” is a more abstract temporal description; however, to be “deep buried” brings the burial into the realm of the concrete, which creates the greater shock of a subterranean or bottomless finality. He contrasts his intense responses, his surprise and impatience, with the impenetrability of the tomb, “That spot which no vicissitude can find.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines vicissitude as “a change or variation; mutability.”

  The poem’s first two lines accelerate with an enjambment that pushes the poem forward. The dashes create a feeling both of rapidity and spontaneity, only to be broken off by a sudden exclamation, the hollowness of “Oh! With whom . . .” The exclamatory “Oh!” suggests the O-shape of the speaker’s open mouth when he realizes his daughter is not standing next to him. The word “whom” ends the second line and seems to pose a question, soon answered in the third line, with “But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,” which also indicates that he is addressing an absence. Read retrospectively then, “whom” seems ordained to rhyme with “tomb.” Because Wordsworth wrote this poem a few years after Catherine’s death, he had started to move on, forgetting his enormous sadness, but then got wrenched back into it.

  Wordsworth was not characteristically a self-questioning poet, but here, three questions appear in the poem’s first eight lines. The first two are directed to the daughter, but the third one the speaker turns on himself, wondering “Through what power” he could have been “so beguiled as to be blind / To my most grievous loss?” Notice how he makes the short but mortifying leap from “beguiled” to “be blind,” with the subtle repetitions of b, l, and d sounds, the assonance of the long e and long i, and the lopping off of be from “beguiled” to form two words, “be blind.” So too the turn toward Catherine is enacted through three words timed to recur at key points in the sonnet: “recalled,” “return,” “restore.” This repetition of the prefix re-, which means “back” or “again,” drives home the poem’s shattering realization that the speaker can never go back nor see his beloved daughter ever again.

  After eight and a half lines roiled by dashes and questions, the final sestet unrolls in a single sentence, the pace calmer, more meditative:

  That thought’s return

  Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

  Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

  Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

  That neither present time, nor years unborn

  Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

  We hear the steep echo chamber of triple rhymes: “return” / “forlorn” / “unborn” and “bore” / “more” / “restore,” as well as the close assonant rhyming of all six final lines. This relentless sonic repetition—hear the drumbeat of similar o and n sounds in “Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn”—seems to enact the speaker’s denial about the loss of his daughter, so that in these last lines he must repeat what he cannot accept. Neither the present nor the future can “restore” his daughter’s “heavenly face.” There is a hint of Christianity in the word “heavenly” without any real sense of redemption.

  In the end, after Wordsworth turns to speak to his daughter and instead must address her absence, he is forced to face the oppressive silence of death. The heartbreak of the poem is also the answer to its final question and its last pang—that time has the power to make the living forget their griefs, that time consigns the dead to the past and drags the living back to life, where they can be surprised by joy.

  John Keats

  * * *

  “This living hand”

  (1819)

  It was December 1819, and John Keats’s health was perilous. The wastage of his body was becoming apparent. The poet Leigh Hunt remembered that his friend, who was just twenty-five years old, often looked at his hand, “which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty.” Keats had received his death warrant from tuberculosis, and the great poems were behind him—the sonnets and the odes, including “To Autumn,” which may be the most perfect poem in English. He was working on a comic poem to be called “The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies.” He never finished this fairy tale, the weakest of his mature poems, whose Spenserian stanzas he churned out with remarkable fluency to earn some money for his publisher; but at some point while he was writing it, he broke off and jotted down some lines in a blank space on the manuscript. He turned from stanza 51—“Cupid, I / Do thee defy!”—and marked this untitled eight-line fragment where there was room on the page:

  This living hand, now warm and capable

  Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

  And in the icy silence of the tomb,

  So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

  That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

  So in my veins red life might stream again,

  And thou be conscience-calm’d—see, here it is—

  I hold it towards you.

  It was once thought that these lines were addressed to Keats’s great love, his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, but most scholars now agree that Keats meant them for use in a later poem or play. They weren’t published until 1898, when they appeared in the sixth edition of H. B. Forman’s one-volume edition of Keats’s work. Once encountered, though, this fragment of consciousness can’t be ignored or forgotten.

  The poem begins with an arresting image of a “warm and capable” hand that seems somehow detached from the rest of the body. This image is so vivid that the poem feels straightforward, utterly direct, though the verb tenses are a little tricky. In the middle of the second line Keats introduces the conditional tense with the word “would,” set off by commas, indicating a proposition or a hypothetical statement about the hand. The poet imagines the warm hand “cold” and ends the line on this enjambment. The third line elaborates on the hand’s coldness: “And in the icy silence of the tomb.” In “The Fall of Hyperion” Keats had already foreseen a similar moment: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.” Here he makes explicit that the warm detached hand is also a scribe, the instrument by which the poet’s thoughts get transposed to the page in the form of a poem.

  The detached “hand” of the poem can refer both to the physical hand depicted in it and to the handwriting, the written material that constitutes the poem. The mystery and eeriness of the detached hand are represented by the mystery and eeriness of the poem itself. The hand seems disconnected from the body even as it is memorializing itself in the poem; in an essay on Keats and the uncanny, the scholar Brooke Hopkins points out that, likewise, “the poem gives the appearance of being detached from some large
r text.”

  The dark mortal fantasy of this fragment continues by bringing in an addressee, perhaps a specific person or some future reader. Whichever one Keats imagined, the fourth line lays out this person’s hypothetical condition: to be haunted by the cold hand, which would “chill thy dreaming nights” with nightmares of death. This recalls the “cold” hand and the “icy silence of the tomb.”

  In the fifth and sixth lines, which proceed without punctuation and with increasing fury, the speaker of the poem further elaborates on this strange fantasy. He suggests that the reader will be so haunted and chilled by the cold, dead hand “That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood / So in my veins red life might stream again.” Understanding that he would be dead by the time this reader encountered these lines, the speaker is enraged in advance by the fact of his mortality. Therefore, he proposes this impossible bargain: that the reader trade places with him, life for death, a last desperate gesture as he confronts his imminent demise. He even indicates in the following line that the person who takes him up on this bargain will be “conscience-calm’d,” as if the imagined future reader will share the speaker’s outrage that death will soon rob the hand of its warmth. Surely, as the poet Mary Ruefle puts it, “there is no greater accusatory poem in existence.”

  At the end of this penultimate line the poem’s single sentence breaks off from the conditional with a simple statement in the present tense, set off by dashes—“see, here it is”—a declaration that the hand is still alive, still warm. The sentence continues in the last line with another simple statement in the present tense: “I hold it towards you.” It is as if the speaker is reaching out with the hand, alive and warm, to prove that it can still grasp. He is almost challenging the reader to shake that hand and make contact. After seven lines of regular blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) the last line is cut in half, the way the speaker’s life will be cut short; it ends on the word “you,” signifying the reader, the only one who remains to see the poem. This “you,” an intentional change from the formal “thou” used earlier, lends intimacy to this final plea.

  Keats’s fragment begins with writing and ends with reading. He suggests that he would like to cheat death by haunting you, the reader, troubling your waking hours and your dreams at night, devastating you so thoroughly that you will sacrifice yourself by trading places with him. The impossible blackmail is a last desperate gesture. He once lifted a living hand. It reaches out to us still, but now through words. Here it is—this made work, this living thing. Look, he is holding out his hand. He is daring you, whoever you are, to grasp it.

  John Clare

  * * *

  “I am”

  (c. 1847)

  John Clare was one of the great originals of nineteenth-century rural England, an agricultural laborer and lower-class poet who wrote poems in what he called a “language that is ever green.” I am focusing on his anguished asylum poem “I am,” but it’s worthwhile to recall that it was written by a local poet who found his poetry in the woods and fields, in the wilds and waste places of nature. He wrote some thirty-five hundred poems, and most of them chronicle a world he loved. “Poets love nature and themselves are love,” he wrote in a late sonnet.

  Clare was a prodigious walker, a solitary who rambled through the countryside with a notebook in his pocket. Socially, he didn’t really fit in anywhere. In London, he was taken up and condescended to as “the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet.” At home, his neighbors considered him peculiar. He empathized with outsiders, such as the Romani, and identified with shy, vulnerable creatures, such as the snipe, the marten, the badger, the field mouse. I’ve always been heartened by his lyric determination, the precision and exuberance with which he chronicled a world that was rapidly disappearing because of industrialization, as well as the privatization, and subsequent fencing off, of formerly open public lands.

  Clare suffered from debilitating physical and mental troubles, which eventually got the better of him. His biographer Jonathan Bate suggests that Clare “conforms to the classic pattern . . . of manic depression or ‘bipolar affective disorder.’” He was most likely schizophrenic. He had periods of lucidity mixed with bouts of depression and episodes of mania. He also suffered from hallucinations, as well as aberrant behavior related to his illness.

  In 1837, Clare was certified insane and taken to Dr. Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beach in Epping Forest, Essex, on the northeast edge of London. In July 1841, he escaped from the asylum and headed on foot for his home in Northborough. Lonely and broke, sleeping in the rough and sometimes eating grass, he walked more than eighty miles in four days. He left an extraordinary prose account of this nightmarish trip, “Journey out of Essex.” “Having only honest courage and myself in my army,” he said, “I led the way and my troops soon followed.”

  Later that year Clare was again certified insane and committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Some of his most enduring works were asylum poems: “A Vision”; a sonnet addressed to his son and namesake; and two disconcerting self-revelations that begin with the words “I am,” one a sonnet (“I feel I am—I only know I am”), the other a lyric that stands as his most haunting memorial. It was transcribed and preserved by William Knight, the asylum steward who befriended him. Thomas Inskip, a watch- and clockmaker who sometimes advised Clare, arranged for its publication in the Bedford Times. I like to think of local readers opening the newspaper on New Year’s Day, 1848, and finding this poem.

  I am

  I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

  I am the self-consumer of my woes—

  They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,

  Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes—

  And yet I am and live—like vapours tossed

  * * *

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

  Into the living sea of waking dreams

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

  Even the dearest that I love the best

  Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

  * * *

  I long for scenes where man hath never trod,

  A place where woman never smiled or wept,

  There to abide with my Creator, God,

  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

  The grass below—above, the vaulted sky.

  This well-designed eighteen-line lyric consists of three six-line stanzas in a steady iambic pentameter. The first stanza hinges on two rhymes: ababab. The second two stanzas alternate rhymes in the first four lines, as in the first stanza, but end with a rhyming couplet. All but one of the rhyme-words (“esteems”) are one-syllable words, which gives an emphatic rhythm to the rhymes. For example, in the first stanza there is special insistence in rhyming the words “knows,” “woes,” and “throes.” In the second stanza, the word “noise” clangs with “joys.”

  The feeling of desolation in this poem is overwhelming. The first line opens with a taut assertion—“I am”—which is followed by a dash, a pause, and then a plaintive logical claim: “I am—yet what I am none cares or knows.” The line is especially forceful because it is end-stopped. This declaration has the rhetoric of argumentation: I am—yet. The speaker of the poem exists, he reminds himself (and us), though his friends have ostracized him, and he is left to console himself in his loneliness. He thus simultaneously declares his existence, his visibility to himself, and his nonexistence, his invisibility to others.

  The poem’s first two stanzas comprise one long sentence, a series of images and abstractions that dramatizes the speaker’s feeling of death in life. At the end of the first stanza he declares that he lives, but “like vapours tossed”—an enjambed line that then breaks to the second stanza:

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,


  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems . . .

  There is an agitated, confusing, almost hallucinatory quality to these lines as he tries to explain his mental anguish, his sense of being completely unmoored. The abstractions pile up and the language almost falls apart under the weight of alienation.

  It’s worth mentioning that Clare’s sensibility here is decidedly Romantic and pre-modern. He is doing precisely what Ezra Pound argues against in his modernist credo “A Few Don’ts” (1913). “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace,’” Pound declares. “It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” John Clare certainly knew the natural world, the natural object, but he is not trying to portray it here. By pairing a concrete image (a “vast shipwreck”) with an abstraction (“my life’s esteems”) he is summarizing a situation, a general state, a cast of mind. The sense of doom and disorientation is not something we are meant to visualize, as in an Imagist poem, but to feel and understand.

  There is a sense of radical alienation in the concluding two lines of the second stanza: “Even the dearest that I love the best / Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.” Note the correction here, the argumentative precision. It’s not just that the people close to the speaker are now “strange”—it’s that they are now “stranger,” as in both “peculiar” and “more remote” than ev-eryone else. Such is the depth of his human disconnection.