100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  “The God Abandons Antony”

  (1910)

  Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, spent his early childhood and most of his adulthood there. His rich inner life combined an exquisitely refined intelligence and a highly sensuous nature with a profound historical sensibility. He was galvanized by the past and fascinated by historical figures, which often served as the inspiration and subject of his poetry. His work therefore unites a historical broadness of scope with a honed emotional intensity, articulated in a direct, understated use of his native Greek. As the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar declares, “Each poem by Cavafy is a memorial poem: historical or personal.”

  With the same scrupulous eye, disinterested intensity, and conscious poetic austerity that he employed in thinking about Alexandrian kings and Roman emperors, Cavafy probed his own erotic past. He wrote unapologetically and with unusual directness and tenderness about his casual homosexual encounters, which, in retrospect, he deemed sacred. Rather than risk condemnation or compromise his commitment to an honest accounting of his personal experience, however subterranean and unconventional, he circulated his poetry among a small group of intimates without seeking wider publication.

  “The God Abandons Antony” is one of seven poems Cavafy wrote about Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), the Roman soldier, statesmen, and doomed husband of Cleopatra. Mark Antony loved Alexandria, the Greek-speaking metropolis of the Roman east. Before his rival, Octavian, marched into Alexandria to take the city, Antony stabbed himself and died in Cleopatra’s arms. Antony’s story riveted Cavafy, who considered the bold general a compelling precursor. The poem, which takes place as Antony faces his final moments, sets up a triadic relationship between the poet, an anonymous speaker who is Antony’s contemporary, and Antony himself.

  The God Abandons Antony

  When suddenly, at midnight, you hear

  an invisible procession going by

  with exquisite music, voices,

  don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,

  work gone wrong, your plans

  all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.

  As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

  say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.

  Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say

  it was a dream, your ears deceived you:

  don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

  As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

  as is right for you who were given this kind of city,

  go firmly to the window

  and listen with deep emotion, but not

  with the whining, the pleas of a coward;

  listen—your final delectation—to the voices,

  to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

  and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

  (Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

  Cavafy took his title from Plutarch’s Life of Antony (chapter 75) and built the poem out of Plutarch’s historical narration. Once Antony’s troops deserted him for Octavian, his cause was lost. Here is how Plutarch describes Antony’s final night:

  It is said that, about halfway through this night, while inside the city all was quiet and dejected because of the fear and the anticipation of what was yet to come, suddenly there was heard the combined sounds of all sorts of instruments, and the shouting of a crowd, along with merrymaking and festive acrobats, as if a procession were leaving the city with no little tumult . . . To those interpreting this sign it seemed as though the god to whom Antony once most likened himself and to whom he was most dedicated, was now abandoning him.

  Plutarch is referring to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and religious ecstasy. As Antony rose to power, he cast himself as Dionysus born anew and publicly took on the god’s attributes. In addition to his reading of Plutarch, Cavafy views the story of Antony’s approaching death through the lens of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (act 4, scene 3), where a group of anxious soldiers hears a strange music coming out of the air or the earth and takes it as a tragic omen: “ ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him.” In his play, Shakespeare changes the god to Hercules, the divine hero known for the twelve labors that tested his prodigious strength. Cavafy for his part chooses not to name the god, who isn’t mentioned again after the title.

  From the start Cavafy conjures an otherworldly scene. The poem begins abruptly, with the phrase “When suddenly.” This immediacy continues with the indication that the events take place “at midnight,” a time of day that in poetry almost always signals an epiphany, an hour of revelation. The first line ends with the clause “you hear,” which both describes what happens suddenly at midnight and introduces someone the speaker is addressing. The next lines specify that the addressee at midnight will suddenly hear “an invisible procession going by / with exquisite music, voices.” This is the sound and sign of the god’s abandonment; the Dionysian revelry recedes, leaving Antony to his mortal fate.

  The following lines are directive: the speaker instructs Antony not to “mourn your luck that’s failing now, / work gone wrong, your plans / all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.” Instead the speaker advises him to “say goodbye” to Alexandria “As one long prepared, and graced with courage.” Daniel Mendelsohn translates this as “Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave”; both translations use a simile here, indicated by “like” or “as,” and both suggest an aspiration, an ideal way to behave. The poem counsels Antony to adopt a stoicism he may not be feeling when confronting his final moments.

  The next eleven lines repeat the structure of the first eight: one sentence on what not to do (“don’t”) followed by another on what to do instead. The advice ranges from variations on “don’t mourn” to “don’t fool yourself.” Here the speaker urges Antony not to deny what the noise of the invisible procession is telling him—“don’t say / it was a dream, your ears deceived you”—that the god is leaving, the city is leaving, the fight is over, not just the military struggle but life itself. The second sentence of the poem’s latter portion repeats the aspirational model: “As one long prepared, and graced with courage.” The next line expands and personalizes the conceit by exchanging “one” for “you”: “as is right for you who were given this kind of city.” The speaker then tells Antony what he should do rather than deceive himself: “go firmly to the window / and listen with deep emotion.” This directive operates on both physical and metaphorical levels. Just as midnight is a transition point between day and night, a window is a transition point between inside and outside. In The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes the window as a borderline surface between here and the beyond. For Cavafy, the exhortation to listen “not / with the whining, the pleas of a coward” but as a “final delectation” is another way of urging the hero to confront the final ebbing beauty of life with a calm, courageous joy. “The Alexandria that is leaving” has turned into “the Alexandria you are losing.”

  By the end the poem’s major elements have taken on multiple valences. The speaker can be read not only as a fictive contemporary speaking to Mark Antony about bidding farewell to Alexandria, but also as the poet talking to himself about leaving that beloved city at the end of his own life. At the same time the poem is advising the reader to face the music, as it were, to leave a treasured place with the serene bravery of a hero. This historical poem is thus also deeply interpersonal, a call for each of us to confront death nobly, to go to the window and listen with deep pleasure to the exquisite procession of life as it passes by for the last time.

  Thomas Hardy

  * * *

  “The Voice”

  (1912)

  The sudden death in November 1912 of Emma Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s first wife, loosed a flood of unsuspected feelings in her husband. The two had been long estranged—they hadn’t shared a bedroom for y
ears—but the shock of her death undid him. Suddenly it was too late to repair what had happened between them (“All’s past amend / Unchangeable”). He mourned her desperately—after she died, he had her coffin placed at the foot of his bed until the funeral—and began to write poems about her almost immediately.

  Hardy’s vivid, surprising, and metrically resourceful elegies for Emma, “Poems of 1912–1913,” appeared as part of his book Satires of Circumstance (1914). This sequence of twenty-one poems is ruthlessly truthful and wrenchingly clear, tender, strange, and grief-stricken, filled with nostalgia and remorse. It took him two years to complete, and he would write about Emma intermittently for the rest of his life.

  The sequence begins with the traumatic shock of her death. The finality of her swift unforeseen departure (“Never to bid good-bye, / Or lip me the softest call, / Or utter a wish for a word”) leaves Hardy’s speaker alone with his feelings, and the sequence turns, as if naturally, from loss to the memory of the time when the two first met and courted, some thirty years before, in the west, near Cornwall. “The Voice,” dated December 1912, is the ninth poem, the turning point, in the sequence. This haunted poem marks the divergence between the past and the present, between what the couple had been to each other and what they became. That separation now turns out to be more final than the man had ever imagined.

  The Voice

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  * * *

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  * * *

  Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

  Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

  You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness

  Heard no more again far or near?

  * * *

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward.

  And the woman calling.

  Hardy was so spooked by the apparition of Emma’s voice that, in an early draft of the poem, he addressed her as “O woman weird.” This agitation, as well as the obvious sense of guilt, can be felt in the tortured syntax of the first stanza: “Saying that now you are not as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me, / But as at first, when our day was fair.” The phantom voice is forcing the speaker to consider three different moments in the couple’s life together, all of which are interwoven: the remote past, “when our day was fair” and they were in love; the recent past, “When you had changed from the one who was all to me” and she became estranged from him; and the current moment, “now,” when she returns “as at first,” so that the remote past has circled back to the present.

  The second stanza begins, “Can it be you that I hear?” If the sound the speaker hears is indeed the voice of his late wife, he wants her to reveal herself as she was in the remote past—“as I knew you then”—when she waited for him to come into town. This remembered vision ends the stanza with a strikingly memorable detail, her “original air-blue gown.” Hardy puns on the word “original,” which means both “inventive” and “from the beginning,” and thus emphasizes the uniqueness of the initial besotted phase of the love affair.

  This lovely image, the memory itself, dissolves in the third stanza, when the “air” drifts away from the gown and becomes the “breeze.” Whereas the second stanza poses the question “Can it be you that I hear?” the third stanza proposes an alternative: “Or is it only the breeze . . . You being . . . Heard no more again . . . ?” Notice how throughout stanzas 1 and 2, as the speaker hears the voice and sees the vision of his late wife, “you” and “me” occur frequently on the same line. When in the third stanza he contemplates the possibility that he’s hearing the wind rather than a voice, he formally separates “you” and “me.” A single “me” occurs at the end of line 2, while line 3 begins with a single “You,” who is “ever dissolved to wan wistlessness.”

  Hardy was particularly adept at using various poetic devices to enact drama and suspense. He composed each poem in his elegiac sequence with a different stanzaic pattern, as if continually searching for the right form to hold his sorrow. “The Voice” has four quatrains with a ballad rhyme scheme: abab. For anyone interested in meter this poem displays complicated and subtle rhythmic effects, which reflect its eerie, tortured subject matter. It employs a baseline of four dactyls (dactylic tetrameter). The dactyl is a metrical foot with three syllables, one accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones ( / ˘˘ ), as in a waltz. The tetrameter line consists of four feet. Hardy uses this meter to create a slightly dizzying rhythm of lament: “Wómăn mŭch | míssed, hŏw yŏu | cáll tŏ mě, | cáll tŏ mě.”

  Notice, though, how he varies the meter within the stanza. Though lines 1 and 3 are regular twelve-syllable, four-beat lines, in line 2 Hardy cuts off the last two syllables of the final foot, truncating the four-beat line to ten syllables. He does the same in line 4, where he shortens the syllable count even further by making significant stressed words last for two beats, such as “day” (line 4), “air” (line 8), and “Heard” and “far” (line 12). Hardy also uses punctuation to pause midfoot on a stressed word, such as “Wómăn mŭch | míssed,” which highlights “missed.” In a similar fashion he pauses on “hear” and “breeze” in lines 5 and 11: “Can it be | you that I | hear?” and “Or is it | only the | breeze,” rhythmically emphasizing the poem’s two questions, its central conflict. As the speaker lurches between the hope that his wife is near and the fear that he is imagining things, it is only fitting that the meter also lurches between waltzing longer lines and stuttering truncated ones.

  The poem also has a terrific density of sound. Hardy uses triple rhymes (such as “call to me” / “all to me”) in each of the regular dactylic tetrameter lines and single rhymes in the shorter lines. The alliteration of significant word pairings, such as “much missed,” “would wait,” “wan wistlessness,” and “faltering  forward”; the hissing ssounds in “listlessness” and “wistlessness”; and the repeated long e sounds blowing through “breeze,” “mead,” “me,” “here,” “being,” and “near” enact the obsessive nature of the speaker’s gloomy ruminations.

  Like the speaker’s sense of hope, the last stanza dramatically collapses, breaking many of the formal patterns established in the first three stanzas. The indentation and shortening of three of the lines create an immediate visual rupture in the poem, which echoes the rupture caused by Emma’s death. The first line of the stanza—“Thus I; faltering forward”—is the only line in the poem that begins with an unstressed syllable; instead, stress falls on “I,” which is further emphasized and isolated by a semicolon. These two words, “Thus I,” are a stark assessment of the speaker’s predicament, that he is utterly alone. Reflecting this devastating revelation, the meter in the first two lines of the stanza becomes irregular, these shorter three-beat lines stumble and falter, and the triple and single rhymes become double rhymes. Consonant sounds relentlessly echo (“faltering forward . . . falling,” “thin through the thorn”) through the bleak landscape where the speaker finds himself faltering and bereft.

  Although he knows that he is alone and suspects that he is hearing only the wind, the speaker also can’t help but continue to hear the voice, the projection of his guilt and regret. Therefore, the voice returns to the poem in a further shortened two-beat line, a single haunting last phrase: “And the woman calling.” Listen to the way that Hardy cleverly employs shared consonant and vowel sounds to migrate from “Wind” to “thin,” “thin” to “thorn,” “thorn” to “norward,” and finally “norward” to “woman.” In this f
inal uncanny line, which is pierced by what Seamus Heaney calls “a banshee note,” Hardy’s speaker understands that the woman in the wind will continue to reproach him, forever calling to him from the other side.

  Edward Thomas

  * * *

  “The Owl”

  (1915)

  Edward Thomas wrote 142 poems, his collected verse, in the short span between December 1914, just months after Britain entered World War I, and April 1917. Here is his poem “The Owl,” which he composed in February 1915:

  The Owl

  Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

  Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

  Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

  Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

  * * *

  Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

  Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

  All of the night was quite barred out except

  An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

  * * *

  Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

  No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

  But one telling me plain what I escaped

  And others could not, that night, as in I went.

  * * *

  And salted was my food, and my repose,

  Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice