100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  Rooms

  I remember rooms that have had their part

  In the steady slowing down of the heart.

  The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,

  The little damp room with the seaweed smell,

  And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—

  Rooms where for good or ill—things died.

  But there is the room where we two lie dead,

  Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again

  As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed

  Out there in the sun—in the rain.

  Mew’s memorial, consisting of one stanza, is like a room in itself. It has a compact feeling of restrained sorrow. Made up of ten lines, a stanza known as a décima, it divides neatly into three sentences. The first begins the poem with a fluctuating beat in two four-stress lines:

  I remémber róoms that have hád their párt

  In the stéady slówing dówn of the héart.

  Mew’s metrical variations are strategic. In the first line anapests (˘˘ /) alternate with iambs (˘ /); however, in the second line Mew puts the anapests at either end of the line and the iambs in the middle, so that the stresses fall on “stéady slówing dówn” and literally enact a steady slowing down in the line’s rhythm. The alliteration of “remember rooms” and “steady slowing” implicates the rooms, which “have had their part” in this slowing of the heart. Though so far there is no mention of another person in the rooms, “the heart” here, as in Langston Hughes’s “Song for a Black Girl,” suggests both feelings for a lover and the core of a person. Because the heart in Mew’s poem is slowing down, a reader begins to detect the makings of an anti–love poem, or a frustrated love poem, as well as the breakdown of a person’s spirits.

  The poem’s second sentence (actually a fragment consisting of several phrases) catalogs three remembered rooms—one in Paris, one in Geneva, a third at an unnamed seaside resort. Mew rhymes the first two lines (“part” / “heart”), but purposely drops the rhymes in the next two lines (“Geneva” / “smell”). This change right away undercuts the rhyming pattern established in the first sentence and signals an atmosphere in these rooms that is far from harmonious. Recalling the third room, the speaker goes on to describe the “ceaseless maddening sound of the tide” coming in and going out. That she finds this sound “maddening,” rather than calming, connects with Mew’s personal feelings. She had a lifelong terror of madness, which afflicted many members of her family and prompted her to swear off marrying and having children.

  As she did in line 2, with “stéady slówing dówn,” Mew strategically places the iambs in the middle of line 5 so that the stresses fall on “céaseless máddening sóund,” which mimics the pounding of the tide. The two phrases formally and thematically parallel each other, and their last words are close half-rhymes. This sentence fragment comes to a stark conclusion with the only past-tense verb in the poem: “Rooms where for good or ill—things died.” This devastating line is also the only one without anapests; instead, the line begins with the poem’s sole trochee so that the stress falls on the word “Rooms.” Notice as well that after the initial “I,” Mew hasn’t brought in the speaker again, or any other person, and she avoids specific attributions, using “the heart” instead of “my heart” and “things died” instead of identifying what or who died.

  Mew’s short lyric then turns, in the seventh line, with the logic of a Shakespearean sonnet. The conjunction “But” signals a shift, a change in direction, and the poem returns to the present tense in a final sentence, a fourth room: “But there is the room where we two lie dead.” With “we two” the speaker reappears, along with another person, with whom she lies dead, and the undercurrent of frustrated love becomes more explicit. Breaking the four-beat pattern, the following eight-beat line combines a long string of anapests and iambs: “Though év | ery mórn | ing we séem | to wáke | and míght | just as wéll | seem to sléep | agáin.” This line visually bursts out of the poem, as if a beam in the room’s ceiling has collapsed and punctured a wall. The word “Though” contradicts “we two lie dead”; therefore, the two dead people “seem to wake” each morning and “just as well seem to sleep,” as though they were wandering dazed, like zombies, through their days. The speaker then subtly compares the couple’s death-in-life sleep to the sleep “we shall” do “in the other quieter, dustier bed.” The future tense, as well as the powerful rhyme of “bed” with “dead,” pinpoints this bed as the final resting place of coffins. This six-beat line hovers between the preceding eight-beat line and the poem’s final and sole three-beat line, which hones the image of the pair in their coffins as “Out there,” exposed to the elements.

  Mew’s concise account of these rooms, which have slowed the speaker’s heart to death, throbs with rage, frustration, and longing. One of the most pressing but unspoken subjects in Mew’s work is thwarted desire, her closeted lesbianism. Given the criminalization of homosexuality in England at the time—Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency under these laws and served two years of hard labor—Mew was unwilling and unable to acknowledge openly her passion for women. She also seemed incapable of achieving a successful relationship with a woman. As Penelope Fitzgerald points out in her book Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, Mew had an unhealthy tendency to be drawn to women who did not reciprocate her feelings.

  Read through the lens of these repressed and thwarted desires, the poem’s surface reticence yields a rich and poignant portrait of a woman denied the pleasures of sexual intimacy. The “steady slowing down of the heart” evokes the long and gradual death of the speaker’s homosexual aspirations. The “ceaseless maddening sound of the tide” describes not just the movement of the sea but the constant flow of her own desires, which become maddening for not being accepted or reciprocated. We can understand the “things” of “things died” as an erotic spark that has burned out. The profound loneliness of an unfulfilled “I” “in the room where we two lie,” the brokenness and distorted sense of self that come from walking through life feeling dead inside, are movingly depicted by the final three lines, which formally and emotionally rupture the poem. It is as if the poet, in her inability to break from conventional form in a repressive, unforgiving society, breaks the form of the poem, so that the poem itself can speak the truth, the disappointed love that dare not speak its name.

  César Vallejo

  * * *

  “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone”

  (1930)

  The Peruvian poet César Vallejo lived in Paris from 1923 to 1938. His dire poverty, his brooding exile and bitter sense of displacement, his growing rage over social inequities and the naked suffering of others, all seemed to overwhelm him. And yet during the last fifteen years of his life, he wrote 110 poems that are his most lasting achievement. Poemas humanos, which his widow, Georgette Vallejo, published posthumously in 1939, is one of the most humane, sorrowful, and agonized works of modernism.

  Here is Vallejo’s most iconic poem, “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca,” in which he foresees his own death. The poem is undated, but on January 2, 1930, Vallejo sent it along with two other poems in a letter to a Peruvian friend.

  Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

  I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,

  on some day I can already remember.

  I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—

  perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

  * * *

  It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down

  these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on

  wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself

  with all the road ahead of me, alone.

  * * *

  César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him,

  although he never does anything to them;

  they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

  * * *

&nb
sp; with a rope. These are the witnesses:

  the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,

  the solitude, and the rain, and the roads . . .

  (Translated by Robert Bly and John Knopefle)

  Vallejo apparently got the idea for “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca” on a wet day in Paris in the late twenties. He was wearing a black overcoat and sat down on a white stone bench in a state of utter dejection. The Cuban critic Eugenio Florit suggests that Vallejo’s sonnet “recalls the ancient practice of memorializing a fortunate event with a white stone, an unfortunate one with a black.” Vallejo may have thought of himself as a black stone atop a white gravestone.

  Some of Vallejo’s biographers believe that Vallejo’s “memory” of his own death was inspired by a waking dream, which had the feeling of a premonition; it came to him on a visit to Peru in 1920. Inadvertently mixed up in a political feud for which he was eventually imprisoned, anxiously hiding from the police at a friend’s house in Trujillo, Vallejo dreamed that he was witnessing his own death in Paris, surrounded by people he did not know or recognize. Some of the details of Vallejo’s daydream turned out to be eerily prescient, close to the circumstances of his actual death eighteen years later, on April 15, 1938. It was not a Thursday, though, but rather Good Friday.

  Vallejo’s self-elegy has a disruptive, estranging effect in almost every translation. Yet it is nearly impossible to replicate its exact rhythms and its grammar in English. The poem is a sonnet written in loose hendecasyllables, the eleven-syllable lines that have been one of the staples of Spanish poetry since the Renaissance. What is especially striking is how Vallejo disorders the typical argumentative logic of the fourteen-line form by constantly careening backward and forward in time. He uses four different Spanish verb tenses, which shift jarringly from one to the other without warning.

  The sonnet begins in the future tense: “Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,” which Bly and Knopefle translate as “I will die in Paris, on a rainy day.” A more literal translation would read: “I will die in Paris in a downpour.” The stormy weather creates a feeling of foreboding, and the line reads as a prediction of the speaker’s own death. However, in the second line we learn that he already has a memory of this day (“una día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo”), as if his death had happened before he predicted it. The third line explains that he will die in Paris, a fate he won’t try to avoid (“—​and I don’t step aside—”), and then suggests that it might happen on a Thursday, just like today, the day he’s writing the poem, in the fall. The first five lines lurch between the future and present tenses, sometimes within the same line (“I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—”). These fluctuations flatten time, giving the sense that the future exists in the present; also, they indicate that the speaker in the present is unflinchingly facing his future death.

  He repeats that his death will be on a Thursday. Why? In answer, Vallejo employs a word from the language of argumentation—“because”—but with a surreal twist: “because today, Thursday, setting down / these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on / wrong.” In other words, in writing the very lines we are reading, the speaker has attached his arm bones incorrectly, as if arms could be put on and taken off like a shirt. It’s interesting to examine Vallejo’s word choices, which are both inventive and strange, both to get a sense of the original Spanish and to understand that translation is more an art than a science. For example, the phrase Vallejo used for “setting down” is “que proso,” a coinage that makes a present-tense verb, proso, out of the noun prosa, meaning “prose”; therefore, a literal translation would be something like “as I prose.” He also pairs a Latinate anatomical word—húmeros, “the upper arm bones,” with a colloquial phrase—“me he puesto a la mala,” “I put it on the hard way,” to suggest some sort of difficult medical arm-reattachment procedure. This image points not only to the extreme effort of this arm reattachment and the resulting feeling of bodily estrangement, but also to the effort of writing the lines, which makes this reattachment necessary. Vallejo also introduces another verb tense, the present perfect—“I have put,” “have I found”—which indicates an action that occurred in the past or begins in the past and continues into the present. Whereas the first five lines bring the future into the present, the following three lines bring the past into the present. The speaker also predicts that he will die on a Thursday, like “today,” because “never so much as today have I found myself / with all the road ahead of me, alone.” The octave closes with the speaker coming to understand the existential isolation of his solitude.

  Vallejo has written one of the most startling voltas in the long history of the sonnet. It’s worth noting an obvious visual cue signaling this turn in the Spanish version: whereas every line in the octave ends with an osound, the ninth line ends with the word pegaban, “they were beating,” which abruptly breaks this pattern. The ninth line also turns from the first person to the third person—the speaker speaking as himself becomes the speaker speaking about himself—to declare that “César Vallejo is dead.” Because Vallejo again uses the present-perfect ha muerto, this clause is sometimes rendered as “César Vallejo has died.” It’s as if the poet has penned his own death announcement. In the Spanish text a comma instead of a period follows this statement—“César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban”—which causally links the beating to his death.

  The following line employs another radical shift in tense. In a note to her translation of the poem, Rebecca Seiferle points out that the hendecasyllabic count also breaks down here in the tenth line, where “the interruption of time is most noticeable and dramatic, when the past tense of ‘César Vallejo has died’ and ‘le pegaban’ (‘they kept hitting him’ but also ‘they used it to hit him’) is followed by ‘él les haga nada’ (‘he does nothing to them’).” The shifting and flattening of time are simultaneously enacted in the poem’s grammar and its rhythm. Interrupting the past tense with the present tense reminds us that the poet composing his own death notice is still alive, protesting the injustice of the brutalities he’s suffered by writing them down. Therefore, the proclamation “Cesar Vallejo is dead” points to the death of identity, the loss of self he feels as he contemplates his journey alone.

  The last stanza concludes the sonnet by naming the witnesses to the violence he has endured. In keeping with the surreal tone of the poem, the witnesses are not people but five key elements of the poem: “the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms, / the solitude, and the rain, and the roads.” (Bly and Knopefle inexplicably add the word “and” to the last line, which in the original reads, “la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos . . .”) The final line of the sestet trails off in an ellipsis after “roads,” as if literalizing the feeling of ongoing loneliness expressed in the final line of the octave: “with all the road ahead of me, alone.” Therefore, it’s no accident that this line begins with “the solitude” and ends with “the roads.” Given that the entire list of witnesses stands as a summary of the poem itself, it is as if Vallejo, like Keats in “This living hand,” means for this poem to speak for him as his witness long after his death, which he has so forcefully predicted, comes to pass.

  Alfonsina Storni

  * * *

  “I’m Going to Sleep”

  (1938)

  “Voy a dormir” is the last poem the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni wrote. She was suffering from terminal cancer and had cut herself off from even her closest friends and family members. It was October 25, 1938; she was only forty-six. Before she died, she posted three letters: one to her son Alejandro, one to a friend whom she asked to care for her family, and a third to the Argentine newspaper La Nación, with this farewell poem.

  I’m Going to Sleep

  Teeth of flowers, bonnet of dew,

  hands of grass, you, lovely nursemaid,

  turn down the earthen sheets for me

  and the quilt of weeded moss.

  * * *

  I’m going to sleep, my nurse, tu
ck me in,

  put a lamp on my headboard;

  a constellation; whichever you like;

  both are fine; lower the light a little.

  * * *

  Leave me alone: you hear buds bursting open . . .

  An unearthly foot rocks you from above

  and a bird sketches you a few beats

  * * *

  so you’ll forget . . . Thanks. Oh, a favor:

  if he calls again on the phone

  tell him not to insist, that I’ve gone . . .

  (Translated by Lauren K. Watel)

  After writing in classical forms such as the Petrarchan sonnet earlier in her career, Alfonsina Storni, like many modernist writers of the time, began to experiment and disrupt these forms, which had come to be considered somewhat stale. This poem follows the pattern of all the poems in her final book, Mask and Clover (Mascarilla y trébol). She termed the form an antisoneto, or anti-sonnet—in other words, a sonnet that works within, and yet against, the traditional form. The Peruvian avant-garde poet José Carlos Mariátegui published a short piece called “El anti-soneto” in a journal in Lima in 1928. Writing about his contemporary Martín Adán, he pronounced “the definitive, evident, irrevocable decease of the sonnet” and called the anti-sonnet “the sonnet that is no longer a sonnet, but its negation, its opposite, its critique, its renunciation.”