I was puzzling how to answer you so I'll do it with a 1983 poem.
Love has nothing to do with words, it is a meeting of eyes. I think
I try to capture that here. I have so many love poems I dont know
where to choose from, but my instinct chose this one.

A poem is a packet of intelligence which unwraps on the tongue.
There was never anybody who understood love better than Shakespeare.
But Dante was the real thing. And Petrarch. I think this idea of
love came from the Arabs through Sicily. It is the true one.
Now for the pub.



Feasting


I am the shape-maker
electing out of the murmuring voices
assonance and rhythm.
I weave from the singularity of love
triptychs of before and after.
The constant spell amazes me
as I fashion this glottal sympathy.
Never to look back and say it was.
Never to look forward and repeat the question.
It was there in the moonlight
as I brushed a tear from your cheek,
Your eyes lit by Paradise,
as you asked yourself where the rainbow lay.
The lost years of youth burn brightest
in the elation of your calm intelligence;
Absurd before and after.
Trapped together for eternity
by an absence of words,
The eyes, making a mockery of language
at the feast of the soul.
You, so pretty.


Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath .......... http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Erminia H. Passannanti wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 01:37:16 +0100, Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >Poetry is about making connections. THe transcendental connection
> >is love. So romantic love is fundamentally sexual. Seems to be.
> >You have to add some quality of language into the recipe.
> >
> >
> >
> >Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
> >Lynx: Poetry from Bath ..........
> http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html
>
> Romantic love...and sexual reliance…I wonder whether one is ever loved
> in the way one wishes to be loved and for what one is. I have the feeling
> one is the projection of another person’s set criteria. One is found and
> selected according to pre-existing regulations of the mind. One at the end
> is never really seen for what one is. One might add that what one really is
> never certain. Or maybe parents, if one is lucky, can see one as one is.
>
> I am thinking of a way to reply to you, Douglas, with a question.
> Shakespeare's treatment of Andrea Bandello's story of Romeo and Juliet of
> Verona
> has certainly established a strong oppositional link between the extremist
> way Italians conceive love ( as a collective experience, in history and in
> society , especially through theatre, and the equally extremist way
> English people have developed their ardent conceptions of love and passions
> in their best genre, the novel, as a typically more private ground. These
> two ways do complete each other in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The sexual-
> romantical private
> constituents, I think, were somehow not predominant in Bandello’s story
> which was based on
> a kind sociologically didactical issue of one would regulate marriage in
> society and in politic.
> In fact Bandello's story of the two families was already quoted by Dante
> Alighieri in the VI Cantos (verse 106) (Purgatorio) and subjected to the
> political ethos. And Luigi Da Porto recalls the same plot in
> 1524 for a short story which lately was developed by Matteo Bandello into a
> novel. The content of the novel, which in the Bandello’s version was still
> very much informed of political significance for it aimed at being staged
> at the Court of Isabella D’Este, was very shortly adopted by Arthur Brooke
> in 1562, transferred on the English ground only three years before
> Shakespeare rewrote it in his own style and from his own stunning
> perspective of love and passion which incorporated the historical and
> political issue but giving prevalence to the herotic.
>
>
> When one reads Dante's verse or Matteo Bandello’s story one is amazed how
> less focused on
> the actual love and sexual attraction between the two young noble children
> of Verona the topic is. In the tradition of Dante's political writing, the
> disastrous love and sexual magnetism related about by
> Bandello was still there mainly to stress the political.
>
> For your surprise , this is how Arthur Brooke prefaced his poemetto about
> Romeo and Juliet in 1562, turning the political into the sexual (a
> sexuality to be loathed and castigated but neverthless given great
> predominance). His introduction reads:
>
> “And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to
> describe unto thee a coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselues to
> vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advice of parents and
> frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and
> superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of vnchastitie)
> attemptyng all aduentures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished lust,
> vsing auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for
> furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull
> mariage, the cloke the shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes
> of vnhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye deathe.”
>
> Therefore, the lesson is : one should marry an Italian, but have a British
> as a lustful lover.
>