Why Don't You Love Me?

Funny how everything old is new again. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s recent seedy email affair lavish epistolary romance was positively a throwback to a Victorian ideal of the surreptitious liaison. I wonder if this episode was brought on by the return of the loveless marriage. As Sandra Tsing Loh recently (and controversially) wrote in the Atlantic, like “fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive—and rare—attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children.” Marriage as the noblesse oblige of the upwardly mobile. Bummer. Who would have thought that the meritocracy would destroy marriage (I had my money on the gays). Looks like Stephanie Coontz deserves a revised second edition (see Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage). But if the marriage of social obligation brings back the flowery and furtive exultations of those in love, I’m (kind of) for it.

Until now we’ve mostly had to stumble on with angst ridden poems about unrequited love. In the morass of this much-loved teenage genre, however, lie a few hidden gems. Unlike the pathetic version beloved by the German Romantics, I thought I’d highlight a few more impudent and triumphant examples.

Nikki Giovanni has a great one in her new collection. Dripping with sass, “Why Don’t You Love Me” is a plainspoken, hand-on-your-hip gem from Ms. Giovanni.

Why don’t you
Love me

I am good with dogs
And children.

[...]

I just don’t understand

I say Jambo
When I answer the phone

And Ciao
When I hangup

I really really really
Don’t know

What more
I can do

A short poem by John Keats similarly shows that when it comes to the cool reception of his feelings, he could be a real dude with a ‘tude. “You Say You Love Me” is a bit more bombastic, but equally compelling (I love the word “inurn”).

You say you love; but then your hand
No soft squeeze for squeeze returneth,
It is like a statue's dead -
While mine to passion burneth -
O love me truly!

O breathe a word or two of fire!
Smile, as if those words should burn be,
Squeeze as lovers should - O kiss
And in thy heart inurn me! O love me truly!

One of the greatest poems has to be one by A.E. Housman (Housman conveniently, if unimaginatively, only numbered his poems). Rather than being angry or disconsolate, Housman endures his predicament stoically. Narrating from beyond the grave, he asks his former beloved to take notice of his headstone. The last line would do Marcus Aurelius proud.

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
Goodbye, said you, forget me.
I will, no fear, said I

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you

Was one that kept his word

George Jones narrated a similar story in “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” But then, as I’ve perhaps stated too many times on this blog, Country Music keeps alive some of our best literary traditions. Mark Sanford may yet have a lucrative second career…