The poetry of unrequited love

Chocolate pancakes for breakfast feels like a real treat when it’s cold and dreary outside.

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” Federico Garcia Lorca.

The other day, I watched a taped lecture with Professor Nick Mount from University of Toronto. Professor Mount talked about how lyrical poems are written because some normal activity has been blocked, the normal progression of time, and the poet must write about that block before returning to the world of time. Mount gives an example; when you have been paralyzed by grief to the point where you simply can’t return to the real world, you write a poem about loss until you can. In this lecture, he jokes and says that if there were no frustrated love affairs, the size of the cannon of English poetry would be greatly diminished.

I think this image of using poetry as a way to overcome a hurt is very interesting. The mention of frustrated love affairs made me think of my own acquaintances with unrequited love.

My first and most severe heartbreak came in the form of a chubby boy known as The Moose. It was classic love in vain, where you pile amazing qualities onto a person you see from afar. When I, after weeks of deliberation and sleepless nights, finally worked up the courage to talk to him, I saw – to my dismay – that his chin sported a cluster of tiny pimples. The image of these pimples is the one that most linger in my mind now, as I think of him, which surely must mean God has a sense of humor! Anyway, although this acne momentarily rendered me speechless, The Moose was soon back up on the pedestal. And there he remained for two long years, until another girl, more forward than myself, swooped down and grabbed him leaving me in a puddle of tears. I wish I could say great poetry sprang from that puddle. It didn’t. But it did lead me to writing as a way to self-soothe. Heartache was thus connected with writing.

A few years later, I suffered another defeat. This time however, my heart had already taken a beating and at the end the “story” played out to my advantage. The object this time was my film professor at university. Not much to behold, it was what he said that tipped me over. He used fancy words like “quasi intelligent” and “verisimilitude”. Words I had never encountered in real life before. I dreamt of sitting next to him, and hearing him whisper all those complicated things in my ear. But Mr. Film Professor never gave me as much as a glance. That is to say not until towards the end, when I was up for an oral exam, a viva voce, when he suggested I come to his summer house, where we could “talk about it over a glass of wine”. I declined - slightly disgusted. Curiously, his proposal cured my heart in an instant.

I won’t talk about the third time I experienced unrequited love. Suffice it to say, it is what made me recognize the truth in Professor Mount’s speech on poetry as an emotional “unblocker”. Poetry is of course interchangeable here with any art form. My third meeting with unrequited love taught me that its nature is particularly suited for crafting a piece of art because of its malleability and because the pain of it, unlike the pain of say a toothache, needles itself into what one might call, for lack of a better word, “soul”. Hence the word “soul-wrenching”.

When we make a piece of art, be it music, a painting, a poem, or a dance, we draw from a place inside us that is broken, damaged, or hurt. It mustn’t be a direct response to the anguish we feel - pain alone doesn’t translate into art – the raw material of it needs to be manipulated and kneaded into shape, worked into shape. A shape we can call art. There’s an abundance of proof of this, as the history of art is full of stories, music, ballets, and paintings made in the throes of unrequited love or its kissing cousin, platonic love. One example is the one below, Dante and Beatrice, here immortalized in a painting by Ary Scheffer, which can be found at the Boston Museum of Art.