My favorite love poem barely checks out like a love poem at all. In Seamus Heaney’s “Scaffolding,” the belated Irish poet compares the wedding he shares along with his spouse Marie to not a rose or even a springtime or birdsong but to your scaffolding that masons erect when beginning construction for a building.
Masons, Heaney writes, “Are careful to try the scaffolding out; / Make sure planks won’t slide at busy points, / Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints;” — work that’s maybe perhaps perhaps not used on the edifice it self but supports the higher work in the future. Their care just takes care of “when the job’s done,” when “all this comes down” to show “walls of yes and solid stone.” Such, he suggests, is love: that we now have built our wall surface. if you place when you look at the time and effort, fan and beloved can “let the scaffolds fall / Confident”
I like much about that poem — its solidness, its succinctness, its easy, workmanlike quality. Nearly all of all though, I favor how utterly unromantic it really is. In five sharp couplets, Heaney reminds us that love — and wedding specially — isn’t mysticism. It’s perhaps perhaps maybe not guesswork. It will be has nothing in connection with stars aligning. No, love is work, and like most good work, it will take quite a few years to construct.
Maybe not that I’ve always thought of love in that way, head you. Growing up, I ( similar to of us) drank profoundly through the fine of exactly exactly what we call the “Romance Myth.”
The misconception goes something similar to this: Somewhere on the market, there’s a single for you personally. This one is amazing — so amazing, in reality, that after you meet them your shared One-ness will manifest itself in a instantaneous and unmistakable connection, one thing comparable to that which we call “chemistry.” Your students will dilate.
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