Valentine’s Day (a poem)

By Roger Owens





The worst ever Valentine’s Day
No matter how you spend it
Is to have yourself a Valentine
But have nowhere to send it

Copyright © 2023 by Roger Owens

All Over the Place: My Valentine

By Michael H. Brownstein

She crossed the concrete fields of the city,

shadows of darkness thickening,

every light dimming in brightness,

and entered the great room of celebration

unsure of what to expect—expecting nothing—

as was I, standing near her on the perimeter,

All Over the Place: Dear Dad, Happy Valentine’s Day

By Michael H. Brownstein

[I wrote this in ’88, published it in the Chicago Tribune.]


Every year I ask my 6th-grade students to write a valentine to someone they love. It’s an enjoyable activity, and they have a lot of fun with it. They write to their mothers, of course, and sometimes to their friends, but they never write to their fathers.

To Valentine’s Day

By Moristotle

[A reader commented yesterday on this poem’s original post, on Valentine’s Day 2015, reminding me I had even written it (and might have republished it yesterday).]

Happier Valentine’s Day than this!

By Moristotle

“Unhappy Valentines: romantic holiday disasters” [various, Guardian, February 11]. Few things conjure up the idea of romance like an exotic trip with a partner, though the reality can be excruciatingly different, as these writers discovered....:

A Valentine’s Day bouquet

By Bob Boldt

I am obsessed with all the varieties of possible human experience; how two lives can see the same setting from such differing perspectives. I think it is necessary for one to not only be able to see the world through all the lenses of personal parallax, but also to understand our experiences from a state of transcendent, unconditioned Reality. My thoughts this Valentine’s Day drifted back to a small London park I visited nearly 45 years ago:

Second Saturday's Sonnet

To Valentine's Day

By Morris Dean
 
 

 
 
 
Shakespeare asked whether he should compare "thee,"
and, having considered, decided not.
Than summer's day, he thought that she (or he)
was more lovely and temperate, less fraught

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Limerick for Valentine's Day:

For this special day, will you be our Valentine?
Come on over; we'll have Paul's vegan galantine¹,
    give thanks we're not geriatric,
    wassail our footnote hat-trick²,
and gift the girls their very own ballantine³.

Thor's Day (and Valentine's)

Be my Valentine

By Morris Dean

"Valentine's Day" is short for "Saint Valentine's Day." You may not have known that.
    Or that it's also referred to as "the Feast of Saint Valentine"—in liturgical (or church) circles.

Motomynd: Quick post-Valentine's Day communiqué

Ahh, Valentine's Day...the time for love and romance!
    And:

• The busiest week of the year for private investigators.
• February 15 is the most popular day for people to start an affair, because they were disappointed with February 14.
• There is a website devoted exclusively to married people wanting to have affairs. It employs 120 people and does a billion $$$ of business a year.

    There is something thought-provoking and tragic in all this....
_______________
Note from Moristotle: Could this be the site Motomynd's third bulleted item refers to: http://www.ashleymadison.com?

No gata do it, no haeftu

Traditional Irish
Turnip Halloween Lantern

While fiddling around with an interesting if trivial idea for today's post—the question how the verb to have to (or have got to) came to be used to mean to be made or required to: Wikipedia's article on modal verbs suggests that have to and have got to developed in Hawaiian Creole English, in which "modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries...gata 'have got to,' haeftu 'have to,' baeta 'had better,' sapostu 'am/is/are supposed to'"—

While I was fiddling around with that, I realized that I hadn't paid enough (or any) critical attention to the reasons my friend gave who gently suggested it was because I had become a grumpy old man that I had dumped on Halloween. He had written to me:

This Halloween, I was reflecting on the fact that it's nice that our most celebrated Holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) all revolve around giving gifts and appreciating the company of others. Rather than abstain, I think it better to put your own twist on the holiday, because God knows, they've been twisted plenty over the millennia for a million different reasons.

    I think I gave this a bye because it's so hopeful and positive-seeming, and my friend has two young daughters, on whose behalf he and his wife have to make difficult parental choices.
    But do these holidays really revolve around sweetness and light? I've already examined Halloween a bit, as well, actually, as Christmas and Thanksgiving. They don't come off well. Christmas and Thanksgiving, in particular, promote an orgy of animal slaughter.
    On Thanksgiving, people go about giving thanks—some of it, admittedly, to the animals they're about to eat, but more of it to their Heavenly Father for "providing" it. Thank you, God, for putting me atop the Great Food Chain of Being. Second only to him.
    During Christmas, people pray for peace on Earth (but not in the abattoirs) and love one another, while participating in the culture of violence toward other animals. Clement Clark Moore's poem needs updating:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    And do you need reminding that the man whose birthday is associated with Christmas was put on Earth by a "loving" God, according to the pagan myth that came to ennoble it¹, in order to be cruelly tortured and executed? But we get to celebrate that on another holiday.

I think that these second thoughts on grumpiness were sparked by a recent interchange with Motomynd. We were talking about the grand-opening video shown on the Crystal Bridges website for its collection of American art. Among the images the video features are two eighteen-wheelers (like the rigs my Bentonville brother-in-law used to drive for WalMart); one sports a photograph of cooked cow on its side, and the other heralds the logo of one of the world's biggest factory animal farms.
    Motomynd commented:

Did you notice how the camera lens lingered noticeably on each of the logos on the trucks? It struck me as odd to be watching a video I assumed was in some way going to celebrate the grand opening of a wonderful new art museum, but in reality turned out to be mainly a commercial for WalMart and some of its favored vendors. Given the nature of the video, one has to wonder what is in store for visitors to the museum.

    The values embodied in the video clip seem to me to contradict art's essential role in challenging tradition, however useful the WalMart money may have been for the acquisition of Alice Walton's collection and the construction of a museum to show it to a public all too reluctant to be challenged.

I have one of those decorative calendars that comes with a frame in which, month-to-month, you switch to a new placard. The placard for this month features the image of a turkey. I display November with the same spiritual sorrow I feel when I eat "meat" because I'm served it by a host whom I choose not to offend or conflict with.
_______________

1. Another related myth is cited in a letter Thomas Paine wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on Christmas Day 1802: "I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas-Day, and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.²"
   
   –Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006, p. 138
2. Paine had in the preceding paragraph suggested that Jefferson, to help France out of her financial straits, purchase the Louisiana Territory, which Spain had just ceded to France. Jefferson did so the following year, for four or ten cents an acre, depending on the source.

Reflections on Sonnet 73

An old college friend emailed me and a few other classmates two days ago that he'd memorized Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and recited it to his wife on Valentine's Day. That's the one you'll all remember when I tell you it begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
    Less well-known is Sonnet 73. Its subject matter (aging) doesn't lend itself to assigned reading by high school students! It came up in the discussion after we had analyzed Sonnet 18 for a bit. Another classmate mentioned that his next book, whose subtitle will begin, "Growing Old...," will quote the sonnet:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
      This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
      To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

To me the most touching thing about Sonnet 73 isn't the aging, but the effect on us of the aging of our loved ones. The poem's statement of this is all the more forceful for being located in its final two lines:

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The statement certainly reflects what I myself feel as my wife and others whom I "love well" grow old. I love her and them more because they (or I) "must leave ere long."
    In fact, I've experienced the same thing with loved ones already dead; my love for them, too, has grown "more strong"—my love for my father, who died thirty-one years ago, and for my mother, who died six years ago. Whatever love I may have felt for my parents when they still lived, it could not have been so strong as the love I feel for them today.
    The sense of love's growing stronger over the years is so remarkable, I can't but believe that for Shakespeare, too, the sonnet was mostly about those final two lines.
_______________
Note: the Wikipedia article on Sonnet 73 (linked to above) says of the ending couplet: "Shakespeare informs his audience that we must 'love more strongly,' because in the end, we are going to leave it all beyond and respond to death." This interpretation makes nonsense of the fact of love's growing "more strong," which it does naturally and not because we obey some commandment to love more strongly.