The Hindu Business Line : Two people with one pulse

"Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring your winter-garment of repentance fling." A snatch that is from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, which is featured in 100 Great Poems of Love & Lust, compiled by Dannie Abse (www.landmarkonthenet.com) .

The `highly personal' selection has `famous poems as well as those perhaps hardly known even to the poetry-reading public'.

What a rich picking there is for an anthologist of love poems, of stories of enduring love and love lost, writes Abse in his intro.

Also, there are `wonderful confessions, often robustly comical, of pure lust, mainly by men, since in past centuries, declarations of love or about love were generally a male preserve'.

Confessions can be bold, such as of Edward Thomas (1878-1917): "My eyes scarce dare meet you lest they should prove I but respond to you and do not love. We look and understand, we cannot speak except in trifles and words most weak."

Thomas lived a life of economic hardship, narrates the author in a short note. Alas, Thomas' first collection appeared after his death, and his "accessible, moving and pleasurable poetry was overlooked for many years."

Even as you hurriedly thumb through, pause to read a few lines from Ovid's Amores.

"Life's on lease. Why settle for eight hours sleep and ignore delightful, flighty Cupid?" he urges.

"Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers," teases D.H. Lawrence. "I wish I could remember that first day, first hour, first moment of your meeting me... " sighs a sonnet of Christina Rossetti.

You can bet on a poem to bring you cheer during an otherwise boring workday. John Manifold tells you how: "I think of you singing when dullards are talking; I think of you fighting when fools are provoking."

To the math-minded, Elizabeth Barrett Browning answers a poser, methodically: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height... "

W.H. Auden demands, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos... " John Frederick Nims pens racily, "Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror... "

But Gavin Ewart takes time to recollect, "As you get old you begin to wonder - what was all that lightning and thunder actually about?"

Spend a minute with the inimitable Shakespeare. "I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound," is a grab from a sonnet of his. "Be bold to play, our sport is not in sight," encourages the Bard in Venus and Adonis.

Among the pages, you'd meet Louis MacNeice, who writes in Meeting Point: "Time was away and somewhere else, there were two glasses and two chairs and two people with one pulse... "

As if in contrast, though, is `Quick and bitter' by Yehuda Amichai, concluding thus: "As we stray further from love we multiply the words, words and sentences long and orderly. Had we remained together we could have become a silence."

A read that deserves a date.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in