Love Heart <3 by -Weng- under a Creative Commons licence

Valentine’s Day – a day for lovers. And poets. ‘O what is love? philosophers have asked’ Iain Crichton Smith wrote, ‘and more than these, the poets, What is love?’ There are probably as many answers to that question as there are poets. Valentine’s Day is not only a festival of romance. One might argue the relationships celebrated on the 14th of February are but an echo of the affair really commemorated on that day: between poetry and love, Calliope and Cupid. You might even say a poet effectively invented Valentine’s Day. Chaucer is said to be responsible for the first known reference to Valentine’s Day as a moment that marks romantic love. In 1382, in Parlement of Foules, Chaucer wrote:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

Love is a whetstone for poets; it is a subject that they use to test and sharpen their talent upon. Scots poets are, of course, no exception, and there can scarce be one, major or minor, who hasn’t sighed or cried over it. Love is the subject of subjects, and in Scotland consideration of poetry of the heart begins with ‘O My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ (Antonia Fraser’s anthology of Scottish love poetry A Red Rose or a Satin Heart actually begins with Burns’s poem). ‘A Red, Red Rose’ was a traditional song Robert Burns collected and worked on. Its mix of summery sentiment and apocalyptic imagery – ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun’ – will be familiar to anyone waiting by the letterbox for a card to drop – or not – onto their welcome mat.

Centuries later, in Kevin MacNeil’s ‘words, seahorses’, we read, ‘i dreamt i was the seafloor and you were the weight of the ocean pressing / down on me’, lines which shares with Burns that same sense of the natural world reflecting the poor lover’s hopes combined with a note of emotional danger (‘the weight of the ocean pressing / down on me'). The preoccupations of poets remain constant because their ultimate subject – mankind – remains the same. Countries appear, disappear, have their boundaries redrawn overnight – but the topography of the heart stays the same. Technology upgrades, the world is rewritten as a sequence of ones and zeroes – but true love remains analogue.

Which is why poetry is uniquely suited to commemorating Valentine Day. It testifies to the unchanging character of the spirit. It’s why we can read ‘May Poem’, written anonymously in the sixteenth century, and still know exactly what the author means:

All luvaris that ar in cair,
To thair ladies thay do repair
In fresch mornyngis befoir the day,
And ar in mirth ay mair and mair
Thruch glaidnes of this lusty May

So don’t worry if that card doesn’t flutter through your door after all. You can celebrate your love with poetry on Valentine Day, or celebrate your love of poetry. Either way, that’s a date worth making.

Category: love poetry