Romanticism

The Romantics —
Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats —
move us with the rhythms of the numinous.

The Poet is often a Romantic.
The vision of Romanticism echoes the Devotional Bhakti Yoga of the East.

Novalis, the German Romantic poet, once wrote:
“We read poetry to heal the wounds that reason makes.”

I garden for the same reason.
Writing, for me, has been a balm against
the endless demand to
please be reasonable.

The Poem is never finished.
The writer is always writing —
grasping at the numinous,
at the unreasonable —
guided by a pen dipped in laughter and tears,
hopes and fears.

Aspired or enthused,
drunk or merely called
to a task that cannot be finished —
for truth and beauty have
no beginning,
no end.

The writer is the pen.
The words are what he has caught in the wind.
A speaking heart,
singing a longing tale —
for there is only one Poem,
one Story,
one Song.

A deeply conflicted Romanticism:
a plaint of beauty that cannot be captured,
that knows no fear,
yet is never consummated in passionate embrace.

A kissless kiss.
A touchless face.

And so,
sHe goes to that longing Love
that shall never be won,
peregrinating to follow an ancient aching heart —
until life is done.

In Romantic Mysticism,
this longing is an allusion
to the ever-seeking heart —
yearning for the Beloved,
the goal being Love —
experienced,
but never sated.

Oh,
to kiss the Beloved
with the same kiss
the Beloved kisses me —
and in that kiss,
live an eternity.

Oh, our hearts know this.
Love attracts Love —
this is the secret of the kiss.

The law of attraction is a sympathetic vibration:
as above, so in you.

And as you are moved from wonder into awe,
your eyes glitter
with the beauty you saw.

All Lovers invent the Beloved.
And then the Music,
the Poem,
the Story
is always about that.

The Lover makes the music,
the Poem,
the Story
as a texture of that ancient ache —
a reality-play,
changing in innumerable revisions and realizations,
forever voyaging with the heart as compass.

Always going.
Never arrived.

For Love has no opposite.
The opposite of hate
is discriminating wisdom.