Life lessons: how to break up well
July 23, 2007It was over. I bought a copy of The Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay (genius of lyrical poetry, particularly lucid on the subject of bad relationships and the endings thereof). I gave it to the terribly disappointing young man with a list of the sonnets he was to read, in that order.
They traced the laughably pathetic rise and decline of our doings with each other, and ended with perhaps the most eloquently scathing dismissal ever written.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, — let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
I can almost guarantee you that you will find an applicable sonnet or two, or three, or a dozen, in The Collected. You didn’t love him, he didn’t love you, it was just about sex, you’ve grown tired of each other, big fight, slow death: it’s all in there. What a life Edna lived, and how well she put its events into fourteen lines.
I think I already posted you my favorite Edna poem on my own blog, so here’s another thought on the topic of breakups:
Men have died from time to time,
and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
This is the thought with which I would comfort my cast off suitors, if I ever cast any off. Unfortunately, I always very kindly let them dump me, and must content myself with the belief that “‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”
But I really do like your and Edna’s philosophy much better. I’m just totally incapable of following it. Pollyanna, c’est moi. Heaven help us all.
In the famous words of Vince Neil, “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.”
Actually had a college buddy who used this line once.
I once said,”What makes someone like you think you could have someone like me?”
In my defense, it was in a bar, and I was much younger…