James Merrill's Masks of Eros, Masques of Love

Abstract

o all poets write, at some point, about love? The most discreet, the most epically distracted temperament will yield some amorous moment: we find them in Milton, in T. S. Eliot. But one love song-say, of J. Alfred Prufrock -does not a love poet make. A certain return to the subject marks the writers we call by that name, those we turn to for pleasures and insights as time goes by. If every romance runs, as subtitles in the Penguin Book of Love Poetry suggest, from intimations and celebrations through desolations and reverberations, the best love poets never settle on a single vision of that rocky progress. They shift perspectives, changing tone or structure, then heed the Muse's command to look in thy heart and write once more (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 1). Writers like Donne and Spenser, Lowell and Rich, take romantic occasions as occasions for reflection, not only on love's urges, pleasures, and fears, but also on how best to model them in art. What does writing in narrative, diary jotting, verse letter, or sonnet sequence mean, not just for one's accuracy, but for the life lived, the love still unaddressed? Such self-consciousness can make an author seem literary, chilly, self-involved. It tugs out of transparency the scrim of convention that lies between us and moments we long to find immediately moving. But gesture merely underscores that neither russet yeas, and honest kersey noes nor the plainest New Jersey this is just to say is a more natural language for the wooing mind than rouged-up conceits (Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost 5.2.413; Williams, This Is Just to Say 372). Love is a fair ventriloquist; yet how