Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I recently watched a movie about a widow and a younger man. It reminded me how classic the trope of forbidden love is. A couple from the wrong side of the tracks meet up in high school, or a couple of differing ages, or cultural backgrounds, become the basis of those heartwrenching narratives for which we need cathartic treatment.

Maybe it’s because who we love is still taboo in some communities; we have yet to fully move beyond starkly rigid notions of love. Who we choose as the object of our affections and desire is a fundamental choice. It is an act of ultimate freedom, one that is as natural as breathing. Thankfully, at the end of the day, it is difficult to police another person’s heart.

Today’s classic poem knows that loving hearts create possibilities for us to exist as full and whole human beings. We need as many examples as possible of sweet passion and friendship. It might be the key to our survival.

The Canonization
by John Donne

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
          Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
          With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
                Take you a course, get you a place,
                Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king’s real, or his stampèd face
          Contemplate; what you will, approve,
          So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
          What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
          When did my colds a forward spring remove?
                When did the heats which my veins fill
                Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
          Litigious men, which quarrels move, 
          Though she and I do love. 

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
         Call her one, me another fly,
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die,
         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
                The phoenix riddle hath more wit
                By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
         We die and rise the same, and prove 
         Mysterious by this love. 

We can die by it, if not live by love, 
         And if unfit for tombs and hearse 
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
         And if no piece of chronicle we prove, 
                We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
                As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
         And by these hymns, all shall approve
         Us canonized for Love. 

And thus invoke us: “You, whom reverend love
         Made one another’s hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
         Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
                Into the glasses of your eyes
                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
         A pattern of your love!”