We regret to inform you that the “Love, Cruel Love” session has been cancelled. Perhaps it should have been called “Love, Inconstant and Fickle, Unpredictable, Swerving Love.” We will save our selected poems, archived below, on the woes of love for next year’s February. That’ll be 2/14 in 2014–time to complain, if ever there was a time to complain, about the divagations of Aphrodite.
Parallel Octave will celebrate the month known as “février” by the French with a selection of poems about the woes of love. Blake! Teasdale! Housman! Joyce! Lowell! WOE!
Image via spreadshirt.com, where you, too, can have a heartbreak-emoticon T-shirt.
We believe it was William Wordsworth who once said “Woe is a dish best shared with lots of people playing instruments.”
Poems follow:
Sara Teasdale, “I am not yours, though lost in you”
James Joyce, “Flood”
A.E. Housman, “He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?”
Amy Lowell, “The Letter”
Thomas Wyatt, “They Flee From Me”
selections from the long “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband,” by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
William Blake, “Love’s Secret”
Ben Jonson, “Song to Celia
John Clare, “I Hid My Love”
Aphra Benn, “A Thousand Martyrs
||8ve: the parallel octave chorus 