Crazy in Love

As a Classic Poem suitable for Valentine's Day, here is a vivid one about crazy, driven love.

Love and insanity have a long association. Expressions like ?crazy about you? suggest both the depth of the link and how automatic or superficial it has become. One thing art does is revitalize such fossilized bits of culture.

And the revitalizing art doesn't need to be new. Mark Alexander Boyd's sonnet was written over 400 years ago, in Scots, but I find emotion and freshness in it every time. It has the sound of conviction. Even in this month of love-rhetoric in the Valentine card, traditional or ironic, Boyd's words, in an essential paradox of art, feel real because of how artfully they are put together. Ultimately, there's no way of saying what makes a poem good in this way: It's a mystery, and largely a mystery of sound, which is to say, beyond a certain point it is beyond analysis.

For me, part of the poem's effect comes from a collision or blending of cultures, a phenomenon of meaning not limited to the modern world. All history is multicultural, I think. The combination of the Scots language and classical mythology is part of the meaning. The effect of Boyd's northern tongue is not merely quaint: Like any idiom it suggests a civilization, and my sense of wonder at the poem is heightened by (for example) the grace and wonder of the Northern word ?bairn? applied to a Mediterranean god of love, the Greco-Roman blind infant Eros or Cupid.

Like many other readers, I first encountered this poem in Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading. Still in my teens, I knew so little that I formed two vivid images from Boyd's lines:

Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air

I saw the desperate lover as an insane ploughman tilling the beach and also?even more demented by love?as a carpenter pumping his hand saw across thin air; the lover's futile effort to build something out of air with his saw seemed even crazier than his futile effort to make something alive grow out of the sand. In time, the straightforward agricultural definition that ?sawis? = ?sows? was explained to me, but the ghostly, mistaken image of sawing the air remains in my imagination.

Pound says in his note about the poem ?I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.? That statement's airy, nearly offhand assertiveness is characteristic. Pound as critic is a charming, persuasive bully: a great ear and a defective mind. Does the reckless confidence that makes ABC of Reading so valuable have the same roots as the actual diagnosis of insanity?literally and not as a literary trope for love?that saved Ezra Pound from being executed for treason? His anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist broadcasts for Mussolini have been much discussed. Possibly, there's not much more to say about them. A good adjective about the matter has been attributed to Czeslaw Milosz: ?To be fooled by Stalin?okay. But to be fooled by Mussolini??unintelligible.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=0799dad18183e979d5d3c5be3149134e

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