Love Poem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Authorial Context: Poet, Interrupted

Pastan won the Dylan Thomas Poetry Award sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine in 1954, and the runner up was Sylvia Plath. Pastan got married after graduation and attended grad school while starting a family with her husband, who was in medical school. By her own admission, something had to go, and that something turned out to be the practice of poetry. She did not begin writing poems again for ten years.

In that ten-year period, runner-up Plath would write the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and became a vanguard of confessional poetry, alongside other American poets, including Anne Sexton. The poetry of Plath and Sexton, often also categorized as Postmodern, centered on individual, and often traumatic, experience. Pastan, when she returned to poetry, took a very different approach, focusing on the life around her and its daily events. Her many collections consider subject matter close to home—family, children, illness, aging, and death are common threads.

Pastan has resisted criticism that she says lauds the male poet for his treatment of the ordinary, while diminishing poems by women who concern themselves with the same subjects. Contemporary poets who write on similar themes to Pastan include Jane Kenyon, who drew tremendous inspiration from everyday elements such as the family dog and the garden. The speaker in “Love Poem” stands with her beloved, drawing comparisons between long-term romantic love and a swollen creek raging with winter’s melt. The poem is emblematic of the ways Pastan employs accessible and familiar scenarios to consider relationships, as well as the meaning of life and its purpose.

While Pastan did not pursue an academic career, she was a faculty member each summer for twenty years at the renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Her reason for not teaching at the academic level was that she believed it would interfere too much with her writing, and she would not be interrupted again.

Social Context: Poetics of the Domestic

Many poets writing in English mine their immediate environments for material. Ross Gay writes odes to his community garden, and to buttoning his shirt. Aimee Nezhukumatathil encourages students to write a sky journal, cataloguing just what they see when they look up. T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons. Poetry of the domestic is not a school, per se, but matters of everyday are an enduring inspiration—there is evidence of it throughout history.

Plath had died by suicide by the time Linda Pastan took up her pen again after a decade-long absence. A look at poetry of the sixties and seventies tends to include the so-called Confessional Poets (including Plath and Sexton, as well as John Berryman and Robert Lowell), and the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima. However, even in the era of second-wave feminism, the Vietnam War, and other more broadly political concerns, poems about ordinary life made their way into people’s lives. Pastan published five collections in the seventies alone, including The Five Stages of Grief. In the eighties, as Pastan moved into her own middle-age, she wrote about the quiet anxieties of aging, loss, and diminished passion, garnering tremendous popular success as well as multiple literary awards.

While Pastan is often described as a poet of Jewish descent, her father was an atheist, and she says she did not enter a synagogue until she was eighteen years old. In poems such as “Mosaic,” however, Pastan draws on Jewish history and Biblical references to ask questions of faith and family. Religion, too, is one of the subjects of daily meditation that make their way into Pastan’s poems.

Although the tone of their work differs, Pastan and author Judith Viorst—who wrote Necessary Losses (1987), a nonfiction book on grief, as well as the poetry collections When Did I Stop Being Twenty (1987) and Unexpectedly 80 (2010)—have much in common in that their readers have been able to follow along in real time. Both Pastan and Viorst have produced work that reflects each stage of their maturity, on themes including marriage, children, aging, and death. For Pastan, her art has drawn from her life as she lived it, and that, combined with a close attention to craft, has been more than enough to solidify her literary legacy.