Who first wrote roses are red, violets are blue, honey is sweet and so are you? Who were the lines written for? And when? Plus is poetry the language of love? Just some of the questions Pele Cox and I seek answers to in this special lovers’ edition. Oh and which poet would you take to bed?
Poets
- Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene)
- Ovid (Beach Body translation by Victoria Punch)
- John Donne (The Expiration)
- John McCullough (Crown Shyness from the collection Panic Response, Penned in the Margins press)
- Derek Walcott (Love After Love)
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways)
Further reading
Pele writes…
Ovid was Rome’s supreme poet of love so who better to choose for this St Valentine’s Day special? The Amores, a collection of elegies addressed to a mistress named Corinna, sparkled with humour, self-mockery, and erotic candour. He followed this with the Heroides, a daring series of fictional letters written from the perspectives of mythological heroines — Penelope, Dido, Medea — giving voice to women’s desire and suffering in ways that felt revolutionary. His most notorious work, the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), presented itself as a tongue-in-cheek instructional manual on seduction, covering everything from where to meet lovers to how to maintain their affections. It was playful, subversive, and deeply at odds with Emperor Augustus’s moral legislation promoting traditional family values.
Rich writes…
Iamb, caesura, enjambment… there are loads of fancy words when you look under the bonnet of any poem and, just like the engine of my old Ford Capri, you don’t need to know what every part does to enjoy the thrill of the open road or read. In this episode I mention iambic pentameter and hexameter. Put simply an iamb is a unit of measure in poetry much like a centimetre or inch is a unit on a tape measure. Specifically an iamb is two syllables: the first a short one; the second longer. I am is a good example although I prefer to think of an iamb as a heartbeat ba- boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.… So pentameter is five heartbeats or iambs. And iambic hexameter is six heartbeats. I’d thoroughly recommend THE MAKING OF A POEM – A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland for its easy-to-read approach to all things iambic. Think of it as the poetic equivalent of the Haynes Workshop Manual I still have for that Capri!
