The heart is an abandoned cave

[PrinceMyshkin]

These are the au revoirs
that heart makes to heart:
I might have loved you, says one.
Says the other, I loved you,
once.


The heart is an abandoned cave.


The sky slants away, gathering dark
from the larger cave.
The universe echoes
with the death of love.

[Countess]

Do I slit my wrists now or after it's all over? Lovely poem but it is rather bleak. No hope?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Do I slit my wrists now or after it's all over? Lovely poem but it is rather bleak. No hope?

No wrists were slit in the writing of this poem.

[symphony]

Ahem, may I?

Loved the first stanza. The rest sounded a bit too obvious after that, in my opinion. The first one has this curious abandonment in the last word- "once". After that, the line "the heart is an abandoned cave" kills the wonder for me somehow. Same goes for the last stanza, though I really like the way "death of love" sounds here.

[firefangled]

These are the au revoirs
that heart makes to heart:
I might have loved you, says one.
Says the other, I loved you,
once.


The heart is an abandoned cave.


The sky slants away, gathering dark
from the larger cave.
The universe echoes
with the death of love.



I liked the first part, but because we do love again, this seemed overly terminal to me.

In a deeper sense, we persist in love, even in our despair, even when we are unaware of doing so (perhaps this persistence is precisely why we love again).

In his diaries Kafka wrote, "Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive."

I would have rather the poem ended with, The heart is an abandoned cave. There is something inhabitable and wanting to be filled there.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I liked the first part, but because we do love again, this seemed overly terminal to me.

In a deeper sense, we persist in love, even in our despair, even when we are unaware of doing so (perhaps this persistence is precisely why we love again).

In his diaries Kafka wrote, "Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive."

I would have rather the poem ended with, The heart is an abandoned cave. There is something inhabitable and wanting to be filled there.

Poor last stanza, it found favour with no one*. But if that verse were understood as intended - as an elaboration of the self-pitying mood of the disappointed lover - then surely it works?

*That expression reminded me of the idiom in Hebrew for saying that you like someone: "You find favour in my eyes."