The Valve - A Literary Organ | Dear Alan Rickman: Will You Be My Valentine Voice?

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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Dear Alan Rickman: Will You Be My Valentine Voice?

Posted by Rohan Maitzen on 02/13/10 at 06:26 PM

Love it or hate it, you can’t avoid it: tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and I thought we here at The Valve could do a little to make sure its literary quality is as high as possible. In aid of that, here is a great idea from the Times: sign up here to have your beloved sent a great poem read by a great voice. Offerings include Dame Judi Dench reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Helen Mirren reading Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and (even better) Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights,” Ian McKellen reading “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Alan Rickman reading Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder"--all more seductive and delicious than chocolate.

Meanwhile in the Globe and Mail, a parade of contemporary writers identify their own favourite love story. Wuthering Heights makes its inevitable appearance: novelist Elizabeth Abbot calls it “the gold standard for literary romance.” Surely not! Some of the other choices are more surprising and many are wholly unfamiliar to me: Jane Urqhuart, for instance, recommends William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev, which she describes as “short, dark, evocative and very moving,” and T. F. Rigelhof speaks up for C. S. Richardson’s The End of the Alphabet, the story of a couple who “discover more to love at the end than anticipated at the beginning.”

Do you have a favourite romantic poem or story? I would vote for e.e. cummings’s “it may not always be so; and i say,” along with “i carry your heart,” as two of my own favourites, as well as the ecstatic conclusion to EBB’s Aurora Leigh:

But oh, the night! oh, bitter-sweet! oh, sweet!
O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy
Of darkness! O great mystery of love,–
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self
Enlarges rapture,–as a pebble dropt
In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine!
While we two sate together, leaned that night
So close, my very garments crept and thrilled
With strange electric life; and both my cheeks
Grew red, then pale, with touches from my hair
In which his breath was...

And in prose, though in other ways my preferences lean away from Jane Austen, it’s hard for me to fault the ending of either Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion for sheer romantic gratification.

Comments

Even as a youngster I found the Earl of Rochester’s “Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover" bizarrely moving (certainly beats Philip Roth), and what do you know, it’s on YouTube.

For prose valentines, I’d be tempted to send Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack ‘cause it’s such a pretty little thing.

My favorite rom-coms are still Congreve’s, although I wouldn’t kick Lubitsch out of bed.

My idea of romance might be a bit eccentric, considering my current relationship reached melting point while listening to Daniel Johnston songs. But I’m still not crazy enough to call any Bronte novels romantic.

By Ray Davis on 02/13/10 at 08:20 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Nice, but: please read the poems yourselves: there is nothing worse than hearing a Famous Actor overread poetry....

By on 02/14/10 at 01:18 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Medea’s interior monologue on loving Jason in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*.

By on 02/14/10 at 04:35 AM | Permanent link to this comment

I especially liked the poem… In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self
Enlarges rapture,–as a pebble dropt..

By James Hawk on 05/12/10 at 11:53 AM | Permanent link to this comment