The Lovers’ Chronicle 12 February – without you (reprise No. 2) – Love Letters of Scott & Zelda – verse by George Meredith – photography by Eugène Atget

12 February 2024 By Rhett 0 In Love, Poems, Random, Songs

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. As Valentine’s day approaches, who are you without? Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

“A recurring theme over the years”
yes, went there several times
“Could be the reason you write,
this tug of war”
absolutely, the wonder,
the source of la joie,
the fount of agony
“Limitless inspiration”
ah, there is the word
the lifeblood
to keep the verse
flowin’ with you

lonesome nights in the rear view

such sadness so easily written

now turnin’ the page

and it writes itself

the thrill of it all

that i can tell you

purpose,

just bein’

for you

to help

to be there

to know

you look forward

to my return

can you see me

hurryin’ to be

with you

more and more
so were it with me

after the coals fade
in the grate
pale lies the shadow

lastin’ is this song
stand wakened
shiver from the dream
therein the answers
the clarity sought

limitations known
so this we get
an utterance
thunderin’ without

forever nights
hardest to write
cannot force the words
through the ache of it all

without
purpose
want
need

to know
without

everywhere

without
time
beauty

without you

A love letter from the literary world, another inspiration for a poem on one of our favorite topics.

Zelda Fitzgerald, née Sayre, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great muse and more. He modeled many of his characters after her, and he even included lines in his books that were from letters that Zelda had written him.

The two went on their first date on her 18th birthday. Her family was wary of him, and she would not marry him until his first novel was actually published. Zelda was still 18 when she wrote this letter to Scott in the spring of 1919:

Sweetheart,

Please, please don’t be so depressed — We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever — Maybe you won’t understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it’s hardest to write — and you always know when I make myself — Just the ache of it all — and I can’t tell you.

How can you think deliberately of life without me — If you should die — O Darling — darling Scott — It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too, — I’d have no purpose in life — just a pretty — decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered — and I was delivered to you — to be worn — I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a buttonhole bouquet — to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help — to know that you can’t do anything without me.

One week after This Side of Paradise appeared in print, Zelda and Scott got married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. They became known as the quintessential Jazz Age couple; beautiful, flashy, with money, and often drunk in public. The year they married, Zelda wrote to Scott:

I look down the tracks and see you coming — and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trouser are hurrying to me — Without you, dearest dearest, I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think — or live — I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It’s like begging for mercy of a storm or killing Beauty or growing old, without you.

Lover, Lover, Darling — Your Wife

So this inspired the followin’. It goes somethin’ kinda like this:

Without You (Reprise No.2)

These lonesome nights last forever
When I miss you most, it is hardest to write
And you can tell when I force the words
The ache of it all and I cannot tell you

Cannot think of life
Without you
Like goin’ blind
No purpose, just bein’

Made for you
Ordered, delivered
To help you
To be there for you

All I want
All I need
To know
You cannot be
Without me

See you comin’
Out of every shadow
Everywhere
You hurryin’ to me

Without you; cannot
Live or laugh or love
To be apart,
It is like
Beggin’ for mercy
From a storm or Time
Or killin’ Beauty
Or growin’ old

Without you

George Meredith
George Meredith in 1893 by George Frederic Watts

Today is the birthday of George Meredith (Portsouth, Hampshire 12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909 Box Hill, Surrey); novelist and poet of the Victorian era.

On 9 August 1849, Meredith married Mary Ellen Nicolls (née Peacock), a beautiful widow with a daughter. In 1858 she ran off with the painter Henry Wallis, shortly before giving birth to a child assumed to be Wallis’. Mary Ellen died in 1861.

On 20 September 1864, Meredith married Marie Vulliamy. She died of cancer in 1886.

Verse

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
- Love in the Valley, st. 5.
Civil limitation daunts
His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.
- An Orson of the Muse (1883).

With patient inattention hear him prate.
- Bellerophon, st. 4 (1887).

Full lasting is the song, though he,
The singer, passes
- The Thrush in February, st. 17 (1888).

Behold the life at ease; it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course.
- Hard Weather, l. 71 (1888).

All wisdom’s armoury this man could wield
- The Sage Enamoured (1892).

Modern Love (1862)

Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.
- St. 4.

And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.
- St. 12.

The actors are, it seems, the usual three:
Husband and wife and lover.
- St. 25.

What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But nature says: ‘My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer.’ Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.
- St. 30.

How many a thing which we cast to the ground,
When others pick it up, becomes a gem!
- St. 41..

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.
- St. 43.

More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.
- St. 48.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! –
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean’s force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!
- St. 50.

Today is the birthday of Eugène Atget (Libourne, Gironde, Aquitaine; 12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927 Paris); flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. An inspiration for the surrealists and other artists, his genius was only recognized by a handful of young artists in the last two years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive.