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Lane Explains It All: Romancing the Gravestones
by Lane Morris Buckman
As Valentine's Day has just passed us, I find myself smiling to think of how I have played pincushion to some of Cupid's oddest darts. I am a silly romantic and have nursed more crushes than Florence Nightingale did soldiers. It is a quirk of my personality that I end up with crushes on dead men all the time. Voltaire, Desmoulins, Byron, Keats and of course my dear, dear Shakespeare are only a few of my imaginary celebrity boyfriends. (The dead ones anyway. Dennis Quaid and Keith Richards are my living imaginary celebrity boyfriends.) I sit and read their work, then end up mooning over them as I am certain women of their day did. Let's face it, those men were the rock stars of their respective eras. You know Shakespeare had more than one corset flung at his head from the back of the Globe.
I discovered Byron in high school, around the same time as Voltaire came to my notice. There was an upper room above the front office of my school and while waiting for my ride home, I would often run up to sit in the window box overlooking the front campus and swoon to the heady delights of Byron's writing. I was a little dramatic. He suited me perfectly. The more I learned about him, the more I loved him. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, indeed. I blush just thinking about it.
Sadly, I always knew that I was not the kind of girl who would ever have turned Byron's head. No. I am so much more the giggling than the purring type. He would have petted me on the head, then cast his eye toward one of my more deliciously cosmopolitan classmates. As such, I was delighted to discover Keats. Byron might have made my stomach flip, but Keats made my heart flutter.
To this day I have never read a description of food so lust inspiring as that of his description of the feast set by Porphyro for Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.---
"And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St Agnes' sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache." 1
Be still my teenaged heart. I fed my romanticism with Keats' work, then someone told me he was uncool, and being the fickle child I was, we broke up. That was when I stumbled upon Camille Desmoulins. I read the letters he wrote to his wife, his stirring and impassioned propaganda for the French Revolution and I was smitten. That he and his darling Lucile met their deaths at the maw of the monster they had fed, orphaning their baby son only made me bite my knuckles that much harder. Still, I felt odd loving so very married a man, and reluctantly left the Desmoulins to themselves. Then launched full force crushes on Napoleon Bonaparte and George Patton, both of whom were brilliant writers. (Men in uniforms, even little tiny ones…it's a weakness.)
However, in the lot of my fickle parade of bygone poets, there has always stood one lone fixture. Shakespeare, my Shakespeare. Have you read his sonnets? Oh, I cannot without stopping occasionally to fling my hand across my brow and sigh. (I'm still a little dramatic.) But of all his work, the whole of Hamlet leaves me in a state. After seeing Kenneth Branagh's full-length celluloid version of the play, both my best friend and I were gasping. She because Kenneth Branagh is her imaginary celebrity boyfriend, and I because there is nothing quite like the sweeping poetry of Shakespeare. I walked around in a cloud for a day. (Okay, I'm quite dramatic.)
When my husband and I were first dating he told me he was not a great poet, so rather than trying his hand at rhyme, he borrowed from that devil Byron and offered me She Walks in Beauty as an ode. He has since shown his own great talent at romantic haiku, but I will always feel a thrill in my soul when I read, She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.2
Why? Because my own intellectual rock star picked it for me.
The crux of it is this: The intellect and creativity required to produce the art these men seemed to put forth so effortlessly is bait in the trap for me. I am at once star-struck, overwhelmed and impressed. I cannot be the only one so stricken by Cupid's backward looking darts. Certainly someone else has sighed with delight over a bygone artist's quill. I'm sure of it. Even Cole Porter wrote, "Brush up your Shakespeare, and the women you will wow!" Take a note, boys. Lord Byron was never lacking for company anyway.
1The Eve of St. Agnes, John Keats
2She Walks in Beauty, George Gordon Byron
Lane Morris Buckman studied English, Foreign Language and Classics
at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she received her
B.A. in 1995.
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