The mess of love By D. H.

Lawrence

Weve made a great mess of love Since we made an ideal of it. The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life That moment I begin to hate her. The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! My love dies down considerably. The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure of it, Its a cold egg, it isnt love any more. Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade; If it doesnt fade, it is not a flower, Its either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the cemetery. The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it, Or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it, It is not love any more, its just a mess. And weve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, egoperverted love.

Personal opinion concerning the message of this poem: Having an opinion on this subject is as hard as it may be to make the difference between truth and intuition. Love is such a subjective experience that you can never be sure whether you have discoreved it genuinely. The nasty thing about romance is that it lasts a second, like a flash of heavenly happiness, and then becomes an intricate mechanism, put into function by will, ego, suggestion and mind. As far as I am concerned, I believe that love is a transitory moment between sanity and madness, a gap in our psychology that permits us to see further in ourselves. Love cant last long because due to its extraordinary nature, we would die, breathless, overwhelmed by its intensity. Love cant be transformed into an ideal because it passes quick. This exercice, good only for silly philosophers, is similar to that practiced by children, who try to cacth sun rays in their fists. Love has the incredible power to dig its way up to our hearts. Love, at least authentic one, which detach from common infatuation, is like a part of our subconscious. When least expected, love retorts all our images about ourselves. We become passionate, furious, wild or on the contrary, mild, neat, even tired, mute in face of Light. Although the effects upon ourselves can be enlightening, the hardest point to follow in love is the relationship with the other person and here is where all the trouble arises. Love without the other is tragical. Common love, between two people, man and woman, encounters important drawbacks as the fear to be discovered. Playing social roles all the time makes impossible for us to be true in love. We play, we hide, we seek but when it comes to show in front of each other, totally exposed, we long to find a shelter in the dark. We prefer to build artificial images of ourselves, we prefer to grave love in stone as to be sure that it doesnt run from us. We doom our lover to make his heart stop in the moment of falling in love, but this moment cant be immortal, cant be stopped, cant be simulated. We surely seem pretty absurd when we pretend to stop the ways of the heart. It doesnt know such rigid rules, heart will always be receptive to the world outside or to world inside, the heart will flow with the big river of emotions and sensations. If I were to imagine what it is inside us that makes us humans, I would imagine a garden full of warmth in which it grows one single tree. Everything in that garden influence the existence of the fruits and each season the fruits taste different. Maybe in spring the fruits have a peculiar taste, the taste of sun and of wind, and maybe in the winter, the fruits retreat in themselves, becoming smaller like a thumb, tasting like sorrow and pitty, that familiar taste of green apples. Love cant become a cold egg, otherwise it isnt love anymore, is a cold concept, analyzed and transformed into an experiment. I have recently seen a short movie, directed by a Czech director, Jan Svankmajer, called The dimensions of dialogue. This little masterpiece described three kind of communication: exhaustive discussion, passionate discussion and factual discussion. Love, as I concluded, has become a subject for an exhaustive discussion, split and retorted on all faces, cut by all kinds of instruments, eaten and thrown up, reinvented and alienated, enstranged by its essence: the ephemeral beauty of instant Truth.