"My love is this fear": Valentine's Day Reflections
Without the fear of loss – from the fragility of life and relationships – a songwriter brashly claims "I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand."
Reflections on the fragility of life and relationships – and what that means for how we love …
A cheery start to these Valentine’s Day thoughts …
“Grief is the price we pay for love.”
– Queen Elizabeth II, at the end of a message “read by the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, at the prayer service in St Thomas church, New York” for the victims of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 and their loved ones.
As an ITV News article noted, “The phrase came to the fore again when she lost her beloved Prince Philip, and it has been remembered anew as Her Majesty's own life came to an end, at the age [of] 96, on 8 September, 2022.”
In 2021, Stevie Wolfe wrote that “The [Queen’s] words themselves are adapted from a passage written by Dr Colin Murray Parkes, a psychiatrist at St.Christopher’s Hospice in his book Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life: “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.””
A post-World War II Russian poet found an apt, near-universal metaphor to describe falling in love, as entering a “colored world” shared with one’s beloved.
Yet despite being utterly captivated by newfound love, the narrator is aware this won’t last forever; they know keenly “these minutes are short.” To fully appreciate and feel that love, they choose to lean into their fear – giving into it and even nurturing it – in the face of life’s fragility and relationship uncertainties:
“When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don’t fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love’s slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.”
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Colours,” translated from Russian to English by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi, S.J.1, in Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, published by The Penguin Group, Inc. © 1962.
(Emphasis added.)
On her 1968 album of spoken and sung poetry set to orchestral music, Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time, Joan Baez recited Yevtushenko’s words on how love is intricately intertwined with the fear of its loss.
Fifty-five years after Yevtushenko’s translated words, “my love is this fear,” went out into the world, an Alabama-born songwriter would explore a similar theme.
By evoking vampires, for whom “death was a joke,” he contrasts that with our own sharp awareness of the unpredictable fragility of love and life, which make our expressions of love more urgent:
“It's not the long, flowing dress that you're in
Or the light coming off of your skin
The fragile heart you protected for so long
Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong
It's not your hands searching slow in the dark
Or your nails leaving love's watermark
It's not the way you talk me off the roof
Your questions like directions to the truthIt's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be goneIf we were vampires and death was a joke
We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand …”
– Jason Isbell and his band The 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires,” from “The Nashville Sound,” an album released in 2017.
Isbell discussed the meaning behind his song, and his excitement in having the insights behind it and these lyrics come to him in a sudden rush, in this 2018 interview with Director/Photographer Sam Jones, host of the TV show “Off Camera with Sam Jones”:
On a lighter note, Isbell confessed that this song only came into existence because his wife, fellow singer/songwriter/musician Amanda Shires – featured alongside Isbell in that Austin City Limits performance, above – came in while he was watching the TV show “Hoarders.” She told him to turn it off and get writing, since he was going into the studio soon. Despite his protests that he already had enough songs written, he said that lit “a fire under my ass.”
If the somber thoughts above – on the near-inevitability of grief when we give our hearts in love – might discourage you in any way from seeking it, am hoping the song “Ready To Love Again” by the band Lady A (formerly Lady Antebellum) offers at least some solace – and even encouragement?
“Seems I've been playing on the safe side baby
Building walls around my heart to save me
Oh, but it's time for me to let it go
Yeah I'm ready to feel now
No longer am I afraid of the fall down
It must be time to move on now
Without the fear of how it might end
I guess I'm ready to love again”
(Love this informal, unplugged performance in a small room, too!)
In her April 2020 blog post on Medium, Caroline Horste notes the profound differences between two different translations of a passage in Yevtushenko’s poem, “Colours.”
This reminds of the startling differences in translations similarly discussed in On the Winter Solstice, for one of Vincent van Gogh’s letters and for a passage in Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s story The Little Prince.
Thank you for your tender essay
conveying to us your courage to love.
There is a plaque on the wall
of the children's hospital in Buffalo:
For all the joy the child shall bring
The risk of grief we'll run.