Writing A Love Song

More religious people then me look to scripture and verse for solace. Although I'm not a religious person i too look to scipture and verse, of a kind. Not from any religious book such as the Bible or the Quran; but instead to poems and music. And as my most recent quandary is with love, or more accurately the old familiar unrequited love. I have been reading poems and listening to songs on the subject. Particularly the more macabre works. Such as those of A.E. Houseman.


BECAUSE I LOVED YOU BETTER

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
`Good-bye,' said you, `forget me.'
`I will, no fear', said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.


Housemans illustrates in this poem that love is a cruel and harsh mistress that chains itself to us, binding us to it and will drive us into madness and destruction if we let it. This appetite for anguish demonstrated in this poem is a integral part of the love song. For torment, weather self inflicted or otherwise, is a integral part of love.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call Suadade which translates as a inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul. As Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds taught me Suadade is a integral part of the love song. For the love song is a sad song. It is never happy and must embrace its pain. A love song that makes no mention of the ache and pain of love are not love songs at all. These songs deny us our humanness and our right to be sad.

A love song must be able to express the duality of love. We must be allowed to explore the darker regions of our hearts we must be allowed our pain, so does the love song for without it it will cease to be a love song and become a pile of bile upon the floor like so many of the other songs that masquerade as love songs and fill our air-waves with their filthy lies. For without the darkness we can never truly see the light. Without the pain of love we can never truly see the joy of it. Within the fabric of the love song, in it's melody in it's lyrics, one must sense the acknowledgement of it's suffering.

So me? I`m happy to be sad. For In the sadness, in my Suadade; I'm left sat at the table to dine with loss and longing, madness and melancholy to face up to the duality of love and am left with the tools to write a love song.