The Master Speed

(Couple Dancing by Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-
1904, English pioneer in photographing motion;
his work influenced the art of Marcel Duchamp)

Robert Frost wrote this sonnet on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding.

It captures “the togetherness of the married couple empowered to resist the flux of wind and water. Frost is not the first to use the language of speed or quickness to show how love may quicken the life of a couple into a vitality that far exceeds what each partner might attain alone. But Frost also plays on the archaic meaning of ‘speed,’ ‘prosperity or success in an undertaking,’ as well as on its Latin root, spes, meaning ‘hope,’ to point to the possibility of rest within motion, permanence within change, the eternal within the perishable.”

~ Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, from Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marriage

THE MASTER SPEED

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still —
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

~ Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet

The Song of Songs

(Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson
Heade, 1819-1904, American artist)

One of the most beautiful lyric love poems in Western literature is The Song of Songs, also known as The Canticle of Canticles or The Song of Solomon. It is found in the Hebrew Bible and in the Christian Old Testament.

The poem is made up of some twenty-five distinct verses. “Scholars differ on the question of their possible interrelation and unity,"  write Amy and Leon Kass in their collection of readings on courting and marriage, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar. “Although the Song of Songs contains no explicit divine or religious references, Jewish and Christian interpreters over the centuries have read the text theologically. For example, Jewish mystical readers see in the images of erotic longing the expression of the soul’s longing for God. . . . Christian tradition has interpreted the song as an allegory of the love of Christ for his bride, the Church, or as symbolizing the experience of God’s love in the individual human soul.”

The editors raise an interesting question, “whether and how the passionate, sensuous love of man and woman may be related, not merely symbolically, to the love for and from the divine.”

from THE SONG OF SONGS

Hark! my beloved!
Behold, here he comes
springing across the mountains,
leaping across the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Here he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattices.
My beloved speaks; he says to me,
“Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come away!
For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree pours forth its figs,
and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come away!”