“Today he'll talk about Hardy's elegies. "But what are they about?", his students will ask. They want the love story. How he hates this question, understanding, now, in the shade of his office, that poetry is among the few things that can survive this question. If the poem is very good it is very hard to say what it is about. It is this and it is not that. It seems like one thing and then, after a while, not so much, one's understanding always shifting with the images and the sounds. He'll add something on Tennyson, perhaps, something on rhyme. Something about that very question, about poems being on of the few things that cannot be summarized or that can survive such an evil with something left over, something else. Something remaining. A trouble. A pleasure. A little extra.” LoveUnderstandingPoemMeaningStorySummary Book:The Other Side of the World Source: The Other Side of the World
“He thinks often of the letter Charlotte left for him. "The story that starts a marriage," she wrote, "is very often the same story that ends it." Or rather, the seed of the end is planted in the beginning. It is the sadness of marriage that one can only learn where the end begins when it is too late; by then love is over and one is left bearing the various carapaces of wedlock - the little roof over our little house, the hate you wore on our honeymoon, the umbrellas we each carried of an English summer to keep us safe from unwanted rain. We err, she wrote, because we think happiness is a state in itself, when really it is only a symptom of love.” LoveMarriageSadnessBeginningLetterEndingSeed Book:The Other Side of the World Source: The Other Side of the World