“Air: ‘The Love of a Woman’” by Robert Creeley
While attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I took Advanced Poetry and one of the things I had to do was annotate some poetry. Here is one of those poems. Enjoy.
The love of a woman
is the possibility which
surrounds her as hair
her head, as the love of her
follows and describes
her. But what if
they die, then there is
still the aura
left, left sadly, but
hovers in the air, surely,
where this had taken place?
Then sing, of her, of whom
it will be said, he
sang of her, it was the
song he made which made her
happy, so she lived.
This is just your everyday poem with four stanzas, each a quatrain. There is no rhyme scheme or any particular order to the meter. There is no refrain in each stanza but the words love and her do play out the poem repeatedly. So upon first glance this is what you see. However this is not the entirety of the poem.
As you dive deeper into the poem, you noticed that the lines crescendo and decrescendo within each stanza. The first stanza rises up in meter and the second starts high and falls back down. This also repeats with the third and fourth stanzas. The third going from low to high but the fourth starting midway, going higher and then crashing back low, as if to give the poem a big finish. It works well for the reader because they can see and feel the movement of the poem and in a sense understand the speaker better; the rise and fall of each stanza being compared to the rise and fall of one’s chest, thus the pulse of the poem.
Digging deeper he starts off the first line with part of the title. Now since titles are actually the last thing I read and I soon forget them once I start the poem, this is just an affinitive statement but for those who read the title, this is only reaffirming the overall theme of the poem, which is the love of a woman.
Moving further, he begins to describe her love as something that surrounds you like the hair on the top of your head. That her love is that closely connected to you, you can constantly feel it. In the next stanza, he continues with her hair but then turns and asks what happens when she dies, thus shifting the mood of the poem from uplifting to a sad stagnation, as if leaving things up in the air. And this mood carries over into the next stanza and there is still the hovering but in the last line, the speaker actually moves and does something, saying that you should honor love however you can. And in the last stanza, it is back to uplifting her but in much more of a grandiose way, as if giving her life again, thus giving the poem the big finish I mentioned.
So overall, the poem flows like air, lifting up and staying and lifting even higher again but at the same time, never really leaving the reader. That the rise and falls of the poem are the heartbeat which the reader can feel pulsing through them, giving them life as the speaker does to the woman, and as the author does to the poem.
