"O lente lente currite noctis equi."
"O, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!" - Ovid
Times may change, but human emotions tend to persist.
Aubade poetry, the delightfully specific form, dedicated to serving the emotional needs of lovers that must part at daybreak, has been observed for centuries. Some love poems are just this particular in subject, while many others share the invocation of eternal union in other ways.
What is it we love about love? Yes, we feel good, we feel whole, we feel alive! We also love because it makes ... no ... sense, and this is a huge relief! So much of our lives are grounded in logic. The ability to thrive outside of logic is the rapturous power of romance, and we need it like we need air to breathe.
So quit worrying about it all for a second, and, as The Talking Heads, so eloquently put it:
"Love is more thicker than forget
More thinner than recall
More seldom than a wave is wet
More frequent than to fail
It is most mad and moonly
And less it shall unbe
Than all the sea which only
Is deeper than the sea"
- E.E. Cummings
Therefore, where the sense stops making ... the magic begins.
The magic that would make two people think that if they begged the sun not to rise, they could spend eternity in each other's arms. The magic that has made couples all over the world, for centuries, entreat the night to last forever, lest they never have to part.
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
- John Keats
Or, a more contemporary example:
Some aubade style pieces just say what they mean, like this Sonny James song.
Others invoke the eternal by the use of metaphors that span a human lifetime, as opposed to a single night. The sentiment is very much related, as for one thing, what is so different between a human lifetime and a single night in the face of eternity?
One of the most tender love poems I know makes use of the human lifespan metaphor.
"John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw,
but blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo!
John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And monie a cantie day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo!"
-Robert Burns
However you make sense of it, let there be love in your life!
