COME

Emily Lobb

There the man sees the image clearly at last. There the woman receives her lover into her heart And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

(Wallace Stevens, ‘Poem with Rhythms’)

Come. Where? A fantasy space where the man sees at last the half-glimpsed shadow, where the lovers—separated by lockdown? by the checkmate of circumstance? by silence, fear?— find each other’s arms. And still, even here in the fantasy otherwhere of the poem, the woman waiting for the man she loves remains alone. He doesn’t come; he never comes. This weeping figure: rejected, abandoned, kept from her lover by some cold weatherfront of fate? Or just silent, trapped in the tyranny of the unsaid? You never knew how much I really liked you, because I never even told you, oh but I meant to. Are you still there?

Tonight I walked in the fields and yelled at the beauty of the sky; the slender shadows of the trees over lane, black-edged sticks of charcoal; the glassy greyness of the lake with its white rocks, its handful of geese, its single swan.

The winter it is past/ And the summer comes at last/ And the small birds are singing in the trees/ Now everything is glad/ Oh but I am very sad/ For my true love is parted from me

The true love, though disproved by modernity, recurs in song and in personal mythologies: the person to know you (me. Who?), to look at you and say you, to understand. Kathleen Jamie wrote, I never / could explain myself, never / could explain. And I ran over the field, the give of the grass, luxurious with sorrow. White dog under a grey sky, the jealous grandeur of the clouds, the lowering evening, the fields crying out. Walking, thinking, unable to get to the ends of thoughts; the single swan parting the water as it sailed towards me. Yellowish grass, trees still bare. The perfection of the swan, and no one to share it. And I wanted to laugh and to weep—who am I, why am I alive in a world so utterly, desperately other from my sole self, isolation, all right, who can know me? He never comes. And, anyway, he wouldn’t understand. I never / could explain. Me. Who? In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats suspends his lovers in the moment before the kiss, frozen in marble, always winning near the goal and never reaching it. Did he know, writing poems and falling into death with his fiancée Fanny living through the wall, close but unable to be together, that love would never bring him what he wanted? That consummation would always shiver, shatter? That he and his beloved would never truly be one? He knew. To say done, over, is to usher disappointment in: everything you do, everything you write and make, leaves you with some emptiness, some sense of is that all? The whole world seems to be saying, ‘that is all.’ If he came and I wept on his breast, would I not say, is that all?

The sky is crying for the field and the field for the sky. Does the swan not love the lake and the lake the white swan? And yet they cannot be together: the final meeting cannot come. Is the whole world not crying out for rest? The trees stretching branches upwards and roots down, the clouds forever rearranging themselves, all of them shouting, come to me, come back. Me seeing you for the last time and not realising that was goodbye. Come back. The poems slipping through my hands. Reading and writing and I never / could explain myself, never / could explain. Asking, is that all? Is this all there is? This pain, this gap from the man’s blurred view of the image and the fantasy place of clear sight? This chasm from the woman to the man that she loves? Come. He never comes. How can I hope if there is only this, questions left unanswered, promises unkept, a field and a sky and a swan and a lake kept apart, a heart shouting and not being heard?

The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’/ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’/ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the/ water of life without price.

The story of the world is a story of desperate desire, to see clearly, to love and be loved. I feel the size of it in my heart, the pink and grey clouds, the melancholy majesty of the swan. You don’t have to be in love to feel your displacement, your exile, your aching isolation from your desires. The bride is saying Come to a lover who isn’t here, that woman waiting for the man that she loves.

He says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’

And the final yes hasn’t yet happened. Everything disappoints, everything is other, everything I read and write tracks a path through its own futile incompleteness, because everything is incomplete. The field is waiting for the sky. I hope now because he’s not here yet. That woman waiting. He says, ‘Surely.’ We hope for what hasn’t happened, and I hope for a coming that will close the gap from what I want to what I feel. A promise that will be kept; and then the women will weep no more. Tell the swans, tell the sky, tell the field. Surely I am coming soon.

Come.

Emily is from Ayrshire. She goes wild swimming and writes novels about other worlds. She is a third year English student from Teddy ‘the best college’ Hall and is excited to spend next year as a postgrad doing her favourite thing: reading modern poetry.