You & I Poem by Fabrizio Frosini

THIS IS A NOTE FOR SOPHY CHEN, who asked for some of my poems to be translated into Chinese: to understand (some of the) meaning(s) of my poem, you can read the commentaries Daniel Brick wrote on it: ___________________________ POEM: “You & I” by Fabrizio Frosini COMMENT by D.J.Brick. « Let me first review the PLOT of this poem. A couple who joined their lives with great hopes for the future have separated. It’s sad but true, and may be for the best – at least, that what the man is saying. But he holds out the possibility of a reunion, even a new togetherness for them. But it’s only a possibility. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. The last stanza finds great joy in memory which is INEXTINGUISHABLE if the former partners are alive – or just one of them. The situation in the poem COULD have been absolute sadness, but the poet’s faith in memory is redemptive. It salvages something otherwise lost. » [Daniel Brick, at Poem Hunter] COMMENT by D.J.Brick. [email March 8,2015] YOU & I - Such simple pronouns in the simplest combination, yet it sums up that blessed condition of union between two people. It almost makes you forget that the clock looms over every mortal relationship, alternately illuminating or shadowing the course of events. The illuminating means the two parties are growing more intimate, sharing more deeply, accommodating inevitable changes in the other. The shadowing means these positive experiences diminish, are negated, and the parties lose any sense of a common identity. The poem ends with a kind of negative closure, namely, And nothing else. There are three questions in the middle stanza which are unanswered, and the second line of the poem could be transferred to its ending, 'Pity it cannot be/enough, to cinch the sense of failure. This is not a relationship on hold for things to improve, it is not likely to be salvaged by a period of adjustment or a trial separation. The speaker is forthright and candid, and there is no dissenting sign from the other party. It is over. And yet we as readers are not finished in assessing what this poem and the failure it embodies can tell us about the experience of love. The language of the poem is truthful, but it is not bitter. The parties agree their affair has failed, but neither one blames the other, nor do they blame themselves. Ironically, the sorrow they feel at their break-up is a shared feeling: although it divides them, it is not divisive in itself. They accede to failure without recriminations, or even regret. There is wistful quality in the poem, sensitively expressed by the speaker's reference to a shared song. I consider the absence of bitterness to be the outstanding emotional tone of this poem, and its absence opens a space and time for wistfulness and a profound last moment of sharing. I am reminded of a very early poem by Yeats, EPHEMERA, about an analogous break-up. The male speaker takes the lead in an offering of good will to his estranged partner and also a view of love which is larger than the details any single relationship. Other loves await us, he tells her. Our souls are love, and a continual farewell. He expresses a quiet confidence that their future ties to other lovers will not be blighted by this failure. He affirms that our need to pursue true love is deeply embedded in our natures at the soul-level, and ephemeral failures will not change this psychic reality. And finally, and most surprisingly, he affirms that what is good, truthful and beautiful in the experience of loving is a permanent aspect of SOUL. That is why he uses the surprising phrase a continual farewell, it is as if what is good, truthful and beautiful will never be entirely lost, erased from memory completely. Instead the experience even of failure becomes soul-stuff. Temporality is the very essence of human love. It occurs over time, it is fulfilled in time; it either lasts through time or it ends at some point in time. Yeats expresses its loss in time in dated florid language, Your eyes that once were never weary of mine/ Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids. In Fabrizio's poem, a similar diminution of passion is expressed in vigorous contemporary language: .. You and I were together/ At the beginning, when that/ Song began. Will we be/ Together at its end? Several things come to mind. A song is the briefest of musical forms; a song that lasts more than ten minutes is a rarity, so the image conveys the sorrow at the brevity of some relationships. Songs tend to accompany our lives and intersect with events in them; lovers frequently identify their relationship with the melody and lyrics of a shared favorite. A song cycle like Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin helps us understand passion and love; hearing a popular favorite long after the break-up brings a stab of memory. The word together appears in the first and last lines of this stanza, like a repeated note in a love song. The stanza with its song analogy is emblematic of the pre-destined route referred to in the first stanza. It expresses the pain and loss without sentimentality, making them all the more truthful. I find in this poem a faith in DESIRE and PASSION as forces operating on the deepest soul-level and on the highest temporal level. Of course, these two levels imply a continuum of psychic energy which connects them; they are not separate aspects of our being, but rather an holistic whole for which we struggle to find articulate language. In writing about Fabrizio's brief lyric poem in this way I may be turning a Schubert song into a Wagnerian opera! So be it. The resonance of lyric poetry often inspires the reader to follow a continuum that leads to depths not previously anticipated, and later the poem can return to its more familiar dimensions. What concerns me at this point is the frustration of desire and the residual energy of passion. How does the individual who has willingly agreed to sever a relationship cope with these powerful feelings of Desire and Passion? One answer is given in that branch of Hinduism which believes VISHNU is the Mahadeva or principal deity of the Universe, which owes it creation, preservation, and termination to his ministry. And Vishnu sleeps while rocking on the cosmic ocean and his dreaming is the stuff of the Universe with all of its myriad living beings. Even the lovers with their Desire and Passion are elements of his dreaming. And thus these powerful psychic forces arise out of him but eventually return into him. I began this essay with a statement about the surprising adequacy of the pronouns YOU and I to describe our human reality, but how completely inadequate are the pronouns he and him to identify the Mahadeva. Still the belief in a theistic being who can absorb the psychic energies rather than let them fester inside of us, doing damage to our will and reason, is profoundly reassuring. Both the Schubert song cycles and Wagner's TRISTAN UND ISOLDE end in suicide, because the released energy of Desire and Passion cannot be contained with a temporal frame. However, this situation may not require such a drastic resolution. It may be that the purpose of lyrical love poetry is to give voice to the temporal emotions and forestall these larger issues which demand a wider, either philosophical or theological perspective for resolution. And in this way a lyric poem like YOU & I or Mihaela Pirjol's COINCIDENCE OR FATE? can satisfy our existential issues. Or we can turn to a classic expression of Desire and Passion like John Keats's THE EVE OF ST. AGNES: Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flush'd and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour with the violet - Solution sweet….. And that may also be a solution sweet to the problem of the aftereffects of Desire and Passion I raised. [D.J. Brick, March 8,2015] ________________

This is such a sweetly skill-inundated composition - penned with a confident delicacy of nuance and poetic rhythm doubtless rare these days...I particularly salute the author's multilingual versatility, too. Kudos, 'doctor' versifier!

A brilliant though quite sad love poem. So often this is what happens to love.

I can only make the best of what I have if does not involve one thing - a soul is what I do not have to give. Fabrizio Frosini, keep up your work because you view is poetic therefore, beautiful.

Nice poem. Elegant and simply with a touch of longing. Thanjs for sharing

o song of togetherness no, no, never can decay the love of you and me without any heavenly bless..........//