P: Papers on Sardonic Love Poetry

I am working on my last academic paper of my graduate degree for my Modern Poetry class, and the topic I've chosen to work on is love poetry. But not just any love poetry--I am looking at 3 poems--Yeats' NEver Give All the Heart, Auden's The More Loving One, and Joseph Brodsky's Love Song--because they all subvert the traditional tropes of love poetry. In other words, they are irreverent. Sardonic. Parodic. I am leading into the paper with an acoustic rendering of the Magnetic Fields' The Book of Love because (a) I guess I'm kind of kissing up to my prof, because he kicks off every class with at least a few youtube clips of songs and, more importantly (b) it illustrates the ambivalence that emerges when countered with the cliches of love and other such subjects. It's rather an interesting week to tackle such a paper, as this week has been a bit emotionally draining, and my thesis isn't working well, and I'm also trying to write/revise an essay for a contest with Gla- m. our Magazine.

But to further the appropriation of other people's words, I've included some lines of verse from a different Magnetic Fields song whose melody I can't stand but whose lyrics I think are awfully bittersweet:

Love is Like a Bottle of Gin:

It makes you blind, it does you in
It makes you think you're pretty tough
It makes you prone to crime and sin
It makes you say things off the cuff

It's very small and made of glass
and grossly over-advertised
It turns a genius to an ass
and makes a fool think he is wise

It could make you regret your birth
or turn cartwheels in your best suit
It costs a lot more than it's worth
and yet there is no substitute

They keep it on a higher shelf
the older and more pure it grows
It has no color in itself
but it can make you see rainbows

You can find it on the Bowery
or you can find it at Elaine's
It makes your words more flowery
It makes the sun shine, makes it rain

You just get out what they put in
and they never put in enough
Love is like a bottle of gin
but a bottle of gin is not like love.