Here is the first, and most famous of the thirty-four Love Songs: . . .
"Once upon a time," this verse suggests, we told love stories, fairy- tale romances, in which sex was kept discretely out of sight. Now Pig Cupid's rosy snout, a displaced and comical phallus, burrows into every sub text, bringing lust to light. The results are dispiriting, at best. The "I" of the poems is not a mystified or sentimental Lady in a Gardenóbut she is not a free and undeceived New Woman, either, enjoying the fruits of her "fantasies" of sexual freedom. Her fantasies have yielded only a grotesque "spawn," and the speaker herself has been transformed into a "weed" amid Pig Cupidís crop of wild oats, "white and star-topped" but planted in an oppressively physical ground of "mucous-membrane."
"Swill poetry," readers called this. "Hoggerel." They were not entirely wrong. Itís clear from the "Feminist Manifesto," "Virgins Plus Curtains," and other poems like "Parturition" that Loy has no nostalgia for what Whitman aptly dubbed "this tepid wash, this diluted deferential love" in which the body stayed unspoken. She, too, dreams of a poetry of "sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts" in which biology would speak. But in the Love Songs she hardly finds herself a poet of "the eternal decency of the amativeness of Nature" (Whitman 1334-35). Quite the contrary. In a world where erotic faith has been demystified, reduced to just so much "erotic garbage," and where the free bestowals of value that characterize Whitmanian love have been replaced by accounts of "the appraisable," Nature becomes an "irate pornographist" to whom the lovers, "shedding [their] petty pruderies" may "sidle up" (poem 26). "Loy's poems on sexual love and its consequences were read," writes Burke, ''as if they were the statements of the woman rebel"; they "confirmed the popular view that free verse led to free love" (42-43). The misreading could not run deeper. Far from being liberated by sexual frankness, this speaker chokes on it. When she tries to articulate desires of her own, she gets only as far as "I would"óand then no verb will come. Her "I" becomes "an eye" in an exotic signal beacon ("a Bengal light"), but that momentary dream of ecstatic dispersal gutters out into the abject image of "an ocean / Whose rivers run no fresher / Than a trickle of saliva": an echo of Pig Cupid's naturalist discourse that trails off as the speaker retreats from the "suspect places" of sexuality into a watchful, "virginal" seclusion. Shrunken from beacon to lantern-dweller, she leaves the worlds of realized fantasies and sexual "Experience" behind, dismissing all she sees as "Coloured glass."
As long as Loy's speaker remains in a cool, satirical mood, living in her lantern, she seems quite poised. When she figures sex as a combative badminton match in poem 10, for exampleó"Shuttle-cock and battle-door / A little pink love / And feathers are strewn"óor when Dawn's Homeric rosy fingers are transformed into a "little rosy / Tongue" that makes the lovers, like heliotropes, "twiddle to it / Round and round / Faster / And turn into machines" (poem 25), the rhetoric is pointed and accomplished, reminiscent of satires like "Virgins Plus Curtains." At such moments the speaker answers the naturalist reductions of Pig Cupidity with detached, mechanical imagery, and her lines echo and displace a more threatening rhetoric of abject biology. Virginia Kouidis has argued that Loy's dismissive reference to "Coloured glass" looks back to the "colored and distorting lenses which we are" in Emerson's essay "Experience": an essay that insists on every subject's noumenal distance from every phenomenal object, including the object which is (or once was) one's beloved (see "From Prison to Prism," passim). From such an ever-"virginal" remove one might well drop lines of satire; both love and sex, with their panting, repetitive, all-but-mechanical promise to cross this great epistemological divide, would be likely objects of scorn.
But Loy's speaker is unwilling to remain at this satirical or Emersonian distance. She repeatedly tries to step forward from her satiric safety and ascribe meaning or value to passionate love, only to have her language gutter out in a sudden shift of diction. In the first poem orgasm promises "Eternity in a skyrocket," but the fireworks fade into a "trickle of saliva" (91). When they lift not their eyes but their "eyelids on Love" in poem 9 the couple sees "A cosmos / Of coloured voices / And laughing honey / And spermatozoa / At the core of Nothing / In the milk of the Moon." Perhaps the word "spermatazoa" is meant to have an exotic beauty, as Loy rejects any "manmade bogey" of diction and decorum, in the manner demanded by her "Feminist Manifesto." But the word sits poorly with the rest of its stanza. It makes "the milk of the Moon" seem a dated euphemism for "semen": the sort of line one would have written "once upon a time."
The failure of love is thus a failure of language: a gesture that links the Love Songs with a number of other modernist poems of unhappy love. In Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," for example, one finds a similar split between anxious and ironic reflexivity and a rhetoric that attempts to speak "biologically": a language of "pinched gestures" and punctured bubbles of idealization poised against one composed of "odious chords" booming from the deterministic world that would flower "If sex were all" (Collected Poems 17). But even Stevens's harshest songs are distinctly Apollo's; his most brutal ironies, usually directed against himself, are finally eased by the aesthetic resolution of well-wrought, accomplished verse. Stevens may push his poems to the point of failure, that is to say, but he will not push them past it, make them fail, in order to see what comes next. For reasons that go beyond her allegiance to reformist sexual politics and her dissatisfaction with their twisting into Futurist naturalismóreasons that go to the heart of her speaker's inability to speak her desire or bestow value on loveóLoy takes that risk, and her speaker, unlike Stevens's, pays the price in a fracturing of syntax, a clash of incompatible dictions, and a "deflationary rhythm" of amatory aspiration and disenchantment (Kouidis Mina Loy 70) .
What balks the singer of these bleak Love Songs? I have mentioned reasons outside the fiction of the sequence proper, especially its Futurist context: a discourse of love that is less reformist than reductive, and which is characteristic of Krutch's "modern temper." Other contextual reasons would include the whittling away of the lover's selfhoodóof anyone's selfhood, at thatóby modern psychologies. If the Love Songs can be read, in Kouidis's words, as a "collage of love's failure that rewrites 'Experience' in flamboyantly sexual imagery," mining the Emersonian tradition's "core of doubt" ("Prison into Prism" 130-31), the great and crescive transcendental self that Emerson mourned and relied on, the self whose "rapacious" power consumed the world around us, "supplant[ed] all relative existence, and ruin[ed] the kingdom of mortal friendship and love" is notably absent from Loy's text. No God haunts her bleak rocks, only an "ego's necessity," hapless before unconscious urges and instinctual drives (Emerson 487; Loy poem 12). Written and published in the age of Freud (whom Loy heard lecture shortly thereafter), the Love Songs also appear a full generation after William James deconstructed the self into four component selves, and found that the innermost essential "Self of selves" consists, when examined in detail, "mainly of [a] collection of . . . peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat," so that "our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked" (92).
With love and the self exposed as ideological or biological constructs, Loy's speaker cannot take refuge in the strength of her imaginative desire, in her longing for Joannes to be simply hers, in vision and in veto; or in the inverse, a dream in which she would be claimed as his. Such dramas of hierarchical idealization, which helped Dickinson out of her own Emersonian isolation, are too risky and reactionary for this New Woman modernist; and although she has clearly tried at some point to idealize Joannes, to make him an idol, a God, Loy is too wary of "romantic thralldom" to hammer out, as does Dickinson, an exultant "Mine. . . / Mine. . . / Mine. . ." (CP #528) or to dabble in "Bondage as Play" (CP #725). "Seldom Trying for Love," Loy recalls,
Fantasy dealt them out as gods
Two or three men looked only human
But you alone
Superhuman apparently
Yet that superhumanity was not his winning feature, finally. Dragging its feet across a line break and through an insult or two, her confession takes an unexpected turn:
apparently
I had to be caught in the weak eddy
Of your drivelling humanity
To love you most
(poem 15)
This declaration rings with a lingering Futurist scorn for weakness: a sop to her anger, a slap at his pride. But if the lines can be read as saying that Joannes's humanity eddied away to reveal him as superhuman, and that the speaker, caught in the retreating tide, loves him as he is now revealed in glory, their final undertone of quasi-maternal tenderness suggests the opposite: that it was precisely the weakness and humanity of Joannes that appealed to the speaker. Marking the shift, Loy makes this the first time that love is a verb in the Love Songs. It is also the last.
I call the tenderness of these lines quasi-maternal primarily to draw attention to the greatest barrier the speaker faces: this time one native to the fiction of the sequence. Evidently Joannes has refused to have a child with her. Their sexual "consummations" were merely "pubescent," she resentfully declares, since unlike adult unions that would lead to a new birth, these bear only "irredeemable pledges" that "Rot / To the recurrent moon" while "the procreative truth of Me / Peter[s] out / In pestilent / Tear drops" (poems 23-24). It is no accident that the first thing the speaker sees through her "coloured glass" is a reduction of her former lover to his sexual apparatus, which she mocks, with no great pleasure, as "The skin-sack / In which a wanton duality / Packed / All the completions / Of my infructuous impulses" and a "clock-work mechanism / Running down against time / To which I am not paced" (poem 2). Given the references to "Birdlike abortions" and "abominable shadows" in which the speaker "Swe[pt] the brood clean out" in poem 4, it seems likely that Joannes has not only withheld his "completions" but forced or made it necessary for the speaker to have an abortion. At the center of the sequence, two poems after the appeal to Joannes's "drivelling humanity," lies a poem of toneless denials and stunned repetition which may look back to that act:
I don't care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut
Red a warm colour on the battlefield
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
(poem 17)
Those two tassels cling to one another as the couple no longer doóhence, perhaps, the speaker's exhausted faint as she watches them. The poem never mentions a specific source for her pain, and the referent of ''as a counterpane" is deliberately obscured. In the second stanza it is unclear whether the speaker is looking at something red and heavy on her knees, say a skirt or lap-blanket; or, more likely, she is on her knees watching the chair-legs, the shutters, something blood-red cradled by a fringed towel. But the impact of the loss is unmistakable: not a deconstruction of the self into Jamesian or Freudian component parts, but its evisceration; its hollowing into a "round vacuum / Dilating with my breath" (poem 17).
The lost child haunts the Love Songs to Joannes. It peeps out from a "padded porte-enfant" in poem 4, for example, and waits in the street in poem 5 as a frail and human cupid tainted by the speaker's self-disgust: "a boy / óOne wing has been washed in the rain / The other will never be clean any more. " His absence is one reason why sex in the sequence always seems a failure. The "I" attempts to see intercourse as something grander than the simply physical embrace where, in the words of the "Feminist Manifesto," "the interests of the sexes merge" (269); but these efforts seem grim, abashed, inadequate. In the prayer that makes up poem 29 we find a plea for the naturalist deity "Evolution" to "Breed such sons and daughters" as will settle for (and be able to find) a "simple satisfaction" in one another, rather than searching for some deeper connection. "Let them clash together / From their incognitoes / In seismic orgasm," the "'I" prays, that they might achieve "far further / Differentiation" afterwards. The alternative, which she has presumably endured with Joannes, would be not a clash but merely contact, not an encounter between two incognitoes but one between two subjects who might have known one another with true intimacy. The couple has not gone through orgasm and differentiation, the prayer indicates, but rather only an unsatisfactory intersubjective friction that faltered and failed, revealing itself as not intersubjective at all, but a warped mirroring of the sort that Emerson called "ascription," and that Lay describes in poem 29 as "Own-self distortion / Winc[ing] in the alien ego."
In what Kouidis might read as a distant echo of Emerson's "Experience," or at least a fourth or fifth cousin of Robert Frost's "Home Burial," the loss of the child thus signals and enforces the epistemological separation of Lay's speaker from her belovedóhow could one I thought I knew and loved do such a thing?óand it results in a deep wound to the speaker's sense of self as well. A paralyzing and multiple deprivation, stripping the speaker of the child, of any certainty in her knowledge of Joannes, of the self-as-imagined-child, and of the self-as-mother, the abortion thrusts her face to face with lack: the "loss of something" which Dickinson was too canny to name any more specifically, but which she "ever felt"; the loss of the beloved other half that Plato's Aristophanes, in the Symposium, locates at the heart of love; the loss of maternal presence that the Freudian mythos finds at the origins of selfhood. Even in poems that do not mention this absence, poems that seem primarily focused on the speaker's failed search for passionate fusion with her beloved (what Georges Bataille calls "erotic continuity," which plucks us out of discontinuous selfhood), I hear the counter-mutter of this enforced return to the pain of individuation: . . . .
With their repeated representation of the lovers' failure to fuse, as with their linking of the failure of love and the failure of language, the Love Songs can be read as representative texts of modernist love. . . . The sex Loy's speaker dreams of, grounded in a "procreative truth". . .would have enacted and proven, at least to her, the connection of the soul to other souls, a material connection accomplished in the flesh and given form in the baby thereby born. The "something taking shape" of her halting overture to Joannes would also have brought the two together into an intimate co-presence that her ironic figures (a welding, a terrific Nirvana) and her plaintive ones (an understanding, a realization) fail to capture: a co-presence that might have been accomplished through language, but not in this ironic context. If the "I" mocks her lover throughout the poem, for his anxious separateness, his priggish impulse to remain inviolate, it is because she does not find their separateness the outgrowth of some existential solitude. . .(36-37)
[A] loss of a child, whether aborted or never conceived, lies at the bitter heart of the Love Songs to Joannes, and . . . this loss throws the "I" of the poems into a narcissistic crisis. It returns her to that archaic trauma which a number of theorists and poets sense at the start of individuated selfhood, and her efforts to salve that wound through sexual and linguistic connection with Joannes all fail--in part because of his desire to remain "inviolate"; in part also, however, because the speaker is so wary of her own amatory figures, thanks to her "modern temper." Sensing that co-presence should be possible, Loy's speaker . . . refuses to settle for the surrogate satisfaction of signification, identifying "no longer with the lost object," as Kristeva explains, "but with a third party--father, form, schema" in order to "triumph over sadness" by shaping sorrow into art (Black Sun, 23; see also 206-16). (38)