If Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after, would we have reason to remember them?
Was his love of Shams of Tabriz, the nomad, “his master,” his friend and teacher, and companion on the arduous road to wisdom, the ancient Sufi poet Rumi’s secret?
Nobody knows the 13th century Persian poet, scholar, and mystic intimately enough to make an intelligent guess, although Rumi, whose secrets have been buried in eight centuries of the past, was as recently as 2014, according to the BBC, the bestselling poet in the US.
Of his relationship to Shams, 30 years his senior (he was 30 when they met), particularly in describing his pain over losing him, as well as of his simplified definition of knowledge, Rumi wrote, “I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned.”
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And what about Humbert Humbert and his professed love for the nymphet in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita?
Was it love that made him go to great lengths—marrying a woman so he could arrange to get her killed, so he could take her tween daughter, now in his custody, on a road trip across the US—in order to possess her? It isn’t love, not in the world’s definition of what true love is.
But Humbert’s idea of love had been stunted when, at 13, he fell for Annabel, a 12-year-old he met on a vacation with his parents to the Italian Riviera. She died four months later of typhus.
There is no justification for what Humbert did for love, what he thought was love, but unable to move on from the death of Annabel, his first love, his unfinished business, Humbert never knew the difference between love and lust, between right and wrong about loving somebody. The bigger question is who knows what love is, a complex riddle that only gets solved at the end of the affair, whether it ends happily or tragically.
Humbert, as we all are in the grip of this thing that takes over all our faculties when we are overcome with desire and obsession, was crazy in love with “Lolita, light of (his) life, fire of (his) loins…(his) sin, (his) soul.”
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Is love in the books, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, more tragic than in real life?
Does tragedy need to be as ruinous as the philosopher Peter Abelard being castrated over his affair with his student Heloise d’Argenteuil, or Antony and Cleopatra causing a war?
But there was John Keats, the English poet, whose pain would have been too ordinary to deserve notice had he not become famous posthumously.
He thought so little of love for himself. Painfully shy and socially awkward, he would avoid women as much as he could. Though he briefly cavorted with Isabella Jones, it was for his neighbor Fanny Brawne that he fell. She was playful and flirtatious, which drew her to him and opened him up to her but also fired up jealousy in his letters.
I choose to hold you in my dreams…for in my dreams you have no end. —Rumi
He was 24, too old for first love, so in 1819, Keats proposed to marry Fanny, only to break off the engagement the following year when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctor’s advice was for him to move to a climate more agreeable than that of England.
With a near stranger, the painter Joseph Severn, Keats set sail for Italy from London, arriving in Rome in mid-November, 1820. He died three months later, on Feb. 23, 1821, in a small room on the upper floor of a small apartment building next to the Spanish steps.
Between Fanny and his death, he wrote many sonnets, including Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast as Thou Art, a work in progress throughout their relationship. Although it is said that Keats might have originally written it for Isabella, the sonnet in its completion was dedicated to Fanny. She mourned for six years when news that he had died reached London.
Side note: Queen Victoria mourned the death of Prince Albert for 40 years.
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The affair between French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine is described as stormy and tempestuous, but it could have been worse—it was murderous.
Rimbaud was a decade younger than Verlaine. They met when he was 17.
When Verlaine first saw him, the young man struck him as childlike, with “the real head of a child, chubby and fresh, on a big, bony, rather clumsy body of a still-growing adolescent.” Before long, Verlaine would leave his wife and his infant son to be with him.
Their life together, though brief, lasting no more than two years, was wild, spiced with absinthe, hashish, temper tantrums, and violent fights that would climax to a shooting, in which Verlaine in a fit of drunken rage would fire two shots at Rimbaud, wounding him on the wrist.
The incident involved the police, who investigated the nature of their relationship, as evidenced by their exchange of letters, and subjected both men to humiliating medico-legal examinations in search of proof of sodomy.
Rimbaud, considered a genius for his influence on poetry and for prefiguring surrealism, especially on account of his extended poem in prose A Season in Hell, turned his back on writing at age 20 and spent the rest of his life traveling, ending up in Africa, in Harar, Ethiopia. He died young. He was 37.
By the end of the 19th century, Verlaine had joined the league of the greatest poets not only in France but also in the world, but like Rimbaud’s, his life did not end happily. He was sent to prison for two years as a result of his torrid affair with Rimbaud, but after that, though his poetry gained a foothold, he descended to drug addiction and alcoholism.
Theirs was the subject of the 1995 film Total Eclipse, in which David Thewlis played Verlaine and a young Leonardo DiCaprio played Rimbaud.
These two tragic lovers caused a commotion again as recently as 2020, when France found itself divided over calls to move the remains of the two poets next to each other in the Panthéon mausoleum in central Paris.
Speaking for the family, a great-grand-niece of Rimbaud told the press, “Rimbaud did not start his life with Verlaine and did not end it with him. These are just a few years of his youth.”
In January 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron decided to honor the wishes of the family. Arthur Rimbaud’s remains will stay at peace in his own grave at a cemetery in Charleville-Mezieres in eastern France.
