I don't think I still love him but surely it gave me a mix of feelings that I wasn't expecting. Maybe my ego got hurt to see how fast he moved on, maybe my anxiety screams to find another love. From the authors you said - Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, John Keats. Do you have any reading suggestion to me? I feel like reading will be a perfect company for me rn. Thank you for your words, I was overwhelmed by it.
I was thinking of Keats’ poem, Bright Star. You might know that Keats cared for his brother Thomas, who died of tuberculosis. Keats then contracted tuberculosis himself, and died at age 24. He was in love with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne. Keats knew he was dying toward the last year of his life; he saw the same symptoms his brother had. He wrote poetry about his fear of death, fear that his creativity wasn’t adequate for good poetry, fear that he would be forgotten. Being a Romantic poet, he reached out across time to implore modern readers to empathize with him, with the universality of love, with our mortality, with the implacable stars. He compares the brevity of human love to the eternity of the universe.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
I think Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish’s performances in the movie “Bright Star” are so gorgeous. You might like it.
I also think Pride and Prejudice is a beautiful book on love. If you haven’t read it, you’ll love it.
Dickinson... too many great poems.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
