This week's poem: "Lonely Hearts"

Tuesday: H1N1 + other infections = tough week. But here's a little ditty, a villanelle by Wendy Cope.

Note: this is how the Online Glossary of Poetic Terms defines villanelle:
A poem in a fixed form, consisting of five three-line stanzas followed by a quatrain and having only two rhymes. In the stanzas following the first, the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately as refrains. They are the final two lines of the concluding quatrain.

Cope's villanelle is from 1986, and I like the way she dusts off this antique form (kind of like Dylan Thomas and his famous villanelle, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night") to show that even a medieval French form can apply to modern life. Writing a villanelle has to be tough! Because the first and third lines are repeated throughout the poem, they do most of the heavy lifting and have to be versatile enough to work in multiple stanzas but original enough to bear repeated reading.

When we read & discuss this particular poem in class, I start by asking how many of them have an eHarmony account. That gets a laugh. Then we talk about personal ads in the pre-internet age. Cope's poem is a riff on the kind of personal ads one might have found in a small weekly newspaper two decades ago. Each stanza is told by a different speaker (hence the variety of adjectives & nouns), but each speaker, no matter the differences, shares that universal desire for love.

Lonely Hearts

Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I'm into music, Shakespeare and the sun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?

Executive in search of something new—
Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Successful, straight and solvent? I am too—
Attractive Jewish lady with a son.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?

I'm Libran, inexperienced and blue—
Need slim, non-smoker, under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Please write (with photo) to Box 152.
Who knows where it may lead once we've begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?


Sometimes I ask my students to write their own lines ... trying to keep the form/meter as much as possible. Well, here's what I thought of just now (tossing the meter out the window but keeping the rhyme). My stanzas might read:

Mormon vegetarian with kids - I have two,
I'm into music, Shakespeare and good fun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?

Tired divorcee in search of something new—
Someone liberal, devout, reads the newspaper too?
Do you live in central Texas? Is it you?

Continuing in this vein of finding love, here's a dynamic clip from "Glee" (a FOX network 'post modern musical' teen dramedy that I just caught last night on hulu.com). I like the original version of this tremendous song by Queen, but as a straight-up fan of musical theater in all of its manifestations, this glee club rendition gives Freddie Mercury a run for his money!