From birth we hear that love is the power that moves the world. We hear that love is one of the most rewarding and pleasurable experiences a human being can live. For love, there is the mother, and there is also the child. For love there are citizens and the homeland. For love great battles have been won and countries have been conquered. Apparently, love is a powerful feeling with which everything can be achieved. In fact, love has been the most recurrent theme in world literature. She has been in charge of telling love in all times and in all forms. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Ulysses and Penelope, Ana Karenina and Count Vronski, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza; but also, the love between Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among many other couples have drawn sighs from us and made us believe in the existence of that feeling. But what happens when that feeling ends or is not reciprocated? Literature has also written about this.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud said, regarding the lover, that "There is no great distance between falling in love and hypnosis... The hypnotized gives, with respect to the hypnotist, the same proofs of humble submission, docility and critical absence as the lover with respect to the object of love". We see how between the lover and the hypnotized there is a great similarity: they are unable to respond voluntarily and there is an external force that dominates their inner strength. That is to say, the person in love responds to his feelings in a subjugated, meek way, as if the feeling were superior to him. We believe we understand, then, that when love ends, there is in the lover an awakening, even a wandering without orientation, because the other, which was his motor, his voice, no longer exists.

In literature there are many texts that have been written where it is proclaimed, more than love, disaffection, loss, the feeling of mourning that can appear because of the lack of affection. Today in this post I am going to work on disaffection in the most romantic genre of literature: poetry. As there are many examples that we could use and work with, I have decided to divide this publication into two parts.

The poetic genre, not only by its nature, can lend itself to feelings of love and lack of love, also by its functionality, thinking that poetry has a function, because it seeks to convey in its verses the feelings of the poetic voice.

After a love breakup, the most normal thing is that people feel pain before separation. This lack of love has a series of stages that can last little or much depending on the pain and the particular circumstances of each breakup. For example, surely the period of pain suffered by a person who has decided to separate from his partner or knows that love is over will be shorter than that of a person who still loves and refuses to accept the breakup.

William Shakespeare

After separation, the present is a marasmus of contradictory memories and feelings; couples may feel love, but also contempt for each other. There is a psychological impact, which brings with it disorientation because people can see the world shake. It is normal for people to feel angry, especially if they were not prepared for such an outcome or to take an accusatory attitude towards each other. Let us look at the last two verses of the poem "My love is a fever that never stops" by the great English poet and playwright William Shakespeare:

Salvation for me, there is none and I don't want it:
all I am madness, restlessness, anger;
crazy as soon as I imagine and vociferous,

and unhappy victim of a lie.
I swore to you honestly and frankly; and my tender love
What did he find in you? Dark night, black hell.

In the first two stanzas of the poem that we do not put here, the lyrical speaker offers us a review of his general state of pain because of the separation; but in the previous stanzas, which would be the third and fourth, we can clearly perceive not the pain but the fury, the courage; even, there is a discredit of the dignity of the couple. Prisoner of jealousy and courage, the person can elucidate and imagine facts that never happened.

Bella herida por cupido

Another state that can cause lack of affection is humiliation in the subject in love. In disorientation, the lover bows down and asks for love, pity and a new opportunity, although deep down he knows he has no possibilities. We can see this in the poem by José Ángel Buesa, a Cuban poet, entitled "Canción nocturna" (Night Song):

At the foot of your bed, like a dog,
my heart was cast.
Night after night
quietly moans his reproach
and unjustly suffers his exile.
There he is. Nothing matters that sets him apart
your cruel little foot.
There, in the shade,
shut up the cry of love with which he names you,
so as not to wake you up.
Night after night, until day arrives,
he groans a reproach and suffers his exile.
You don't know it, nobody would know it.
And at the foot of your bed, like a dog,
my heart still waits.

In this poem, which we reproduce in its entirety, we see how the poetic voice compares his heart with that of a dog. This heart is not only thrown at the feet of its beloved, but also suffers humiliations day after day ("Nothing matters more than your cruel little foot"), it even speaks of an exile and its silence in the face of contempt.

Emily Dickinson

After a while, the person is able to better visualize the feelings, his feelings and those of the other person, and is able to find some resignation, not total, but at least observe things more calmly. In this sense we can read poem 37 by the great American writer Emily Dickinson:

Heart, we will forget you
on this night, you and me.
You, the heat I lent you.
I, the light that gave me.
When you have forgotten
Tell me, I have to erase
hasten my thoughts.
And accelerate your work
lest in your tardiness
I will remind you again.

In the previous lines, we read how the lyrical speaker speaks to his heart, to which he affirms that forgetfulness will come, even if he does not know when. However, he acknowledges the difficult task to which he submits him and urges him to hurry because, on the contrary, the memory will return and in one way or another it will return to relapse. In this stage, as in the previous one in which the heart is compared to a dog, here it can speak, even feel that a part of it dies.

Otelo Y Desdémona

The Mexican poet Jaime Sabines has a poem written in prose that could make that moment of resurgence clearer and highlight sadness. Although the text is a bit ironic, we find in his words the definitive tone and the determination to cut with all the ties of the relationship. As I said before, this poem is written in prose, so it does not have stanzas but paragraphs. Here I transcribe the first and last paragraph:

I hope to be cured of you in a few days. I must stop smoking, drink and think about you. It is possible. Following the prescriptions of morality in turn. I prescribe myself time, abstinence, loneliness.
…
One more week to gather all the love of time. To give it to you. So that you can do with it what you want: keep it, caress it, throw it in the garbage. It doesn't work, it's true. I only want a week to understand things. Because this is very similar to leaving a madhouse to enter a pantheon.

Fuente

As we can see in the previous poem, the lover knows that he must forget the other and for that he needs time: he speaks of weeks of solitude, of abstinence. This process of abstinence, as he calls it, implies not seeing the other person, not thinking about him, but also giving him back his love, a love that belongs to the other. It is how to remove that feeling from oneself and give it to the owner so that he can do what he wants with it. Notice that he talks about coming out of madness into death, and that's how he feels about not being loved. With time, if we stop seeing the loved one, "the neural circuits that are involved in this phenomenon weaken, and levels of neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, among others, stabilize". In other words, with time and without contact with the other person, the body of the subject in love can adapt to the change and will surely return to normal.

Julio Cortazar

In the poem "The Future" by the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar we can see how the subject in love begins to accept the absence of the other; the process of conformity begins. Let's see the first stanza of this poem:

And I know very well that you won't be there.
You will not be in the street,
in the murmur that sprouts at night
of the lighting posts,
or the gesture of choosing the menu,
nor in the smile that calms
the complete books of the metro,
nor in the borrowed books
nor in it until tomorrow.

The lyrical voice mentions everyday events in which the other person will no longer be there. It is not fortuitous that it begins with acceptance and then lists each of the places, actions, details in which the beloved figure was reaffirmed or was constant and will no longer be. In the mention of absence is the acceptance of nostalgia and remembrance.

Fuente

How much joy or relief can the lover feel when expressing through his verses his innumerable cuitas? Is writing a way of admitting defeat or assuming the end of the relationship? Writing thus becomes an outlet, just as it becomes a form of healing.

As we have seen so far, the lack of love can create in the subject in love a series of reactions, mostly unconscious, which are detrimental not only to his pride, his self-esteem, but also to the other person. In the next part of this work we will see how one of the most common feelings of the subject in love appears: jealousy. I hope to see them in the next part.