Never Seek to Tell Thy Love: A Love Odyssey by Andrew H. Oerke (review)

This slender, well wrought volume of fifty-five poems proves true to both its title and subtitle. But in different ways. True to its subtitle directly. But true to its title indirectly—hence ironically.

Never Seek proves true to its subtitle in offering an epic array of persons and places, with our poet embarked on an odyssey in quest of knowledge. To name only ten of each: persons—Dante, Knute Rockne, Mother Teresa, Babe Ruth, Nefertiti, Mozart, Hedy Lamarr, Buddha, Little Orphan Annie, and Grandma; places—Giza, Nepal, Paris, Santa Fe, Rome, Palestine, Calcutta, Jalapa, Geneva, and Mars.

This volume also proves true to its title, though with a contextual shift and so with irony. Oerke takes his title from a fragment poem in the Notebook of Blake: “Never seek to tell thy love, / Love that never told can be.” In context, “love” here refers first to one’s beloved and second to love itself. The speaker has confessed to his beloved that, love being outreaching by nature, his own love has recently reached out to another: “I told her all my heart,” whereupon “Ah, she doth depart.” But Oerke has shifted the context of lines 1 and 2 and so given them a new and ironic meaning. For he has drawn on the root and biblical meaning of “tell.” That is, “count” or “number” or “reckon” or “sum up,” as in Genesis 15—the Lord commanding Abram: “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them … So shall thy seed be.” This root and ancient meaning of “tell” pertains to all fifty-five poems, but especially to three, as they record a quest for knowledge not only of self but also of a realm of light beyond our own.

Readers of Oerke over the years are well aware of his penchant for expressing lofty ideas in lowly lingo. So we are hardly surprised by the opening lines of the first of these three poems, “Mona Lisa”: “What you know is what we haven’t learned yet. / Your face is a wall safe we’d love to crack / to cop its secret.” But she grants only a mysterious smile. And so in the closing lines our poet chides her: “The sickle of your smile sweeps right through us / and leaves us in windrows, wondering what happened.” Leaves us, that is, as if among rows of mown hay waiting to be baled and taken to the barn. We too are waiting. For we need less wonder and mystery, more light and knowledge. Perhaps language, clearly more articulate than painting, will lend us a sharper sickle.

Beneath the title of the second poem, “Language the Accomplice,” Oerke has aptly placed, as epigraph, those two lines from Blake: “Never seek to tell thy love, / Love that never told can be.” Aptly, in that, now that we have the true meaning of “tell,” these lines reach out much further than before. Now “love” refers both times to love itself: love at large, universal. And so these lines, in new context, read: never seek to count or reckon or in any way to quantify love itself. For it is beyond telling. Yet language specializes in telling. It thus reveals itself, like painting, a poor accomplice for our poet as he seeks to tell his love. If painting leaves him waiting, language leaves him tiring. He has sifted myriad “histories and mysteries / of meaning, with the gist still undigested.” That is, with the untellable essence of love still untold. Inevitably, “I grow tired.”

The last of these three poems, and concluding the volume, is “Return from the Sun.” Here our poet quests on without the mediations of painting and language. Quests instead with immediate vision. Accordingly, the poem records his vision entire in present tense: “Sunlight is so fantastic that who / I am is what I see and what I see / is what I am.” “Return” offers three six-line stanzas, emblems of the...