the very flame of love
It sounds enchanting doesn’t it – the very flame of love; but it is Claudius speaking and the full quotation is: ‘There lives within the very flame of love/a kind of wick or snuff that will abate it’. Which is much less cheerful. In a similar way (to my mind anyway) I have been possessed for a while by an image from Elizabeth Bishop – of snow not dissolving on the sea from her Imaginary Iceberg. Somehow from the marriage of these two emerged this (with some Antony and Cleopatra as well as Othello thrown in):
The very flame of love
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship
Elizabeth Bishop
to see a cloud that’s
dragonish – a blazing glory
in an evening sky
was to mistake you
for an iceberg
when only snow
lay on the sea
brief fractals sinking
melting invisibly
into the liquid salt
<>
no winking crystals
in the restless swell
to break the light
or to preserve
the untouched alps
rising from the
fleet monstrous deep
as chaos comes again
This follows the style of imaginary iceberg – a succession of heart capturing images whose overall meaning is enigmatic and elusive. ‘to see a cloud that’s/dragonish’ and ‘ fleet monstrous deep’ affected me strongly by infecting my imagination. I’m not sure if you get away with the blatant borrowing of ‘chaos comes again’. I wish you could but fear for your imprisonment for theft:) I’d ask for some explanation but suspect that it’s a poem that is intended to reverberate rather than elucidate.