SOURCE: Abramson, Glenda. “The Love Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.” American Journal of Semiotics 11, No. 2 (Fall, 1986): 221-47.

[In the following essay, Abramson discusses the theme of love in Amichai's poetry.]

If Yehuda Amichai does not use as topics for his work all three of those that Dante considered fundamental to poetry, salus, venus, and virtus, the second, venus, appears as a pervasive theme, perhaps the most pervasive throughout his work, revealing a consistency of idea which has unfailingly moved through the structured verse of the early volumes to the less tersely conceived poems of later years. One of the primary topics of his poetry is the alteration of love within a variety of contexts: time, war, youth and maturity, memory and religion. Love is the framework in which most of the events of the poetry take place, and it is itself celebrated or mourned in a number of long lyric cycles, particularly in the early books, written between 1948 and 1968. This poetry proposes an idealized, perhaps illusory love which is not only romantically perfect in itself, but which in its perfection will serve to replace religious belief and practice no longer of spiritual or emotional benefit in the life of the lyric “I.” It describes the search for this perfect love, which may also serve as a means of escaping guilt for the abandonment of God, or of providing a substitute for the loss of God.

“I've found you,” one says in love.
Without having lost you. The pain of loss
Happened before
Offstage, in another, painless time.(1)

Also, the early poetry explores the manipulation of love by forces that are beyond the lovers' control even when these forces emanate from the lover himself as guilt and conflict. Generally what we find in this poetry is the dark side of love: loss, ephemerality, pain, and disappointment. An apocalyptic shadow haunts even the most idyllic of the early lyrics. The search for fulfillment, with a romanticized and unrealistic illusion as the guide, informs this verse with a restless and agonized eroticism born of remembered experience or imagined sexual perfection. Later poetry concludes that this ideal was never realized, that love did not in itself content the lover or become a satisfactory replacement for lost spirituality. In the later verse “love” shifts its focus and assumes a paradoxical character, referring increasingly to the mechanics of sexual intercourse, which have supplanted the much-sought totality of emotional and sexual fulfillment. In the poetry of the late seventies and eighties it becomes clear that “love,” now further detached from emotion, is assuming a more abstract quality, akin to a metaphor for many life experiences.

Despite Amichai's reiteration of some early themes in his later love poetry, this should not be seen as mere repetition but as a significant continuation and development of the early work, a progression of discourse which has moved from the postulation and examination of an idea to its gradual negation and ultimate renunciation. The “lover” is able at last to distinguish between his imagination—which has provided him with the illusive and elusive ideal of love—and reality. His disappointment is reflected in verse which has abandoned the bold lyricism of the early years, in accordance with the changed context of love, to become more restrained and reflective.

POEMS 1948-1968

In the early poetry the experience of love assumes altered connotations with its altered connections, the most important being religion or, rather, belief symbolized by religious ritual. Love and religion are virtually inseparable in Amichai's early verse, almost as if he had taken as a paradigm the peshat and derash of the Song of Songs together in an ideological unity. This is not entirely foreign to Hebrew poetry, for some medieval Jewish poets utilized the love poem as their metaphor for the worship of God. Amichai is similarly not alone in utilizing the process of love for the purpose of demystifying a mystifying area, nor, of course, is he the only one to apply the truth of sacred sources to the modern world, rendering it appropriate for art. In the seventeenth century the languages of love and religion had much in common. Jon Stallworthy tells us that “the Song of Solomon as ‘mystically’ interpreted provided the love poets and the spiritual writers with a seemingly impeccable precedent for elaborating either theme in the language of the other.”² Through overfrequent usage coupled with the change in religious attitudes, such linguistic alignments frequently grew empty and stylized. Whether indeed Amichai's poetry is metaphysical in the seventeenth-century sense is open to question. Yet his love poetry bears the stylistic and emotional hallmarks of the metaphysical verse while resting much more firmly on the ground of theology and religion. If, for example, John Donne's religious imagery is indeed no more than typical seventeenth-century figurative language, or what someone has called “witty blasphemy,” Amichai's very similar imagery is ideologically deliberate. For example, his neat “an eye for an eye / your body for [the sake of] mine” (ayin taḥat ayin / gufekh taḥat gufi) is more than a clever play on the word taḥat (“under,” “in place of”) but has implications regarding spiritual retribution: the lex talionis is invoked in the context of lovemaking while the Holy Ark is open.³ In other words, it is as if Amichai has taken the particular aesthetics of the metaphysical poetry, which, because of its highly refined intellectualism, can become ideologically misleading, and given the religious imagery, at least, substantive meaning; or it may be as if the seventeenth-century imagery with its religious connotations is simply an empty gun which Amichai, in his own time and place, has armed. The ultimate aspiration of Amichai's love poetry, however, differs from that of the Spanish Jewish poets as well as the “metaphysical” poets, for it is neither spiritual nor directly religious. Despite the pervasive blending in of religious elements, his loving is paradoxically earthbound, erotic, physical, and fraught with pain and anxiety. The last lines of one of his most characteristic love poems, “Farewell,” set the tone of his verse as a whole and provide its underlying conviction:

For whatever will not be, no hand writes,
And whatever was not of the body
Will not be remembered.(4)

The critic Julian Lovelock makes a clear distinction between great love poems and poems of great love.⁵ Amichai's poems are the latter kind because love itself is their subject, albeit love which is sought, imagined, idealized, or delusory, its “greatness” only potential or possible. The lyric “I” does not speak to the beloved in the sense of courtship or flattery—as Dryden put it, “entertaining [her] with the softnesses of love.” The female partner is described through extravagant images, but they serve often to distance her, as if the hyperbole dehumanizes rather than endears her. The overt sexuality of many of these images indicates that she is little more than a means toward some kind of self-realization on the part of the lover. Rarely is the woman transmitted to us as an object of deep affection; more often she is an adversary stronger than he, to be overcome by something other than physical love—by the lover's need for an even more exalted experience. More importantly, the poetry seems to be aspiring toward a concept which can be defined as ahavah be-emet, following Amichai's own reference to ha-ohavim be-emet in “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children.” The idea of be-emet in relation to love, “actual,” “real,” or perhaps “great” love, the nature of which he does not clarify, seems to refer to an emotional transcendence which endows the lovers with the security of a special kind of knowledge or perception that survives the material pressures of their lives:

But perhaps He will pity those who love truly
And care for them
And shade them
Like a tree over the sleeper
On the public bench.(6)

They never attain the higher reality of “real love,” however; the love represented in the poetry can be passionate, satisfying, hopeless, disappointing, exalted, or ecstatic, but it does not provide unity of souls with the unity of bodies, nor a “marriage of true minds.” This projected unity is alluded to in a poem in which the lover describes how

… We were such a good
And loving invention.
An airplane made from man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.(7)

Generally, however, the love described is not purified or endowed with grace, nor does it assure the lovers of immortality. Whatever is meant by ahavah be-emet, the lovers do not achieve it, and what they do possess, according to the poetry, is insufficient. Amichai's love poetry offers not an affirmation of ahavah be-emet, only speculation as to its nature and a consuming need to experience it.

Without this kind of love, ahavah be-emet, the union of Amichai's lovers is that of bodies only. Any other view of love apart from the shadowy notion of “real love” approaches the dangerous territory of the spirit and faith. The poet labors to avoid crossing such boundaries, he rejects the possible allegorization of physical love or its transmutation to mysticism, by blurring the distinction between the love of God and sexual love, by demystifying sacred texts, and by clear and constant references to the human body, which becomes the symbol of his choice and the barrier set between spiritual and human love. For example, the object of the liturgical injunction “It is our duty to praise the Master of all” becomes

For we should praise
The vessel of everything: your breast,
the trumpet sound of shoulder
That bore you to me on midsummer's night …(8)

The liturgical phrase aleinu le-shabbeah (“it is our duty to praise”) is used to glorify the woman's body. Sacred words from the prayer which are meant for God are spoken during sexual love and directed to the beloved: “Rise up and tremble. For yours is the kingdom.” In a love poem bearing similar pronominal ambiguities John Donne declares: “But thou are resolute; Thy will be done,” lines appearing in the same Christian prayer, although Amichai's source is the Aleinu.⁹ Amichai compares the woman to the high priest whom, the poetic “I” admits, his body forgets even on Yom Kippur. In other words, the woman, taking the place of the high priest, is the one remembered by the lover's body. The word guf (“body”) is significant, for the subject of the sentence is not the lover but his body, mortified by Yom Kippur, ha-guf ha-mistagef, a nice play on words. The magnificence of the high priest's vestments becomes a metaphor for the great beauty of the woman's body. Her nipples, eyes, and mouth blaze for the lover like the high priest's breastplate of judgment or, in keeping with the purpose of this poetry, rather than the high priest's breastplate. An admonition to praise God is diverted by Amichai by recontextualizing sacred lines: “I love you / With all my might / As long as I live” (Deut. 6:5).¹⁰

The choice of body and the correlative rejection of religious or spiritual love is not easily to be made, for underlying it is a sense of sin, of stealing the exaltation meant for God and offering it to a woman; her body, which has assumed the attributes of an object of worship, consequently becomes also a symbol of sin. As C. S. Lewis somewhat provocatively said of Donne (with whom Amichai often shows strange affinities), Amichai's “I” appears not to be able to rid himself of a medieval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality, a problem which serves especially to characterize his love poetry, and which manifests itself through the often surprising amalgamation of religious imagery. This dislocation of the sacred sources into comments about the process of love amounts almost to a confession of treachery to God. This is clarified in Amichai's great spiritual autobiography, “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela,” whose refrain is taken from Deuteronomy 6:10: “When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.” The poet has eaten, “but I am not full and I have not blessed,” signifying the lack of acceptance of principles of faith which are now open to question. Words, phrases, and ideas from the biblical text are woven into this verse, setting it squarely in the context of religious tradition, yet it is an analysis of spritual breakdown. The conflict between the ethical values embodied in Jewish worship learned as a child and the natural transgressions of childhood and adolescence creates the poem's tension and determines its spokesman's consistent attitude to God. The indictment of human passion intrudes in the shape of imagery usually associated with holy ritual, suggesting that love for the partner of the lyric “I” leads directly to loss of love of God, instead of the fulfillment of earthly love in the perfect love of God, the aspiration in some of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. The deuteronomic leitmotif alters its meaning in varied contexts and becomes especially equivocal when placed in the context of human love:

My father was afraid
to make an empty blessing.
To bless the Creator of the fruit of the tree
and not eat its fruit.
To bless without loving. To love without fulfillment.
I have eaten
but I have not been satisfied
and I have not blessed.(11)

There is a correlation in this little conundrum between blessing and loving. To the father love means expectations fulfilled, so that his blessing becomes conditional upon them. He is therefore afraid to bless and his son is similarly afraid to love, in both cases because of the disappointment they anticipate at the end of the ritual. While Amichai elsewhere clarifies the father's expectations and describes his disappointment, never does he offer any evidence of what satisfaction in love may mean. Lisboa (“to be fulfilled”) can only refer to a kind of metaphysical or transcendent unity, for physical unity alone is obviously not sufficient for his “I.” “I have eaten” in this context means “I have loved.” The further implication is that I have not been satisfied by love and I have therefore not blessed, because of the premise expressed in the verse that to bless without loving is untenable.

Sin is defined in “Benjamin” by human love, which represents a betrayal in turn of the values substantiated in the ritual. It is all owed and should be directed to God, but the lyric “I” has wrested it away, with guilt for the substitution of human love for love of God the result. In “Benjamin” Amichai characteristically twists lines from the Morning Prayer into a soliloquy in which expressions of love mingle with the ancient words of thanksgiving:

The prayers you said as a child
come back and drift down from above
Like missiles that missed
Returning to earth after a long time,
Unnoticed, harmless.
When you're making love
They come back. “I love you,” “You're mine.”
I give thanks before you. “You shall love”
The Lord your God. “With all my might …”(12)

By a polyphonic interweaving of avowals of love with the prayer Modeh Ani and the Morning Prayer, the possible objects of love can be seen as having become either synthesized or separated. In fact, by judicious use of quotation marks, Amichai has carefully demarcated the planes upon which God and the woman exist for his spokesman, while preserving the sense or intent of the verse. The verse continues: “Stand in awe, sin not and be still. Selah.”

In this quotation from Psalm 4, transposed in the liturgy to the prayer said on retiring to bed, Amichai has omitted the middle sentence occurring between “sin not” and “be still”: “Commune with your own heart upon your bed.” By referring to the same prayer in the next two lines of the verse he offers an explanation for the omission:

Shema on Going to Bed. On
the bed
Without the Shema. On the double
bed …(13)

In a passage in a poem called “We Did It,” the radiance of the act of love is likened to that of Ezekiel's vision of wheels and sacred beasts. Amichai consolidates the vision in a muddle of limbs and wings:

Like wheels and holy animals
And with the chariot-deeds of prophets
We did it six wings
And six legs but the sky
Was hard above us
Like the summer earth beneath.(14)

The idea of kilayim, “mingling,” or the breeding of diverse kinds, is stated first in Leviticus 19:19: “Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed.” It is explicitly referred to in the opening stanza of Amichai's ironic tribute to the High Holy Days, “And This is Your Praise” (ve-hi tehilatekha): “In my great silence and in my small cry / I plough mingled seed.” The idea of kilayim also serves to define the poetry in which erotic and spiritual images are joined together or overlap, each infusing the other with the hint of a different kind of ecstasy. Yet ecstasy appears to be out of reach, and the pointedly physical imagery suggests the notion of a substitute for what is truly desired by the poetry's “I,” who could not fulfill his father's expectations of him and achieve faith, aptly termed by Donne “this intermitting anguish, pietie.” For reasons explored in “Benjamin” he was unable to accept God's will or submit himself to the strictures of Jewish orthodoxy. “Love,” the symbol in the early poetry of the alternative, the negative impulse opposing the positive impulse of faith, becomes his only refuge.

Through his compulsive use of religious imagery in the most specifically physical love poetry, the poet is indicating both the problem and its solution. On the one hand he is recording his awareness of his own transgression. On the other, he is offering as a solution the defiant attempt to demystify that unreachable spiritual realm by incorporating it into the world of human love, thereby challenging it: for example, the psalms perform their function for him as effectively as they do for the religious, but through love of a woman, not of God. Kohelet retracts his pessimism line by line—due to love, not through faith. The holy paraphernalia now serves the cause of earthly love, since the lover has rejected and been rejected by God.

The second series of love poems in “Now and in Other Days” (1958), called “Pine Cones in the Tree,”¹⁵ contains eight brief poems divided into rhyming couplets, each poem presenting a different image of the lovers: they are like two associations in one mind—as he is referred to, so is she; they are like two lightbulbs in a lamp—each one alone too dark, but together lighted they are a festival of light. She is the walled public garden of the city, and he, the road which moves away from her. They are like two stones at the bottom of a hill, secluded and alone. They are two numbers standing alone and combining

—or being subtracted because, after all, the sign
Sometimes changes.

He is like soft water in a pipe, waiting to be summoned by the turning of a tap and to be received by her. The couplets, which owe something to “metaphysical” conceits, affirm the isolated perfection of their love, yet even at their most serene the lovers are separate entities, two lightbulbs, two stones, two numbers. The poems offer an apparent affirmation of love, yet separateness and isolation are implicit in them. Ahavah be-emet, the coupling of both spirit and flesh, is still undiscovered, and it is only for a brief moment that the bulbs achieve “a festival of light,” unbounded unity in each other. Love has proof in continuity, and “real love” perhaps in eternity, yet the nature of Amichai's conceits confirms only its uncertainty and brevity. The poet suggested in “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” that only “true” or “real” lovers may be worthy of God's grace; the notion of separateness offered by the couplets in “Pine Cones,” implying that the lovers have failed to achieve perfect unity, indicates their separation also from God.

Lack of completeness is hinted at in the lyrical “Six Poems to Tamar,”¹⁶ which, on the surface, are idyllic expressions of love framed by the staples of romantic convention: rain, sun, spring, flowers, grass, the full moon. The woman's body is “full of lizards; they all love sun.” Her eyes, breasts, and thighs compose the sensual picture and complement the earth-images providing the cycle's setting. On the surface, peace and tranquility accompany unconditional and perfect love; yet notes of unease penetrate the harmony of body and nature, the hint of conflict about what is only an act of love, not perfect love itself:

Beside my bed the rustle of a newspaper's wings,
There are no other angels.

The word malakhim means “messengers” as well as “angels,” stressing the different natures of the heavenly and earthly media; either way, the angels, messengers of God, will never appear as signs of acquiescence or approval. At times love is able to deflect despair and act even against the realistic cynicism of Kohelet, as if the lover, conditioned by Kohelet's words, allows love to change his mind:

Every day of our lives together
Kohelet erases a line of his book.

The imagery becomes increasingly erotic, but the cycle ends on an enigmatic note:

My blood has many relatives
Who never visit it.
But when they die
My blood inherits.

The past again asserts its claim on the actions of the lover. Its representatives are never far away: angels, Kohelet, and the psalms have intervened between him and the absolute realization of love, but just as the power of love alters evil in the world, represented by Kohelet's conclusions, it also negates the power of Kohelet the representative of God's wisdom. It is paradoxically both good and bad, therefore, to “erase” Kohelet's words: good in terms of human love, bad in terms of the spiritual tradition. Even the apparently unequivocal statement that “all 150 psalms / roar at once” yields some unease, as does every reference to the sources in the context of human love: the poet uses the term tehillim in its biblical sense of a psalm, and in the poem's context it means no less than that. Yet the biblical psalms are, in addition to being songs of praise, representations of conflict in the psalmist regarding his relationship with God. Amichai's love poetry is never entirely devoid of a similar conflict relating to the object of his own love, but his conclusion is not as positive as that of the psalmist.

Human love cannot save the lovers from “the terrible trial” because it is never more than transitory, and even though it may “hasten the salvation of the world,” which is an idea Amichai expresses in later poetry, salvation will not be extended to the lovers. Attempts to fix love within a solid and protective frame usually fail. Images of enclosure occur throughout Amichai's love poetry, solid, controlled images which have their place in a defined environment: the public garden is walled, the road is in a city, the water is in a pipe, the numbers occur in their framework of arithmetical sums, the bulbs are part of a lamp. Yet there is nothing here like Donne's compass, an instrument whose two separate arms are centrally joined, with their separate movements interlinked. It is also sufficient to itself and free from external definition or pressure. Amichai's images, rather, echo the phrase from a legal contract, “together and severally,” which he transposed to serve as the refrain for one of his early love poems: “both of us together and each alone.” His walled garden, Noah's ark, a box, a house all suggest a safe bolt-hole in some guarded space, far away from the attempts of God and man to disturb the lovers. Isolation, enclosure, and secrecy are the necessary ingredients for love, and in “The Cyclamen” the lover admonishes his partner:

Don't sing out loud,
For if someone hears, everything will be ended.(17)

The tender and predominantly idyllic mood of “Six Poems to Tamar” gradually disintegrates in the sonnet cycle “We Loved Here,” set in the framework of war.¹⁸ The first sonnet, one of the most anthologized of Amichai's poems, describes his father's war—“their” war as opposed to “my wars,” for which the son must later leave. The end of the cycle indicates the nature of his war from which the father had hoped to protect him. Sandwiched in between, but with the war as intermittent counterpoint, are the love sonnets. Spring, Amichai's abiding symbol for love, gradually becomes “the land of the enemy,” while characteristically the lovers lie protected like mummies in a pyramid. A sense of helplessness in the face of encroaching chaos threatens them and leads to the sapping of love: the full and joyous sexual symbolism of the previous cycles changes to images of dry sterility and abandonment.

Our lives are hardening, our lives
Like slices of yesterday's bread …
We've left everything as if it weren't ours
Like a room one suddenly quits …
See, like a street emptied
After a festive celebration
My body empties too and becomes quiet.

The cycle draws to an end with the juxtaposition of love and the force that has finally breached the carefully placed walls of the sanctuary.

And the middle of the story now, perhaps the climax
The war …
Behind the hills the troops waited
Not free of their war
And never to return to their houses.

However obvious war appears in these and other poems as the destroyer of life and love, it is not the most convincing counter to the fulfillment of love, although in practical terms it penetrates the lovers' security and forces them apart. “Real love” in the sense of love that survives separation, that is not a breach but, in Donne's words, “… an expansion / Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate,” is hardly a factor in the experience of the lyric “I.” Quite the contrary; he says: “If we don't stay together we won't stay at all. / Even more so—we won't live.”¹⁹ However, the assumption that war with its implication of separation is perhaps only the “middle” of the story offers a slim thread of hope. In a later verse he states with conviction that ultimately he will not be destroyed by war at all, for he ends the poem of gentle eroticism with the certainty that “not in wars, I won't ever fall in wars again.” So while war is undoubtedly a serious threat to the immediacy of love in time and space, it is not the only threat: “We loved here. Reality was something else.” This line introduces another definition of love as a counter to all external reality, as an escape from life, not a part of it. Love gives way to radio and newpaper headlines, something outside summons the lover: a foot is “between the door and the mezuzah,” and the lovers's key, in which they trusted, is in “their” hands. Not only war but another, less objectively destructive external force invades the tight framework of love, the “box” whose lid has suddenly been pried open. Amichai's later love poetry, written in the seventies and eighties, usually abandons the context of war, yet the outcome of love is still unsatisfactory. Society, social duty, and identity take on the implicit guise of “them,” those that break into love's dwelling, with love consequently unable to survive the social and spiritual environment in which the “I” is placed. The intruding force remains unspecified: it is partly war, partly social duty, but there is more: we are led once again to the notion of “mixture,” kilayim, which dominates the love poetry. Eros and the world of faith cannot coexist, human love is unable to resist the onslaught of guilt.

To lie in the darkness and hear
A voice above the voice
Again in the night, and to touch the brow.
Afterwards to fall:
Not in wars, I won't fall in wars again
But here and now, in this land of without,
A land without me and without you,
A land of gray hills. A land of forever.(20)

The intruding voice makes the lover aware of emptiness in his life despite the uniting power of the act of love. The first line of the poem offers a clue to the reason for this emptiness: “Again be my earthly kingdom beyond the door / whose path does not lead back.” Mattah, “below” (“earthly”), is the conceptual contrast to ma'alah, “heavenly.” “Fall” in this poem means “to suffer.” It does not carry the Christian connotation of sin, in this case “the sinfulness of sexuality,” but may refer to the context of sexuality, defined clearly in “Benjamin”:

Angels resembling holy scrolls
with velvet robes and white silk skirts,
crowned with silver and silver bells,
angels fluttered around me, sniffed my heart
and said uh-uh to each other
with grownups' smiles. “I'll tell your father.”(21)

If guilt is taken to be part of “them,” the intruders and destroyers of love, then “they” symbolizes not only the practical burdens of social duty but also spiritual obligations, God and his deputies, angels and the father, upon all of whom responsibility for moral vigilance has been placed.

Who are you?
A small Jewish boy from the diaspora
Skullcap on head. From there. From that time.(22)

While the lover and his partner are making love,

Far from here, on another continent of time,
the dead rabbis of my childhood are clearly seen
Holding the gravestones
High over their heads.

Due to the nature of his loving, Amichai's lyric “I” has betrayed his past, and it is this that prevents his achievement of perfection in love. By its very contrast his attitude brings to mind the reply of Tertan, the enigmatic hero of Lionel Trilling's short story “Of This Time, Of That Place” to the same question, “who are you?” Tertan replies: “I think, therefore I am (cogito, etc.). But who am I? Tertan I am; but what is Tertan? Of this time, of that place, of some parentage, what does it matter?”²³

To Amichai's “I” it matters a great deal. An entire novel, coincidentally titled Not of This Time, Not of This Place, explores its hero's search for his lost childhood, for the reconstitution of his past, divided by his having left the country of his birth. As a result of his odyssey he is able to analyze and reconcile at least one of the troubling constituents of his past: the enforced orthodoxy of his childhood. In the poetry, by denying the most essential of the parts that constitute his historical identity, Amichai's lyric “I” loses his grip on that identity and mourns its loss. His parentage, unlike Tertan's, is specific; the composite world of the “dead rabbis” is no less his own, but, unlike them, he has betrayed it. He walks up a street named after a pious old Jew, carrying

Your bed on my back like a cross
but it's difficult to imagine
a woman's bed
as the symbol of a new religion.(24)

He describes how, during a passionate encounter with a woman whom he calls only “a tourist,” he shows her the place where he used to keep his phylacteries, while she seduces him.²⁵ In a later poem he indicates how the remembered ritual of worship all but possesses him: when his younger partner is teaching him the dances of her generation to the popular music of the time, he explains:

I didn't know them
But I made the movements of the citron
and of “holy, holy”
And of wrapping myself in the prayershawl
And of winding the phylacteries
And of swaying and bowing.(26)

POEMS 1968-1984

The overall concern of Amichai's love poetry is the dreadful inability of the individual to prevail under the dominating need both for human and spiritual love. It is a long and evolutionary personal drama in which the lyric “I” seeks to comprehend and certainly to experience the true nature of love in all its guises. The drama takes the form of an interior monologue, for the lover is, in effect, the only actor: the object of his love rarely reacts with speech or activity, being very much the passive partner. Her consistent action is to leave when love ends. “The end came bitter and quick / but the time between us was slow and sweet.”²⁷ Many of the poems are elegiac or valedictory, with variations of the word or idea of “forgetting” (shekhiḥah) recurring to underline the finality of separation. In none of the later books does Amichai's love poetry echo the freshness of approach of his earlier work. His spokesman has discovered that the love with which he is particularly concerned is an evolutionary human phenomenon and not a transcendent or metaphysical state, such as we find, for example, in Alterman's poetry. It changes as the lover changes; it does not grow in spirituality, nor does it alter its direction. It diminishes with age. For all those reasons the striving for love, the major topic of the early verse, is unsuccessful, and the “great love” sought, unrealized. The poetry of this period is concomitantly less opulently figured: love is seen in relation to the banality of life, not its promised and imagined glory. There is, however, a clear conceptual movement in the later books, from love as a single emotional and physical encounter to love as a sign of lifelong emotional progression: according to Amichai's own equation, “to speak of change is to speak love”;²⁸ the poetry in which he describes the alteration of body and spirit due to physiological causes, such as age, or existential causes, such as marriage and family relationships, is the poetry of love. In the seventies it became a lament for the loss of youth and the attendant loss of the kind of love characterized by youth. Amichai's lyric lover does not subscribe to the idealistic consolation that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds: altered love, such as that embodied, for example, in a marriage, does not arouse joy or provide contentment. It is no longer the “love” which meant exclusively the romantic sexual meeting of youthful lovers, so well explored in the earlier books, bounded by urgency, imperfect yet always idealized. Marriage seems a small recompense for the loss of whatever truth such love supplied: on his wedding anniversary the lyric “I” summarizes his view, or need, of love:

I can't undo
The things I've done in my life.
A Zionism of two people to return
To the homeland of their love
Together, no more.
My eye is turned to only one direction,
Like an ancient, heavy cannon
In an old fortress by the sea,
Fixed to its place.(29)

Love's permutation in middle age provides little satisfaction:

Here in this house I consider how love
Becomes friendship in our lives' chemistry.
And how friendship consoles us
For death to come.
And how our lives are like stray threads
Without hope of being rewoven
Into another fabric.(30)

In the poetry of the seventies and eighties love is occasionally still viewed as a panacea for the loss of God, a clear and deliberate substitute for religion:

You made it possible for me to live
for a few months
without needing religion
or a world-view.(31)

Generally, however, this poetry no longer sees the spiritual tradition as an adversary to love. Love itself and not religion is its point of departure, and human responses to the conditions of loving, its main concern. The collection Not for the Sake of Remembering (Ve-Lo al Menat Lizkor, 1971) reveals an absence of allusiveness indicating a development toward a new and almost imagistic style of poetry. The removal of his language from a traditional context relinquishes its correspondence with a delimited moral order. The framework which had supplied the words with special resonance is now disregarded, so that the love poetry assumes a different guise, with love serving as a metaphor for aspiration or achievement within the poet's own existential ambit. The language is able to stand on its own, almost entirely devoid of metaphor and with less recourse to simile than in earlier volumes. The poetry is confined more than previously to the poet's immediate outer landscapes, usually Jerusalem and, notably in this volume, Buenos Aires.

In the cycle of love poetry “Poems of Buenos Aires” the verse is uncharacteristically sparse, with an inner rhythm reminiscent of Spanish, and, in mood, containing something of what Lorca defined as duende, a darkness of soul almost inexpressible in words. If originally Amichai's lyric lover hoped for fulfillment beyond the physical, in this cycle he has faced the realization that none exists and that love is ephemeral and illusory. The poems of Buenos Aires describe the silent joining of lovers in dark rooms with blinds drawn not against the hot southern sun but against streaming rain. The gray wetness and heavy skies complement the claustrophic interior settings in which a dreamlike sequence of meetings and separations take place. The poetry's atmosphere of enclosure is intensified by the threefold boundaries of the wet, enclosing weather, the urban area delimited by streets and avenues, and the dark rooms. Beautiful but sad women with exotic names—Sylvia, Susanna, Dolores—flit across the lover's vision, but they speak a language which he is unable to understand, the lack of communication merely reinforcing what is already certain failure and frustration. The lack of consummation or completeness in love is emphasized by the failure of verbal communication: “I kissed her mouth which a strange language / had shaped.” “How alone and abandoned the Spanish language / in the room. Later, / Hebrew too.” The lovers are strangers, their union ratified by a few words spoken before separating. “In this room / Two can be strangers / to each other.” The differences between them exceed the linguistic; different hemispheres even alter the geographical certainties of their lives, so that when apart they are unable to share seasons or times of day. The entire series is loveless, despairing, dry, dark, and impersonal, at times almost detatched. It describes the passionless love of maturity, unsatisfying and without ideals, the total antithesis of romance and its conventions: springtime, nature, youth, and freedom. The season is a torrid summer with skies “like a layer of gray plaster,” the settings are exclusively urban—roads, cafes, hotels, rooms. The lover is middle-aged and weary, bound by memory which demands repetition in life, a need to recapture the past. His gestures are, however, hollow and devoid of significance, for time has robbed his love of substance.

So many words dropped along the way
So much blood spilt,
So much laughter,
So little remains!

Generally this poetry avoids sexuality, but when on one occasion it veers toward eroticism, the religious imagery, hitherto absent, once more reappears. In the case of this poem, which is the only one in the collection containing allusions to Jewish ritual, the allusions do not indicate guilt but mourning, for they are used in the context of the death of love. Words redolent of the liturgy alternate with erotic descriptions of the girl's body:

Your thighs are red with fire
The folds of your dress dark
For saying
Kaddish.
May I rest in peace, may you,
Amen.

In some of the poems love is viewed as an attempt to defeat death. Religion and ritual having failed, God having both abandoned the lover and been abandoned by him, love is all that remains: at a funeral the speaker sees a woman wearing a black dress that clings to her thighs. The implied sexuality appears to him as an escape from extinction. The prevailing tone of the cycle is, however, one of regretful sadness, with familiar phrases recurring: “silent weeping,” “the laughter of shadow,” “water can be wept / not stones,” and repeated words, such as “pain,” “despair,” and “mourning.”

In this collection Amichai reveals himself to be a poet of what is, not what ought to be. The tone of regret in this poetry is equally existential, forgoing the romantic remedy of supplying the missing element by means of illusion. He simply examines the facts of loss brought about by human error and weakness, and laments the passage of time. By “making war against time” he defends himself from time's depredations. He dwells frequently on the particular ability of memory to resurrect the past as a reproach to the present, so that his crossing of “the river of memory” is the leitmotif of this poetry, the memory being of the senses, colors, shapes, sounds, and smells.

If one wished to apply a comprehensive adjective to qualify the love poetry in Not for the Sake of Remembering and the collections following it, notably Ha-Zeman (“Time,” 1977), “weary” would best serve. This is the poetry of acceptance, even submission, the terms of which are those associated with love. Joy in love, even if not the elusive “real love,” belongs to the past, for now “love is precise and cold like a glass eye”;³² the memory of joy, although comforting, still dooms the present love to failure. The word meduyak, “exact,” “accurate,” or “precise,” frequently appears in Amichai's later verse as a pejorative adjective indicating detachment or indifference, an impersonal precision presumably contrasting with the emotional chaos of love. It is this chaos that the spokesman lacks and that represents to him the disorderly, ecstatic elements of love as opposed to logical precision. Language itself becomes an analogy for love, for, says the poetry's “I,” when a man ceases speaking his own language regularly, it becomes more “exact” through his intermittent and careful usage of it. Past lovers recall their love in similarly “exact” and economical emotional terminology. The lyric “I,” however, cannot accept the precision of this discourse; for him pain, disruption, disorder, even uncleanness, the emotional antonyms of meduyak, are the only acceptable complements of love.

I who remain, I dirty
my mouth and lips and tongue. In my words
are soul's garbage and desire's refuse,
dust and sweat. And even the water I drink
between my cries and the murmuring of desire
is, in this dry land, urine
many time recycled.(33)

The spokesman's visit to the ancient port of Akhziv, which concludes Not for the Sake of Remembering, inspires a series of speculations on the nature and mechanism of love, particularly in middle age, when illusion is destroyed and the lover is no more than a second-hand gift, prettily wrapped but scarcely a surprise. The same harbor setting had stimulated an earlier series of erotic lyrics devoid of the emotion of love but examining the elements of sensual experience, interlaced with religious guilt.³⁴ Now the spokesman is forced to take comfort in blessings other than sexual love and to accept that his submission to time is, if nothing else, heroic.

The mature verse in the volumes following Not for the Sake of Remembering explores the attempt to come to terms with the realization that neither does perfect love exist nor can guilt be eradicated. The lyric “I” struggles to summon the memory of love in the hope that it will soften the blows of time, but memory fails as a palliative. The poetry returns repeatedly to the theme of memory, which it explores with some contradictoriness and paradox: love is sought in order to still the pain of memory, but it is the memory of love that is being stilled. The memory of love, in any case, brings not consolation but pain.

God, the soul you gave me
Is smoke
From the constant burning of love's memories
We are born and burn immediately
And so until the smoke, like smoke, disappears.(35)

In fact the concept of memory in this poetry may be equated with fantasy, for “memory” of love is as idealized as the love originally sought and rarely found. Memory itself is a facet of the imagination. The ability to recreate in the mind not only events but a vanished world is one of the greatest gifts given to man, according to the Spanish proverb recordar es vivir—“to remember is to live.” As far as Jewish history is concerned, this faculty is a two-edged sword, but when refined and structured by the artistic imagination it can assume a positive, ontological power. However, Amichai's love poetry of the late seventies and the eighties portrays no more than the heroic individual who is compelled to accept the perhaps unpalatable definition of himself seen through love, that is, to accept what love has become for him in the present, unadorned by transcendent splendor. He has no choice but to understand that the passionate beauty of love to which he has always aspired exists only in the disordered imagination of memory, as “silent and tiger your body waited in the season's change,”³⁶ or “The full moon traces the line of your cheek / your breasts, the line of mine …”³⁷

The later verse is, however, not all doom-laden or weighted with Werther-like despair. On the contrary, the whimsy which was, for the most part, suppressed in Not for the Sake of Remembering emerges in Me-ḥhorei Kol Zeh Mistater Osher Gadol (1974; translated by Ted Hughes as Amen). Pain, disappointment, the acute sense of loss, frequently surrender to a wry acceptance of the situation, a poetic shrug of the shoulders. The lyric “I” has accepted the fact that for him “real love” is a myth and that love itself is a memory. Little remains of it other than its signs, which rapidly diminish. The failed lover, whose “generation machine is still sweet / between my legs,”³⁸ yet who “creates the fruit of the end” (a word-play on the blessing over the wine: ba-ḥutz: borei peri ha-gafen / va-ani: borei peri ha-sof),³⁹ is now able to fill the objective and nonparticipatory role of observer of the mechanics of love, intercourse, and the lovers' bodies. He notices every action of love, the young men and women, the couples, the physical possibilities in women, the entire process of sex. The lyric “I” is no longer exclusively the lover, as in the earlier books; he is now watching others and commenting on them. Generally this poetry has become increasingly sexual, as if the act of love, detached from all emotion, is all that remains. Occasionally the eroticism gives way to a kind of lasciviousness when Amichai writes about women's underwear; fortunately such instances are few and can be excused by their humor—for example, when he draws a contrast between the large, blank-faced military women of Eastern Europe and their delicate underclothing.⁴⁰ In a switch of mood from sadness to cynicism, serious comment becomes a witticism which does not always entirely mask the pain—the notion of failure for which cynicism is a defense is never far beneath the surface. Yet a sense of loss has so frequently been explored in the poetry that the “I,” who exhibits a growing weariness with his own condition, fluctuates between elegiac sadness and sometimes something closely resembling melodrama. The shadow of lovers parting, tears being shed, empty places being revisited is often presented without the substance of profound emotion.

I sit at the table and write
precise things. I remember
the hopes I had for the first love
before I met the girl I loved,
but hardly remember her,
like a man who remembers his thirst
in the desert, but not
the drink of water.
What remains is a pattern of the event
not its content, the shape of letters,
not the meaning of words.(41)

The spokeman's next visit to Akhziv in She'at ha-Hesed (“The Moment of Grace,” 1982) is scarcely an echo of the earlier contemplations of passionate love inspired by that particular landscape. The “I,” having forgotten “what is as plentiful as the sand on the seashore”—a frequent biblical simile—carries a deckchair onto the beach. Above his head the conflicting forces of wrath and tranquillity do battle while he sits peacefully examining a woman bather whose skin is “tanned and sunburnt for pleasure.”⁴² His own life's drama is reduced to “small cries.” Elsewhere, in a departure from the almost consecrated modern usage of the akedah as a symbol of suffering, the lyric “I” observes that the victim can be bound to an altar by bonds of love. The angel appears at the wrong moment to admonish the lover and command him not to stretch out his hand, whereupon the youthful “victim” of the binding complains to the angel: “you spoil everything.”⁴³ In a poem from the 1977 collection Time, the spokesman tells us that every part of his own body is engaged for some burden, to carry a rifle and ammunition, to bear guilt and the weight of time. Only his penis is “free and happy,” useless for war or work, inadequate for carrying or for building.⁴⁴ Whimsy is the tone of “Air Hostess,” a woman who “belongs to the conservative party / of those who have only one great love in their life.”⁴⁵ Even the title of the 1980 collection, “Great Tranquillity—Questions and Answers,” is ambiguous and paradoxical, typical of this poetry in its presentation of contradictory moods and the ironic counterpoint of concepts. The self-conscious mockery of love, the frequent blunt references to lovemaking, genitalia, and women's bodies, do not conceal the theme of the later poetry as a whole. The constant recalling of emptiness, empty spaces, empty houses reinforces the statement that “when man is abandoned by / his love, an empty round space expands inside him like a cave / for wonderful stalagmites, slowly.”⁴⁶ In none of the later poetry is this emptiness filled, except with dreams and fantasies. Memory is all that remains to fill the void, and a blunt sexuality, graphic details of nudity, and visual explorations of women's bodies, which constitute the spokesman's defiant challenge to the pain of loss and the emptiness of his life, wherein

Now our feelings are like fishes' entrails
slaughtered fowls thrown into the market,
food for scavenging cats and stray dogs.(47)

A few echoes of the earlier love poetry remain: poems of tranquil beauty which extol the woman and which recreate the almost perfect love of the spokesman's youth. Such an echo is provided by a poem entitled “Ideal Love” where, in a rather poignant reminder of the earlier frequency of such concepts, love is compared to religion. The equation lacks the old defiance, however, and the consequent guilt: the beginning of ideal love is seen as a ritual ceremony accompanied by power and majesty, the firing of a cannon before Ramadan or the blowing of the shofar. The lover's sinfulness is obliquely referred to by invoking the trumpet blast

In Elul to banish sin.
That's a religion! That's love!(48)

This is reminiscent of the earlier conjugation of love and the sound of the shofar in “Benjamin.” In “Straight from Your Prejudice” the woman is dressed and ornamented as a religious object. However, this poem presents a formalized and quasi-rhetorical mixing of religious and erotic images, devoid of implication except for the desire “to kiss your thighs / Like a mezuzah at the door,”⁴⁹ again making the act of worship analogous with acts of love. Love and religion are psychologically coupled in “A Tourist,” where the terms of lust and worship are ambiguous: “unholy lust in the guise of prayer,” “holy desire.”⁵⁰ Prayer and desire both designate a state whose end is ecstasy, but the ecstasy sought in this poem is primitive and equivocal, composed of both holy and ugly impulses. It reveals a coarsening of the method by which the religious exaltation experienced as a child is striven for by the adult through human love.

The development and decline of “love” throughout Amichai's poetry runs parallel to that of the lover: from a state of quest, tenderness, and hope it alters to emptiness and memory. Memory is the leitmotif of the later poetry, but even that is now seen to be futile:

To stop forgetting for a while
will not restore the past to you
only the empty pressure of memory
like the heavy weight
tied to a hotel key.
Memory will not reopen
those rooms.(51)

The statement “and whatever was not of the body / will not be remembered,” which appeared in a poem of evocative beauty describing lovers parting, now becomes ironic and negative, discrediting the spokesman's unilateral notion of love. In the end, devoid as it is of joy, love is no more than a burden to be borne throughout life. From man's earliest age it defines sin, and then, having tempted him, it remains with him as an elusive vision never to be made actual. Or if it is ever caught, it either changes its form immediately or disingtegrates, leaving the lover eternally diminished.

Love and loving seem to underlie every action or situation of the lyric “I” and are evoked constantly throughout every phase of his life, in every place and with every activity. Nevertheless it appears at the end that neither loving nor love itself is the focus but the functioning of the man in his entirety: his body, his abilities, his experiences, his spirituality, and his social worth. Love in its ascendance or decline becomes the overall metaphor for the life of the individual in his youth or aging, his vitality or tiredness. The female “you” who accompanies him throughout the verse is a mirror of his own abilities or even a commentary on them. Ultimately love is the rod by which the human processes are measured.

The love poetry may, in the final analysis, not be about love at all, but about the problems of youth and maturation, encompassing rebellion and the loss of faith, the death of parents, experiences in war, in relationships, and in society; later it reflects the shock of aging, physical changes, and the shifting of roles in family and society. The soldier becomes a good citizen; the young lover, a responsible husband. The son becomes the father.

The children say to me: what are you daydreaming?
Like my father said when I was a boy,
What are you daydreaming. This is what I've come to, now.(52)

Love bears the burden of these crises as a projection of the spokesman's life; like an emotional whipping-boy it takes the lashes of experience.

Notes

1. “Mazati otakh,” Me Aḥorei, p. 109.

2. Jon Stallworthy, ed., The Penguin Book of Love Poetry (New York, 1984), p. 23.

3. ayin taḥat ayin
   gufekh taḥat gufi
   ha-kol patuaḥ
   ha-aron, sodekh, pi.
   An eye for an eye
   Your body with [for] mine
   Everything open:
   The Ark, your mystery
   My mouth.

   (Shirim, p. 207.)

4. “Hayi Shalom,” Shirim, p. 155.

5. Julian Lovelock, ed., Songs and Sonnets (Casebook Series). p. 23.

6. “Elohim Meraḥem al Yaldei ha-Gan,” Shirim, p. 247.

7. “A Pity—We Were a Good Invention,” in Yehuda Amichai: Selected Poems, trans. Assia Gutmann, Penguin Modern European Poets (1971), p. 25.

8. “Aval Aleinu le-Shabbeaḥ,” Shirim, p. 247.

9. John Donne, “The Bracelet,” Elegy 11.

10. Ve-Lo, p. 116. Based on Deuteronomy 6:5. “Massot Binyamin ha-Aḥaron mi-Tudelah,” Akhshav pp. 97-139 (hereafter “Binyamin”).

11. Ve-Lo, p. 106.

12. Ibid., p. 107.

13. Ibid.

14. “Asinu et Zeh,” Akhshav, p. 88.

15. Shirim, pp. 33-37.

16. “Shishah Shirim le-Tamar,” ibid., pp. 23-25.

17. “Shir ha-Rakefet,” ibid., p. 73.

18. “Ahavnu Kan,” ibid., pp. 42-59.

19. “Shel Malkhut She'avrah,” Akhshav, p. 87.

20. “Od Pa'am,” Shirim, p. 215.

21. “Binyamin,” Akhshav, p. 121.

22. “Shirei Akhziv,” ibid., p. 199.

23. Lionel Trilling, “Of This Time, Of This Place,” in Short Story Study, ed. A. S. Smith and W. Mason (Edward Arnold, 1961).

24. “Bi-Reḥov ha-Rav Kook,” Akhshav, p. 51.

25. “Tayeret,” ibid., p. 193.

26. “Rikkud Aḥar Hazot,” Ve-Lo, p. 25.

27. “Mar ve-Nimhar,” Akhshav, p. 26.

28. “Le-Daber al Shinuyim Hayah le-Daber Ahavah,” Me-Aḥorei, p. 95.

29. “Yom Hatunah,” ibid., p. 59.

30. “Tiyul le-Makom Yafeh,” ibid., p. 128.

31. “Shirei Buenos Aires,” Ve-Lo.

32. “Nisyonot le-Taer Guf,” ibid., p. 121.

33. Ha-Zeman, p. 63.

34. “Sha‘ar Akhziv,” Akhshav, pp. 194 ff.

35. “Shir Ahavah,” Me-aḥorei, p. 34.

36. “Bizmani, Bimkomekh,” Akhsav, p. 27.

37. “Shishah Shirim le-Tamar,”’ Shirim, p. 25.

38. See n. 28.

39. “Hi Amrah Lo la-Vo Od,” Me-Aḥorei, p. 113.

40. “Shir Politi,” Ha-Hesed, p. 31.

41. “Ani Yoshev le-Yad ha-Shulḥan,” ibid., p. 60.

42. “Akhziv 1973,” Me-Aḥorei, p. 138.

43. “Akedah,” ibid.

44. Ha-Zeman, p. 74.

45. “Air Hostess,” trans. with Tudor Parfitt, Great Tranquillity (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 27.

46. “Song,” trans. Ted Hughes, Amen (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 47.

47. “Tekhnikah shel Ahavah,” Ha-Hesed, p. 81.

48. “Ahavah Idialist,” Me-Aḥorei, p. 144.

49. “Straight from Your Prejudice.” trans. with Tudor Parfitt, Great Tranquillity, p. 77.

50. “Tayeret,” Akhshav, p. 193.

51. “Bittul ha-Shekhiḥah le-Zeman Kaḥzar,” Ha-Hesed, p. 28.

52. “Ani Ro'eh Penei Aḥerim Rabim,” ibid., p. 121.

Amichai's poems have been quoted from the following editions, all published by Schocken Books: Shirim 1948-1962 (1967); Akhshav ba-Ra'ash (hereafter cited as Akhshav) (1968); Ve-Lo al Menat Lizkor (hereafter Ve-Lo) (1971); Me-Aḥorei Kol Zeh Mistater Osher Gadol (hereafter Me-Aḥorei) (1974); Ha-Zeman (1977); Shalvah Gedolah (hereafter Shalvah) (1980); She'at ha-Hesed (hereafter Ha-Hesed) (1982). All translations are the author's own unless otherwise specified.