6 Love Letters By Famous Writers (And One Painter)

With Valentine’s Day approaching, I thought I would make a compilation of the best love letters by famous authors that I’ve come across.  Some of these have been excerpted for the sake of space, but there are links provided to either the full letters or the books where you can find them.  Enjoy!

Oscar Wilde

To Lord Alfred Douglas; these love letters were used in a libel trial against Wilde.  (Source, with other letters, here.)

My own Darling Boy,
I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends.
Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other.
Goodnight, dear. Ever yours,
Oscar

Pablo Neruda

Neruda, known for his love poems, even dedicated his book 100 Love Sonnets to his wife Matilde with a love letter.  (Book here.)

My beloved wife, I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver or crystal or cannonfire. But—with great humility—I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark; pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.

Pablo and Matilde

Edith Wharton

To W. Morton Fullerton, a young journalist that the writer had an affair with when she was 45; this letter comes after the end of the affair, reflecting back on their love and passion and the excruciatingly painful ending as Wharton experienced it.  (Excerpt; full letter here.)

I re-read your letters the other day, & I will not believe that the man who wrote them did not feel them, & did not know enough of the woman to whom they were written to trust to her love & courage, rather than leave her to this aching uncertainty.

What has brought about such a change? Oh, no matter what it is—only tell me!

I could take my life up again courageously if I only understood; for whatever those months were to you, to me they were a great gift, a wonderful enrichment; & still I rejoice & give thanks for them! You woke me from a long lethargy, a dull acquiescence in conventional restrictions, a needless self-effacement. If I was awkward & inarticulate it was because, literally, all one side of me was asleep.

I remember, that night we went to the “Figlia di Iorio,” that in the scene in the cave, where the Figlia sends him back to his mother (I forget all their names), & as he goes he turns & kisses her, & then she can’t let him go—I remember you turned to me & said laughing: “That’s something you don’t know anything about.”

Well! I did know, soon afterward; & if I still remained inexpressive, unwilling, “always drawing away,” as you said, it was because I discovered in myself such possibilities of feeling on that side that I feared, if I let you love me too much, I might lose courage when the time came to go away!—Surely you saw this, & understood how I dreaded to be to you, even for an instant, the “donna non più giovane” who clings & encumbers—how, situated as I was, I thought I could best show my love by refraining—& abstaining? You saw it was all because I loved you?

Ernest Hemingway

I’ve written before about how Hemingway’s larger-than-life machismo wasn’t immune to sentimental feelings towards those he loved, and this letter, written in his characteristic sparse style to his fourth wife, is one such example.  (“Pickle”?!) (Book of letters available here.)

Dearest Pickle:
I love you always and always will.  Now go to get our life started.  Don’t let anything bother you.  I’m sorry to be so sticky getting off.  Will be wonderful when I see you and will be truly faithful to you every minute I am away.  In my heart in my head and in my body.
Your loving husband
Mountain

John Steinbeck

Not really a love letter as much as a letter about love, written to his son when his son told him he was newly smitten.  (Full letter here.)

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind.

The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable.

The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

Frida Kahlo

When Frida Kahlo’s love letters to painter Diego Rivera came out a year or two ago, I jumped all over them.  For someone who made her living with the paintbrush rather than the pen, her love letters are more lyrical and contain more raw passion than most I’ve seen from writers.  They are all good, but this one is my favorite.  (Source, with handwritten letters in Spanish, here.)

My Diego:

Mirror of the night

Your eyes green swords inside my flesh. waves between our hands.

All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light. You were called AUXOCHROME the one who captures color. I CHROMOPHORE — the one who gives color.

You are all the combinations of numbers. life. My wish is to understand lines form shades movement. You fulfill and I receive. Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.

Frida and Diego

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Poetry is like Baseball and Drive-Bys

There are a lot of things I forget I like until someone forces them on me again.  For instance, I never buy raisins at the grocery store, but am always pleasantly surprised– each time– at how delicious they are whenever I eat them, and  I forget I enjoy going to live sporting events until I’m sitting in the stands with my friends beside me, nachos in hand, and heckling whichever player happens to be closest at the moment.  (Baseball is probably the best for this, since outfielders make such easy targets.)

“Hey you! Yeah, you! YOU SUCK!”

Poetry is like this for me.  I know, in a vague way, that I’ve enjoyed it in the past, but I never sit down and read poetry on my own, and lord knows I can’t write it.  (I’ve tried.  I’m horrible.)  Yet each and every time I’m forced to read poetry, usually as either a student or a teacher, I’m struck all over again how much I love it.  Since I’m both teaching poetry in a creative writing class for the first time this year and preparing my seniors for their AP lit exams in May, which includes a poetry section, I’ve been digging through old collections I have sitting on my shelves and asking for recommendations from poet friends.

And, unsurprisingly, I fall in love with almost every poem I decide to teach, and a lot that I decide not to teach for whatever reason.  Language and rhythm are things I already enjoy in well-written prose, so to see it unfurl and flourish tenfold in poems leaves me entranced and impressed.  They also have a way of getting to, and striking hard, certain feelings or emotions that otherwise seem nebulous and intangible, and they do it in such unexpected and fleeting ways, hitting you like a drive-by.  Simply put, poems are acrobatic literary feats, the best of which present parallel reflections of our world that are truer, rawer, and more articulate than what we consciously realize we’re experiencing.

Here are three poems that I’ve either discovered or re-discovered this semester and particularly enjoyed.  These poems quietly explore the visceral interplay of love, distance, and letting go, show how a single moment or experience can juxtapose death and life, and discover new ways of looking at loved ones whom we always thought we knew.

 

X. We Have Lost Even

 We have lost even this twilight.

No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped out of the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin between my hands.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in the sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I have said and feel you are far away?

The book fell that is always turned to at twilight
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.

-Pablo Neruda, Twenty Poems of Love and A Song of Despair

VEGLIA

Un’intera nottata

Buttato vicino
A un compagno
Massacrato
Con la bocca
Digrignata
Volta al plenilunio
Con la congestione
Delle sue mani
Penetrata
Nel mio silenzio
Ho scritto
Lettere piene d’amore

Non sono mai stato
Tanto
Attaccato alla vita.

-Guiseppe Ungaretti, published in Cima Quattro

[Vigil

A whole night

Crouched near
A companion
Massacred
With his gnashed mouth
Facing the full moon
With his congested hands
Penetrating my silence
I have written
Letters full of love

Never have I been
so
attached to life.]

Some Foreign Letters 

I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor’s Day,
where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes
of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way
to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones.
This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will
go to a bazaar at Bismarck’s house. And I
see you as a young girl in a good world still,
writing three generations before mine. I try
to reach into your page and breathe it back…
but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

This is the sack of time your death vacates.
How distant you are on your nickel-plated skates
in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past
me with your Count, while a military band
plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last,
a pleated old lady with a crooked hand.
Once you read Lohengrin and every goose
hung high while you practiced castle life
in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce
history to a guess. The Count had a wife.
You were the old maid aunt who lived with us.
Tonight I read how the winter howled around
the towers of Schloss Schwoebber, how the tedious
language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound
of the music of the rats tapping on the stone
floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone.

This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne,
Switzerland. sixty-nine years ago. I learn
your first climb up Mount San Salvatore;
this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes,
the yankee girl, the iron interior
of her sweet body. You let the Count choose
your next climb. You went together, armed
with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches
and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed
by the thick woods of briars and bushes,
nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo
up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated
with his coat off as you waded through top snow.
He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled
down on the train to catch a steamboat for home;
or other postmarks: Paris, Verona, Rome.

This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue.
I read how you walked on the Palatine among
the ruins of the palaces of the Caesars;
alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July.
When you were mine they wrapped you out of here
with your best hat over your face. I cried
because I was seventeen. I am older now.
I read how your student ticket admitted you
into the private chapel of the Vatican and how
you cheered with the others, as we used to do
on the Fourth of July. One Wednesday in November
you watched a balloon, painted like a silver ball,
float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors,
to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional
breeze. You worked your New England conscience out
beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout.

Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, you mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come
here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you,
you will tip your boot feet out of that hall,
rocking from its sour sound, out onto
the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall
and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by
to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

-Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters