An Eternal Fixation.

Today I saw the woman I’ve mentioned a few times before on this blog, the one I’ve referred to as ‘the most beautiful woman I ever met.’

I’ve seen her a few times across the years and managed to meet each encounter with composed resignation. Today I felt unusually sad. I was reminded of the fact that she it was who ignited my fondness for a popular Irish ballad. It’s one I've posted here before, but I’ll post it again in case anybody’s interested (and I won’t be offended if nobody is.) The poetry is a compound of the sublime, the unsophisticated, and the slightly silly, but the narrative bears some small resemblance to my own experience:

  

It also occurred to me that writers can be a little prone to fixations with that one bright light which sucks them in, caresses them with a firm but demure eye, and then holds them with their walk, their personality, their demeanour, and their lightness of being – all the things which make a woman beautiful whether she is pretty or not. And if she adds that quality into the mix, well…

Kavanagh had his Hilda, Yeats his Maud, Dickens his Ellen, and TS Eliot even married his fixation when he was sixty eight and she was only thirty. (It takes a woman’s particular brand of courage to do that, I think.)

And then my own minor ditty flowed quickly and remorselessly into my head. It’s embarrassingly syrupy, but I do admit to there being an embarrassingly syrupy side to my nature, a side which occasionally – though not often, thankfully – finds egress when I’m not frowning and staring steely eyed at people I dislike.

Do kiss me once before I die

Before the redd’ning of the sky

Before the final lullaby

Before the dark'ning of my eye

Before the race of life is run

Before the setting of the sun

Before the battle’s lost and won

Before my deeds come all undone

But no, belay that trifling plea

Forgive the shameful symmetry

For ladies fair must ever be

In concord with their honesty

 

Edited to add later

 

It's a matter of interest, albeit minor I suppose, that just one week after writing this the woman to whom it referred left my orbit in the most decisive way possible and shut the door behind her. I had no idea it was going to happen and the devastation I felt was as deep as it was irrational.