Scott Peddie

Some poems survive because they tell the truth before we are ready to admit it. Michael Drayton’s “The Parting”, better known by its first line, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”, is one of those poems. It stages the end of a relationship with startling poise. The speaker sounds resolved, even relieved. Then, line by line, that certainty begins to tremble. Drayton, an English poet who lived from 1563 to 1631, belonged to the same literary age as Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser,...

Rumi’s famous reflection on lovers meeting is one of the most poignant lines you will ever read. It seems, at first, to speak of romance: the ache of searching, the hope of recognition, the strange feeling that another person has been missing from one’s life before they ever arrived. Yet the quote reaches further than romance. It asks whether the person we seek is truly outside us, or whether the longing itself points back to something already present within. “The minute I heard my first love...

Some sentences feel less like statements and more like doors to a greater degree of insight. Mahmoud Darwish’s line is one of them: “I don’t want you to be mine. I want you to be free, and still choose to stay with me.” It is tender, but not soft in the easy sense. It asks something difficult of us. It asks us to imagine a relationship without possession at its centre. It suggests that being chosen means more when the other person has room to leave, change, breathe, and still return. Many...