The Gift of Love from Romantic Poets like Shakespeare, Gershwin and Hovis Presley

I know lots of us find it difficult to put our feelings into words. So often you end up with clichés or simply something that doesn’t really express what we really feel.

Great poets have the ability to find images and combinations of words that get to the heart of our emotions and make a connection with us. Apart from Shakespeare who unfortunately has become a cliché, I particularly like e.e. cummings’ poem that begins ‘I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)’ and Khalil Gibran’s ‘Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.’

The best song lyrics do the same when they’re not rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’. I love the way Ira Gershwin expresses the way romantic love combines little things, memories and the deepest feelings:

‘The way you hold your knife / The way we danced til three / The way you changed my life / No, they can’t take that away from me.’ But then I am an old romantic.

Being romantic and funny is the hardest challenge. The late Hovis Presley had the Northern talent for veiling deep emotions with humour:

‘I rely on you like a camera needs a shutter / like a gambler needs a flutter / like a golfer needs a putter / like a buttered scone involves some butter / I rely on you’.

Even writers such as journalists or advertising copywriters, whose work is not likely to be remembered beyond the weekend, have to emulate the immortals by finding the right words and eschewing clichés if they want to make a connection with their readers. The greatest love of my working life has been writing copy but sadly I could never get near the genius of Ira Gershwin- or even Hovis Presley.

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