"St. Valentine" by Metzinger‘Enamoured’: A Love Poem by Margaret Coats The Society February 22, 2025 Love Poems, Poetry 25 Comments . Enamoured String me a strand of pure white pearls supernal, Warming my throat as quivering fingers do, Roughened but figuring tenderness eternal, My love is wholly kind, old, young, and true. Swing me sweet swirls of redolent effervescence From blossoming branches of heady magnolia sprung, Dewy ambrosia of long continued presence, My love is wholly true, kind, old, and young. Cling to me, reassuringly collecting Our whirl of delights conserved a thousandfold, Savoring fruits of fervor and reflecting, My love is wholly young, kind, true, and old. Sing me resounding rhapsody sforzando, A skillful skirl of fluency refined, Combined with purling murmuring scherzando, My love is wholly old, young, true, and kind. Bring me to see the beatific vision, The universe in cordial order slowly Atwirl in perfect luminous precision, My love is kind, old, young, and true and holy. . sforzando: forcefully scherzando: playfully . . Margaret Coats lives in California. She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. She has retired from a career of teaching literature, languages, and writing that included considerable work in homeschooling for her own family and others. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. 25 Responses Roy Eugene Peterson February 22, 2025 I am “enamored” with the skillful word dexterity in this melodious poem with the order of the last line alternating while continuing the beautiful rhyming scheme. The cherry on the top was changing “wholly” to “holy” in the last line of the last verse. This is truly a poem composed by a brilliantly inspired intellect. Reply Margaret Coats February 24, 2025 Thank you, Roy! True, holy love is the best inspiration, as many poets before us have thought and said. Reply Paul A. Freeman February 22, 2025 Where to start? Each stanza involves a sense – touch, smell, touch, sound, taste – and begins with an -ing verb + ‘me’, that specifically leads into the sense that is the topic of the verse. The fourth line endings of the verses, using the reordered adjectives ‘kind’, ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘true’ and ‘holy/wholly’, each rhyming with the endings of the second lines, is new to me but very effective. And the language. As sophisticated as the mechanics of the poem, the language brings the vivid imagery to life – and occasionally sends me scurrying (metaphorically) for the dictionary. Great stuff, Margaret. One I’ll be perusing a few times, I imagine. Reply Margaret Coats February 24, 2025 Thank you, Paul, for reading carefully and noticing so much. And especially for saying that with all the mechanics to peruse, the poem is vivid–indeed, full of life, as love should be. By the way, I regard discovery of complex mechanics a great compliment. Back in my days as a science student, mechanics was my favorite part of physics because of its complicated and orderly beauty. Reply Paul A. Freeman February 25, 2025 Funnily enough, your poem appeared just after I finished writing, for a competition, a poem / song based on Groucho Marx’s ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it!’ which has an intricate rhyme scheme and variously-lengthed lines. Not my usual fare, at all. I’ll submit it to the SCP if it isn’t among the competition winners, though it may be a little left of the acceptance line, even though it’s satire. Anyhow, you’ll get to see it somehow. Margaret Coats February 25, 2025 Look forward to it! Cynthia Erlandson February 22, 2025 I agree with Roy and Paul — there are so many brilliant devices and effects in this poem. I, also, loved the re-arrangement of each verse’s final line, as well as the initial “ing” words, and the arrangement of the stanzas by senses, which Paul pointed out. I was also delighted by your “ando” words (and other unusual vocabulary). Reply Geoffrey Smagacz February 23, 2025 It’s interesting how you alternate feminine and masculine rhymes in the first four stanzas, which works well in your love poem. The last stanza is different as love elevates to the spiritual realm. Reply Margaret Coats February 27, 2025 Geoffey, thanks for noticing this. Let me say more about it in a fuller answer using a full-width box below! Margaret Coats February 25, 2025 Thank you, Cynthia! The “ando” words for the sound-and-hearing stanza are Italian musical terms, telling how to perform a piece. I know a pianist-poet who uses terms from this vast vocabulary as an epigraph of sorts to most of his poems. Why not, then, actually put them in the poem, especially when “sforZANdo” and “scherZANdo” rhyme perfectly, considering placement of the accent, as “FORCEfully” and “PLAYfully,” do not. Love your appreciation! Reply Joseph S. Salemi February 22, 2025 The poem is a beautiful piece, and as Paul points out, it is truly synaesthetic in its deliberate references to the five senses. In fact, the poem begins and develops with language that strongly suggests the speaker’s love (both emotional and carnal) for a spouse or a lover, but ends with an unambiguous spiritual mention of the beatific vision, and the insertion of the word “holy” in the repetend, with deliberate word-play on the word “wholly.” The poem is more complex than the title “Enamoured’ suggests. There are many instances of female saints who were “espoused” to Jesus in a union that was analogous to actual marriage (St. Catherine De’ Ricci is a famous example, and I will publish a poem on her soon here at the SCP). But while this poem might be read in that metaphorical way, I think it more likely that the speaker is describing a deep relationship with a human spouse, and how the joys of that relationship have been crucial in helping the speaker to holiness and the eventual beatific vision. Their marriage has been sacramental, and all of its fleshly delights have been a foreshadowing of heavenly bliss. One minor point: I think the word “A-twirl” needs its hyphen, since this is usually the case with the old /a-/ present participles that substitute for the regular /-ing/ forms. And Margaret’s use of the older form is a touch of great skill here, because she clearly wants to maintain the /-ing/ sound for the initial word in each quatrain, and for the several other instances throughout the poem where the /-ing/ form is employed (warming, quivering. blossoming, savoring, purling, etc.) Reply Margaret Coats February 25, 2025 Joseph, thanks very much for seeing so deeply into the complexity of the poem. It starts with a scene my husband and I often experience, with his helping to fasten the clasp of a necklace. But from there I consider love in many ways. As you have sometimes said, we are incarnational beings, to whom love must manifest itself in body and spirit. I’m glad you brought up the female saints espoused to Christ, for this thoroughly spiritual love has its bodily manifestations as well (receiving a ring, for instance). It is sacramental not in domestic graces that assist man and wife to achieve the beatific vision, but in reception of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. I look forward to your poem on Catherine de’ Ricci. The five characteristics of love correspond to the senses, but not entirely. And thus the love spoken of here could be, as well as that of a spouse, the highly significant love of others such as siblings or friends. In writing this, I thought of the woman I call my best friend, and even of a male doctor (the relationship is not at all social but professional) who helped recently to define the simultaneous contrast of “young” and “old” by saying that we are “not old friends, but friends of many years.” This poem may have more in it than any other I’ve written of what is beyond putting into words–even though it is also a valentine for Bruce. I value as well your notice of how sounds function. Although I was not thinking of it, this poem has relatively few /s/ plurals–and they’re symmetrically distributed, with two each in the first three stanzas, but none in the last two stanzas. Those two deal with the more “intellectual” senses of hearing and sight, making greater precision (even sonic) appropriate. Reply Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Joe, thanks for your compliment on the use of “atwirl.” I’ve spent a while investigating whether it needs a hyphen, and the consensus seems to be that it does not. “A-twirling” does need the hyphen, and I think I’ve agreed with you before about that. But “atwirl” (and “atwitter”) with no hyphen are acceptable as meaning “twirling” and “twittering.” Hard for me to tell precisely why, but it may be that with the /-ing/ in place, the preceding /a-/ is understood to mean “at,” Reply Warren Bonham February 22, 2025 I’ve never seen anything like this one. You continue to set the bar ever higher. Reply Margaret Coats February 26, 2025 Thanks, Warren. Let’s continue going for our best each time. Virtue is more in the effort than in the artistic achievement! Reply Margaret Coats February 23, 2025 I delay answering comments on this poem out of grief at the outrage treated by Brian Yapko in a post above. Please be assured of my appreciation, commentors. I will make a due response later. Reply Julian D. Woodruff February 23, 2025 A classic, Margaret! All the present participles give it a languid, soft feeling. I’m wondering if you have a melody in mind for it. There are too many instances of skillful rhyme, assonance, and alliteration to mention, within and between lines, and between stanzas as well, but in addition to the wholly-holy wordplay, I liked the quieter one on pearl-purl. Also, the appearance of “sprung” to end Ii.2 relates most effectively to the family of stanza openings. And most importantly, you’ve got a “string” of images to set scribblers back to school—“heady” indeed. One further thing: I love it that you saved enjambment for the last stanza, where it underlines the stately spin of God’s time. Reply Margaret Coats February 27, 2025 Thank you so very much, Julian! Your delightful reading has noticed features that escaped me, such as the special meanings of “sprung,” “string,” and “heady,” and how the enjambment works in the last stanza. “The stately spin of God’s time” is a marvelous way to describe the motion of the created universe. I’m honored by your critical acumen. I did, of course, think of you when I decided to use the Italian musical terms. Reply James Bontrager February 27, 2025 I love the vivid imagery!! The seeming contradiction of “my love” being simultaneously “old” and “young” is enchanting. Reply Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Thanks, James. There are many ways to try to explain that contradiction. Ever freshly exciting, and comfortably familiar at the same time (for example). Love in its many manifestations is simply full of surprises! Reply Yael February 28, 2025 What I really love about your exquisitely and beautifully crafted love poem Margaret, is that it seems to consider love more from an agape perspective rather than the usual carnal eros angle. Even though it directly addresses all the bodily senses, devoting a stanza to each one, it does so without coming across in a steamy and carnally arousing manner. Not that there is anything wrong with overt sexual passion in a love poem, but I find it refreshing to read a love poem which addresses the topic from a higher intellectual and more spiritual plane. Reply Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Thank you, Yael! Touching on both agape and eros does true justice to love. Getting the perspective just right is a struggle for any poet who tries to achieve it, and of course for many lovers who develop their love through years of human imperfection and occasional failure. I’m honored that this poetic effort of mine is refreshing to you! Reply Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Geoffrey, thanks again for your observation above, about line endings alternating masculine and feminine in four stanzas, becoming different in the last stanza where the perspective changes to the spiritual. Yes, the alternation between distinct opposites is appropriate for a love poem as such, though we could say that the love of friendship between persons of the same sex also encompasses such different personalities that they are opposite while being similar. That is true of both non-sexual friendships I mentioned above to Joseph Salemi. But your observation could go on to wonder about all line endings being feminine in the final stanza–which has relevance itself when we think of God as the subject or object of human love. The Renaissance poet Henry Constable in his Spiritual Sonnets described human love of God as feminine, because in his era it was fine to say that a female is a lower being than a male, and ought to be submissive. This is true of human beings as creatures of God, and more so as sinners against Him. Constable’s sequence of sonnets concludes with several on Mary Magdalen, the “woman who was a sinner.” He even dares to say that his (admittedly male) soul must be, in relation to God, “like a woman spouse.” These poems remained in manuscript for centuries, and when most of them were published in the 19th century, the final two sonnets were so troublesome that the publishers omitted them. They were not published–and Constable’s work was read incomplete–until the mid-20th century. My exclusively feminine endings in the final stanza don’t say nearly as much as Constable did, so you are right to find them merely different than those in the other stanzas. But the conventional terms “masculine” and “feminine” can suggest the greater difference between sensual and spiritual realms! Reply Laura Deagon March 4, 2025 kind, old, young, and true I didn’t notice the order of these words at first, but when I went back to re-read this poem, as I often have to do, not being too familiar with the flow of some poetry, it caught my eye and I found it very playful. Reply Margaret Coats March 5, 2025 Thanks, Laura. It is playful, not a predetermined pattern. But I did keep “holy” for last and most important, just like the sense of sight, which is greater because of the great quantity of information and understanding we get from it. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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Roy Eugene Peterson February 22, 2025 I am “enamored” with the skillful word dexterity in this melodious poem with the order of the last line alternating while continuing the beautiful rhyming scheme. The cherry on the top was changing “wholly” to “holy” in the last line of the last verse. This is truly a poem composed by a brilliantly inspired intellect. Reply
Margaret Coats February 24, 2025 Thank you, Roy! True, holy love is the best inspiration, as many poets before us have thought and said. Reply
Paul A. Freeman February 22, 2025 Where to start? Each stanza involves a sense – touch, smell, touch, sound, taste – and begins with an -ing verb + ‘me’, that specifically leads into the sense that is the topic of the verse. The fourth line endings of the verses, using the reordered adjectives ‘kind’, ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘true’ and ‘holy/wholly’, each rhyming with the endings of the second lines, is new to me but very effective. And the language. As sophisticated as the mechanics of the poem, the language brings the vivid imagery to life – and occasionally sends me scurrying (metaphorically) for the dictionary. Great stuff, Margaret. One I’ll be perusing a few times, I imagine. Reply
Margaret Coats February 24, 2025 Thank you, Paul, for reading carefully and noticing so much. And especially for saying that with all the mechanics to peruse, the poem is vivid–indeed, full of life, as love should be. By the way, I regard discovery of complex mechanics a great compliment. Back in my days as a science student, mechanics was my favorite part of physics because of its complicated and orderly beauty. Reply
Paul A. Freeman February 25, 2025 Funnily enough, your poem appeared just after I finished writing, for a competition, a poem / song based on Groucho Marx’s ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it!’ which has an intricate rhyme scheme and variously-lengthed lines. Not my usual fare, at all. I’ll submit it to the SCP if it isn’t among the competition winners, though it may be a little left of the acceptance line, even though it’s satire. Anyhow, you’ll get to see it somehow.
Cynthia Erlandson February 22, 2025 I agree with Roy and Paul — there are so many brilliant devices and effects in this poem. I, also, loved the re-arrangement of each verse’s final line, as well as the initial “ing” words, and the arrangement of the stanzas by senses, which Paul pointed out. I was also delighted by your “ando” words (and other unusual vocabulary). Reply
Geoffrey Smagacz February 23, 2025 It’s interesting how you alternate feminine and masculine rhymes in the first four stanzas, which works well in your love poem. The last stanza is different as love elevates to the spiritual realm. Reply
Margaret Coats February 27, 2025 Geoffey, thanks for noticing this. Let me say more about it in a fuller answer using a full-width box below!
Margaret Coats February 25, 2025 Thank you, Cynthia! The “ando” words for the sound-and-hearing stanza are Italian musical terms, telling how to perform a piece. I know a pianist-poet who uses terms from this vast vocabulary as an epigraph of sorts to most of his poems. Why not, then, actually put them in the poem, especially when “sforZANdo” and “scherZANdo” rhyme perfectly, considering placement of the accent, as “FORCEfully” and “PLAYfully,” do not. Love your appreciation! Reply
Joseph S. Salemi February 22, 2025 The poem is a beautiful piece, and as Paul points out, it is truly synaesthetic in its deliberate references to the five senses. In fact, the poem begins and develops with language that strongly suggests the speaker’s love (both emotional and carnal) for a spouse or a lover, but ends with an unambiguous spiritual mention of the beatific vision, and the insertion of the word “holy” in the repetend, with deliberate word-play on the word “wholly.” The poem is more complex than the title “Enamoured’ suggests. There are many instances of female saints who were “espoused” to Jesus in a union that was analogous to actual marriage (St. Catherine De’ Ricci is a famous example, and I will publish a poem on her soon here at the SCP). But while this poem might be read in that metaphorical way, I think it more likely that the speaker is describing a deep relationship with a human spouse, and how the joys of that relationship have been crucial in helping the speaker to holiness and the eventual beatific vision. Their marriage has been sacramental, and all of its fleshly delights have been a foreshadowing of heavenly bliss. One minor point: I think the word “A-twirl” needs its hyphen, since this is usually the case with the old /a-/ present participles that substitute for the regular /-ing/ forms. And Margaret’s use of the older form is a touch of great skill here, because she clearly wants to maintain the /-ing/ sound for the initial word in each quatrain, and for the several other instances throughout the poem where the /-ing/ form is employed (warming, quivering. blossoming, savoring, purling, etc.) Reply
Margaret Coats February 25, 2025 Joseph, thanks very much for seeing so deeply into the complexity of the poem. It starts with a scene my husband and I often experience, with his helping to fasten the clasp of a necklace. But from there I consider love in many ways. As you have sometimes said, we are incarnational beings, to whom love must manifest itself in body and spirit. I’m glad you brought up the female saints espoused to Christ, for this thoroughly spiritual love has its bodily manifestations as well (receiving a ring, for instance). It is sacramental not in domestic graces that assist man and wife to achieve the beatific vision, but in reception of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. I look forward to your poem on Catherine de’ Ricci. The five characteristics of love correspond to the senses, but not entirely. And thus the love spoken of here could be, as well as that of a spouse, the highly significant love of others such as siblings or friends. In writing this, I thought of the woman I call my best friend, and even of a male doctor (the relationship is not at all social but professional) who helped recently to define the simultaneous contrast of “young” and “old” by saying that we are “not old friends, but friends of many years.” This poem may have more in it than any other I’ve written of what is beyond putting into words–even though it is also a valentine for Bruce. I value as well your notice of how sounds function. Although I was not thinking of it, this poem has relatively few /s/ plurals–and they’re symmetrically distributed, with two each in the first three stanzas, but none in the last two stanzas. Those two deal with the more “intellectual” senses of hearing and sight, making greater precision (even sonic) appropriate. Reply
Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Joe, thanks for your compliment on the use of “atwirl.” I’ve spent a while investigating whether it needs a hyphen, and the consensus seems to be that it does not. “A-twirling” does need the hyphen, and I think I’ve agreed with you before about that. But “atwirl” (and “atwitter”) with no hyphen are acceptable as meaning “twirling” and “twittering.” Hard for me to tell precisely why, but it may be that with the /-ing/ in place, the preceding /a-/ is understood to mean “at,” Reply
Warren Bonham February 22, 2025 I’ve never seen anything like this one. You continue to set the bar ever higher. Reply
Margaret Coats February 26, 2025 Thanks, Warren. Let’s continue going for our best each time. Virtue is more in the effort than in the artistic achievement! Reply
Margaret Coats February 23, 2025 I delay answering comments on this poem out of grief at the outrage treated by Brian Yapko in a post above. Please be assured of my appreciation, commentors. I will make a due response later. Reply
Julian D. Woodruff February 23, 2025 A classic, Margaret! All the present participles give it a languid, soft feeling. I’m wondering if you have a melody in mind for it. There are too many instances of skillful rhyme, assonance, and alliteration to mention, within and between lines, and between stanzas as well, but in addition to the wholly-holy wordplay, I liked the quieter one on pearl-purl. Also, the appearance of “sprung” to end Ii.2 relates most effectively to the family of stanza openings. And most importantly, you’ve got a “string” of images to set scribblers back to school—“heady” indeed. One further thing: I love it that you saved enjambment for the last stanza, where it underlines the stately spin of God’s time. Reply
Margaret Coats February 27, 2025 Thank you so very much, Julian! Your delightful reading has noticed features that escaped me, such as the special meanings of “sprung,” “string,” and “heady,” and how the enjambment works in the last stanza. “The stately spin of God’s time” is a marvelous way to describe the motion of the created universe. I’m honored by your critical acumen. I did, of course, think of you when I decided to use the Italian musical terms. Reply
James Bontrager February 27, 2025 I love the vivid imagery!! The seeming contradiction of “my love” being simultaneously “old” and “young” is enchanting. Reply
Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Thanks, James. There are many ways to try to explain that contradiction. Ever freshly exciting, and comfortably familiar at the same time (for example). Love in its many manifestations is simply full of surprises! Reply
Yael February 28, 2025 What I really love about your exquisitely and beautifully crafted love poem Margaret, is that it seems to consider love more from an agape perspective rather than the usual carnal eros angle. Even though it directly addresses all the bodily senses, devoting a stanza to each one, it does so without coming across in a steamy and carnally arousing manner. Not that there is anything wrong with overt sexual passion in a love poem, but I find it refreshing to read a love poem which addresses the topic from a higher intellectual and more spiritual plane. Reply
Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Thank you, Yael! Touching on both agape and eros does true justice to love. Getting the perspective just right is a struggle for any poet who tries to achieve it, and of course for many lovers who develop their love through years of human imperfection and occasional failure. I’m honored that this poetic effort of mine is refreshing to you! Reply
Margaret Coats February 28, 2025 Geoffrey, thanks again for your observation above, about line endings alternating masculine and feminine in four stanzas, becoming different in the last stanza where the perspective changes to the spiritual. Yes, the alternation between distinct opposites is appropriate for a love poem as such, though we could say that the love of friendship between persons of the same sex also encompasses such different personalities that they are opposite while being similar. That is true of both non-sexual friendships I mentioned above to Joseph Salemi. But your observation could go on to wonder about all line endings being feminine in the final stanza–which has relevance itself when we think of God as the subject or object of human love. The Renaissance poet Henry Constable in his Spiritual Sonnets described human love of God as feminine, because in his era it was fine to say that a female is a lower being than a male, and ought to be submissive. This is true of human beings as creatures of God, and more so as sinners against Him. Constable’s sequence of sonnets concludes with several on Mary Magdalen, the “woman who was a sinner.” He even dares to say that his (admittedly male) soul must be, in relation to God, “like a woman spouse.” These poems remained in manuscript for centuries, and when most of them were published in the 19th century, the final two sonnets were so troublesome that the publishers omitted them. They were not published–and Constable’s work was read incomplete–until the mid-20th century. My exclusively feminine endings in the final stanza don’t say nearly as much as Constable did, so you are right to find them merely different than those in the other stanzas. But the conventional terms “masculine” and “feminine” can suggest the greater difference between sensual and spiritual realms! Reply
Laura Deagon March 4, 2025 kind, old, young, and true I didn’t notice the order of these words at first, but when I went back to re-read this poem, as I often have to do, not being too familiar with the flow of some poetry, it caught my eye and I found it very playful. Reply
Margaret Coats March 5, 2025 Thanks, Laura. It is playful, not a predetermined pattern. But I did keep “holy” for last and most important, just like the sense of sight, which is greater because of the great quantity of information and understanding we get from it. Reply
