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While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am.
Reading these poems, which were written between 1939 and 1976, I realized that Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between who I ought to be and who I am (which leads to the inevitable awkward moment in so many of Ditlevsen’s poems).
Take, for instance, “The Eternal Three,” where love is not the exalted union of two souls; rather, one is always in love with the wrong person. Or “Self-Portrait 1,” where Ditlevsen lists what she can and cannot do: “I cannot: cook / pull off a hat / entertain company … I can: be alone / do the dishes / read books.” Or “Warning”: where the heart “can only dream, not yearn / for what exists in light of day.” In these poems there is so often a longing for something that is not, something that was, something that could be.
Or, in “There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die”: “You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby, / and you got what you wanted but were still alone.” Fulfilling the dream of family doesn’t bring an end to loneliness, it doesn’t lead to what you thought it would. Instead, you’re split in two—you are now the girl from before, the girl who still lives and cannot die—and the woman who is “left roaming a world of stone.”
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