Three thousand years before anyone wrote a sonnet, an anonymous Egyptian poet picked up a reed pen and tried to say what love feels like from the inside. And he started with our most basic human needs — food — and then goes on to better things of life.
The result is one of the oldest love poems in existence, and one of the most quietly beautiful. It doesn't reach for the heavens or the eternal. It reaches for oil and honey, for linen and bread, for the small seal-ring on a finger. It says: this love is woven through everything sustaining and ordinary and good. And then, in its final lines, it makes a promise so simple it stops you cold — that all the days ahead will be food set before us. Dates and honey, bread and wine.
In this episode we read and explore this remarkable poem — a voice from 1200 BC that sounds, in the best possible way, like someone you know.
We share poems in good faith and with full credit. A Letter to the Poets →
This Love
Translated by Michael V. Fox, adapted by Robert Hass
We share poems in good faith and with full credit. A Letter to the Poets →