Love in the Open Hand

Love in the open hand

I remember discovering Edna St. Vincent Millay in high school, reading sonnet after sonnet with the thrill of discovery that comes when you find a poet who speaks what you hadn’t realized you felt or wanted or dreaded or hoped. It was the tender, tentative season of first boyfriends and the first flickerings of high romantic longings. The sentimentalities of popular songs of the period didn’t last too long, though some of them still have nostalgic appeal. But a few lines have lingered over the decades, serving new purposes and reminding me of something about love I don’t want to forget. These are among them–the final quatrain and couplet of one of Millay’s many musings about love’s hopes and disappointments:

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,

Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,

As one would bring you cowslips in a hat

Swung from the hand or apples in her skirt

I bring you, calling out as children do,

“Look what I have! And these are all for you!”

They express youthful idealism, no doubt, but I have been glad for the way that “open hand” has reminded me from time to time to offer love—spousal, parental, filial, in friendship or in the wide circles where kindness is needed—without strings attached. It may, of course, be nearly impossible to give love without hope of reward or reciprocation. It may not even be healthy or wise. But there is in those words an encouragement to give and let go, to give freely and generously and without constraint that is valuable to direct our imaginations toward.

The reference to children that ends the poem offers a similarly valuable reminder of what “becoming like a little child” might look like. There is glee in bringing a gift to the beloved, and simplicity, and the wholeness of nothing withheld in a glad moment of giving. I have known people who have this kind of open-heartedness about them—who make you feel in the moment you spend with them that you matter more than anyone else right then. With no forsaking of their more enduring fidelities, these sweet folks seem utterly confident that there is enough love to go around—that love can even, in a sense, be “squandered,” held in the open hand where it might be lifted and dispersed by a gust of wind or spill to the ground. And that would be okay, too.

Because there is enough. Perhaps that’s the encouragement I find in the image of “love in the open hand.” Love circulates and flows. It frees and is free. Freely given, it takes root in new hearts. We don’t have to know where it all goes. We just have to let it.