Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, February 14th, 2025.

Choosing a poem for Valentine's Day is, we'll call it a fraught decision. And yet, out of the myriad of wonderful, beautiful,

not so great love poems out there, I really have no regrets about today's selection.

It's by Wendell Berry, and it's called Loving You has taught me.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

Loving you has taught me the infinite longing of the self to be given away and the great

difficulty of that entire giving.

For in love to give is to receive, and then there is yet more to give, and others have been

born of our giving, to whom the self, greatened by gifts, must be given, and by that giving,

be increased, until self-burdened, the self, staggering upward

in years in fear, hope, love, and sorrow, imagines rising like a moon, a pale moon, risen in daylight

over the dark woods, the self, whose gift we and all others are,

the self that is by definition given.

This is not a saccharine love poem. This is a poem that deals with the very real intricacies of human love. It begins with a

direct address. Loving you has taught me. And then it becomes something else. And there are a few

other moments when that you is remembered. But this

reflection, true to the title, leads the speaker into loftier realms where they are learning

not only about the nature of love. the first few lines of the poem are very

theoretical. Loving you has taught me this general or theoretical thing about love.

Loving you has taught me the infinite longing of the self to be given away. But then the relationship

of these two people comes back to the four.

...