I live, I die: I burn and I also drown.
I'm utterly hot and all I feel is cold.
Life is too soft and too hard for me to hold;
my joy and my heavy burden are mixed in one.
The opening lines of this sonnet—arguably the most well-known lines of verse Labe ever composed—can be found an expression of a central thematic component pervading much of the rest of her poetry. The passionate swings between extremes and the investment of pain and death as inextricable components of love all point to an obsessive aesthetic that links romance with walking on the edge of insanity.
Do you have so little memory of me
that your promises are broken so easily?
How do you dare abuse me? How could you wrong
one who has stayed so loyal, for so long?
The poet here seems to come perilously close to the edge to the point of stepping over the line into madness. The rest of the poem is spoken in a same tone of frenzy that mixes longing with exasperation with paranoia with hatred with apology. It is the portrait of a woman abandoned. Or, more precise, a woman currently alone who cannot help but fear that she has been abandoned that her lover is never coming back.
Ever since I felt cruel Love first poison me
with the first of many fires in my chest,
with a sacred flame that never lets me rest,
for one single day He has not let me be.
Passion is a term often applied to the verse of Labe. Passion is the positive flip side of the same emotion that often, under different circumstances, is termed “hysterical.” Let there be no doubt that these lines—and even more the ones above—are indicative of a hysteria, but manifested in the form of poetry and especially in the precise construction of a sonnet, it becomes far less easy to disfigure such passion as simple histrionics. The image of love as something that is also poison is another iconic image revealing the thematic obsession of the poet.
Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss
me again, with your richest, most succulent
kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant
to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss
from my love-hot coals.
Naturally with a writer of such passion, it would be a mistake to assume that the only emotions making it into the immortality of the written word would be the pain and heartache of love. Love may be a poison capable of burning hot before leaving one cold, but it is also that flame capable of igniting the fire within the chest. Labe’s verse is not just the bemoaning of lost love and the drama of feeling abandoned, it is also the expression of desire felt and passion returned in kind.
