Buddha and Love

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Poem by Yasmine Gooneratne on Buddha's wife Yasodhara, her despair when he renounced everything he had:

Yasodhara

Heroic, I have been told, was the manner of his going
breaking in a night the familiar, well-loved ties
gazing not weakly backward, but forsaking
at a stroke youth, and love, and pleasure, taking
a lonely road.

Once taken, the step has proved the right one, after all
of his great virtue every man has heard.
Even in the days and nights before our parting
the reluctant mouth
the hesitating hand I wondered at
and the averted eyes
had begun to assume what I can recognise
now to have been a stranger's
polite perfunctoriness.

Familiar rutted bark grew smooth as metal
and coldly doffed its helpless parasite:
so did our marriage end, civilly settle
the issues long before that summer night
when the gates opened to his quiet word.
Now absence confirms
our estrangement.

Detachment should, according to his rule,
bring me through discipline at last where cool
knowledge of self reveals his fine and fair
new kingdom of the mind-- but can i follow where
he goes when, in the numb
silence of the night the child cries
choking into the pillow, or in sleep
turning, sucks his thumb?

Alone with me, in a deserted city
gay once with lights and garlands woven with love,
Discipline takes the place that once was his
and though, like his, its voice forbids self-pity
compelling self-control,
I have nothing for this new husband but pretence.

Betrayed by life into a loveless chamber
O may my twitching hands that touch and pleasure nothing,
my shaken gaze
leaping from emptiness to emptiness
and my body, shriveling quietly beside the aching cavern
where my soul stood,
never reveal that there has taken place
an act of violence.

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Victoria - Knut Hamsun

What, then, is love? A wind whispering among the roses—no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. A danse macabre in which even the oldest and frailest hearts are obliged to join. It is like the marguerite which opens wide as night draws on, and like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.
Such is love.
It can ruin a man, raise him up again, then brand him anew. Such is its fickleness it can favour me today, tomorrow you, tomorrow night a stranger. But such also is its constancy it can hold fast like an inviolable seal, can blaze unquenched until the hour of death. What, then, is the nature of love?
Ah, love is a summer night with stars in the heavens and fragrance on earth. But why does it cause the young man to follow secret paths, the old man to stand on tiptoe in his lonely chamber? Alas, it is love which turns the human heart into a fungus garden, a lush and shameless garden wherein grow mysterious, immodest toadstools.
Such is the nature of love.
No, no, it is something different again, like nothing else in the world. It visits earth on a night in spring when a young man sees two eyes, two eyes. He gazes, he sees. He kisses a mouth, and it feels as though two lights have met in his heart, a sun that flashes at a star. He falls in her arms, and for him the whole world becomes silent and invisible.
Love was God’s first word, the first thought that sailed across his mind. He said, Let there be light, and there was love. And every thing that he had made was very good, and nothing thereof did he wish unmade again. And love was creation’s source, creation’s ruler; but all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.