Many psychoanalytically informed scholars in the university today work the borderland between the personal and the public. The love poem printed here chronicles an intimate evening to morning. Perhaps because I am enmeshed in this historical moment, it is an intimacy played out on the stage of a national holiday of war and independence. The literary matrix suggests that intimacy and public lives have been intertwined elsewhere and at other times. The prideful love of Cleopatra for Antony ended with the fall of the arch of ranged empire, a tragedy and a triumph. Less complexly, Penelope loyally undid her weaving each night that she might save herself for Ulysses, fighting for Helen in the Trojan War. In the modern era, the cultures of the West have played out large myths on a small scale. Irony and ambivalence are at work here, as they are in many loves today that ricochet between the diverse fantasies of culture and the individual.

Public and private losses and separations scream from the center Can one ever read about the center anymore without thinking of William Butler Yeats' line; “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”? Though I am optimistic about intimacy, I wrote the poem several years ago. I read it today through the lens of the morning headlines. As I write this commentary, a quarter million American men and women are in the Middle East in preparation for a war with Iraq. The poem's collation of war and love is embossed on the page in a new way. Yet it seems to me it is, after all, a love poem about the creation of communal myths of national identity that resolve into the personal. And so, from both perspectives, it is a poem that ends with “gulls/foraging/at day's/break.”

Michael Slevin is a Ph.D. candidate in British literature at George Washington University and an academic associate at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. Sheri A. Hunt, M.D., who edits this column, is a candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in both the adult and child training programs. A published poet and member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes reader comments and suggestions at .