by John Wareham, guest blogger and author of Sonnets for Sinners.

Excerpted from:

SONNETS FOR SINNERS: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love,
by John Wareham
Published by Welcome Rain, New York.
Copyright © 2010 by John Wareham

The ubiquity of illicit love surely proves that marriage is like a castle under siege; all those the outside are trying to get in, and all those on the inside are trying to get out. But if the prime goal of those so anxiously seeking entry to the castle is  lifetime partnership, then no wonder so many unions fail. With more time and effort, these same people might make a better match—and, given the work that marriage takes, a more compatible one, too. Maybe that’s why James Taylor hit a nerve with his song, “It’s sad to belong to someone else when the right one comes along.” Unfortunately, such a latecomer often proves all too tempting; an irresistible focus of love and lust within a thrilling aura of secrecy. Partakers become accomplices in the crime of seeking grander thrills than marriage can provide.  Then the “brevity factor” comes into play: the moments that illicit lovers spend together are so fleeting that they seldom become truly familiar, allowing their intense, love-fevered illusions to remain intact for months, years, or even lifetimes. A grand tour of illicit love, conducted in my anthology of forty-nine epiphanic sonnets,  guides us through six typical stages.

1. Attraction. Sonnets for Sinners opens with fourteen lines distilled from the heartfelt emails of Governor Mark Sanford, who, standing in a crowded room experienced a Some Enchanted Evening moment. “My heart cries out for you,” he wrote, “and an even deeper connection to your soul / I have crossed lines and I love you.” Well, the governor certainly crossed some lines, but whether he fell in love with the woman known as Maria might be moot, for as Voltaire warned, “If you think you love your mistress for herself, you are mistaken.”  Right—for as several ultimately regretful sinning sonneteers make clear, upon gazing into the eyes of an imagined soul mate, illicit lovers, like Narcissus, mostly romance their own reflections.
2. Fever. Chandler Haste shares hard-won insights about the drug induced fever of illicit love: “You blow me stardust from your heart / and speed the pulsing of my being.” Indeed: mind and heart collude in a struggle that blends infatuation, enchantment, and lust into a dangerous fever. No passion is so serious, no sickness so potent. It fells princes, presidents, potentates, and paupers. Doctors can’t quell it. Analysts can’t shrink it. Priests can’t exorcise it. The police cannot imprison it. A spouse cannot snuff it. Young men and women sacrifice their lives for it. Old folks stagger up its beckoning path. It is a feverish delirium that must run its course.
3. Lamentation. Nailed on the crucifix of illicit love, sinners discover themselves hanging between two thieves—guilt and desire. Worse, however, than the inescapable presence of these forlorn companions, is the agony of ungovernable, intermittent separation from the loved one; “How like a winter hath my absence been from thee,” says Shakespeare. Yes, for clandestine lovers coming together may be easier than getting together; and as the wounded Tiger Woods texted his tootsie, “It’s brutal that you can’t always be with me.”
4. Farewell. We seldom know how much we love, or how dependent we have become upon the drug of love, until a breakup. A clean rupture would be ideal, the kind of calm goodbye that poet Michael Drayton urges in the opening line of his most famous sonnet, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.” In the unreal world of illicit love, however, nothing is so simple, and the agony of goodbyes can seem as interminable as they are unbearable. Hence Emily Dickenson’s observation, “Parting is all we know of heaven / and all we need of hell.”
5. Ending. The problem with the enzyme of secrecy that so heightens a sinner’s pleasure is that it also provokes pangs of anxiety, and ultimately poisons the affair. In the end, guilt-wracked sinners feel relief, but dedicated love addicts suffer a sense of loss and longing. For them, if the opening act was a heart-stopper, the closing curtain can be a soul destroyer, and suicide a distinct possibility. An apparently more palatable way to end an illicit affair is to marry one’s lover. With the glue of secrecy gone, however, longing and lust may evaporate, too, thereby, as in a devilish game of snakes and ladders, delivering the hapless partners all the way back to the bottom rung.
6. Epiphany. No one can comprehend the enslaving power of illicit love without first being incarcerated in its crazed penitentiary. It is as true of a lover as of love itself: we only know well the paramour to whom we so madly committed—then, later, objectively judged. To understand the intensity of illicit love one must be free of it, but not always have been free. Only then can we appreciate the potential alchemy in sinning: with luck, that intoxicating experience can be evolve into wisdom, which, if it does not always bring joy, can yet produce the insight and redemption so beautifully described by Elan Haverford: “Lastly, a chastening sun fired fiery darts, / annihilating my losses and lies, / absolving my crimes, healing my heart / and cleansing the salt from my scarlet eyes.”

Ah, yes, psychologists and theologians can theorize on the nature of illicit love, but as you see, it takes a sinning poet to fully bare a lover’s heart and soul.

For more go too www.sonnetsforsinners.com

Buy: Sonnets for Sinners: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love

John Wareham author, poet, and lecturer, is an eminent coach and counselor to upward strivers—from prison inmates to corporate chiefs. His works include the life-changer, How to Break Out of Prison, the critically acclaimed novel Chancey on Top—ranked in the New York Observer “among the finest novels ever”—and the bestselling psycho-political thriller, The President's Therapist.

Visit: www.johnwareham.com

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