Eminescu in Veronica’s Poetry
1. The booklet Poesii, edited in Bucharest in 1887 (editor Ig. Heimann) – and warmly recommended by the poet to a young Bucharestan publisher, in such terms of ecstatic recognition as: “Her book is ever new for me… How wonderful verses can be found in it. Read them, read them, and you’ll see how right I am!” – represents the only editorial apparition of Veronica Micle’s. Some essays in this love novel are in black, some in white tones, each with its own bright and shaded sides, sublimates of the soul and of correspondence renditions.
After a long suffering, Eminescu was appreciating in 1887, almost from posterity, the greatness, the tenderness and warmth, the passion of the feelings whose direct subject he was, this love stimulating both of them to poetry and mutual moral support.
2. Born on the 22nd of April, 1850 at Năsăud in Ilie Câmpeanu’s family – who participaed in the 1848 revolution in the Ardeal and died of the wounds he received in the Apuseni Mountains – Veronica was to be brought to Moldavia by her mother, the Câmpeanu widow, settling in Târgu Neamț, then to Iaşi, where they made a living from washing clothes for the rich or from modest services as a midwife. In 1864, still a year five student at the central school in Iaşi – an institution of secondary education – Veronica ends her studies by marrying the universitary professor Ştefan Micle (1820 – 1879), 30 years her elder, the result of this alliance being their two daughters, Valeria and Virginia, both with interests in poetry and music.
Her 20th birthday finds her by the side of her husband on an European trip during which by chance she meets the poet, in Viena. By that time, Eminescu had already had some poems issued in Literary Conversations, a very appreciated review in Micle’s house. She had remarked the name of the talented poet and also had a glimpse of his portrait:
“I wonder: how feelings arise
Just at a glimpse of someone’s portrait ?
As I have never seen your eyes
And all I knew was you’re a poet !”
(At the Poet’s Portrait)
The meeting in Viena, an episode much romanced by biographers, seems to have moved more the poet who, after having settled in Iaşi, was to frequent Veronica’s salon where he even was reading from his poetry. An affectionate bond is born between the two, which was being kept under discretion, as required by Veronica’s marital status. But as days go by, their feelings deepen and don’t go unnoticed to the others so, soon, the old husband’s desk gets crowded with more and more anonymous letters from intrigants which, fortunately for the two, he mistrusts. Veronica’s the one to break the silence, apologizing to the poet rather than warning him, about his behaviour: “Isn’t it that my indifference broke your heart, your heart that was full of me? But I’m taking God for a witness if this indifference was true, this simulated coldness was but to counterbalance your boundless love that you were continuously proving. Your looks, all your being, were showing only love for me. You had so little control of yourself, that even the slowest of all men would have realized you were in love with me, hence shouldn’t I have disclaimed it all and thus hiding to the piercing eye the reciprocity of an equally strong feeling?”
3. By a turn of fate, on the 6th of August 1879 Ştefan Micle dies, putting an end to this “platonic love of almost a decade” (G. Călinescu) as, arrived in Bucharest to sort out the long-awaited pension, Veronica samples the “divine drunkness and happy follies”, as she herself calles it, “after a long marital winter” – in Călinescu’s words – by the side of his “instinctive” in love, Eminescu.
The Mite Kremnitz episode leaves a trace of regret in the poet’s life, which he would ultimately overcome. The poet’s feelings for Mite reaching so high that he was dedicating her his verses, made Veronica feel that someone “souverainement supérieure had chased me away from your soul”. The angel raising from among the mortals in the path of his life took the face of Mite Kremnitz, and the poem So fresh was to stirr ill-feelings in his older flame, the official sweetheart, introduced by the poet as his fiancée, to all around Bucharest.
Under pressure from Maiorescu, her jealous brother in law, the offended Mite retires to the height of her aristocracy, being certain of the riscs of that “hour of pretending” and particularly appeased by the verses she had inspired to the poet. A writer herself, she would later publish her memories of Eminescu. She has put such an abrupt end to her romance with Eminescu, that he was soon to forget all about his moment of distraction, returning swiftly to his fated Veronica.
4. G. Călinescu views almost all of Eminescu’s aspirations in love as “greek style” and belonging to Cupid’s voluptuary: “Gracious neck, beautiful shoulders, / Palid breasts and shapely rounded / He would hide in his arm’s holders…” His love poetry is not seldomly visited by carnal visions, by the statuary image of the initiation in the couple’s sensuality. The poet feels at home with romantic stances such as: “Oh, come again into my arms, / And let me dive into your eyes, / Allow my head to sweetly rest, / Against your breast, against your breast!” or other direct references to “marbly arms”, “the white glow of your bare neck”, “the sweet roundness of growing breasts”.
However, one is wrong to believe that Eminescu’s love poetry suffers of sensualism or, as it has been said, is a “sensual” poetry. His real romantic life is relevant of his erotic aspiration and appetite which are embodied in the distinguished, intellectual type of woman (Cleopatra Poenaru, Mite, Veronica…), with “marbly” graces. Veronica was portraying this alliance, between the refinement of upper class (in spite of her only recently having acquired it) and these graces. Her poetry, also, wasn’t lacking of a fine sensiblity, even though it won’t reach beyond the album level. Moreover, the young woman was not only blonde, but also suited to an earlier ideal of his:
“She’s not short, she isn’t tall, she’s not thin, but shapely quite
So one’s arms have what to hold, as a sweetheart she’s just right.”
Although just recently affiliated to the aristocracy, Veronica continued to live in modesty, passing discretely through salons and etiquette. She was avoiding the socializing crowds, spending most of her time indoors reading the fashionable novels of her time, writing, finding rhythms of her own on the piano keys, caring for her children or simply finding things to do. She was avoiding the ballroom dance parties at the club (to her husband’s stupefaction) not that she wouldn’t have had the 40 gold coins for the gowns, but precisely for that salon complex about which she was writing to one of her friends, in an elegant French: (tr.) “Rather than appearing among people whose elegance would amaze you and who’d look with pity at the blue collar frog (“la grenouille prolétaire”) trying to mingle with them, tell me you too will find it’s not worth it and that it’s wiser to stay home.” …Fact that was giving the poet an extra reason to like her.
The poet’s bouts of jealousy were well founded, not only by rumours spread by certain intrigants, but by Veronica herself, self confessing and feeling guilty of her episode with I.L.Caragiale. Scenes of jealousy occur even before true love is born, as early as 1875, on the idea of the morning star (“still a strong currency of those years” – G. Călinescu), as Veronica is publishing that very year in Literary Conversations verses such as these, where we see flirting whims rather than real argument:
“You were dear to me, once,
But what was will never be
For without you, at I glance,
This world isn’t void to me.

And I like up in the sky
How the morning star is glowing
But its light would pale and die
As soon as the Sun is showing

With its handsome silhouette
Bringing life to all by far,
Shortly making one forget
All about the morning star

You’ve been morning star to me
That at dawn was shining bright
But you’ve set – and now I see
It’s much sweeter the sunlight…” (You Were Dear To Me...)
We are still in the decade of that “platonic love” (1875) when Eminescu was still in Iaşi and when scenes of the secret romance were alternating with the whims of any innocent love. At times, she prefigures the final break up and lets us believe she’d compensate the poet’s absence with another flame “that is to come”, getting consolation in the ideea of fate:
“When destiny decides one way
Wishing to change it is in vain…”

“And as it was, to turn back time
There’s nothting anyone could do
As to revive the love, sublime
That there was once between us two.

Then, may your soul beyond goodbyes
Remain at peace, without regret…
One yearning’s gone, new ones will rise,
And of my love you will forget…” (Don’t cry...)
Sublime delusion, whims of a woman in love, who loves passionately, as:
“I walked off without regret
Without craving anything,
Of your being to forget
Of your love, of everything.

I took to the wide world’s ways
Just at hazard’s will adrift
Neither seeking better days
Nor fearing estrangement, shift

If longtime I walked that road
I don’t know, from so much pain,
Missing you, to your abode
I’m drawn desperately again. (I walked off…)
The poet traverses the same distress (“the departure”) himself. Here is, below, a parallel to “I Walked Off…”, the poem “You’ve Left….” After a hasty break up, she remains “broken heart”, to sheds tears “in your footsteps vale”, crossing the torment of separation:
“You’ve left, following your dreams
Only looking straight ahead,
Of my tortured love, it seems,
Not remembering a thread.

Desperately brocken heart
I’ve been staring at your trail
My tears, since your depart,
Flooding in your footsteps’ vale

And I ask myself how would
Such deep love possibly wane
And why did you leave for good,
And why can’t my tears drain?” (You’ve Left…)
5. During the last years of Ştefan Micle’s, at least, Veronica’s chagrins d’amour were not safe of preconceptions, her soul terribly torn between reason and feeling, between mind and heart. The mistress is scolding her lover with “harsh words”, reason pushes him away, while soul and yearning work oppositely:
“Go”, I say, my mind foretelling
only bad things for it, all;
“Stay”, an inner voice is spelling
For my longing and my soul.
……………………………………….
Then, what to believe indeed
You don’t know, the words I said,
Or the boundless love you read
In my loving eyes, instead.

Alas! My confusion’s greater
Much more work I have to do
As I don’t know what is better :
Reason, heart to listen to?” (Go, I Say...)
How boundless is her love resurfaces in her poem “My Yearning For You…”, a revival of her yester year longing for the poet:
“Today, my yearning for you’s still
Of my whole life the only role,
You are, as you once were, and will,
The master of my loving soul

One word from you, for one word’s sake
And at the music of your voice
There is no law I wouldn’t brake
And I would love you and rejoice.”
A poem built around her guilt for her being married is “Your love…”:
“Your love is profound, I know,
And severe, deep your torment,
That is why I’m always so
Hiding from you, never present…”
But the idea of her predestination lies under the matrix of an acute feminity: “
I’m to definitely hate
When I know I’m loved and worth,
And to love when it’s too late
That’s my destiny on Earth.” (Your Love…)

Hatred isn’t but “disguised” love:
“Whenever I remember you
Oh, what I feel I really dread
But my soul maybe’s cheating too
And doesn’t hate, but loves, instead.”
(And I Am Hating You…).
Veronica would later justify herself, breaking the silence with the words:
“Isn’t it that my indifference broke your heart, your heart that was full of me (…), this simulated coldness was but to counterbalance your boundless love (…), even the slowest of all men would have realized you were in love with me…”
She herself feels this passion is immense:
“If it could be incarnated
All the love I feel for you
Time would be incorporated,
All infinity would, too.” (If It Could Be…)
Thus, she slowly loses control of herself: “That I’m in control no more / Of myself, and of my heart…”, she becomes “a toy” of Cupidon’s, a “slave”, even a poor “tramp” thawing at the sunbeams and takes the blame for everything:
“You don’t care about my love !”
Veronica’s simulated doubting, instrumental to proving his love (“It was but a woman’s ruse / Just to prove your love’s no fad…”(Letter) pushes him away:
“But you, quiet and confused
Have departed, deeply sad.”
The invocation of this “wild goose-chaser” or “water freezing troll” has lots of candour, traversed by a shiver of guilt:
“Come on darling, come, be nice
You may have been wild goose-chasing
But remember, with your eyes
You’ve seen me too, wild and crazing…” (Letter)
Break ups and making ups were frequent and the woman in love knows how to wait for the storm to pass, mistrusting what’s been said in anger and hastily, and advocates for the ways of calm and peace, rejecting those of irritation and nervosity: “With voice devoid of anger, say of me you’ll forget” (The Love For Me Or Hatred…)
6. There was, between Eminescu and Veronica, a shared intimacy of what we call the passion for writing. The poet would recite from his poems, she would read them thoroughly. Such sincere and moving poems, Veronica must have most certainly known them by heart. We call lyrical complexes the obsessions that permanently and retroactively crystalize into oneself’s manner of expression so close to identification. And Veronica had so many occasions to detect this in both his intimacy and his poetry. The poet’s image seated at his table among “papers spread” (preoccupied to put into words all those “ideas without number”, searching for the key of that “eternal riddle”), under Veronica’s remote vigil, is one of the most vivid images she has, throwing bridges over the distance, helping her appease her longing for him. Ironically, ink’s getting spilled over these pages:
“What made you shiver? Maybe, the mystery’s found out?
- No, it was just the inkpot, I’ve spilled the ink about
And widely, on your pages, the darkest night has smitten
You have been left with nothing of all that you have written.”
(Nothing But The Dust And Ashes…)
Veronica must have seen among the poet’s papers such realities, since this image returns obsessively in one of her thoughts: “Once you’ve written the most beautiful page in the book of your life, the destiny, with its eternal irony, would spill the ink all over the pages that follow.”
A vast majority of Veronica’s poems are replicas and reverberations of the eminescan verse, some even revealing an epigonic mimetism. Here are some examples:
“Why keep counting your years to see whether you’re old…”
“The whole world, immense and empty right before me is laid.”
(The Whole World, Immense)
“And when the night is deep, at the abyss of silence…”
(And When The Night Is Deep…)
“Up in the sky the moon’s appearing…” (Up In The Sky…)
“One word from you, for one word’s sake
And at the music of your voice…” (My Yearning For You)
“Up in the sky the moon’s alight” (Up In The Sky The Moon’s Alight…)
“Ah! to them I’d take you there and I would restore your youth
I’d redeem your heart with all its sadly lost treasure, in truth,
Of illusion and desire!
I’d make wings grow back to your soul so that all across the sky
And over the whole of this world they’d empower it to fly
For one being’s loving fire!” (Longing For The Past…)
“While looking at your charming face…” (At the Poet’s Portrait)
“That is why, thinking of you…” (How Without Warning…)
“Sweet forgetfulness, you’ve come…” (Forgetfulness)
“For this dream of happiness, oh ! so expensively I’ve paid,
As now both my heart and soul are ruined at the sorrow’s blade !
I’ve so passionately loved you, and I have been so love struck
That when losing you I’ve also lost all traces of goodluck.”
(Long Before Getting To Meet You)
“How many times my heart would jump
With every move or sound,
Thinking that you at last have come
You, sweetest thing around.
And then, how many times I cried
Seeing the night was near,
Having to put the candle out
Alone, without you, dear.
Oh, if you knew how many times
My sleepless nights would falter
Until the dawn – the ritual crimes
On my wild love’s great altar –
You’d have come as by fortune sent,
Be only for a moment,
To, with a kiss, bring to an end
My devastating torment !”
“No more sobbing and stop crying…” (All Alone…)
“You were dear to me, once…” (You Were Dear To Me…)
“Where, I wonder, is the wisdom you once had ? I wonder why,
When I tell you to be nice, then why’d you shiver, why’d you cry?”
(Rhymes To A Friend)
“Don’t you know that love’s a story old as mankind on this earth ?
Don’t tease anymore your thinking with this nonsense of no worth !”
(Rhymes To A Friend)
“You from the waves of time come forth to luminate…”
7. The poet’s “beloved image” provides every so often open grounds for homage and utmost gratitude, for devoted admiration and mutual respect. Not surprisingly, Veronica’s having sleepless nights and, at late hours in the night, her soul that “from the world […] breaks free with grace/ Happily soaring up into serene, sweet spheres…” The poet is “the most beloved one” and his sweetheart plainly declares: “…I worship you”. (And When The Night Is Deep…)

While, by a lyrical association, Eminescu was relating his sweetheart to the linden tree or imagining her entwined with other various elements from nature, Veronica too is intensely experiencing a similar associative process. Looking at flowers (“When blooming lilies of the valley / You used to fondly give me…” – It’s lilies of the valley’s time…) and admiring the moon (“Like her, you’re wandering around / And so is life and all I’m worth” or “I wish that from your roaming frenzy / I’d halt the moon and stop you too”- Up in the sky) are to become as many lyrical leitmotives.
8. “But today, the passion’s prisms have obscured all your vision ;
All around you have been changing, and your views are in revision”
– verses of deep veronian thought (Rhymes To A Friend), after having witnessed the most devastating trials and ordeals the poet has been through, out of love. Standing by the poet during his transient stances of misogynism (“short minded, long skirted”), Veronica tries brightening him up and consoling him:

“Let no more your mind be bothered with such minor, petty things..
Don’t you know love is a story played since eons on man’s strings ?
For the tenth time if you hear it, a sweet sound it would unfold,
And you’d think it was a new one, though you knew that it is old ; ”
lamenting at the poet’s alienation from the now inaccessible world of candour and spiritual tranquility:
“When you used to be cold blooded, and resisting love’s appeal

When ironically bitter you would answer all those who
May have passionately told you that they were in love with you ;
Through the world when you were passing light heartedly all the same
Never having tied your thinking or your life to someone’s name…”
and sorrowfully perceiving the changes in the poet under the burden of love suffering, at the “ubi est sapientia quae in altis temporibus habebat” theme:
“Where, I wonder, is the wisdom you once had ? I wonder why,
When I tell you to be nice, then why’d you shiver, why’d you cry?”
9. The eminescan irony is a reality, which Veronica doesn’t elude. “The bitter irony” she mentions above, as well as the “ironical smile” spotted in the poem Wipe Your Tear (again, the veronian moral support) are but manifestations of the one who, with superiority, from high up his irony, looks down at the world below. The “sweet vision” reveared by Veronica (“sweet vision worshiped in my mind”) is but the morning star that shows up from afar only to disappear again, taking with it the mystery of eternity:
“But like a Morning Star your gleam
Just for a blink to me, a dream,
Then vanish ...”
Veronica’s accurately intuiting the intellectual fatigue on this chained Prometeus’s figure and offers her homage of profound, dramatic understanding and devotion:
“And if my hand could reach your brow
Your locks off it I’d gently plow
To leave it clean and lily clear
Love icon that I would revere…”
(And If My Hand Could Reach…)
10. Through poetry, by visiting Veronica’s salon or often strolling by her house, Eminescu found ways to express his love. Her name, composed and recomposed in various metathetic combinations, had become an intimate instance of pleasure. His eye, his ear, were feverishly searching for more harmonious and exotic ways, so the name Veronica can pass combinations of sounds in the idea of such an enigmatic imperative: “Verona, Vreona, Voerna, Vnoera, Vanoer, Anoero, Arnoev, Aernov, Aernev, Anerov, Aronique, Enorvica, Vicenora, Acivrone, Civranco, Neociovra, Vranceoi, Narvice, Narvioce (ms. 2283, f.l).” Veronica herself was aware of this exercise and profoundly impressed of this proof of love, will retain the fact for an later poem:
“To be capable to take you to some moment in the past
And once there we’d be looking at the cloudless sky so vast
I’d repeat all that you said,
When among the stars in heavens and all flowers you could name
Dreaming, loving you were searching for a word that you could claim
That could be my name instead…”
……………………………………………………
“And the same way you once did, you would look into my eyes
You would tell your dreams of love and to me, your tale would rise
As the sweetest song’s refrain;
You would feel what you once felt, I’d again be to you dear,
Happy as no one has been, as we were the yester year
On this earth, to be again!”
(Longing For The Past)
11. On the 28th of August, 1855, after the poet’s two year-fight with the shadows, Veronica refreshes her homage to this “man with mind so great” (Nothing But The Dust And Ashes…) in one of the most revering ode that have ever been offered to the Morning Star [“the Morning Star of Romanian poetry”, the name by which Romanians affectionately revere the poet]. The woman who lived and suffered by the poet’s side was having, ever since their contemporaneity, the exact intuition of his genial dimensions. Here is the image of the inaccessible height of this pyramydal “stone colossus”, in antithesis with her “smallness” (“I know my smallness well”) of a mortal who’s cherishing, idolizing him: (To X… )
“The summit of the pyramyd my eyes can hardly touch…
Just near this stone colossus so small I’m, you can see
Thus, in your mind the universe can as in mirrors watch
Your genius over centuries will everlasting be.

You’re yearning for my tenderness… and that under love’s spell
To reach you and my destiny to tie to yours you’ve planned
But how could this be possible, I know my smallness well,
When your great personality I might not understand…

On earth your geniality is soaring to the sky
So to my fate and distantly let me just watch at times,
A witness to your majesty until the day I die
Your miracle in secrecy to cherish, idolize.”
On the 16th of June 1889, in The Morning newspaper the poem Moon Rays was to appear, under Veronica Micle’s signature, by the tragic news of the poet’s death (the poet wanted once to name Moon Rays a volume of his verses!). The poem, a fated premonition that came true without her knowing anything about it, is one of the most moving poems, reiterating their unique and unhappy destiny:
“In exchange for a moonrise what wouldn’t a dead man trade!”
You said this, then so did I, when flying on yearning’s wing
Led by love’s magic, we were – gazing at the sky’s parade -
Dreaming of eternity in the briefness of a blink…”
12. The To Him postume poem brings a new light on the poet’s intrests and views. Immersed in his idealistic world, this “buddhist thinker” (so she knew of the eminescan phylosophy) is pointlessly reciting his “verse”, as the “pigmys” won’t ever reach up the stairs of the sublime, so superficial is their world:
“You from the waves of time come forth to luminate
A buddhist thinker born into another world…”
……………………………………………….
“The pigmys won’t be able to gather the sublime,
Life’s bitter prose will have you forgotten and proscript…”
Once again, Veronica pays eternal homage to her Morning Star, “the sacred charm” of his love:
“Don’t waste your feelings anymore, as life is ever changing
Remain within the sacred quarters, other worldly bard
And don’t be bothered that despite you were but just an earthling
Eternity will write your name on its Most Honoured card!”