“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” William Shakespeare writes in Romeo and Juliet, one of his most famous tragedies, as the two titular leads bid farewell to each other until their next meeting. The sorrow of the two characters are described as a sweet kind of lament, and truly, only those who in love become privileged to experience this sorrow, but is it only sweet because they both know for a fact that their longing will only last until they next lay eyes on each other? Would parting, then, still be as sweet if Romeo and Juliet knew that it would be their final meeting -- that the next night would no longer see the two in love?
A piece from his collection of poems, Histories, Charlie Veric’s Parting Time takes the reader through the moments
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Each doing a role the other / can’t play: I the ruthless wanderer and you, my faithful Penelope (8-9).” In the epic being alluded to, Penelope is Odysseus, the wanderer in the poem’s context, extremely faithful wife, who keeps her suitors at bay while her husband is away. Her faithfulness to Odysseus is a model for what ideal faithfulness and loyalty in a marriage or in a relationship should be, but as the poet states, the two personas cannot mirror what Penelope and Odysseus have become, unable to play the roles of the two literary figures. These lines denote unfaithfulness between the two, and as the persona relays, it is was he who was Odysseus, and the other a Penelope different from the Penelope known in the epic poem, leading the readers to conclude that the man sitting in the car with the persona has been unfaithful towards him. However, despite the situation, it is also noted in the poem, that the love that the persona has for the other has not gone, and this is reiterated as the poem opens, as the persona talks about how he knew and still remembered the other person’s insides and outsides, and again, as the poem closes, through the words he wanted to convey to his lover: “Look at me who loved you then, I’m the one loving you