A woman in California asked me whether I have a favorite word and if so what is it? I said my favorite word is “you.” I love “you.” She was disappointed. I think she expected me to opt for “mellifluous” or “sibilance” or some other onomatopoeic special.
But I am a poet, and pronouns in a poem or prose poem function as unknowns do in algebra, and “you” is the most versatile one out there. The word means the same singular and plural, and it is gender-free, so it can conceal not only identity but sex and number. This makes “you” as useful as “it” and even more complicated from the epistemological point of view. “You” can be Albert or Albertine, and no one need be the wiser.
When I say “you” in a poem, I immediately establish a certain intimacy even if the words “I” and “you” in the specific case are pronominal fictions representing abstract entities, imaginary selves, characters in a dream, the author and the reader. Thus T. S. Eliot begins his love song: “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky.” Join me in this adventure. Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock may lack confidence. But I, the author, am as suave a seducer as you are likely to meet
Many claustrophobic poems would get an instant oxygen infusion if you were to add a second person, you, to the I-dominated mix. In Frank Loesser’s “I Believe in You,” one of the great songs in Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the singer sings to himself, to his mirror image in the executive washroom, while the man’s rivals harmonize (“gotta stop that man”) and their electric razors provide the kazoo-like percussion. Yet this hymn to an egocentric hero can, stripped from its theatrical context, serve quite well as a lady’s declaration of love to her dreamboat.
You and I form a joint conspiracy. Robert Frost has a wonderful poem, “Meeting and Passing,” in which a man and a woman who are destined to become lovers meet by chance on a path both take. After exchanging greetings, they resume walking in their opposite directions. This is how the poem ends: “Afterward I went past what you had passed / Before we met and you what I had passed.” The last line is a small wonder, not least because of its compression and because its iambs fall emphatically on the two verbs, the pronouns “you” and “I”, and the second half of “Before.” The moment “we met,” over too soon, was the moment poised between “before” and “after” as each of us enters the other’s past, which is also his or her own future.
In grammar the first and second persons combine to form the first- person plural: I plus you equal we. And we also equal something else. When we go to bed, “we two being one are it,” John Donne writes in “The Canonization” about the consummation of love, the momentary unity of the sexes combined into a higher entity. But these pronouns are slippery. Can we identify “I” with the ego, “it” with the id, “we” with the superego, and “you” with the other, imagined or real, a substitute for the parent of the opposite sex, exerting a force beyond the pleasure principle? Not necessarily, although it’s tempting to twist this Freudian conceit into a full-blown story, where “you” equals death, a beautiful blonde angel with a slight lisp, who sings her seductive song while Odysseus is leashed to the mast.
Ask yourself the question the surrealists struggled over: “Death – male or female?” Then consider the same question only with “you” instead of “death.”
Without “you” I would be as lonesome as Adam in Eden lacking free will. I need “you” as life needs to end in death. Without you there would be no sin, no sex, no history, no temptation, no chance for immortality. Are these rationalizations? Maybe, but that’s better than the endless quarreling between Adam and Eve that follows the eating of the forbidden fruit in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The pungency of “fruitless” and the double meaning of “vain” in Milton’s lines make the point: “Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning; / And of their vain contest appeared no end.”
Whatever else they are, “I” and “you” represent the first dichotomy. “I” is to either as “you” is to or – the second person always introduces the possibility of disagreement, if not dissent. An ordinary fork in the road acquires an additional level of complexity if it is approached by two rather than one. Or maybe “I” and “you” are two lines that intersect, as the Rue de Rennes and the Boulevard Raspail meet in Paris, before going their separate ways. And in an early chapter, the novel’s hero and heroine, still unknown to each other, will cross the street in opposite directions or ride the same number 11 bus in London between the statue of Wellington on Threadneedle Street and the Albert pub on Victoria Street with its Irish flags in the window, it being St. Patrick’s Day.
When Andrew Marvell writes, “Two paradises ’twere in one / To live in paradise alone,” his mathematical metaphor is crucial to his defense of solitude. Just as “alone” contains “one,” I without you am one individual, unified, undivided, living in two paradises. One is the absence of time. The other is the absence of “you.”
Yet who can resist the lure of the second person? Without her, with whom would I quarrel or link? She brings the fruit of knowledge to me and I eat, and we have invented free will, which is synonymous with rebellion. Free will, free fall. Yet we feel tall. We are the gods of Romanticism, you and I, swaggering like Antony willing to kiss away his kingdom for a mirth.
In brief, “you” mean more than the world to me.
— David Lehman [from The American Scholar, June 3, 2011]