from the book by the poet Paula Muçodemi

I cannot get those years of my early youth out of my mind. I remember around 1986, I happened to be at the Writers' League, at the desk of Dritero's secretary, Kristina…

Dritero heard us laughing and came out of his office. A conversation then started about the book he had just published with translations of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns.

As a young man with great ambitions, I asked him right there at his office door, because Kristina worked in the anteroom.

The thought I expressed was this: “I liked the translation immensely, and these poets are flawless in every poem in their works.”

I remember it like it was today. Dritero smiled and went back into his office...

Today, after so many years, living in London and reading Burns and others, I think differently.

There is no such thing as a flawless body of work, but in Albania, back in those days, they would publish collections of their best works, and naturally, we assumed they were flawless...

Why am I saying this, you might ask…?

I say it because I have come to realize that if there are ten pearls in a poetry book, it shows the author's talent and creative ability… and by gathering ten poems from ten books, they make up a complete body of work…

I had this thought while reading the poetry book “On the Train of the Muse” by the poet Paola Muçodemi, and specifically one of these poems titled “The God of the Soul”.

***

The poem “The God of the Soul” is a lyrical poem with intimate content, where love is presented not simply as a romantic feeling, but as an experience that unites pain, memory, longing, and spiritual devotion. In its lines, one can feel the human struggle to understand a complex truth: that love and pain, though they seem like two opposing states, often spring from the same emotional root.

The title is not just a poetic label. It contains the fundamental idea of the creation: when love becomes a deep part of one's being, a person begins to experience the beloved as a power that rules their inner world. The poem opens with a statement that immediately defines the speaker's state of mind:

Perhaps I am not yet very mature,

I cannot tell love and pain apart,

But I know that the pain is terrible,

And love makes you shed tears!

Here we have an emotional paradox. Love, which is usually associated with happiness, appears intertwined with pain. The speaker does not claim to have fully understood the nature of her feelings; on the contrary, she admits an uncertainty that makes the poetic voice more human and believable.

The phrase “I cannot tell love and pain apart” is the psychological axis of the poem. It suggests that the feeling has crossed the boundary of an ordinary emotion and turned into an experience that touches the whole being.

However, the last line of the stanza does not deny love. It accepts the tear as a part of it. Thus, tears are not only a sign of suffering, but also proof of the intensity of the feeling.

At this point, the poem does not ask whether love brings pain, but how deeply it can penetrate the human soul.

In the second stanza, the poem moves from general experience to concrete images:

The eyes search for hidden happiness,

The lips stay searching for the silent word,

The blood races, searching for its color,

The feet dig for the vanished foundation!

This is one of the most interesting parts of the poem, because feelings are not described solely through thought. They are distributed throughout the entire body.

- The eyes symbolize the search and the desire to find happiness.

- The lips represent the unspoken word, the missing communication, and perhaps a confession left hanging.

- The blood is tied to life, passion, and inner identity.

- The feet express the search for support, for a foundation upon which the feeling can stand.

We have, therefore, a movement from the outside toward the inside: from sight to the word, from the word to the blood, and from the blood to the foundations of existence.

Particularly interesting is the line “the feet dig for the vanished foundation”. It creates the image of someone seeking to lean on something, only to discover that the ground beneath their feet is no longer stable.

Here, love is not just an emotion; it shakes the individual's inner balance.

On the other hand, this figure is also one of the places where the poem becomes harder to interpret. “The vanished foundation” is an open expression, which could imply the loss of security, of trust, or of a previous relationship. It is exactly this ambiguity that leaves room for the reader to interpret, although a clearer connection to the surrounding images would strengthen the line even more.

The third stanza brings an important shift. After the search and uncertainty, the figure of the beloved appears:

Drunken images pass through my mind,

Like the misted glass, after the pouring rain.

Your face smiles at me, faded and bitter,

To show that it is the god of my soul.

Now we are dealing with memory, but not a calm and orderly memory. The images are “drunken”, meaning troubled, shifting, perhaps overloaded with longing.

The comparison with the view after the rain suggests a moment when the world becomes more visible, but also stranger. The rain may have passed, but its traces remain. In the same way, an experience of love may have passed from the present, while it continues to live on in memory.

The strongest figure in this stanza is “Your face smiles at me bitterly”.

A smile usually expresses joy, while bitterness expresses pain. Their union creates an emotional contrast: the beloved's face brings closeness and suffering at the same time. She is present in the speaker's mind, but this presence does not fully soothe her.

It is a smile that might contain longing, loss, regret, or a love that has not died out.

Thus, the beloved is not presented as an ordinary romantic figure. She becomes an inner presence that continues to influence the speaker's spiritual life, regardless of the concrete circumstances of the relationship, which the poem does not explain.

The title is the key to interpreting the entire poem.

In the usual sense, the word god is tied to a higher power, to worship, and to something that transcends humanity. When this word is placed next to the word soul, it creates a metaphor for a love that has gained an almost absolute authority over the individual's inner world.

To call someone “the god of my soul” means to place them at the center of your emotional experience. Her presence becomes a source of meaning, while her absence or the memory of her can become a source of suffering.

Herein lies the beauty, but at the same time the danger of this poetic figure: love can elevate the other to the dimensions of a deity, giving them an extraordinary place in a person's life.

But is this a love that frees the soul, or a love that makes it dependent on another presence?

The poem does not give a final answer. It leaves the reader facing this question, making the title deeper than a simple declaration of worship.

The poem relies mainly on lyricism, metaphor, and personification. It does not build a story with characters, events, and clear development. Instead, it gives us fragments of a state of mind.

One of its features is the use of verbs that express searching: the eyes search, the lips search, the blood searches, the feet dig. This repetition creates an inner movement, as if the whole being has set out in search of something that has not yet been found.

Another feature is the intertwining of concrete words with abstract meanings. The eyes, lips, blood, and feet are bodily elements, while happiness, the silent word, and the vanished foundation belong to the world of experiences. This combination gives the poem a sensitive and physical character.

However, some expressions are more obscure than others. “The misted glass” and “the vanished foundation”, for example, require a clearer connection to the experience they want to express. In modern poetry, ambiguity can be an artistic tool, but it becomes fruitful when it creates several possible meanings, not when it severs the emotional connection with the reader.

The rhythm, too, relies more on the flow of feeling than on a regular metrical scheme. The rhymes and sound similarities help create a lyrical melody, but they are not always uniform. This does not devalue the poem; it simply shows that its main strength lies in its images and emotional intensity, rather than in formal perfection.

In a deeper reading, the poem can also be seen as an attempt to understand personal identity through love.

When the author says she cannot tell love and pain apart, she is not just describing a feeling. She is showing that the experience of love has begun to influence the way she understands herself.

The eyes, lips, blood, and feet seem to be searching for something lost. This could be a person, a relationship, a former security, or a part of oneself that has been changed by love.

In this sense, the beloved becomes more than an object of desire: she turns into a reference point for the speaker's consciousness.

But the poem does not tell us whether this relationship is fulfilled, broken off, or impossible. And it is important not to turn this silence into a fact that the text does not state. What we can say for sure is that the love experienced here is troubled, loaded with memories, and accompanied by a deep sense of uncertainty.

The strength of this poem lies in the attempt to express a feeling that cannot be fully explained with ordinary words. It seeks images to make the inner pain tangible and focuses the experience on the body, memory, and the figure of the beloved.

Three elements are particularly important:

The emotional paradox: love and pain are not easily separated.

The body as a mirror of the soul: the feeling appears in the eyes, lips, blood, and feet.

The central metaphor of the title: the beloved is elevated to the dimension of a power that rules the inner world.

On the other hand, the poem could gain more strength if some metaphorical figures were connected more naturally to one another. Some lines have obvious poetic weight, but not all manage to create the same clarity or the same intensity. Careful work on the precision of the imagery, the rhythm, and the connection between stanzas would help the emotion reach the reader without losing its naturalness.

This assessment does not deny the poem's sensitivity. On the contrary, it distinguishes between the sincerity of the feeling, which is present in the text, and the artistic craftsmanship, which determines how powerfully that feeling manages to communicate with the reader.

“The God of the Soul” is a poem that places love on the border between happiness and suffering, memory and absence, worship and uncertainty. It does not seek to tell us the story of a relationship, but to make us feel the mark that a relationship leaves on the soul.

In the end, the title brings us back to the essential question: what happens when a person becomes so important to us that their presence affects the way we experience ourselves?

The answer the poem suggests is that deep love does not lie only in what we feel for the other. It also lives in the way we remember, suffer, search, and change.

And perhaps this is exactly where its essence lies: the beloved may be a single person in the outside world, but in the poet's inner world, she can become an entire universe.

From time to time we will also have analyses of other poems from this book...

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