Sunday 1 February 2015

jenny don’t change your number, i’m gonna make you mine

Although the object of his affection extolled in rather cheesy verse was won over as a woman to be respected in her own right and a constant companion in the fight for his cause, the love poetry—looking forward to Saint Valentines’ Day, that Karl Marx penned for his beloved, Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen can make anyone proud and secure in his or her romantic overtures.

As a philosopher, author and theatre-critic (recalling how Marx later expounded, ideally, that every man ought to have the luxury after an honest day’s labour to be a critic in the evening) in her own right, Jenny Marx was swooned by such lines:
See! I could a thousand volumes fill,
Writing only “Jenny” in each line,
Still they would a world of thought conceal,
Deed eternal and unchanging Will,
Verses sweet that yearning gently still,
867-5309.