Abstract. Across centuries and traditions, poetry and song return with striking persistence to love, longing, separation, death, homecoming, seasons, and weather. This article proposes that the recurrence reflects the organization of living coordination itself, more than literary convention, emotional expression, symbolic representation, or the cultural construction of romantic love. Lyric attention concentrates on the three zoetic mediations of embodiment, being-with, and dwelling, which it treats as one coordination; it attends disproportionately to L2, where coordination becomes felt before it is explained; it uses L3 articulation as its operation far more often than as its subject; and it favours symbolic reference to absence. Above all, love poetry and lament arise from changes in the relevance and availability of another living being, changes that can transform a whole life without any transaction, exchange, or reciprocity. The argument is offered as a theoretically grounded and historically comparative hypothesis, with stated conditions under which it would fail.
I. The Same Songs for Thousands of Years
Some time around 600 BCE, on the island of Lesbos, Sappho described what happened to her when she watched a woman she desired sitting close to a man, listening to him talk and laugh. Her tongue breaks, a thin fire runs beneath her skin, her eyes see nothing and her ears roar, sweat pours down, trembling seizes her whole body, she is greener than grass and seems to herself not far from death. The fragment says almost nothing about who the woman is, what Sappho wants from her, or what might come of it. What it records with extraordinary exactness is a body reorganized by the presence of another person.
In the eighth century CE, Li Bai wrote the four lines of "Quiet Night Thought" that are still among the first poems Chinese children learn by heart. Moonlight lies before the bed; it might be frost on the ground. He raises his head to look at the bright moon, and lowers it to think of home. Within twenty characters the poem moves from light on a floor to a momentary confusion of seasons, from an upward movement of the body to a downward one, and from a moon that is shared by everyone, everywhere, to a home that is available to no one in the room.
In 1988 Tracy Chapman released "Fast Car", in which a young woman who works in a convenience store, looks after a father who drinks, and remembers a mother who left, sees in a lover's car the chance to drive out of town and begin again. By the final verse the plan has been realized and has failed in the old way: she is working, he is out drinking, and the car is once more the only exit she can imagine. In 2021 Olivia Rodrigo released "drivers license", in which a teenager who has just passed her driving test drives alone through the suburbs, past the street where the boy she loved lives, in tears, while he is with someone else. The licence that was supposed to belong to a shared future has arrived after that future dissolved.
These works are not culturally interchangeable. Archaic Greek symposia, Tang officialdom, the American working poor of the late 1980s, and the suburban adolescence of the streaming era differ enormously in their poetic conventions, in their institutions of love and marriage, and in their conceptions of what a person is. Yet each work articulates a recognizable configuration of attraction or attachment, bodily disturbance, place, distance, and an anticipated future that has become uncertain or impossible. The puzzle is why such different traditions keep returning to it. One consequence follows at once: the lyrics of popular song are best approached as one more iteration in the long history of poetics, answerable to the same questions as Sappho and Li Bai, rather than as a separate and lesser form.
Familiar explanations each illuminate something, and none of them settles the puzzle. Literary scholarship describes genres, conventions, metaphors, and the intertextual chains along which motifs travel, but convention explains persistence only by pointing to earlier persistence. Psychology investigates attachment, grief, and arousal, but it tends to locate love inside individuals and to treat the moon, the frost, and the suburban street as context. Social theory shows how love poetry is shaped by gender, class, patronage, and the institutions of marriage, and the cultural construction of romantic love has been one of its most productive topics, but construction explains why love takes different forms more readily than why it is sung about so persistently at all. Every poet digests, sleeps, and keeps warm, and there is far less lyric poetry about digestion than about the moon. Why do human beings repeatedly make poetry about these experiences rather than about countless other features of their lives that are just as universal and just as consequential?
This article proposes an answer drawn from Living Value Theory, which begins from living coordination rather than from meaning, representation, or exchange. It uses four of the theory's distinctions as a framework for generating hypotheses and for stating what would count against them: the five mediations through which human life is coordinated, the five levels of recursivity at which coordination can proceed, the three types of recursive counterpart with which a living being coordinates, and the three modes in which symbols operate. The proposal can be stated as a single configuration. A change in the mesocosmic status of another living being is felt across the inseparable zoetic mediations of embodiment, being-with, and dwelling; it frequently produces the felt salience of L2; poetry articulates it at L3; and it does so predominantly through symbolic reference to absence. Love poetry is the most productive test case for this configuration, because the beloved is neither a possession, a party to a transaction, a social role, nor merely a representation, but a recursive living being whose significance can transform an entire life without providing anything in return. The article does not rank poems by greatness or philosophical sophistication. It asks what poetry most frequently makes consequential, and it offers the answer as a hypothesis to be tested across the world's poetic traditions rather than as a finding already established there.
II. The Zoetic Core of Poetry: Three Mediations, One Living Coordination
Living Value Theory distinguishes three zoetic mediations, modes of coordination that belong to living process itself and require no capacity for durable making. Multisensorial embodiment is a living being's coordination with its own ongoing organization: its maintenance, capacities, vulnerabilities, and felt changes, registered through every sensory register at once. Multispecies being-with is coordination with other living beings capable of responding in turn, including attraction, attachment, dependence, avoidance, conflict, and separation, and including beings of other kinds than one's own. Multiversal dwelling is coordination with found conditions that do not answer back: daylight and darkness, seasons, weather, climate, terrain, altitude, gravity, and the geographical distances that separate one place from another. In what follows they are called embodiment, being-with, and dwelling.
Rather than three domains that exist separately and subsequently interact, these are analytically distinguishable mediations of one continuous living process. A living being never coordinates with weather in general, with its body in general, or with others in general, but always with this cold, this fatigue, this person, together.
Consider spring, perhaps the most poeticized season of the temperate world. Spring is a change in found conditions: longer daylight, rising temperature, new growth. The same change alters bodily states, from sleep and appetite to the feel of open air on skin; it alters the activity of other living beings, birds singing, animals mating, people moving out of doors; and it therefore alters the possibilities of encounter, attraction, and anticipation. A spring poem is accordingly a poem about embodiment and being-with almost before it begins. The converse holds equally. Poetry of longing is very often poetry about weather, darkness, distance, or the turning of the year, because the absence of a beloved is lived through the cold of a bed, the length of a night, or the miles between two places. Rather than existing apart and acquiring symbolic connections through metaphor, the mediations are already coordinated in living experience, and poetry finds them there together.
Japanese poetics made this inseparability a formal requirement. A haiku conventionally contains a kigo, a season word, so that every poem, whatever else it concerns, is anchored in a found seasonal condition. Bashō's last poem, dictated to his disciples in Osaka in 1694 as he lay dying, says in a plain rendering: ill on a journey, my dreams go wandering over withered fields. The season word is kareno, the withered fields of winter. The poem's illness is embodiment, its journey and its fields are dwelling, and its dreams, which still range across a landscape the body can no longer cross, are the last movement of a life spent travelling toward others and away from them. Being-with is present in the circumstance of the poem itself, spoken to companions gathered at the bedside of a man whose dreams are elsewhere. None of the three mediations could be removed without the poem ceasing to be about anything.
Keats's "To Autumn", composed in September 1819, opens by making a season into a companion: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun". Autumn and the sun conspire together to load the vines and swell the gourd, so that a found nonrecursive condition is addressed as though it answered back. Personification is one of poetry's most persistent operations, and in these terms it is a poetic attribution of interrecursivity to dwelling. The second stanza turns the season into a labouring body, sitting careless on a granary floor, asleep on a half-reaped furrow, watching the last oozings of a cider press hour after hour. Ripeness, weather, harvest work, drowsiness, and the slow temporality of the season become one coordination, and the poem's famous calm depends on that unity.
The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" (1965) achieves the same unity in a very different idiom. Almost every concrete detail of the song concerns weather and bodily comfort: leaves gone brown, a grey sky, a walk on a winter's day, the thought that in Los Angeles the singer would be safe and warm, a church entered for its shelter and a prayer only pretended. The song is nevertheless about distance and belonging, and about a tie, mentioned almost in passing, to a woman whose claim keeps the singer in the cold city. Each mediation acquires its significance through the others. The cold matters because of the distance; the distance matters because of a body that wants warmth; and the city's winter is hard to bear partly because someone is holding the singer there.
The two remaining mediations, multimateriality and multisymbolization, are indispensable to human poetry. Poems are composed, written, performed, recorded, printed, broadcast, streamed, and remembered through made materials and symbolic practices, and without them nothing of Sappho or Li Bai would have reached anyone alive today. The distinction that matters here lies between the conditions of poetic production and the experiences poetry foregrounds. A song produced with sophisticated digital technology and distributed through global platforms can still be almost entirely concerned with someone missing another person on a cold night. When made things do come to the foreground, they tend to arrive as carriers of zoetic stakes. The car in "Fast Car" is poverty's one imaginable exit. The licence in "drivers license", a multisymbolic deposit issued by a state, matters because it was meant to inaugurate a shared future and now inaugurates a solitary one. Such songs are especially useful for testing the argument, since they show multimateriality and multisymbolization entering the lyric while the zoetic core remains decisive.
The first hypothesis follows. Across poetic traditions, embodiment, being-with, and dwelling will dominate thematic attention, and they will most frequently appear as inseparable aspects of a single living coordination rather than as separate subjects.
III. Why Poetry Dwells at L2
Living coordination can proceed at different levels of recursivity, distinguished by what the recursion is doing rather than by sophistication or worth. At L1, coordination proceeds without becoming separately salient: a body moves, a relationship holds, a familiar street is walked without being noticed. At L2, ongoing coordination becomes salient through disturbance, discrepancy, uncertainty, attraction, or interruption; something feels off, or newly compelling, before it can be fully named. L3 is articulation, in which a felt distinction is put into symbolic form for the first time, this pain or this longing named for this occasion. L4 stabilizes articulations into portable grounds: classifications, doctrines, decisions, and categories that travel beyond the situation that produced them. L5 is reflection on those stabilized grounds themselves. The levels are not stages through which every poem must pass, and the dependency of later levels on earlier ones makes none of them more valuable than the others.
The second hypothesis is that poetry attends disproportionately to L2. The lover becomes uncertain whether the feeling is returned. Someone leaves. A familiar place feels different without having changed. The season turns. A remembered encounter becomes painful to recall. An anticipated future becomes impossible. Each of these is a change in the texture of living coordination that is felt before it is explained, and often without ever being explained. Felt misalignment is the commonest poetic form of L2, but L2 also includes the newly compelling, which is why the first sight of a beloved and the first warm day belong to it as fully as heartbreak does. Poetry is unusually well suited to remaining with such experiences without resolving them. Where a clinical, legal, or theoretical genre is obliged to move from felt salience to classification and decision, a lyric can hold the salience open, and its reader or listener is invited to inhabit it rather than to settle it.
This requires a conceptual distinction that is easy to miss. A poem is itself an articulation, and in that sense every poem operates at L3. It does not follow that poems are about articulation. A song can communicate heartbreak with remarkable precision while never discussing what heartbreak is, how language works, or why the singer understands the experience in the terms chosen. L3 is pervasive as poetic operation and comparatively rare as poetic subject. The exactness of Sappho's fragment lies in what it articulates, a body losing even its capacity to speak, and the fragment never pauses to ask how such a loss could be put into words, although the paradox of articulating the failure of one's own tongue lies close at hand.
L4 and L5 are present in poetry and less prominent in it. Religious poetry often stabilizes doctrine, satire works through the categories it mocks, philosophical verse from Lucretius onward argues, and political songs press decisions upon their listeners. Ironic lyrics can turn on the conventions of the love song itself. The hypothesis claims only that sustained explicit reflection on categories, explanations, and their limits is much less common than the articulation of felt experience. Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (1969) is instructive precisely because it is unusual. The singer recalls how she once saw clouds as fanciful landscapes and later as things that hide the sun and bring rain, subjects love and then life to the same review, and concludes that she does not really know any of them at all. The successive interpretations are the song's subject. It reflects on its own earlier articulations and on the instability of every stabilization, which places it nearer to L5 than almost anything else in the popular canon, and its exceptional standing helps to show what most songs do not attempt.
Two qualifications keep the hypothesis honest. Not every powerful poem concerns misalignment or new salience: celebration, contentment, play, and the pleasure of ordinary presence can be articulated while what they represent remains predominantly L1, as in a drinking song, a harvest song, or most of Keats's autumn before its final stanza. And a change in coordination does not automatically produce L2, since many changes are absorbed at L1 without ever becoming salient. The empirical claim therefore concerns relative prominence rather than exclusivity. There is also a reason, internal to the theory, why poetry's relation to L2 should be so intimate. L2 draws on metabolic reserves and cannot be sustained indefinitely without cost, and a felt disturbance that resolves neither into repair nor into rest becomes destructive of every other coordination. Poetry gives L2 a bounded form. A lament can be sung, and then it ends; it can be sung again next year. Art is also among the practices that actively produce L2, and a song can do to its listener something like what the beloved did to the singer, which suggests that poetry participates in recursive fluidity as well as articulating its interruptions.
The second hypothesis can now be stated in full. Poetry disproportionately foregrounds L2 experience, while L3 operates as its means of articulation. Explicit thematic treatment of L4 and L5 will be comparatively uncommon.
IV. The Fundamental Event: A Change in the Status of a Recursive Counterpart
A living being coordinates with three types of recursive counterpart, and the difference between them is the theoretical centre of this argument. Nonrecursive counterparts do not alter their course in response to being engaged: the moon, a stone, the frost-like light on a floor. Selfrecursive counterparts alter in relation to their own ongoing state: one's own heartbeat, sleep, hunger, or healing. Interrecursive counterparts respond to one's responses in turn: another living being who can approach, withdraw, answer unpredictably, or fall silent. Recursivity is settled aspect by aspect, so that a beloved's body has nonrecursive aspects, its weight and its warmth on a cold night, alongside the interrecursive aspects that make love possible at all. What distinguishes another living being as a counterpart is that its recursive activity cannot be reduced to the expectations, interpretations, or decisions of whoever encounters it. A stone does not change its mind, and a lover may.
The decisive distinction lies between a change in the counterpart and a change in the counterpart's mesocosmic status. Two independent dimensions of that status matter here. The first is recursive relevance: how much of a living being's ongoing coordination depends on, and is organized around, a given counterpart. The second is availability: whether, and in what ways, that counterpart can at present be engaged in coordination at all. Recursive attribution, the settled sense of what kind of responsive being the counterpart is, usually stays constant through the events poetry cares about most. The beloved remains a person throughout. What changes is how much of the lover's life is organized around that person, and whether that person can still be reached.
Love, on this account, characteristically begins as a conferral of relevance, and a conferral of a peculiar kind. It is directed at a single individual rather than at a class of counterparts, and it can occur without the participation, consent, or even awareness of the being on whom relevance is conferred. Someone falls in love with a person who has not changed at all. Sappho's fragment is the paradigm: the woman is doing nothing to Sappho, she is listening to a man, and Sappho's body comes apart. Taylor Swift's "Enchanted" (2010) stages the same event in a contemporary idiom. The singer meets someone at a gathering she had expected to be tedious, finds the evening transformed, and then lies awake wondering whether he is already in love with someone else and hoping that he is not. No relationship has been established, no mutual recognition confirmed, no response given. Nothing has been transferred and nothing is owed. The other person's existence, and the futures their possible actions might open, are already reorganizing the singer's sleep, attention, and anticipation. This is what a change in mesocosmic status looks like when it arrives: a counterpart previously inconsequential becomes intensely consequential, and the change registers first in the body.
Adele's "Someone Like You" (2011) presents the converse. The singer has heard that a former lover has settled down and married; she turns up uninvited, asks not to be forgotten, wishes him well, and resolves to find someone like him. The counterpart remains alive and fully recursive, responding to the world and to another partner. What has changed is his availability for the relationship as it once existed, while his relevance to the singer has scarcely diminished. Her memories and anticipations still presuppose a configuration that no longer obtains, and the mismatch between what her coordination remains organized around and what is now available produces an L2 of exceptional intensity. The structure of interrecursive time sharpens the point. The past of a relationship is closed as event and open to being taken up again by either party, and the song is the record of a situation in which only one party is still taking it up.
W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues", in the four-stanza version published in Another Time (1940), radicalizes the case. The poem began in a play Auden wrote with Christopher Isherwood as a mock lament for a politician, and its later career as one of the most widely read elegies in English shows how completely a change of setting can change what a poem does. In the elegy the counterpart has not withdrawn from a relationship; his recursive activity has ceased altogether. Yet his former relevance continues to organize the survivor's embodied experience and relation to the world. The poem's demands are addressed to made things and found conditions. The clocks are to be stopped and the telephone cut off, the public world of aeroplanes and traffic is recruited into mourning, and at last the stars, the moon, the sun, and the ocean are dismissed as no longer wanted. The loss of one person becomes a demand that the whole lived world reorganize itself around his absence. In these terms the poem asks nonrecursive counterparts to answer back, to register a loss they cannot register, and part of the grief it articulates is the indifference of dwelling to the death of a beloved. The inseparability of the zoetic mediations is nowhere more visible: a death in being-with is lived as a disorder of the sun.
This leads to the observation on which much of the argument turns. A person may become less available while becoming more consequential, so that relevance and availability need not move together and can move in opposite directions. Living Value Theory offers an explanation. Coordination that succeeds best tends to disappear from view: it is muted at L1 and carried out without separate attention, as a relationship that holds does not announce that it is holding. While the beloved is present, an enormous range of coordination with them proceeds silently across embodiment, being-with, and dwelling: the shared rhythm of sleeping and waking, the habitual routes, the expected voice in the evening, the season anticipated as a season spent together. When the counterpart becomes unavailable, all of this muted coordination becomes salient at once. Every place, routine, and season that had been organized around the person now registers their absence. Where a single person sustained many stakes at once, little redundancy may remain to absorb the loss, and the survivor's whole mesocosm is unmuted together. The dead, moreover, continue to organize the living through what their lives deposited: letters, photographs, houses, songs, a name. Absence therefore intensifies bodily attention, memory, environmental association, and anticipation, which helps to explain why so much poetry concerns people who are no longer there. It was their presence that went unsung.
The third hypothesis follows. A major generative condition of love poetry and lament is a change in the mesocosmic status of another recursive being, in its relevance, its availability, or both, especially when earlier coordinations continue to matter after that status has changed.
V. Love Is Not a Transaction: What Poetry Knows About Being-With
Much social theory describes being-with in transactional terms. The elementary model is simple: A gives X to B, and B gives Y to A. Gift theory, exchange theory, and rational choice theory elaborate it in different directions, and the model accurately describes a particular configuration of transfers. It cannot describe interrecursive being-with in general, because living beings do not need to exchange anything, or to receive anything in return, in order to become consequential for one another. The unargued assumption that transactions are the primary unit of social life is transactive dualism, and love poetry is among the most extensive bodies of evidence against it.
Reciprocity is the transactional model's most plausible general concept, and it is the wrong one for love. Love can be unreturned, unacknowledged, unconditional, or directed at someone who is no longer alive, and none of these conditions makes its mesocosmic significance disappear. A singer can experience extraordinary happiness simply because someone exists, whether or not that person offers anything at all. Unrequited love is often read as failed exchange, an investment without return. Poetry consistently treats it as something else: coordination with an interrecursive counterpart whose capacity to respond is exactly what makes hope, waiting, and fear possible, and whose actual response is not required for the coordination to transform a life. This is non-transactional interrecursivity, in which the other's freedom to answer or not to answer belongs to the relation itself and is in no sense a breach of contract.
Transactions can nonetheless intrude. A gift can take part in loving being-with without functioning as an exchange, and a flower brought home in the evening may simply extend a coordination already under way without creating any claim. When the same gift is treated as creating a debt, an obligation, or an entitlement, the significance of the coordination changes, and what had expressed affection comes to be experienced as pressure, calculation, or purchase. The difficulty lies in the reduction of being-with to transactional equivalence and not in material objects as such, which poetry has always welcomed into love: rings, letters, a lock of hair, a scarf left behind.
Popular song has its own explicit theorists of this distinction. The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" (1964) is an unusually blunt rejection of the idea that wealth can secure affection: the singer offers to buy his lover anything she wants and insists that money cannot buy the one thing he cares about. The song still defines love negatively, against a market it declines to enter. Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" (1974) is more revealing. Parton wrote it on leaving her professional partnership with Porter Wagoner, and the song's speaker is the one departing. She goes, wishes the other joy and happiness, and promises continuing love. That love asks for no restoration of the relationship, claims no continued possession, and expects no return. It persists as relevance without availability, and as a wish for the other's flourishing that is indifferent to reciprocity. Whitney Houston's 1992 recording turned the song into a global anthem of romantic intensity, yet its structure remains that of a love that releases its object.
Narrative theory makes the same point from the other side. Vladimir Propp's morphology of the folktale classifies events by their function in the plot, so that the abduction of a princess and the seizure of a magical object can fall under the single function of villainy, and the lack of a bride and the lack of a marvellous object under the single function of lack. Joseph Campbell's monomyth likewise brings its hero home with a boon, whether that boon is a person or a treasure. Such formal descriptions are illuminating for what they set out to describe, but they classify the loss of a person and the loss of an object as equivalent disruptions because both set a search in motion. In recursive terms the two differ in kind. A lost object remains what it was, and if found it can be recovered as such. A lost person goes on living a recursive life elsewhere, changing in ways the one who lost them cannot follow, or ceases to live at all, and in neither case can they simply be recovered. Poetry is especially sensitive to this difference because it need not convert the continuing significance of a living counterpart into a goal, an acquisition, or a resolution, and can stay with the person as a person.
The fourth hypothesis follows. Love poetry will frequently foreground the non-transactional significance of other recursive beings, including forms of love that persist without return, recognition, possession, or exchange.
VI. The Poetics of Absence: Why Reference Dominates Symbolization
Symbols do not always do the same thing, and Living Value Theory distinguishes three modes in which they operate. In coordination mode, a symbol participates directly in the coordination it names, as the word "fire" shouted in a burning building is part of the evacuation rather than a report about one. In reference-to-absence mode, a symbol makes something not immediately present, a person, an event, a place, or a possibility, available to present coordination. In re-presentation mode, a symbol stages a configuration as present for consideration or experience, making present again what was once present or presenting what was never directly experienced, rather than pointing toward an absent counterpart or directing immediate action. The boundaries require care, because a single utterance can operate in more than one mode at once, and much of the interest of poetry lies in how the modes are combined.
Reference to absence should dominate lyric poetry for a reason that follows directly from the preceding sections. Poetry concerns absent lovers, dead relatives, distant homes, vanished childhoods, anticipated reunions, and futures that have not arrived. The distinctive capacity of symbolic reference is to make what is not present consequential in the present, and this capacity matters most where a recursive counterpart has become unavailable while continuing to organize living coordination. The beloved is absent, and their significance remains. Symbolic reference is how a living being with poietic capacities coordinates with that remainder.
Petrarch's Canzoniere is the great European archive of this mode. The poems to Laura, whom Petrarch first saw in Avignon in 1327 and who died in the plague year of 1348, fall into poems of her life and poems of her death, and absence governs both parts. In life Laura is largely unavailable, married to another, glimpsed rather than possessed; after her death she becomes more present to the poet than ever. Even a poem of the first part turns on absence. Sonnet 90 begins "Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi": her golden hair was loosed upon the breeze. The past tense does the work. The poem recalls an image, acknowledges that its cause has faded, and insists that the wound it made has not healed for that, and throughout the sequence l'aura, the breeze, puns on Laura's name, so that the beloved is folded into the moving air of a place.
The Beatles' "Yesterday" (1965) compresses the same structure into a little over two minutes: a past in which troubles seemed far away, a present in which the singer feels diminished, and between them a departure whose reasons were never given. Its title names a time rather than a person. "Someone Like You" refers to a lover who exists and is elsewhere, and its closing resolve to find someone like him is reference to absence projected forward, an anticipated future modelled on a counterpart who cannot be had. The comparison does not depend on Petrarch, Paul McCartney, and Adele sharing a historically constituted conception of romantic love, which they plainly do not, but on the fact that each uses symbolic reference to sustain the present significance of a coordination no longer available in its earlier form. Keats turns the mode back on itself: "Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too". The question refers to an absence, and the answer redirects attention to what is present.
Coordination mode supplies the contrast. "Allons enfants de la Patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé!" The opening of "La Marseillaise", written by Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg in 1792, is a summons. Its words do not describe something absent; they attempt to organize living beings in the present, to set bodies marching and voices singing together, and they announce the day of glory as already here. Anthems, ritual chants, work songs, football songs, and lullabies operate in the same way. A methodological qualification becomes essential at this point. Coordination mode may be far more common in poetic performance than in the represented content of lyrics. A lullaby coordinates a caregiver and a child, slowing breath, matching voice to rocking, easing a body toward sleep, even when its words refer to absent fathers, distant markets, or imaginary animals. A work song paces labour whatever its verses tell. Any comparative study must therefore code what a song does in performance separately from what its words refer to, or it will mistake an artefact of written transmission for a property of poetry.
Re-presentation requires separate attention. Some poetry presents scenes, characters, and possibilities without being organized around an absent counterpart of the speaker's own. The traditional ballad "Sir Patrick Spens" stages a king's command, a sailor's foreboding, and a shipwreck, and asks its listeners to witness a configuration rather than to share a narrator's loss. Dramatic monologues present a speaker who is not the poet, and much descriptive and narrative verse presents worlds for contemplation. Re-presentation should not simply be assumed to be rare. The genres in which it dominates, ballad, epic, dramatic monologue, and certain kinds of descriptive and didactic verse, should instead be identified and their frequency compared with that of lyric. Even there absence returns at the edges: the ladies of the ballad who will wait on the shore, with their fans and their golden combs, for lords who are lying at the bottom of the sea are reference to absence embedded within re-presentation.
Poetry thus presents a paradox. It uses a distinctively human symbolic capacity, one that depends on the poietic mediations and opens levels of recursion no other living being reaches, in order to remain extraordinarily close to the concerns of zoetic life. Rather than making symbolization its subject, it lets symbolic reference keep an absent person, place, or possibility affecting embodiment, being-with, and dwelling, which is why a poem about the moon over a distant home can still tighten a reader's chest twelve centuries later.
The fifth hypothesis follows. Reference to absence will be the most frequent foregrounded symbolic mode in lyric poetry, particularly in love poetry and lament, while coordination mode and re-presentation will be more prominent in particular performance traditions and genres.
VII. From Sappho to Olivia Rodrigo: A Comparative Test
The argument so far is theoretical, and the historical persistence of poetic themes is not by itself evidence of an invariant zoetic structure. Literary traditions influence one another: Petrarch drew on the troubadours, who drew on a long Mediterranean culture of love lyric, and the Petrarchan sonnet then spread through European verse for three centuries. Archives preserve some genres more successfully than others. Sappho's fragment 31 survives largely because the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus, quoted it as an example of how a poet selects and combines the symptoms of passion, so that what remains of her is partly what later critics found useful. Written elite poetry and orally transmitted song have very different histories of survival, and the oral traditions most likely to show different patterns are precisely those least likely to have reached the archive. Contemporary commercial music is shaped by recording industries, radio formats, streaming algorithms, and genre conventions that reward some themes over others. A serious comparison must therefore distinguish widespread recurrent patterns from the effects of transmission and selection.
The comparison proposed here would include ancient Greek lyric; classical Sanskrit love poetry; classical Chinese poetry from the Shijing to the Tang; Arabic and Persian lyric; Japanese waka and haiku; European medieval and early modern poetry; African oral poetic traditions; and contemporary popular song in several languages. The aim is to compare identifiable genres and practices across historical settings, not to treat each tradition as a representative sample of a civilization. Several traditions have already carried out part of the classification themselves, and their categories are data. Sanskrit poetics divides the erotic sentiment, śṛṅgāra, into love in union and love in separation, vipralambha, and treats separation as an especially fertile ground of poetry. The classical Arabic qaṣīda conventionally opened with the nasīb, in which the poet halts at the traces of an abandoned encampment and weeps for a beloved whose people have moved on, a convention that binds dwelling, being-with, and reference to absence into one opening gesture. The Kokinshū, the first imperial anthology of Japanese waka, compiled in the early tenth century, arranges its books chiefly by the seasons, by love, by parting and travel, and by lament. The troubadour alba laments the dawn that parts lovers. Each of these is an L4 stabilization within its tradition, and the hypothesis predicts that such stabilizations, in traditions with little or no historical connection, will tend to sort poetry along the configuration described above.
Coding would proceed along the four distinctions. The five mediations would be coded for prominence and, more importantly, for inseparable co-occurrence, so that a poem whose weather is its longing can be distinguished from a poem that merely mentions both. The five levels of recursivity would be coded twice, once for the experiences a poem represents and once for the activity the poem itself performs, which keeps L3 as operation apart from L3 as subject. The three types of recursive counterpart would be distinguished, together with any change in a counterpart's relevance or availability. The three symbolic modes would be coded by their predominant lyrical operation while allowing several to coexist, and performance would be coded separately from text wherever performance can be recovered. A further set of categories would capture the events by which another living being's status changes: arrival, intensification, distancing, interruption, and permanent loss.
A focused comparison of four songs shows how the coding would discriminate. "Fast Car" is dense and mixed. Love, poverty, a father's drinking, a mother's departure, wage labour, and a car are jointly foregrounded, so that multimateriality and economic constraint stand beside the zoetic core rather than behind it, and the song's tragedy lies in the persistence of made and inherited constraints across a change of partner and of town. It is a contrast case in which the predicted zoetic dominance should be weaker. "Someone Like You" approaches the ideal type of the configuration: changed counterpart status, continuing relevance, L2 misalignment, and reference to absence carried forward into anticipation. "drivers license" shows the inseparability of embodied distress, movement through an environment, multimaterial and multisymbolic infrastructure, and the absence of a desired counterpart; its suburban streets are made things rather than dwelling, yet they are driven as though they were the terrain of a loss. "Both Sides, Now" is the counterexample in which reflection on changing interpretations is itself foregrounded, and it should score high for L5 as represented experience. A framework unable to distinguish these four songs from one another would be too coarse to test anything.
The hypotheses would be weakened by specifiable findings. A large prevalence of poems primarily concerned with material objects, institutions, or explicit philosophical classification would undermine the predicted zoetic dominance. A high frequency of sustained L4 or L5 reflection would challenge the recursivity hypothesis. Evidence that coordination mode dominates the represented content of many oral traditions, as praise poetry and work songs may turn out to show, would require the absence hypothesis to be restricted to particular genres or modes of circulation. And if changes in counterpart status proved no more prominent than other kinds of disruption, such as storm, famine, illness without a loved other, or the loss of property, the proposed explanation of love poetry would need substantial revision. Stating these conditions in advance is what makes the framework testable, rather than a new vocabulary for familiar literary observations.
VIII. Why Poetry Matters for a Science of Living Coordination
Poetry is not primitive theory, an early and imprecise attempt to explain what later disciplines would explain properly. A poem need not formulate any account of embodiment, interrecursivity, or dwelling in order to be exact about them. Sappho knew nothing of autonomic arousal and recorded its signs with a precision no clinical vignette has improved upon; Li Bai had no concept of availability and caught, in a glance at the moon, what it is for a home to be out of reach. Poetry may preserve aspects of living coordination that become obscured once they are translated into abstract classifications, because the translation moves them to L4, where the felt salience of L2 is no longer what is being recorded.
Treating poetic language as representation alone misses what it does. A poem about an absent person is more than a symbolic description of someone elsewhere. Its articulation can alter the singer's present bodily state, reactivate remembered places, change what is anticipated, and reorganize the significance of ongoing life. The symbol does not simply stand for an absent reality; it participates in living coordination through its reference. Far from collapsing reference to absence into coordination mode, as though every elegy were a marching song, this shows why the symbolic modes must be distinguished without being treated as separate worlds: reference to absence is itself a way of coordinating with what remains of a counterpart who can no longer be engaged directly.
The argument also returns to the distinction between transactions and interrecursive being-with. Social theory frequently begins with exchange, roles, interests, obligations, or relationships. Poetry often begins elsewhere, with the bodily and environmental significance of another being, including where no exchange, obligation, or established relationship exists at all. Poetry is not thereby more accurate than social theory, which can see things no lyric could, from the distribution of stakes in a marriage to the economics of the recording industry; what poetry can do is preserve phenomena that particular theoretical abstractions make difficult to see. The sheer abundance of love poetry is itself a datum that theories beginning from exchange have had trouble explaining in their own terms.
Why, then, have poets written about love, separation, death, seasons, and home for thousands of years? Not only because these are prestigious subjects, and not only because poetic traditions reproduce established conventions. The proposed answer is that these subjects keep arising from the conditions of living coordination itself. Living beings encounter one another, become consequential for one another, and undergo changes in presence, availability, and significance. These changes are felt through the inseparable mediations of embodiment, being-with, and dwelling. Human symbolic capacities allow them to be articulated, including when the beings, places, or possibilities that matter are no longer there. Poetry is one enduring form of that articulation, and its historical recurrence may reflect the recurrence of fundamental possibilities and disruptions of living more than the repetition of the same ideas.
The configuration can now be stated once more. A change in the mesocosmic status of a recursive counterpart is felt across the inseparable zoetic mediations, frequently producing L2, which poetry articulates through L3, predominantly by symbolic reference to absence. Love poetry is its most productive test case because the other person is neither a possession, a transaction, a social role, nor simply a representation, but a recursive living being whose significance can transform an entire life without providing anything in return. The strongest implication is that poetry may have been remarkably faithful to the actual organization of living coordination, even where theoretical accounts of poetry, exchange, and relationships have not been. How far that fidelity holds is an empirical question, and the comparisons proposed here are designed to find out.
Selected References
Auden, W. H. 1940. Another Time. New York: Random House.
Bashō, Matsuo. 2004. Bashō's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Bashō. Translated by David Landis Barnhill. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon.
Keats, John. 1820. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. London: Taylor and Hessey.
Longinus. 1995. On the Sublime. Translated by W. H. Fyfe, revised by Donald Russell. Loeb Classical Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Petrarca, Francesco. 1996. Canzoniere. Edited by Marco Santagata. Milan: Mondadori.
Propp, Vladimir. 1968 [1928]. Morphology of the Folktale. Second edition. Translated by Laurence Scott, revised by Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Voigt, Eva-Maria, ed. 1971. Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta. Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep.
Recordings
Adele. 2011. "Someone Like You." On 21. XL Recordings.
The Beatles. 1964. "Can't Buy Me Love." Single. Parlophone.
The Beatles. 1965. "Yesterday." On Help! Parlophone.
Chapman, Tracy. 1988. "Fast Car." On Tracy Chapman. Elektra.
Houston, Whitney. 1992. "I Will Always Love You." On The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album. Arista.
The Mamas and the Papas. 1965. "California Dreamin'." Single. Dunhill.
Mitchell, Joni. 1969. "Both Sides, Now." On Clouds. Reprise.
Parton, Dolly. 1974. "I Will Always Love You." On Jolene. RCA Victor.
Rodrigo, Olivia. 2021. "drivers license." Single. Geffen.
Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph. 1792. "La Marseillaise." Strasbourg.
Swift, Taylor. 2010. "Enchanted." On Speak Now. Big Machine.