Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Cosi" is a lively meditation on love, illusion, and the transformative power of perception. The poem takes its title from Così fan tutte, Mozart’s opera about love’s fickleness and the playful deceptions that test fidelity. Nims plays with this theme, presenting love as an experience marked not by constancy but by shifting affections and an embrace of fantasy over rigid reality. The poem’s speaker reminisces about being "in love with Dorabella all that autumn" and "in love with Fiordiligi come the spring," immediately countering himself with the bristling voice of fact: "Oh no you weren’t!" This immediate contradiction sets the poem’s tone—one of mischievous self-awareness, where the truth of emotions is less important than the joy of experiencing them.

The playfulness of Nims’ language mirrors the playful deception in Mozart’s opera, where lovers are tested and love proves both mutable and resilient. The poem dismisses the idea of a stable, one-dimensional truth in favor of something richer, more fluid. The speaker admits, "Daft about ‘em / Is what I was," delighting in the music of their names as much as in the feelings they evoke. Love, in this vision, is less about unwavering devotion than about reveling in the ephemeral, in the thrill of shifting passions and the poetry of infatuation.

This vision of love stands in contrast to the strict logic of "fact," embodied by "your fuddyduddy daddy"—a stand-in for conventional wisdom or rigid moralism. This figure clings to the belief that the world should be "just so," resisting the notion that truth might be flexible. The phrase "He never had a gaudier notion, had he?" carries an exasperated, almost affectionate tone, as if lamenting how some people fail to appreciate the extravagance of imagination. The sharp contrast between "Yes" and "No" in "Round every 'Yes' his clump of cactus, 'No!'" suggests that fact is not only restrictive but prickly, resisting the fluidity that love and illusion invite.

Nims urges a different way of seeing—one that prioritizes imagination over dry facts. "Might as well basket all your eggs in isn’t," he declares, rejecting certainty in favor of the liberating "isn’t," where things don’t have to be fixed in a single reality. In this realm of illusion, the mundane is transformed, as "trash-heaps alchemize to Byzant- / ine dancing floors by gilt pavilions." This line, broken across the stanza, enacts a kind of transformation itself, the enjambment pulling us across the threshold from refuse to splendor. Byzantium, long associated with opulence and aesthetic excess, becomes a symbol of the imagination’s ability to elevate the ordinary into something golden, luminous.

The final image crystallizes this vision: "Like lissom flora all an airy day / Plain Doe and 'Ligi to mad tambours sway." The once ordinary figures of Dorabella and Fiordiligi, nicknamed affectionately ("Plain Doe and 'Ligi"), now twirl in a world of music and movement. The word "lissom" conveys lightness and fluidity, reinforcing the idea that love—like dance—thrives in motion, in shifting rhythms rather than in rigidity. The "mad tambours" evoke an ecstatic, almost Dionysian revelry, where love, illusion, and music intertwine. This closing image suggests that to love is to surrender to the dance, to allow oneself to be carried away by passion’s melody rather than trying to pin it down with reason.

Ultimately, "Cosi" champions a vision of love that embraces its contradictions and delights in the irrational. Nims’ playful, musical style—full of internal rhymes, alliteration, and enjambment—mirrors this thematic embrace of movement and transformation. The poem argues that fact, with its stern insistence on stability, is ultimately less interesting than the fluidity of love, where perception can shape reality. Like Così fan tutte itself, the poem leaves us in a world where love is a performance, where illusion is as meaningful as truth, and where, for all its unpredictability, love remains a thing to be celebrated.

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