By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

WE share secrets depending on the level of trust and comfort with persons, and the sensitivity of the information being shared. Some secrets we share with our partners, some we share with friends, some with total strangers. However, there are also secrets we ourselves are unaware of and brought to light by others who interpret meanings from their interaction with us, things we sometimes deny ourselves from knowing.

Most secrets are personal and kept to ourselves. These secrets are sometimes shared with creatures we are intimate with, as expressed in a poem, The Secret, published in The Golden Book of Poetry (1947), where its author was listed as, ‘Anonymous’. The poem is about a secret kept between the speaker and two others, a robin and a cherry-tree:

We have a secret, just we three
The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree;
The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,
And nobody knows it but just us three.

Nature keeps our secrets, as much as its own secrets. The impact of nature’s secrets can be overwhelming, as they are unpredictable, uncertain, and sometimes threaten human lives, as expressed in Emily Dickinson’s poem, The Reticent Volcano Keeps:

The reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan –
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man.

Secret love is a favorite theme among many poets such as William Blake’s Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’ John Clare’s The Secret, and A. E. Housman’s Because I Liked You Better. In the song Secret Love, songwriter Alice Peacock, shares her secret love to a star:

So I told a friendly star
The way that dreamers often do
Just how wonderful you are,
And why I’m so in love with you

 W. B. Yeats’s The Secret Rose, (“Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours … “) and Lola Ridge’s Secrets, (“Secrets, / running over my soul without sound .. “) explore the depths of spirituality.

A proverb of Thai origin, “There are no secrets in the world” is echoed in Robert Frost’s couplet, The Secret Sits, believing, that secrets are always there, even if we deny its existence, like an elephant in the room:

We dance around in a ring and suppose
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows

So that, we may utter no words but we exude the heat, and burn.