The Best Love Poems of All Time

[Adolescent09]

When first I looked into your eyes
each breath became a thousand sighs.
My heart drummed out a thunder beat
I glowed with joy from head to feet.
The hand of love had touched my soul,
as the bell of destiny began to toll.
The tide of love began to rise,
the world was filled with summer skies.
My sodden clouds of cold and grey
glowed with gold, then wisped away.
A brilliant rainbow arched across,
as waves of love began to toss.
The air was filled with lovebird cries,
when I first looked into your eyes.

When I first looked into your eyes,
all time and space were paralyzed
And in that instant, I was shown
a universe I had never known.
I dwell there still, in Paradise,
when I look into your eyes.

You are friendly, kind and caring
Sensitive, loyal and understanding
Humorous, fun, secure and true
Always there... yes that's you.

Special, accepting, exciting and wise
Truthful and helpful, with honest blue eyes
Confiding, forgiving, cheerful and bright
Yes that's you... not one bit of spite.

You're one of a kind, different from others
Generous, charming, but not one that smothers
Optimistic, thoughtful, happy and game
But not just another... in the long chain.

Appreciative, warm and precious like gold
Our friendship won't tarnish or ever grow old
You'll always be there, I know that is true
I'll always be here... always for you.

- Written and owned by Angela Lee Hillsley

[Sojourner]

Here are two that I rate among the best;

Sonnets
VIII
And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,–this wonder fled,
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how belovèd above all else that dies.

~Edna St. Vincent Milay
From 'Second April' 1921


THE TRIUMPH OF TIME
(abridged)

...The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
Hours that rejoice and regret for a span,
Born with a man's breath, mortal as he;
Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,
My love, my love, and no love for me!

It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
Some waif washed up with the strays and spars
That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars;
Weed from the water, grass from a grave,
A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.

There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread:
Body for body and blood for blood,
As the flow of the full sea risen to flood
That yearns and trembles before it sink,
I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.

Yea, hope at highest and all her fruit,
And time at fullest and all his dower,
I had given you surely, and life to boot,
Were we once made one for a single hour.
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart,
Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart;
And deep in one is the bitter root,
And sweet for one is the lifelong flower.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

[kilted exile]

Here's To Thy Health
Here's to thy health, my bonie lass,
Gude nicht and joy be wi' thee;
I'll come nae mair to thy bower-door,
To tell thee that I lo'e thee.
O dinna think, my pretty pink,
But I can live without thee:
I vow and swear I dinna care,
How lang ye look about ye.

Thou'rt aye sae free informing me,
Thou hast nae mind to marry;
I'll be as free informing thee,
Nae time hae I to tarry:
I ken thy frien's try ilka means
Frae wedlock to delay thee;
Depending on some higher chance,
But fortune may betray thee.

I ken they scorn my low estate,
But that does never grieve me;
For I'm as free as any he;
Sma' siller will relieve me.
I'll count my health my greatest wealth,
Sae lang as I'll enjoy it;
I'll fear nae scant, I'll bode nae want,
As lang's I get employment.

But far off fowls hae feathers fair,
And, aye until ye try them,
Tho' they seem fair, still have a care;
They may prove waur than I am.
But at twal' at night, when the moon shines bright,
My dear, I'll come and see thee;
For the man that loves his mistress weel,
Nae travel makes him weary.

Rabbie

[Janine]

When purusing on "Poet's Corner", just now, I found this poem and thought it was great. I have long been a fan of e.e.cummings, so I really like this one:

if i believe

if i believe
in death be sure
of this
it is

because you have loved me,
moon and sunset
stars and flowers
gold creshendo and silver muting

of seatides
i trusted not,
one night
when in my fingers

drooped your shining body
when my heart
sang between your perfect
breasts

darkness and beauty of stars
was on my mouth petals danced
against my eyes
and down

the singing reaches of
my soul
spoke
the green--

greeting pale
departing irrevocable
sea
i knew thee death.

and when
i have offered up each fragrant
night,when all my days
shall have before a certain

face become
white
perfume
only,

from the ashes
then
thou wilt rise and thou
wilt come to her and brush

the mischief from her eyes and fold
her
mouth the new
flower with

thy unimaginable
wings,where dwells the breath
of all persisting stars

e.e. cummings

[Sojourner]

While verses from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' have been cited several times on this thread - So far, not the following verse, which remains my personal favorite from that collection;

Go From Me

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm.
The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning


-Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet V from 'Second April' should be included on this list as well;

V

Once more into my arid days like dew,
Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
Long since to be but just one other mound
Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
And once again, and wiser in no wise,
I chase your colored phantom on the air,
And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
And stumble pitifully on to where,
Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,
Once more I clasp,--and there is nothing there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[ennison]

Here's one stanza from a Burns' poem posted elsewhere in the forums.


Yestreen when to the trembling string
The dance gaed through the lighted ha'
To thee my fancy took its wing
I sat, but neither heard nor saw:
Though this was fair and that was braw
And yon the toast of a the town,
I sighed, and said amang them a',
'Ye are na Mary Morison.'

[lavendar1]

Good stuff:

The elegies of Sextus Propertius - find them at:

tkline.freeserve/co.uk/Prophome.htm

[THX-1138]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot

i love the last line

(Till human voices wake us, and we drown)

[NDL]

Now here's a real love poem.

Now sleeps the crimson petal
By
Alfred Lord Tennyson


Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

[ArwenUndomiel]

One of my favourite poems

THE GOOD-MORROW
by John Donne

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

[Tasmanian]

The verses usually clumped together as 'Lucy' by Wordsworth (although there is much debate as to whether these verses are all about the same subject or not. Nevertheless, one of the most moving love poems I've read:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

I travelled among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

[Ledsepp]

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

William Butler Yeats

[kemal]

You Are A Must For Me


you are a must for me, you never know
i keep your name in my mind as a nail
your eyes getting more bigger as they get bigger
you are a must for me, you never know
i am heating inside of me with you


Trees are getting ready for autumn
this city is that old Istanbul?
clouds are torn aparts in darkness
street lights are immediately flashing
over sidewalks, the smell of rain
you are a must for me, you are absent


to love is sometimes a rather disgraceful fear
man gets tired all of a sudden in an evening
captive, with living over straight razor
sometime, breaks his hands, his passion
takes out a few lives in his lifetime
whichever door he knocks sometimes
behind him, whistle of the naught silence of loneliness


a poor gramphon plays in Fatih
from ancient times a Cuma* plays
standing in the corner, i would listen non-stop
i would bring an untouched sky to you
weeks are crumbled in my hands
what shall i do, what shall i hold on, where shall i go
you are a must for me, you are absent


maybe you are blue dotted child in june
Ah noone knows you, noone knows
a ship leaks from your deserted eyes
maybe you are taking an aeroplane in Yesilkoy
wholly got wet, your hair shudder
maybe you are blind, broken, in a hurry
Bad winds are carrying away your hair


whenever i think of living a life
maybe hard in this wolves table..
without a shame, though without getting our hands dirty
whenever i think of living a life
i start with your name, with saying Silence
your secret seas are moving inside of me
No, it wont happen in other ways
you are a must for me, you never know...

attila ilhan


does anbody read this?

[Bii]

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What is all this sweet work worth,
If thou kiss not me?
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley



Entirely agree - can't beat a bit of Love's Philosophy - what a great love poem!

[xAleksx]

I think this is a really great love poem, I used it for my English assignment (year 12!).

Christopher Marlowe - Come Live With Me And Be My Love (The Passionate Shepherd To His Love)

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks 5
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies, 10
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair linèd slippers for the cold, 15
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love. 20

Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing 25
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

Wouldn't any woman love a man who spoke of his love for her like Marlowe???

[Lyn]

When you go - Edwin Morgan

When you go,
if you go,
And I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.

[hockeychick8792]

This is my favorite:

I Asked God
- John Raine -
I asked God for a flower, he gave me a bouquet
I asked God for a minute, he gave me a day
I asked God for true love, he gave me that too
I asked for an angel and he gave me you.

What do you think?

[ktd222]

This is my favorite:

I Asked God
- John Raine -
I asked God for a flower, he gave me a bouquet
I asked God for a minute, he gave me a day
I asked God for true love, he gave me that too
I asked for an angel and he gave me you.

What do you think?

It's nice. Kind of cheezy for me, though.

[hockeychick8792]

It's nice. Kind of cheezy for me, though.

What kind of poems do you like then, ktd222?:confused:

[ktd222]

What kind of poems do you like then, ktd222?:confused:

There is an array of poems dealing with an array of subject matters I adore, love being one matter. I just don't like this particular one.

[hockeychick8792]

There is an array of poems dealing with an array of subject matters I adore, love being one matter. I just don't like this particular one.

What ever you say ktd222:thumbs_up . Do you have any specific poets you enjoy? For example I like Edgar Allen Poe (yes it may be morbid and dark at points but i love that:D ) and also I like a few of Lord Byron's poems.

[ktd222]

What ever you say ktd222:thumbs_up . Do you have any specific poets you enjoy? For example I like Edgar Allen Poe (yes it may be morbid and dark at points but i love that:D ) and also I like a few of Lord Byron's poems.

I've never really "read" Lord Byron's, or Poe's work. Just the past year I've been reading a lot of Wallace Steven's work. He's a genius! Before that, the authors who's work I adored, and still adore, are Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings(to an extent, until his works give me a headache from all the weird syntax and line rearrangements), John Berryman, etc. The list could really go on forever. I guess it's not poets more than poems I enjoy...and what I see happening in poems...and what happens to me when reading particular poems.

[hockeychick8792]

I've never really "read" Lord Byron's, or Poe's work. Just the past year I've been reading a lot of Wallace Steven's work. He's a genius! Before that, the authors who's work I adored, and still adore, are Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings(to an extent, until his works give me a headache from all the weird syntax and line rearrangements), John Berryman, etc. The list could really go on forever. I guess it's not poets more than poems I enjoy...and what I see happening in poems...and what happens to me when reading particular poems.

Yeah, it is in the poems. There are a few of Emily Dickenson's poems that I like a a few I dislike. So your are right there.:idea:

Hey... you seem like a poet are you?
I can write poetry and I have been published a few times, but nothing big.

[Dorian Gray]

My favourite love poem - When we two parted by Lord Byron.

[lumos]

frost.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only know
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose--
But were always a rose.

[ktd222]

frost.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only know
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose--
But were always a rose.


This is nice. I like how Frost moves from fact, to speculating what else can signify a rose, to reverting back to the orginal fact of what a rose is when referring to this other person

[petethered]

Petes' radical Poetry Blog

petepoetry-bullybuster.blogspot.com

Have a look at my Radical poetry site

Cheers Petethe red

Desire

O Whistle an' I'll come to you , my girl
O Whistle an' I'll come to you , my girl

Tho' partner and parents an a' would go mad
O whistle an' I'll come to ye, my girl.

Peter Burton

Rabbie helped wi this one.

[cuppajoe_9]

I KNEW A WOMAN

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virutes only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well herwishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass and grass turn into hay:
I'm a martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).I heart Theodore Roethke.

[Moira]

LOVE
By Pablo Neruda

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers I ache from the
perfumes of spring.
I have forgotten your face, I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?
Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks,
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.
I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice; I have forgotten
your eyes.
Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to my vague memory of
you. I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm.
Your caresses enfold me, like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every
window.
Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because
of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires: shooting
stars, falling objects.

[Countess]

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light 5
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face; 10
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 15
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

-- I love LORD BYRON

[Felixstowe]

Unrequited love is a horrible thing to suffer from.

[jon1jt]

The Indian Serenade
Percy B. Shelley

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep or night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me-who knows how? -
To thy chamber-window, sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream,-
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O, beloved as thou art!

O, lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast:
Oh! press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!

[远-方]

WOW!God me!I am a new comer,but deeply got lost here for so many beautiful poems.....I am from China living in Shanghai ,a good listener and spectator,but I love english cultures so much,and especially by Shelley and Lord Byron!Also here is a popular one in China by Tagore,have perfect translation in Chinese:


The furthest distance

The furthest distance in the world
Is not between life and death
But when I stand in front of you
Yet you don't know that
I love you



The furthest distance in the world
Is not when I stand in front of you
Yet you can't see my love
But when undoubtedly knowing the love from both
Yet cannot be together


The furthest distance in the world
Is not being apart while being in love
But when plainly can not resist the yearning
Yet pretending
You have never been in my heart



The furthest distance in the world
But using one's indifferent heart
To dig an uncrossable river
For the one who loves you!

[Nova74]

This is by far my favorite; I think it sharply says it all in a big rush of emotion, fast and quick, the same way that it feels when you reflect on that moment with that person.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

[Durgamol]

Maria Pawlikowska - Jasnorzewska

Love


I haven't see you for a month
And nothing. Maybe I'm paler
a little bit sleepy, a little bit quiet,
but it looks possible to live without air!

(translated from Polish)

[tan man]

what is going on in this world? are you guys serious? do you really think that there can be love poems out there better,in any way, than those written by Lord Byron and Keats? the only exception can be Emily Dickinson in her seemingly homosexual poems like ;To have a Susan of my own.

[tinustijger]

Hey, I can't find that poem on the net, do you have a link for me tan man??

[Moira]

Hey, I can't find that poem on the net, do you have a link for me tan man??

To own a Susan of my own
Emily Dickinson


To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss—
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!

[lotus_flower123]

hi,
i am a new member.
i think that Donne's," A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning" is the most beautiful love poem ever.

[Sylph]

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[Shalot]

The Lady of Shallot is a good one. The song is also pretty good. Does anyone know who sang it?

Well I was just digging through the archives and I found this! If we're talking about the same song it's Loreena McKinnett!

And look someone else misspelled Shalott! And he likes Star Wars! I think Stanislaw and I must be soul mates. Or maybe we knew each other in a past life! (where has he been anyway?)

Seriously, though. This is a good poem about unrequited love. but I guess it counts as a love poem. although, it is better to read about it than to experience it.

[Il Penseroso]

Lola, by the Kinks


I met her in a club down in old soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-cola
C-o-l-a cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said lola
L-o-l-a lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

Well Im not the world's most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola
Well I'm not dumb but I cant understand
Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man
Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

.......

[jon1jt]

great tune il penser. reminded me of another oldie love poem...um, sorta.

------
I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long.
Like a worn-out recording, of a favorite song.
So while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed.
And in the personals column, there was this letter I read:

"If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
If you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain.
If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape.
I'm the lady you've looked for, write to me, and escape."
.........

[CountingSheep]

My Love Is Like To Ice

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal's with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

Edmund Spenser

annnnd

[ 130 ]
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Shakespeare

[quasimodo1]

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
........

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

[Monica]

We've been studying Shelley pretty extensively on English literature classes but I came across the following poem in one of the Twin Peaks episodes.


Love's Philosophy - Percy Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

[JBI]

Weep, Lovers, sith Love's very self doth weep,
And sith the cause for weeping is so great:
when now so many dames, of such estate
In worth, show with their eyes a grief so deep:
For death the churl has laid his leaden sleep
Upon a damsel who was fair of late
Defacing all our earth should celebrate,-
Yea all save virtue, which the soul doth keep
Now hearken how much love did honor her.
I myself saw him in his proper form
Bending above motionless sweet dead,
And often Gazing into Heaven; for there
The south now sits which when her life was warm
Dwelt with the joyful beauty that is fled.

Dante Alighieri,La Vita Nuova, VIII
Translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[Mortis Anarchy]

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair


DON'T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
........

-Pablo Neruda

[Midas]

LOVE, that word must rank as one, if not the, most misused, abused, and therefore, misunderstood, words in the English language ( and that applies to its equivalent in any language.)

There are 'love poems' that attempt to describe love, and there are those that express it in, often overly, romantic terms.

It is easy to see from the many posts here how varied the meaning can be, or at least, how the variations of its expression can touch the differing emotions of others.

There is also a clear distinction, and one which often causes confusion, between 'love', and being 'in love'.

Just having come to this website, I thought I had better skim through the many contributions to this long thread. I was pleased to find that, I believe, two contributors, one being Monica, or was it Miranda, had included what I feel strongly is the most definitive in describing what 'true' love is, and by so doing, what it isn't.

To understand, and therefore appreciate it, fully, one needs to understand the metaphors Shakespeare uses which relate more to the familiar of his day when
seafaring (wandering bark, and 'height be taken'), and land farming (hand sickle making a compass sweep) had a more closer relevance to daily life than it does today.

How often do we hear the cliched expression in teetering relationships - 'I don't love you anymore'. Well, according to Shakespeare, and I concur, that would be an impossibility. Why? Because love is not from a tap that can be turned on and off. Love, that is real love, is eternal - period! No 'ifs and buts'.

Probably, with but a few exceptions, its nearest example is found in a mother's love for her child. Yes,. there are one or two exceptions even here, but generally, that love is there rock solid, and undying.

I make no apologies for posting it once again.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:-

No, It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:-

If this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

W Shakespeare

As I have said, I find this clearly defines 'True Love'.

As an example of expressing the romantic, I would like to share with you one that you will not find on the internet, nor in any anthology. It was written by one of my Chinese students at Taiwan University. I had been introducing the class to poetry, with great trepidation I might add, and it sparked something
in one or two of my students. This one shook me with its simplicity, and I need not tell you the writer was female, just 21 - her only English was what had been learned in school.

Lovely Words
by Iris Lee

Lovely words flow from your mouth
into my ears
then gently swamp my heart.
Willingly, and unwillingly
I struggle.
Till my lonely heart
is drowned contentedly
in your lovely words.

[Brigitte]

My English teacher told me that this is the only good love poem she's ever read:

Tonight I Can Write
by Pablo Neruda


Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
......


She said this because this poem isn't the typical "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" romantic gibberish... (she's not very romantic, it seems). This poem is "real." I agree.

[Midas]

Well Brigitte, If your teacher goes along with those sentiments in the poem, I would think she is a little indecisive, and confused about 'love'. It is certainly at variance with Shakespeare's idea of love, as it appears to turn it on and off - like so many do with their idea of love.

It illustrates our confusion with the word. It has become so misused, and abused through use over time. This is often because of the way some interchange the word love, with 'in love'.

To me, love, between two people, if it ever existed (Shakespeare defined), would continue after being 'in love' could well have died. or faded. We love our parents, and/or our children, but we are not 'in love' with them.

Perhaps, Brigitte, in that poem, the confusion is occasioned by the writer being confused, or not understanding the difference. By that I mean that they both 'loved' each other, but their being 'in love' as in romantic displays
that people 'in love' seek as an expression, and confirmation,were not always evident and therefore created that doubt.

Just some thought to toss around.

[quasimodo1]

The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
....


-- Dylan Thomas

[quasimodo1]

Evening Song

LOOK off, dear Love, across the shallow sands,
And mark yon meeting of the sun and the sea,
How long they kiss in sight of all the lands.
Ah! longer, longer we.

Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun,
As Egypt's red pearl dissolved in rosy wine,
And Cleopatra night drinks all. 'Tis done,
Love, lay thine hand in mine.

Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart;
Glimmer, ye waves, round else unlighted sands.
O night! divorce our sun and sky apart
Never our lips, our hands. Sidney Lanier

[Nottagore]

WOW!God me!I am a new comer,but deeply got lost here for so many beautiful poems.....I am from China living in Shanghai ,a good listener and spectator,but I love english cultures so much,and especially by Shelley and Lord Byron!Also here is a popular one in China by Tagore,have perfect translation in Chinese:


The furthest distance

The furthest distance in the world
Is not between life and death
But when I stand in front of you
Yet you don't know that
I love you

Excuse me sir/madam, but this "very popular" poem that appears in hundreds, if not thousands of websites, blogs, and BBSes across China is NOT by Tagore. It is a poorly translated version of a "Poetry by relay writing" by a group of Taiwanese students based on two lines of a poem written by a popular female Taiwanese novelist.
Somewhere along the line, someone put in the "Tagore" tag and post it on one Chinese BBS, and as is always the case, that spread and spread.
Several disclaimers have appeared on various forums, but as usual, more people would rather believe in myth rather than truth.
There are at least 8 different English versions (translations) of this poem, some of which are incomprehensible.
E.g. The remotest distance is not in the world ;
Raw and dead but;
and
On the boundary farthest distance
Is not to living with die
and
The farest distance in the world
is not that between living and death
==============================

I notice there are some Chinese nationals visiting this forum; for them, here is one site you can read up on the background to this "myth". It is written mostly in Chinese.
users.openface.ca/~dstephen/fake-tagore.htm

For people who cannot read Chinese, but are curious about what this is all about, there is one version that is mostly in English:
The Story Behind "Furthest/Farthest Distance"
rainlane.com/dispbbs.asp?boardID=26&ID=24645&page=1

and a "disclaimer" at rpi.edu/~jix/disclaimer.htmlposted by Muyv (Xiaoyun Ji), one of the original translators of the version that is quoted by the poster on this forum.

[Annabel Lee]

These are two of my favorite love poems, both by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile--her look--her way
Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day" -
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, -
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

[quasimodo1]

To Annabel Lee: Ulalume--A Ballad

THE skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere--
The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:--
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll--
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek,
In the ultimate climes of the Pole--
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek,
In the realms of the Boreal Pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere--
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year--
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber,
(Though once we had journeyed down here)
We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn--
As the star-dials hinted of morn--
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn--
Astarte's bediamonded crescent,
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said--"She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs--
She revels in a region of sighs.
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion,
To point us the path to the skies--
To the Lethean peace of the skies--
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes--
Come up, through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said--"Sadly this star I mistrust--
Her pallor I strangely mistrust--
Ah, hasten!--ah, let us not linger!
Ah,fly!--let us fly!--for we must."
In terror she spoke; letting sink her
Wings till they trailed in the dust--
In agony sobbed; letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust--
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied--"This is nothing but dreaming.
Let us on, by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybillic splendor is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty to-night--
See!--it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming
And be sure it will lead us aright--
We surely may trust to a gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom--
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista--
But were stopped by the door of a tomb--
By the door of a legended tomb:--
And I said--"What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied--"Ulalume--Ulalume!--
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere--
As the leaves that were withering and sere--
And I cried--"It was surely October,
On this very night of last year,
That I journeyed--I journeyed down here!--
That I brought a dread burden down here--
On this night, of all nights in the year,
Ah; what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber--
This misty mid region of Weir:--
Well I know, now this dank tarn of Auber--
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

Said we, then--the two, then--"Ah, can it
Have been that the woodlandish ghouls--
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls,
To bar up our way and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds--
From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds--
Have drawn up the spectre of a planet
From the limbo of lunary souls--
This sinfully scintillant planet
From the Hell of the planetary souls?"

Edgar Allan Poe

[quasimodo1]

(Perhaps no exceeding the mystic beauty of Ulalume, still a unique and intense view of this subject:) " Love Is A Parallax" by Sylvia Plath
'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

......

[calupmoney81]

If only I could handle this love I have
Id give it to you
If only I owend the world
Id give It to you
If only I had money
Id give it to you
If only you loved me
Id love you

"I would not call it the best but I wrote it does that make it the worst??"

[Bakiryu]

To Annabel Lee: Ulalume--A Ballad


This has always been one of my favorite poems!

[quasimodo1]

To Bakiryu: Yea, the ballad...Ulalume by Edgar Allen Poe just resonates better with every re-read, don't you think. Much better than the poems everybody associates with Poe. I'll have to look up the poet you posted, can't say i remember much about him. quasimodo1

[Bakiryu]

eh, what poet? *looks around* The one in my sig? :blush:

[stephofthenight]

Sonnet 145 Those lips that Love's own hand did make

Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate'
To me that languish'd for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
'I hate' she alter'd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying 'not you.'

[quasimodo1]

To Stepofthenight: Use of Shakespeare is like bringing out the best wine when the wedding party is almost over. quasimodo1

Vitam Impendere Amori by Guillaume Apollinaire
(Vitam Impendere Amori: To Threaten Life for Love)





Love is dead within your arms
Do you remember his encounter

He’s dead you restore the charms

He returns at your encounter



Another spring of springs gone past

I think of all its tenderness

Farewell season done at last

You’ll return as tenderly

[Tabula_Rasa]

1.Love's Philosophy - by Percy Bysshe Shelly
2.Desire - by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
3.I Gave Myself To Him - by Emily Dickinson
4.We'll go no more a-roving - by Lord Byron
5.The Clod and the Pebble - by William Blake

...etc.

[quasimodo1]

Corinne's Last Love Song

I

HOW beautiful, how beautiful you streamed upon my sight,
In glory and in grandeur, as a gorgeous sunset-light!
How softly, soul-subduing, fell your words upon mine ear,
Like low aerial music when some angel hovers near!
What tremulous, faint ecstasy to clasp your hand in mine,
Till the darkness fell upon me of a glory too divine!
The air around grew languid with our intermingled breath,
And in your beauty's shadow I sank motionless as death.
I saw you not, I heard not, for a mist was on my brain--
I only felt that life could give no joy like that again.

II

And this was Love, I knew it not, but blindly floated on,
And now I'm on the ocean waste, dark, desolate, alone;
The waves are raging round me--I'm reckless where they guide;
No hope is left to right me, no strength to stem the tide.
As a leaf along the torrent, a cloud across the sky,
As dust upon the whirlwind, so my life is drifting by.
The dream that drank the meteor's light--the form from Heav'n has flown--
The vision and the glory, they are passing--they are gone.
Oh! love is frantic agony, and life one throb of pain;
Yet I would bear its darkest woes to dream that dream again.

Jane Francesca Lady Wilde... also Irish nationalist, poet and editor.

[jon1jt]

i think this is a love poem in a universal sense. certainly a favorite of mine, perhaps love enough. :)



Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same


He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

Robert Frost

[quasimodo1]

i love you much(most beautiful darling)
by: e.e. cummings
.................................................. ..........
i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

[quasimodo1]

First Love ...title should read, John Clare


I ne'er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet.
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.

My face turned pale, a deadly pale.
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked what could I ail
My life and all seemed turned to clay.

And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away.
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.

I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start.
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.

Are flowers the winter's choice
Is love's bed always snow
She seemed to hear my silent voice
Not love appeals to know.

I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling place
And can return no more.


- John Clare

[karo]

Some Kiss

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives:
the touch of the spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell
and the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling.

At night I open the window
and I ask the moon to come and press its face against mine,
breathe into me.

Close the language door and open the love window.
The moon won't use the door, only the window.

Rumi

[karo]

This thread's great. Still working my way through it. In the meantime, here's another contribution from me by Carl Sandburg:

The Great Hunt

I cannot tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last-
Maybe I'll tell you then-
some other time.

When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the rack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, " So long"-
Maybe I'll tell you then-
some other time.

I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you.
I shall never find any
greater than you.

[quasimodo1]

A TRUE LOVE

WHAT sweet relief the showers to thirsty plants we see,
What dear delight the blooms to bees, my true Love is to me!
As fresha dn lusty Ver* foul winter doth exceed, [Spring]
As morning bright, with scarlet sky, doth pass the evening's weed*, [garment]
As mellow pears above the crabs* esteemed be,-- [crabapples]
So doth my Love surmount them all, whom yet I hap to see.
The oak shall olives bear, the lamb the lion fray*, [frighten]
The owl shall match the nightingale in tuning of her lay,
Or I my Love let slip out of mine entire heart,
So deep reposed in my breast is she for her desert.
For many blessed gifts, O happy, happy land!
Where Mars and Pallas strive to make their glory most to stand!
Yet, land, more is thy bliss, that, in this cruel age,
A Venus' imp thou hast brought forth, so steadfast and so sage:
Among the Muses nine, a tenth if Jove would make,
And to the Graces three, so fourth her would Apollo take.
Let some for honour hunt, and hoard the massy gold;
With her so may I live and die, my weal can not be told.

Nicholas Grimald

Sullivan Ballou's Letter to his Wife




July the 14th, 1861

Washington DC



My very dear Sarah:



The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.



Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure - and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine 0 God, be done. If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.



But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows - when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children - is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?



I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death -- and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country, and thee.



I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and I could not find one. A pure love of my country and of the principles have often advocated before the people and "the name of honor that I love more than I fear death" have called upon me, and I have obeyed.



Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.



The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me - perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar -- that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.



Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have oftentimes been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot. I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.



But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night -- amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours - always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.



Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.



As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers his and hers I call God's blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children.



Sullivan

LOVE SONG FOR ALEX, 1979

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;
the lover of my life, my youth and age.
My heart belongs to him and to him only;
the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage
Now grown to years advancing through the dozens
the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire
fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder
but all my days of Happiness and wonder
are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.
{unfortunately, an excerpt from this love poem by contemporary poet, Margaret Walker}

[Virgil]

LOVE SONG FOR ALEX, 1979

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;


I love that first line!!

[karo]

"the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage"

Powerful words! Great!

[quasimodo1]

MORE STRONG THAN TIME
Since I have set my lips to your full cup, my sweet,
Since I my pallid face between your hands have laid,
Since I have known your soul, and all the bloom of it,
And all the perfume rare, now buried in the shade;

Since it was given to me to hear on happy while,
The words wherein your heart spoke all its mysteries,
Since I have seen you weep, and since I have seen you smile,
Your lips upon my lips, and your eyes upon my eyes;

Since I have known above my forehead glance and gleam,
A ray, a single ray, of your star, veiled always,
Since I have felt the fall, upon my lifetime's stream,
Of one rose petal plucked from the roses of your days;

I now am bold to say to the swift changing hours,
Pass, pass upon your way, for I grow never old,
Fleet to the dark abysm with all your fading flowers,
One rose that none may pluck, within my heart I hold.

Your flying wings may smite, but they can never spill
The cup fulfilled of love, from which my lips are wet;
My heart has far more fire than you can frost to chill,
My soul more love than you can make my soul forget

She Walks In Beauty


She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

- Lord Byron

[HailStorm]

I was going to post Pablo Neruda's poem but I see Brigitte added it back in June. Still a lot of catching up to do so if these are repeated, my apologies.
Two of my favourite love poems

'Leo Marks'
The Love That I Have

The life that I have is all that I have, The life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have, A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours

<<<<>>>>

Somewhere There Waiteth
Sir Edwin Arnold

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For one lone soul another lonely soul,
Each choosing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,
Then blend they, like green leaves with golden flowers,
Into one beautiful and perfect whole;
And life's long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.

[Zombie]

I love you
You don't love me
I'll get over it
>.<

[quasimodo1]

ELEGY FOR MARIE
So that our age and ages yet unsung
May know how well we loved when we were young,
And that your loveliness, my long delight,
Shall not forever vanish into night
And leave behind no trace upon the earth,
I pledge you all my mettle, all my worth,
Wit of my wit, which life to you shall give
Long time or never, as these lines shall live.
All who shall read the songs I sang for you,
With bitterness or sweetness threaded through
According as you dealt me joy or tears,
Shall call you goddess, and the more the years
Fly past, the more your perfect loveliness
Shall age defy, green in its timelessness…
{Beginning of this poem}

[trippy star]

Shakespeare's Sonnet XVII:

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.

[quasimodo1]

HOUSES OF DREAMS
You took my empty dreams
And filled them every one
With tenderness and nobleness,
April and the sun.

The old empty dreams
Where my thoughts would throng
Are far too full of happiness
To even hold a song.

Oh, the empty dreams were dim
And the empty dreams were wide,
They were sweet and shadowy houses
Where my thoughts could hide. ............
{first three stanzas of this poem by Sara Teasdale}

[karo]

Upon my couch at night
I sought the one I love -
I sought, but found him not.
'I must rise and roam the town,
Through the streets and through the squares;
I must seek the one I love.'
I sought, but found him not.
I met the watchmen
Who patrol the town.
'Have you seen the one I love?'
Scarcely had I passed them
When I found the one I love.
I held him fast, I would not let him go
Till I brought him to my mother's house,
To the chamber of her who conceived me.

Old Testament

[sreeja]

I love William Wordsworth's poems

[quasimodo1]

ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Again I see you, ah my queen,
Of all my old loves that have been,
The first love, and the tenderest;
Do you remember or forget -
Ah me, for I remember yet -
How the last summer days were blest?

Ah lady, when we think of this,
The foolish hours of youth and bliss,
How fleet, how sweet, how hard to hold!
How old we are, ere spring be green!
You touch the limit of eighteen
And I am twenty winters old.

My rose, that mid the red roses,
Was brightest, ah, how pale she is!
Yet keeps the beauty of her prime;
Child, never Spanish lady's face
Was lovely with so wild a grace;
Remember the dead summer time.

Think of our loves, our feuds of old,
And how you gave your chain of gold
To me for a peace offering;
And how all night I lay awake
To touch and kiss it for your sake, -
To touch and kiss the lifeless thing.

Lady, beware, for all we say,
This Love shall live another day,
Awakened from his deathly sleep;
The heart that once has been your shrine
For other loves is too divine;
A home, my dear, too wide and deep.

What did I say--why do I dream?
Why should I struggle with the stream
Whose waves return not any day?
Close heart, and eyes, and arms from me;
Farewell, farewell! so must it be,
So runs, so runs, the world away,

The season bears upon its wing
The swallows and the songs of spring,
And days that were, and days that flit;
The loved lost hours are far away;
And hope and fame are scattered spray
For me, that gave you love a day
For you that not remember it.

{poet whom Marcel Proust favored, Alfred de Musset}

[Beverly S]

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb:
He is meek & He is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

Here's a William Wordsworth poem for you, written in 1807 called: My heart leaps up when I behold

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound to each to each by natural piety.

[drunkenKOALA]

Annabell Lee

IT was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee.
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee,
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee,
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud one night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

This is one of my all time favourite poems by Edgar Allan Poe. I have lost count of the number of times I find myself reading it. It is most definitely a love poem, albeit a rather tragic one.

Nice, I really like it.

[Walid Ammar]

Hello everybody
Congratulation, this lovely expression shouldn't be said to me, but to my HEART who was waiting to find out such a site as EDEN AS YOUR SITE.
Thank you

[quasimodo1]

I Think I Should Have Loved You by Edna St. Vincent Millay
II

I THINK I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.
{by Edna St. Vincent Millay}

My Dear and Only Love

MY dear and only Love, I pray
This noble world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
But purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,
Which virtuous souls abhor,
And hold a synod in thy heart,
I'll never love thee more.

Like Alexander I will reign,
And I will reign alone:
My thoughts shall evermore disdain
A rival on my throne.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all.

But I must rule and govern still,
And always give the law,
And have each subject at my will,
And all to stand in awe.
But 'gainst my battery, if I find
Thou shunn'st the prize so sore
As that thou sett'st me up a blind,
I'll never love thee more.

Or in the empire of thy heart,
Where I should solely be,
Another do pretend a part
And dares to view with me;
Or if committees thou erect,
And go on such a score,
I'll sing and laugh at thy neglect,
And never love thee more.

But if thou wilt be constant then,
And faithful of thy word,
I'll make thee glorious by my pen
And famous by my sword:
I'll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before;
I'll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee evermore.

James Graham, First Marquis of Montrose

Poems from the Vita Nuova
Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa,
Sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone,
E così esser l’un sanza l’altro osa
Com’alma razional sanza ragione.

Fàlli natura quand’è amorosa, 5
Amor per sire e ‘l cor per sua magione,
Dentro la qual dormendo si riposa
Tal volta poca e tal lunga stagione.

Bieltate appare in saggia donna pui,
Che piace a gli occhi sì, che dentro al core 10
Nasce un disio de la cosa piacente;

E tanto dura talora in costui,
Che fa svegliar lo spirito d’Amore.
E simil face in donna omo valente. Love and a Gentle Heart Are But One Thing

Love and a gentle heart are but one thing,
as the philosopher in his sentence wrote;
so they without each other live dare not
as rational spirit without reasoning.

‘Tis nature, when in love, makes Love a king, 5
and in his mansion lodges then the heart,
wherein he rests, as in his habitat,
either in brief or lengthy slumbering.

Beauty in a wise lady then appears,
which so delights the eye, the heart is taken 10
with longings of the thing that pleases so;

and this delight at times so long endures
it makes Love’s very spirit soon awaken.
The same a woman feels about man’s awe.

Lovers' Infiniteness

IF yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all,
I cannot breath one other sigh, to move,
Nor can entreat one other tear to fall,
And all my treasure, which should purchase thee --
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters -- I have spent.
Yet no more can be due to me,
Than at the bargain made was meant,
If then thy gift of love were partial,
That some to me, some should to others fall,
Dear, I shall never have Thee All.
Or if then thou gavest me all,
All was but All which thou hadst then;
But if in thy heart, since, there be or shall,
New love created be, by other men,
Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears,
In sighs, in oaths, and letters outbid me,
This new love may beget new fears,
For this love was not vowed by thee.
And yet it was, thy gift being general,
The ground; thy heart is mine: what ever shall
Grow there, dear, I should have it all.

Yet I would not have all yet:
He that hath all can have no more,
And since my love doth every day admit
New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store;
Thou canst not every day give me thy heart;
If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it:
Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart,
It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it:
But we will have a way more liberal
Than changing hearts, to join them, so we shall
Be one, and one anothers's All.

John Donne

[Sylph]

To His Coy Mistress


Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side.
Should'st Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster then Empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast.
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
For Lady you deserve this State;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.
Thy Beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound
My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try
That long preserv'd Virginity:
And your quaint Honour turn to durst;
And into ashes all my Lust.
The Grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning glew,
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r.
Let us roll all our Strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.


Andrew Marvell

[AwayAloneAlast]

Excellent choice there, Sylph! Marvell is unfortunately quite understudied, but one of my favourite of the older poets.

For myself, I would have to rate Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shower," as my favourite 'love poem.' It isn't a romantic love poem, but it is certainly filled with a deeply sorrowful love, more powerful than any other I can recall:

Three years she grew in sun and shower;
Then Nature said "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And her's shall be the breathing balm,
And her's the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."

Thus Nature spake -The work was done -
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.

[NikolaiI]

The Oblation - A.C. Swinburne

Ask nothing more of me, sweet,
All I can give you I give
Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet:
Love that should help you to live,
Song that should spur you to soar.

All things were nothing to give
Once to have sense of you more,
Touch you and taste of you, sweet,
Think you and breathe you and live,
Swept of your wings as they soar,
Trodden by chance of your feet.

I that have love and no more
Give you but love of you, sweet;
He that hath more, let him give;
He that hath wings, let him soar;
Mine is the heart at your feet
Here, that must love you to live


--
This is not one of the greatest of all times, it's just kinda nice.
(I was reminded it by the Donne poem)

[AwayAloneAlast]

When You are Old by W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


---
One of my favourite Yeats poems. From his earlier volume, "The Rose."

[patrycja]

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" - one of the best ever written :)


COME live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lin&#232;d slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

[MrBojangle]

No more :D

[quasimodo1]

THE YOUNG FOOLS (LES INGENUS)
High-heels were struggling with a full-length dress
So that, between the wind and the terrain,
At times a shining stocking would be seen,
And gone too soon. We liked that foolishness.

Also, at times a jealous insect's dart
Bothered out beauties. Suddenly a white
Nape flashed beneath the branches, and this sight
Was a delicate feast for a young fool's heart.

Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling,
The women who hung dreaming on our arms
Spoke in low voices, words that had such charms
That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling.

[mukta581]

''Time and Love''

WHEN I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—
That Time will come and take my Love away:

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Last Breath

You have never given me a reason to believe
that you weren’t perfect,
that I wasn’t meant to fall in love with you,
from the first time we met
to the last time we’ll ever see each other.
You’re my newest tragedy,
my newest reason to breathe,
and I can’t afford to have
these feelings go unrequited,
I can’t afford to let you go,
because my heart is spent from
the last time it was taken
and wrung dry of passion
before it was given back to me.
But I could fall asleep so alone
and wake up with my head
full of thoughts of you,
whispering “I love you” softly, as if
you were there next to me,
searching for your hand to hold,
wanting to just stare into your eyes for a while.
And if I saw you there, I wouldn’t dare to blink
because you’d disappear if I did,
and you’re too damn beautiful to look away from.
I can’t live without you, girl.
I’ve absolutely lost my mind in this love for you.
I want my future to have you in it,
I want my life to be spent with you,
I want you to say that you can see
this fire in my eyes and in my heart,
and I want to see the same in yours.
I want to grow old with you,
I want to see the world with you,
I want to love you with everything I possibly can,
because every minute would be well worth it.
And if I couldn’t do that, if you couldn’t love me,
I’d still wait for you until my last breath,
wishing only to use it to tell you one last time
how much I love you.

Show me I can trust you

I'm trying to give you my trust
Because you've got my heart
Please don't play with it
I'm tired of the same games

I want you to know
I really do have something for you
I hope you feel the same way to.
Can we make this work?

I honestly don't know
Where this is gonna lead us
I barely know you
But you got me dreamin of u every night

Do me a favor babe?
I'm gonna try to give
My trust to you
Just please... show me that I can.

[Anonymous Angel]

http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k154/s_p_ming/MyPrinceMyPatternsReb39.jpg


A very beautiful love poem, one of my favorites. Long ago, I did a painting based on this particular poem. (Above) I hope you like both the poem and the painting...Rebecca Tacosa Gray

Painting:

My Prince, My Patterns.
Watercolor on Arches Watercolor Paper
Copyright 2000, Rebecca Tacosa Gray

_________________________________

PATTERNS

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime-tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding.
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled upon the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon -
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
"Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se'nnight."
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
"Any answer, Madam?" said my footman.
"No," I told him.
"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer."
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, "It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Amy Lowell [1874-1925]

[mukta581]

Why I fall in love with you!

Since I met you,
I've fallen in love with you,
at least a hundred times
for a hundred different reasons.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
when I watch you doing something you enjoy,
something you are so involved in,
that you are unaware of my presence.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
when I listen to you talk to other people.
Whether you are being interesting and funny
or warm and caring,
and genuinely concerned,
you have a way of making people feel better
with nothing more than words.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
just thinking about you,
remembering all the memories we've made.

Falling in love for the first time,
staying in love during the rough times,
finding more to love about you every day.
And whenever I think about
the wonderful things that lie ahead of us,
I fall so totally and completely,
In love with you,
All over again.

You need to understand,
with you my love has no beginning,
and most certainly no end,
My love for you,
I most certainly know,
Only knows,
FOREVER!

[Nicki]

My Dearest...
Not your words, not mine,
but our hearts and souls entwined.
No time or distance will prevail,
in the story these two will tell.
Exact thoughts. different words,
singing in our hearts to be heard.
The deepest pain they do share,
and tired souls to each they bare.
Only dreams were left to grasp,
a thought of a forever love at last.
For there is nothing greater to be,
than a lover who is just like thee.
Now my heart is lifted of the weight,
for I have found my true SoulMate!
love...

by CSL

[mukta581]

Love!!!!

You make me feel real
you make me feel alive
inside its your love i secretly thrive

the things you say
the things you do
no one Ive met can compare to you

your my soul mate so special
your my everything your the one
you my match me we stick like glue
when were apart i feel so blue

i hate the fact i cant be with you
believe me when i say this i really really do
id give anything in this world just to be laying next to you

my heart and soul to you i owe
i hate the way life's planned out its evil taunting flow
the things i think and feel for you no one can ever no

id love to leave and spread my wings fly away like a dove
id leave with you and never look back my special secret love

[dramasnot6]

Why I fall in love with you!

Since I met you,
I've fallen in love with you,
at least a hundred times
for a hundred different reasons.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
when I watch you doing something you enjoy,
something you are so involved in,
that you are unaware of my presence.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
when I listen to you talk to other people.
Whether you are being interesting and funny
or warm and caring,
and genuinely concerned,
you have a way of making people feel better
with nothing more than words.

Sometimes I fall in love with you
just thinking about you,
remembering all the memories we've made.

Falling in love for the first time,
staying in love during the rough times,
finding more to love about you every day.
And whenever I think about
the wonderful things that lie ahead of us,
I fall so totally and completely,
In love with you,
All over again.

You need to understand,
with you my love has no beginning,
and most certainly no end,
My love for you,
I most certainly know,
Only knows,
FOREVER!

Aww
That says it all :)

[DeathAngel]

To my Dear and Loving Husband

By Anne Bradstreet


If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

[mukta581]

My Love

My love is like an ocean
It goes down so deep
My love is like a rose
Whose beauty you want to keep.

My love is like a river
That will never end
My love is like a dove
With a beautiful message to send.

My love is like a song
That goes on and on forever
My love is like a prisoner
It's to you that I surrender.

Perfection in my Eyes

All I ever wanted was to be part of your heart,
And for us to be together, to never be apart.

No one else in the world can even compare,
You're perfect and so is this love that we share.

We have so much more than I ever thought we would,
I love you more than I ever thought I could.

I promise to give you all I have to give,
I'll do anything for you as long as I live.

In your eyes I see our present, our future and past,
By the way you look at me I know we will last.

I hope that one day you'll come to realize,
How perfect you are when seen through my eyes.

[intoxicatedsoul]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

[mukta581]

You will never know!!!!
You will never know,
how much you hurt me,
when you walk way,

you will never know,
how much i cry,
when you never say i love you,

you will never know,
how much i just love you,
and only you,

you will never know,
how much i want to be with you,
cause i am so happy,

you will never know,
how much it hurts,
when you leave me on my own,

you will never know,
how much i truly,
do trust you,

you will never know,
how much,
you really do mean to me!!

[LarryK]

from one of the oldest love songs:

... I am the rose of Sharon,
and the lily of the valley,
As the lily among thorns,
so is my love among the daughters,

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow
with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
and his banner over me was love.

Stay me with flagons,
comfort me with apples:
for I am sick with love. ...

from The Song Of Solomon: 2:1-5, KJV

oh, also: ASPHODEL by William Carlos Williams [much too long to quote, but one of the greatest of all love poems]

[JBrower]

Sky Blue and Black by Jackson Browne
In the calling out to one another
Of the lovers up and down the strand
In the sound of the waves and the cries
Of the seagulls circling the sand
In the fragments of the songs
Carried down the wind from some radio
In the murmuring of the city in the distance
Ominous and low

I hear the sound of the world where we played
And the far too simple beauty
Of the promises we made

If you ever need holding
Call my name, Ill be there
If you ever need holding
And no holding back, Ill see you through
Sky blue and black

Where the touch of the lover ends
And the soul of the friend begins
Theres a need to be separate and a need to be one
And a struggle neither wins
Where you gave me the world I was in
And a place I could make a stand
I could never see how you doubted me
When Id let go of your hand

Yeah, and I was much younger then
And I must have thought that I would know
If things were going to end

And the heavens were rolling
Like a wheel on a track
And our sky was unfolding
And itll never fold back
Sky blue and black

And Id have fought the world for you
If I thought that you wanted me to
Or put aside what was true or untrue
If Id known thats what you needed
What you needed me to do

But the moment has passed by me now
To have put away my pride
And just come through for you somehow

If you ever need holding
Call my name, Ill be there
If you ever need holding
And no holding back, Ill see you through

Youre the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
Youre the whispering and the sighing
Of my tires in the rain
Youre the hidden cost and the thing thats lost
In everything I do
Yeah and Ill never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue
Thats the way love is
Thats the way love is
Thats the way love is
Sky blue and black

[quasimodo1]

MORE STRONG THAN TIME
Since I have set my lips to your full cup, my sweet,
Since I my pallid face between your hands have laid,
Since I have known your soul, and all the bloom of it,
And all the perfume rare, now buried in the shade;

Since it was given to me to hear on happy while,
The words wherein your heart spoke all its mysteries,
Since I have seen you weep, and since I have seen you smile,
Your lips upon my lips, and your eyes upon my eyes;

Since I have known above my forehead glance and gleam,
A ray, a single ray, of your star, veiled always,
Since I have felt the fall, upon my lifetime's stream,
Of one rose petal plucked from the roses of your days;

I now am bold to say to the swift changing hours,
Pass, pass upon your way, for I grow never old,
Fleet to the dark abysm with all your fading flowers,
One rose that none may pluck, within my heart I hold.

Your flying wings may smite, but they can never spill
The cup fulfilled of love, from which my lips are wet;
My heart has far more fire than you can frost to chill,
My soul more love than you can make my soul forget

[thom]

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

[Tarquin]

my favorite love poem is by Cassandra Clare, in her book City of Bones:

"To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed"

[thom]

"Celia Celia", Adrian Mitchell

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on

;)

[7deadlysins]

Auden's 'Tell me the truth about Love'

My boyfriend read this two me one afternoon.
It's just beautiful.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love


Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

:)


i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings



I read this last summer, i think it one of the most beautiful poems i have ever read, so simple, so real.

[Pensive]

Auden's 'Tell me the truth about Love'

My boyfriend read this two me one afternoon.
It's just beautiful.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love


Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

:)


It's brilliant! Thanks for posting the poem. :)

[Paul Roe]

I think I will arise now and go to Innisfree, and there watch the swallows twitter.
Nine pearls and rubies will I give away there, but I will keep my fancy free.
If I had world enough and time, an hundred years would be spent on this reply.
But, at my back, time's winged chariot is hurrying near and it will not stop for me.

Do I paraphrase myself through these lines? Very well then, I do.
I am a vast, colossal wreck and I have a mind of winter, especially when I am sitting in silence listening to the frozen lake crack, pop and rumble.
I will sing praise for the bright star.
I will wish myself to be as steadfast.
Nature's eremite will guide me down the road less taken toward immortallity.

Be not proud, Time and Death.
This verse your virtues rare shall eternize, but you are already there.
Down by the sally gardens, where frost is no longer spectre gray, where spring springs from the breast of the sky, I palely loiter.
Not ancient ladies, when refused a kiss, are so far from hope and love, though the daisies spring and the butterflies flicker about.

A singing skylark lifts me up before a bawling nightingale sets me down.

To Keats, Shelley, Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Yeats, Marvell, Pope, Housman, and Spenser...
Cheers!

Paul
antiaging4geeks.com

[islandclimber]

ode with a lament---- Pablo Neruda

[Roivas]

Well, this depends on what is meant by a love poem, but here are two poems that I like which deal with love:

"Night is My Sister, and How Deep in Love"

Night is my sister, and how deep in love
How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,
There to be fretted by the drag and shove
At the tide's edge, I lie -- these things and more:
Whose arm alone between me and the sand,
Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,
Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand.
She could advise you, should you care to hear.
Small chance, however, in a storm so black,
A man will leave his friendly fire and snug
For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back
To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I Thought Once How Theocritus Had Sung"

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young;
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang, --Not Death, but Love.

~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[nacreous]

yes, those were very pretty, but I think that Byron's "She walks in beauty" is the all-time single best love poem ever.
just my opinion.

[Pecksie]

I will probably think of many more poems after I've posted this, but here are a few that really moved and continue to move me (in no particular order):

A Feaver, by John Donne
The Good Morrow, by John Donne
"Black absence hides upon the past...", by John Clare
Sonnet V, by Garcilaso de la Vega
Poem 20, by Pablo Neruda
Sonnet ("Largo espectro de plata conmovida..."), by Federico García Lorca
Song of the Soldier Husband, by Miguel Hernández (and many more of his)
They Flee from Me, by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sonnet 116, by William Shakespeare
"Grieve not, dear love, although we often part...", by the Earl of Bristol
"Love's Philosophy", by P. B. Shelley

[kelby_lake]

I misread "love" for "loved" in suggesting Keats' Ode. With an apology I want to add that Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" should be on the list of best "love" poems.[/i]

i like that too. okay it's not a romantic love poem but 'On A Dead Child' is nice:

http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/on_a_dead_child.html

Dissolution/fading of love:

http://www.bartleby.com/121/8.html

[qimissung]

I'm new to this forum, but I've really enjoyed reading these poems. I didn't realize e.e. cummings had written such lovely poems; I also like the one that ends "nobody, not even the rain has such small hands."

I like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Yeats, and Neruda, and on and on. It has been fun.

I know Edna St. Vincent Millay is on here several times, and I apologize if this one has been included. It is the one that makes my throat close up and makes my heart give a lurch of recognition.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

[Quoth the Raven]

Hi, this is my first post :)

I just read through the entirety of this thread and there are so many beautiful poems I would have picked that have already been mentioned - notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese No. 14, e. e. cummings' i carry your heart with me and Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman.


This poem may not be the greatest of all time, but I do have a fondness for it:

I Am Very Bothered - Simon Armitage

I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.

O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn't shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.

Don't believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me.

[Kafka's Crow]

BE in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.

Ezra Pound

[Page Sniffer]

I vote for two of his, but they go together so beautifully as in a "before" (perhaps when love is being anticipated), and "after" as in wisdom found when a heart is broken and trying to heal. Yeats hits it square on the head and in the heart. They are: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, and Never Give All the Heart.

I loaned my copy out, sorry I didn't post them with my opinions. I have the first memorised, but the second not enough to post it and do it justice. They are easy to find however. Thanks and peace to us all.

[dramasnot6]

I'm new to this forum, but I've really enjoyed reading these poems. I didn't realize e.e. cummings had written such lovely poems; I also like the one that ends "nobody, not even the rain has such small hands."
.

My favorite love poems are also by ee cummings.

[quasimodo1]

Love Poem for Wednesday


You’re the day after Tuesday, before eternity.
You’re the day we ran out of tomatoes
and used tiny packets of ketchup instead.

You are salt, no salt, too much salt, a hangover.
You hold the breath of an abandoned cave.
Sometimes you surprise me with your

aurora borealis and I’ll pull over to watch you;
I’ll wait in the dark shivering fields of you.
But mostly, not. My students don’t care for you

{excerpt}

Imagining you my being burns more brightly, my

veins turn the night red. About my heart the armed

guardian rattles with suspicion. Has your feeling

cought sight of me down through the liberated

stars: Are you coming from unopposable space. --

Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, May, 1913 {translated by

Edward Snow}

[zaazusmiles]

This poem is one of the most widly love poems in the world, written about her husband Robert Browning.

"How do i love thee, let me count the ways"
"if god choose, i shall but love thee better after death"

just 2 lovely lines - looking the rest up on the net is worth it - i love it.

Ahh... Elizabeth Barret Browning's sonnets are the best love poems of all time. Makes you want to fall in love all over and over again.

[stark6]

Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi
che 'n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea,
e 'l vago lume oltra misura ardea
di quei begli occhi ch'or ne son sì scarsi;

e 'l viso di pietosi color farsi,
non so se vero o falso, mi parea:
i' che l'esca amorosa al petto avea,
qual meraviglia se di subito arsi?

Non era l'andar suo cosa mortale
ma d'angelica forma, e le parole
sonavan altro che pur voce umana;
uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole
fu quel ch'i' vidi, e se non fosse or tale,
piaga per allentar d'arco non sana.

Francesco Petrarca

This translation is not so good but...

She let her sunlit tresses fly
tangled and golden in the air.
Unmeasurable light was in her eyes
(how fine they were!) and now that look is rare.

Her kindness showed in tender glances,
wind-flushed cheeks. At least that's how it seemed.
I was walking tinder, I took chances.
The next part might be something that I dreamed:

A fiery lightness in her bearing,
a voice that wasn't mortal — it was song,
a sort of angel presence she was wearing.

She was a thing from heaven. If I'm wrong
I'd just as soon not know.
To heal the wound you don't unstring the bow.

[Niketa]

:) I may not get to see you often as i like Imay not get to hold you in my arms all through the night But deep in my heart I truly know you're the one that i love and i can't let you go I can't promise you the world but i can try too give you a happy life I can't promise you i'll never make mistakes But i can try the best i can I can't promise you that I'll catch you everytime you'll fall but i can try always be close by so that i can help youu get up I can't promise that our love will last forever like in storybooks but i can promise that no matter what i'll never forget the memories i made with you:)

[pballplaya101]

Im not able to express my love in that mannor because in that mannor there are no words that could express my love for you, there are no sentences that are made up of words that could express my love, there are no frases that could express this undying fire and passion that i have for one very beautiful girl, there are no paragraphs, essays, comics, books, novels, or dictionaries that could express this awe powerfull connection that i have with the one girl that truley has my heart....so you ask me why i love you and in depth and this is why i cant tell you.

[mazHur]

THE LOOK
anon



STEPHON kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Stephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.

[woodce]

Thomas Hood's Time, Hope, and Memory is pretty good. My favorite is the very beginning when he says, "Fly through the world, and I will follow thee,Only for looks that may turn back on me;"

and the end, "When thou art vext, then, turn again, and see Thou hast loved Hope, but Memory loved thee."

[mazHur]

What We Might Be, What We Are

by X. J. Kennedy

If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We'd not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,

But you're just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I'm a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we'll stay slightly remote.

[woodce]

Yeat's Never give all the heart was not what i expected. I expected more.

[learntodiscover]

Edgar Allen poe, LENORE

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.

Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!
Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."

I know it might not look like a love poem but I keep coming back to it. The is the second poem I know from him that he mentions the name LENORE with sweet remembrance. I think H emight hae truly loved a lenore (or maybe the real woman has a different name) who died.
Look at his famous poem THE RAVEN and you'll see what I mean.

[mazHur]

Edgar Allen poe, LENORE

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.

Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!
Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."

I know it might not look like a love poem but I keep coming back to it. The is the second poem I know from him that he mentions the name LENORE with sweet remembrance. I think H emight hae truly loved a lenore (or maybe the real woman has a different name) who died.
Look at his famous poem THE RAVEN and you'll see what I mean.


Beautiful poem by Poe,,, wonder how many young wives died before his eyes other than Annabel Lee or all are the one and the same?:D

[heisenheim]

hello,

the poem is really cool. I try to find the song of that poem..

Thanks...

[traytray]

Hmm..indeed i'm quite torn..i hold so many close to my heart. Some that come to mind are..William Wordsworth..Emily Dickinson..Elizabeth Barrett Browning..Lord Byron..John Keats..William Shakespeare..Pablo Neruda.;)

[carino]

Don't go far off, not even for a day
Don't go far off, not even for a day,
Because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
And I will be waiting for you, as in
An empty station when the trains are
Parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
The little drops of anguish will all run together,
The smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
Into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
On the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
Into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
A second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
Have gone so far I'll wander mazily
Over all the earth, asking, will you
Come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

[Cellar Door]

NO SECOND TROY

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

"No Second Troy" is reprinted from The Green Helmet and Other Poems. W.B. Yeats. Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1910.

I know "No Second Troy" is not a typical love poem, but the story behind it is amazing; Yeats, Maude Gonne, her husband McBride- I love it... She was violence, he detested violence, but loved her. I find it to be captivating.

[Jozanny]

I know "No Second Troy" is not a typical love poem, but the story behind it is amazing; Yeats, Maude Gonne, her husband McBride- I love it... She was violence, he detested violence, but loved her. I find it to be captivating.

Could you explain this a little better? Maude Gonne had a violent temperment; her husband McBride did not and loved her? Where does Yeats fit into this?

[JBI]

Could you explain this a little better? Maude Gonne had a violent temperment; her husband McBride did not and loved her? Where does Yeats fit into this?

Both Gonne and Husband had violent temperaments. Their marriage failed due to domestic violence, as it is told, and I highly doubt it was her hitting him.

This from Yeats on the subject;

from Easter 1916

"This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."

[Jozanny]

Both Gonne and Husband had violent temperaments. Their marriage failed due to domestic violence, as it is told, and I highly doubt it was her hitting him.

This from Yeats on the subject;

from Easter 1916

"This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

Hmm. Yeats was something of an elision in my formative years such as yours. I never really took to him, but I never really had much enthusiasm for Irish literary traditions, and that despite Joyce. I did enjoy listening to old Celtic mythology "untainted" by Anglican penetration, and there were some interesting poems in Kinsella's anthology that used Celtic to interesting advantage, but nothing I've read of Irish authors to date has ever really won my empathy, except Swift, but to me he is about as British as they come.

[mangueken]

I have always thought e.e. cummings wrote some very beautiful love poems

[Cellar Door]

Jozanny-

I mean to say that Yeats loved Maude Gonne, even though Yeats detested violence. I suppose I should have clarified that in my post. Oops. I am a big fan of Yeats; perhaps this will clear up what I meant:




In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a twenty-three year old heiress and ardent Nationalist.[29] Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student."[30] Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.[31] Looking back in later years, he admitted "it seems to me that she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes."[32] Yeats' love remained unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her nationalist activism.[33] His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he had first met in 1896, and parted with one year later. In 1895, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began."[34] Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his horror, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.[35]

Yeats' friendship with Gonne persisted, and in Paris in 1908 they finally consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul."[34] The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: "I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too."[36] By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Young and Old":

My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WB_Yeats

[Jozanny]

That cleared up things substantially Cellar; much appreciated.

[JBI]

Either way though, Yeats is still one of the greatest poets; perhaps the greatest 20th century one. He seems to be the greatest first generation modernist, and was held even by them as such.

[Jozanny]

Either way though, Yeats is still one of the greatest poets; perhaps the greatest 20th century one. He seems to be the greatest first generation modernist, and was held even by them as such.

Do you believe this or are you repeating consensus?

I am, no pun intended, handicapped in my diffidence toward the man because his reputation was fed to me rather than studied so that I could make up my own mind--and as previously indicated, *the Celtic pathos* at some point becomes belabored victimization in my sensibility. Look at the Italian approach, in comparison. Italy wraps itself up in Old World corrosion and its authors remain perfectly contented to frolic on these grounds, from Dante through Eco. Irish writers seem to demand that their hurt feelings be indulged--and I'd argue that even Joyce does not transcend this. He makes it squarely front and center of his genius. It seems only now in the early 21st century that Ireland is dusting itself off and saying to the rest of the world, "hey, we're kind of pretty, ain't we?"

I seem to derive better rewards from other sources, and that's okay.:p

[JBI]

I believe it - I have read over his collected poems, time after time, and am amazed on every reading. Metrically, and in terms of syntax and form, there is no match - he understands the way words work, and uses them to create deeper meanings than what appear on the page. In terms of content, his later works especially transcend his "Irishness" as you have called it, in the sense that he seems to have purged the majority of personal experience out of his work, in an (successful) attempt to make his poetry universal.

If you look into his process, you can see exactly why he achieves such effects. He used to write an average of two lines a day - that is, spend so many hours writing but two lines, then thinking over them, and revising them. With such slow care, and skill with language, it is almost inevitable that such poetic strength will emerge.

[Jozanny]

If you look into his process, you can see exactly why he achieves such effects. He used to write an average of two lines a day - that is, spend so many hours writing but two lines, then thinking over them, and revising them. With such slow care, and skill with language, it is almost inevitable that such poetic strength will emerge.

I will take it under advisement JBI, with the caveat--(and I tried to explain this to luke, though elocution failed me to some degree)--I do not really like studying poetry while immersed in the process of publishing my own.

The only reason I've made some effort at it since *getting to know* you and quasi, in this forum, is I have not truly been working, and so what the hay:p, yet my intellect rebels, insisting that I stand on my own two feet, with perhaps muted appreciation for a spare group of *moderns* and contemporaries. Anne Sexton doesn't make me feel threatened, so I can enjoy her evocative playfulness with fairy tale, and Vassar is to some degree a spiritual sister, which is why she gets a pass. Yeats, and even to some degree his errant sympathizer Roethke, makes me feel impatient. I am actually surprised, in fact, that I came to enjoy Browning on my own, by myself, with neither the ghost of my Shakespearean or my actually deceased Jamesian guiding me through to appreciation.

[JBI]

I guess that's the difference - I have no ambition to write poetry in the next little while, but all the ambition to write about poetry. Either way though, if I were writing poetry still, I would probably stick to obscure multicultural sources, as that is what critics are looking for / society is looking for.

[Sunflower]

(Rainer Maria Rilke) Autumn Day (Translated by M. D. Herter Norton, 1938)
Lord, it is time. The summer was very big.
Lay thy shadow on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.
Command the last fruits that they shall be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
urge them on to fulfillment and drive
the last sweetness into heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will build him one no more.
Who is alone now, long will so remain,
will wake, read, write long letters
and will in the avenues to and fro
restlessly wander, when the leaves are blowing.

[Guinivere]

Robert Burns, Ae fond kiss

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met-or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweeli alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

[mazHur]

Robert Burns, Ae fond kiss

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met-or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweeli alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.


enchanting poesy!
excellent!

[byquist]

Shakespeare's sonnet that starts:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ...

[JBI]

Shakespeare's sonnet that starts:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ...

Sonnet 130.

[V.Jayalakshmi]

Dear Members,
Really,amazing! I thought I had contributed here.Anyway it was pleasure again to read all over again.I am glad so many read with so much variety.So here is my contribution.

By Florence Earle Coates


IF love were but a little thing—
Strange love, which, more than all, is great—
One might not such devotion bring,
Early to serve and late.

If love were but a passing breath— 5
Wild love—which, as God knows, is sweet—
One might not make of life and death
A pillow for love’s feet.

[backline]

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! "
Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
they may be the sadest lines in the history. in this untrue world, the only thing that is true is true love. but is love always be true?


Cruised back four years (page 6) for this reference.

Dover Beach, by Mathew Arnold, is not only my favorite poem, but a great love poem.

The Industrial Revolution was on, and yet years before Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle naturalists had noted that the incessant waves had eroded the face of the "White Cliffs of Dover" revealing 10,000 years of limestone. Upon examination the shellfish fossils that made up the lime had changed very little in that time.
Therefore, the world was a lot older than the 6,000 years interpreters of the Bible said.
"Tain't so!" - What the Bible said, was the conclusion. Thus England entered the "Post Christian" phase.

Poetry changed.

Arnold in "Dover Beach," cuts to the heart of the matter: if heretofore life's "meaning" had crashed like a dove on Dover beach, what would replace it?

Dover Beach
by Mathew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair.
Upon the straights;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray
Where sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then begin again,
With tremendous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear
Its meloncholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wild, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-1848


It seems like a vision poem like The Seine Net, by Robinson Jeffers. But that vision is not addressed to a loved one, nor is it about the conclusion that only love has meaning now.

In any event it gets my vote for greatest love poem (with the background info anyway).
Or at least I tend to agree with Arnold's viewpoint: If; then...

[Jozanny]

And why do we neglect Donne?

THE CANONIZATION.
by John Donne


FOR God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love ;
Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout ;
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ;
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face
Contemplate ; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas ! alas ! who's injured by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call's what you will, we are made such by love ;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us ; we two being one, are it ;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love ;

And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage ;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage ;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ;
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize—
Countries, towns, courts beg from above
A pattern of your love."


As it is late for me, I will return to say something about Donne and his illumination on love tomorrow, possibly.

[AliciaLoh]

My name will be up in your list one day. I'll do whatever it takes to be as famous as Bob Dylan or Shakespeare.

[Jozanny]

And why do we neglect Donne?


Call's what you will, we are made such by love ;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us ; we two being one, are it ;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love ;



As it is late for me, I will return to say something about Donne and his illumination on love tomorrow, possibly.

For someone who can sometimes scoff at great poets with impatience, I am seemingly most lenient when it comes to continued appreciation of Donne; he is my favorite Elizabethan, and The Canonization is one of my favorite poems, and the verses I single out here is what elevates the piece to metaphysical mastery.

[JBI]

Jacobean, not Elizabethan.

[Jozanny]

Jacobean, not Elizabethan.

For a quibble, my friend, that is a stretch. Kermode counts him among the Elizabethan, but with a little quell-time, perhaps, I can offer a little more analysis. Not this morning tho.

[Cat_Brenners]

I love Cummings love poems. Hard to beat them.
Cat

[conartist]

The Ecstacy, John Donne

[Alan kikani]

Here is my favorite love poem , which is by Lord Byron


When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow-
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me-
Why were thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:-
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met-
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?-
With silence and tears.

[dramasnot6]

I love Cummings love poems. Hard to beat them.
Cat

I could not agree more.

[Jassica]

My favorite love poem... by A. Pushkin (of course, it is only translation)

To ***
The wondrous moment of our meeting...
I well remember you appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In hopeless ennui surrounding
The worldly bustle, to my ear
For long your tender voice kept sounding,
For long in dreams came features dear.

Time passed. Unruly storms confounded
Old dreams, and I >from year to year
Forgot how tender you had sounded,
Your heavenly features once so dear.

My backwoods days dragged slow and quiet --
Dull fence around, dark vault above --
Devoid of God and uninspired,
Devoid of tears, of fire, of love.

Sleep from my soul began retreating,
And here you once again appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In ecstasy the heart is beating,
Old joys for it anew revive;
Inspired and God-filled, it is greeting
The fire, and tears, and love alive.

And other Pushkin's poems such as "Confession", Tatyana's letter from Eugeni Onegin and so on

[PoeticPassions]

Ah, I love that Byron poem, Alan... I have it posted on one of my blogs.... though in a sense it isn't really a love poem. More of a lament... perhaps with a tinge of bitterness and disdain.

Any love poem by Pablo Neruda is so passionate... so beautiful.

[~Sophia~]

Letter - (Leonard Cohen from Let Us Compare Mythologies)

How you murdered your family
means nothing to me
as your mouth moves across my body

And I know your dreams
of crumbling cities and galloping horses
of the sun coming too close
and the night never ending

but these mean nothing to me
beside your body

I know that outside a war is raging
That you issue orders
That babies are smothered and generals beheaded

But blood means nothing to me
It does not disturb your flesh

tasting blood on your tongue
does not shock me
as my arms grow into your hair

Do not think I do not understand
what happens
after the troops have been massacred
and the harlots put to the sword

And I write this only to rob you

that when one morning my head
hangs dripping with the other generals
from your house gate

that all this was anticipated
and so you will know that it meant nothing to me.

[Pryderi Agni]

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.


Nothing more need be said before Senor Neruda.

[Basak]

distant eyes

distant eyes! you were birds
and seemed treasuries of sorrow
you've been quiet since the final death
you stopped
and toward
that profound conclusion from within
an amber worm, advanced
beyond carrying its reasons around
like a shell, with its stones
more ruby than a mystery,
more diamond...
distant eyes!
and flocks of pain...

distant eyes! you were birds
or the metaphors of birds...
or else resembled a bit of prose
and those
who came you took one by one:
and the prophet of a storm; of death
it was the spring, skipping
over the spoor of roses
you came... distant eyes!
you! autumn angels...

distant eyes! you were birds,
and seemed treasuries of sorrow


Hilmi Yavuz
Translation by Walter Andrews

[mmmmmm]

was a favorite poem of Audrey Hepburn.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

[Silas Thorne]

I did a bit of editing to this love letter from Tarzan in 'Tarzan of the Apes', Chapter 18, by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

I am Tarzan of the Apes.
I want you. I am yours. You are mine.
We live here together always in my house.
I will bring you the best of fruits, the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle.
I will hunt for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters.
I will fight for you. I am the mightiest of the jungle fighters.
You are Jane Porter, I saw it in your letter.
When you see this you will know that it is for you and that Tarzan of the Apes loves you.

:lol: Will this work?;)

[a_little_wisp]

Ah, this is by Peter S. Beagle from his book 'The Last Unicorn'. It's... nothing crazily elegant, but ... love isn't always crazily elegant. Anyway:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/2531

[Fallen_Angel]

There are so many great poems on this thread. My little piece of Love poem.

Celestial Love

Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering D?on film,
Thou must mount for love,?br> Into vision which all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel,
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like,
When good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
There Past, Present, Future, shoot
Triple blossoms from one root
Substances at base divided
In their summits are united,
There the holy Essence rolls,
One through separated souls,
And the sunny ?n sleeps
Folding nature in its deeps,
And every fair and every good
Known in part or known impure
To men below,
In their archetypes endure.

The race of gods,
Or those we erring own,
Are shadows flitting up and down
In the still abodes.
The circles of that sea are laws,
Which publish and which hide the Cause.
Pray for a beam
Out of that sphere
Thee to guide and to redeem.
O what a load
Of care and toil
By lying Use bestowed,
From his shoulders falls, who sees
The true astronomy,
The period of peace!
Counsel which the ages kept,
Shall the well-born soul accept.
As the overhanging trees
Fill the lake with images,
As garment draws the garment's hem
Men their fortunes bring with them;
By right or wrong,
Lands and goods go to the strong;
Property will brutely draw
Still to the proprietor,
Silver to silver creep and wind,
And kind to kind,
Nor less the eternal poles
Of tendency distribute souls.
There need no vows to bind
Whom not each other seek but find.
They give and take no pledge or oath,
Nature is the bond of both.
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns,
Their noble meanings are their pawns.
Plain and cold is their address,
Power have they for tenderness,
And so thoroughly is known
Each others' purpose by his own,
They can parley without meeting,
Need is none of forms of greeting,
They can well communicate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves
Do these celebrate their loves,
Not by jewels, feasts, and savors,
Not by ribbons or by favors,
But by the sun-spark on the sea,
And the cloud-shadow on the lea,
The soothing lapse of morn to mirk,
And the cheerful round of work.
Their cords of love so public are,
They intertwine the farthest star.
The throbbing sea, the quaking earth,
Yield sympathy and signs of mirth;
Is none so high, so mean is none,
But feels and seals this union.
Even the tell Furies are appeased,
The good applaud, the lost are eased.

Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond,
Bound for the just, but not beyond;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in others still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,
Without a false humility;
For this is love's nobility,
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold,
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand, and body, and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good:
For he that feeds men, serveth few,
He serves all, who dares be true.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Red-Headed]

Favourite poem of all time is a difficult one! I don't know what criteria you could use to determine that. I might plump for Milton's Paradise Lost, Blake's Tyger or Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (original spelling).

However, I have always loved Louis Macneice's Bagpipe Music.

I'm going to have to get better reading glasses as I have posted this in the wrong forum. Doh!

I will say my favourite love poem would be Yeat's No Second Troy, as it is predominantly about his unrequited love for Maud Gonne.

[Alan kikani]

It is the hour

It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard;
It is the hour -- when lover's vows
Seem sweet in every whisper'd word;
And gentle winds and waters near,
Make music to the lonely ear.
Each flower the dews have lightly wet,
And in the sky the stars are met,
And on the wave is deeper blue,
And on the leaf a browner hue,
And in the Heaven that clear obscure
So softly dark, and darkly pure,
That follows the decline of day
As twilight melts beneath the moon away.

[blithe_spirit]

My favourite love poem has to be:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B.Yeats

A beautiful sentiment, beautifully written.

[Tournesol]

I really love these two poems by Robert Browning!
They're both bitter-sweet!



Meeting at Night

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Parting at Morning

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

[Saladin]

My Love Is Like to Ice by Edmund Spenser

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congealed with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

[Silas Thorne]

'The Mistress: A Song'
by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter's day;
When life and light, with envious haste,
Are torn and snatched away.

But, oh! how slowly minutes roll.
When absent from her eyes
That feed my love, which is my soul,
It languishes and dies.


For then no more a soul but shade
It mournfully does move
And haunts my breast, by absence made
The living tomb of love.


You wiser men despise me not,
Whose love-sick fancy raves
On shades of souls and Heaven knows what;
Short ages live in graves.


Whene'er those woundng eyes, so full
Of sweetness, you did see,
Had you not been profoundly dull,
You had gone mad like me.


Nor censure us, you who perceive
My best beloved and me
Sign and lament, complain and grieve;
You think we disagree.


Alas, 'tis sacred jealousy,
Love raised to an extreme;
The only proof 'twixt her and me,
We love, and do not dream.


Fantastic fancies fondly move
And in frail joys believe,
Taking false pleasure for true love;
But pain can ne'er deceive.


Kind jealous doubts, tormenting fears,
And anxious cares when past,
Prove our heart's treasure fixed and dear,
And make us blessed at last.

[Silenced Chaos]

My favourite love poem is probably Matthew Arnorld's

'Dover Beach'

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.



The 'Ah, love, let us be true to one another!' fragment is intensely memorable.

[forever_bloom]

If You Forget Me

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I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

[qimissung]

That's lovely, forever bloom. Who wrote it?

[Lynne50]

On a much lighter note...
Here by Grace Paley
Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face.

How did this happen?
well that's who I wanted to be
at last a woman
in the old style of sitting,

stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration.

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's a sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth.

I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa and ask him
to sit beside me for a minute.

I am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

[Nick Capozzoli]

The Exequy by Henry King...

This is a superb lament to the poet's dead wife. I won't quote this long poem, but I direct your attention to the passage beginning with:

Mean time, thou hast her, earth: much good
May my harm do thee...

[wessexgirl]

There are so many beautiful love poems on this thread, many of them favourites of mine. I couldn't just pick one from the greats of Shakespeare, Donne, Neruda, Barrett Browning, Yeats, Byron.......

I didn't see Christina Rossetti on here though, (apologies if I've missed her).

Christina Rossetti
Remember

REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

[alexisj]

On Love

Kahlil Gibran
1923

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep,
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say,
'God is in my heart,' but rather,
'I am in the heart of God.'
And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night,
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.



This poem may not be popular to some of you guys..but i do hope that you get to read this and get to understand the message it conveys. it's really lovely guys , trust me..!

________________

"When the hired gets tired, the tired gets fired."
from dress up games (http://www.dressup.me/) and hair games (http://hair.dressup.me/) community, Phil

[qimissung]

It's beautiful.

[Stargazer86]

I really like The Highway Man by Alfred Noyes
so romantic!

[Saladin]

Ghazal 464

The fame of your virtuous deeds
Like my love have reached a peak
Joy is what everyone needs
Neither can fade, nor are weak

Wine, imagination will find
Is outside the realm of mind
No metaphor of any kind
Can transcend wine-speak

My purpose will come about
On the day that I find out
You granted without a doubt
The union that I seek

When with you, I stay
A year is just like a day
And the times you are away
A moment, a year-long streak

A vision of your face
In my dreams I trace
In my wakefulness I chase
My dreams to have a peek

Your grace on my heart bestow
As your love & kindness grow
My weakness will clearly show
Like a crescent, lean & meek

Hafiz, don't groan & blame
If for union you aim
Not for a day or a week;
Of separation you must reek

- Hafiz

[lady_litlover]

Ono Komachi's tankas are really beautiful for being so short

Yielding to a love
that recognizes no bounds,
I will go by night-
for the world will not censure
one who treads the path of dreams

but I think some of Thomas Wyatt's poems are equally beautiful... I can't decide

[Pryderi Agni]

Ono Komachi's tankas are really beautiful for being so short

Yielding to a love
that recognizes no bounds,
I will go by night-
for the world will not censure
one who treads the path of dreams

but I think some of Thomas Wyatt's poems are equally beautiful... I can't decide

Oh, my...another Ono no Komachi lover...

How about this, then?


Why do I want to dress me up without you around me?
I don't even feel like taking my comb made of box tree in the vanity case.

It's by Harima no Otome.

[sadparadise]

Just finished listening to a simple twist of fate. Now I am reading this as one of the greatest love poems. That is a simple twist of fate! My 8 year old loves this song. You should hear her sing the long notes on the words e.g straight and freight train. We play this song quite often.

I will add, My Love is a Red Red Rose. The Scottish Bard Rabbie Burns.

[optimisticnad]

there are so many that i love but at the moment the one that comes to mind and I hope we've not had it already is Derek Walcott's 'Love after Love', love thyself first huh....

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life

OH OH, damn you guys have got me started but i love this one by shelley, this and walcott's above is the only few poems that I know by memory.

MUSIC, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed:
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

ok my last fave for tonight, i lvoe the first stanza, its amazing. by anne finch

Cou'd we stop the time that's flying
...Or recall it when 'tis past
Put far off the day of Dying
...Or make Youth forever last
To Love wou'd then be worth our cost.

But since we must loose those Graces
...Which at first your hearts have wonne
And you seek for in new Faces
...When our Spring of Life is done
It wou'd but urdge our ruine on.

Free as Nature's first intention
...Was to make us, I'll be found
Nor by subtle Man's invention
...Yield to be in Fetters bound
By one that walks a freer round.

Marriage does but slightly tye Men
...Whil'st close Pris'ners we remain
They the larger Slaves of Hymen
...Still are begging Love again
At the full length of all their chain.

[Heathcliff]

I really like The Highway Man by Alfred Noyes
so romantic!

-hi-fives loudly-

I was about to say that.

My year seven English teacher made me read it. Left me in tears in the middle of the school library.

[muel]

Watery eyes, what a pair they make,
Fascinating and yet demanding;
Distance kept to separate emotions,
Tangled in the seat of passions.

Restitution for the emancipation,
Liberation did come late;
Closest feelings fled incognito,
Watery eyes, my fondest REMEMBRANCE.

[milktea]

To those who said simple answer: Dante <-- Yes.

But... if it hasn't been mentioned already:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
Rumoresque senum severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
Dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut nequis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

I'm pretty sure this is the sole inspiration for the numerous kiss poems like Tennyson's Love's latest hour is this, which is another great love poem.

[sweetdisorder]

Though Im young and I might not even know what love means I'd have to say the poem that admire the most would have to be " Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822).
The last for lines always reply in my in mind over and over again:
"and the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me"

[*Genie*]

Modestly(!), I suggest my own poem:

Thy love, at my glacial heart, has started a fire;
Burning my whole "Me" whilst melting the frost,
Made all the world, and ME above, be lost
In its new, mightily-conquered empire.

The lord by whom all my talent's hired,
And all my thoughts, for, I feel no ability,
Versus Plato's will, to oppose its authority;
So, let my soul, happily, by it be inspired.

Yet, thou dear me!, are not to be beheld;
For, folk just see the bright flames in dance,
At whose fever, all burn and fade, no chance,
Even for the poor match who first made it flared.

But no matter, what THEY say, view and hear;
To me, thy love and thou are yet so dear.


By: Genie Parker

Besides, I add this song by Ben Jonson and hope it is new here:

DRINK to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither'd be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!

[Uroboros1989]

I think that the best poem of love is John Donn's "Plea".
He subtly highlights the true tender nature of man and vicious nature of woman hahahahah
I'm joking....
But i love this poem very much!

[sinotsimon]

I'm sure someone will have already posted this, but here it is, an obvious choice and a beautiful poem.

EE Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Of course I don't know all the love poems ever written; but of those I do know, Poe's Annabel Lee holds a special place in my imagination:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

This works in so many ways on so many levels, from the sheer rhythm and music of the words, to the mood painting and imaginative tropes: this is great art and sincere human emotion: magnificent!

[Remarkable]

Sebas. Melmoth, I came to this thread with the intention of posting the exact same poem:). I find Annabel Lee to be to thoroughly enthralling: except from the wondrous use of language, with flows so easily, I find in it this marvelous evolution of the ordinary and mediocre into something heavenly (Annabel Lee died of a cold and Poe was able to make a great declaration of love out of it)...

I received a collection of Poe's poems from someone very dear to me and they hold a double significance for me, but I remember the first time I read Annabel Lee to my class during lunch break and they were all eyes and ears. I felt like love really knows how to get you!

[henslerm]

Rilke's Duino Elegies some of the most beautiful verse ever written. Deep, enchanting and engaging, it must be read repeatedly to gain any appreciation for it.

[andrewparkin]

its my list

Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare
Love One Another - Kahlil Gibran
Meeting at Night - Robert Browning
My River - Emily Dickinson
Love's Philosophy - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Maud - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Annabelle Lee - Edgar Allan Poe
Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art - John Keats
To His Coy Mistress - Andrew Marvell

[Gregory Samsa]

Gaius Valerius Catullus

Let’s Live and Love: to Lesbia

Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.

[Seasider]

It's very clear.
Our Love is here to stay.
Not for a year,
But ever and a day.
The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know,
May just be passing fancies
And in time may go.
But oh my dear
Our love is here to stay
Together we're
Going a long, long way.
In time The Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble.
They're only made of clay.
But our love is here to stay.

I think it's by Ira Gershwin. Such an American poem. Perfect for the period which I take to be the thirties. Love it. And the tune that Gershwin wrote was pretty good too.

[erin montemurro]

I too am a poetry enthusiast and have enjoyed much of the poetry mention by other members in this thread however i have recently moved to China and have been dabbling in some Chinese classic poetry - one of my favorites is a writer named Li Bai - for those interested why not check out a poem or two of this Tang Dynasty poets pieces of work (English translations can easily found on net ) - Erin

[Rodof]

Wendy Cope is one of my favourites

Valentine

My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up

And I’m afraid it’s you.

http://www.lovepoems-lovepoetry.com/valentine-by-wendy-cope/

[Vir]

Well, I know I'm a bit late to this party. But I am now several hours invested in it, so I thought I'd take the liberty to revive the thread at the risk of annoying people and cast a vote.

This is my favorite love poem—or at least it is until I finish considering the contention this thread has offered.



My Picture
By Abraham Cowley

Here, take my likeness with you, whilst 'tis so;
For when from hence you go,
The next sun’s rising will behold
Me pale, and lean, and old.
The man who did this picture draw,
Will swear next day my face he never saw.

I really believe, within a while,
If you upon this shadow smile,
Your presence will such vigour give,
(Your presence which makes all things live)
And absence so much alter me,
This will the substance, I the shadow be.

When from your well-wrought cabinet you take it,
And your bright looks awake it;
Ah, be not frighted, if you see,
The new-soul'd picture gaze on thee,
And hear it breathe a sigh or two;
For those are the first things that it will do.

My rival-image will be then thought blest,
And laugh at me as dispossessed;
But, thou, who (if I know thee right)
I’th’ substance does not much delight,
Wilt rather send again for me.
Who then shall but my picture’s picture be.

[Transmodernism]

I hope I don't annoy anyone by posting this because it's not in English. I'd translate it, but it would sound tacky: in my opinion this exquisite sonnet by Petrarch is untranslatable because the precise way he uses the Italian language constitutes the art and beauty of this piece.

Quando fra l'altre donne ad ora ad ora
Amor vien nel bel viso di costei,
quanto ciascuna è men bella di lei
tanto cresce 'l desio che m'innamora.

I' benedico il loco e 'l tempo et l'ora
che sí alto miraron gli occhi mei,
et dico: Anima, assai ringratiar dêi
che fosti a tanto honor degnata allora.

Da lei ti vèn l'amoroso pensero,
che mentre 'l segui al sommo ben t'invia,
pocho prezando quel ch'ogni huom desia;

da lei vien l'animosa leggiadria
ch'al ciel ti scorge per destro sentero,
sí ch'i' vo già de la speranza altero.

[Tristram_Buckle]

This may now be my favorite! Thank you.

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms
Like fairy gifts fading away;
Thou wouldst still be adored
As this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will.
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still.

It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear,
That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear.
No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she turned when he rose.

[z2011]

Hi,

This is a poem I have written, looking forward to reading your opinions about it:

What would you do if you wake up thirsty in the middle of night………….
Searching, And no water was around………….
What would you do if you lost the blanket warms you in a winter night………..
If you lost the only candle and you alone in the dark…………
If you were alive and part of your body taken apart…………..
If you lost the love of your life……………
What would you do………..
Don't tell me it's life…………
Same words, same expressions, over, and over, I said to others all my life…………..
Now, how can I breathe……
How can I live……………
And, just for her I was alive……..
Every morning counting seconds to see her smile………….
To see the life doors opening for me through her eyes…………..
To see the wind blowing her hair, on my face, flies………….
To walk me n her holding hands very tight…....
Just to feel the touch of her lips on my cheeks lies………..
If you lost the love of your life………….
What would you do……………
------------------------------------------------------------
Source: http://poemszm.blogspot.com/

Regards

[Buh4Bee]

Sorry, not a poem, but felt compelled to post this oldy, but goody:

I Corinthians 13:4

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

[moxeee]

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under the rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.
-- Michael Ondaatje

[louisgeorge]

cool !!!
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow. :)

[mazHur]

I wish i were the little pendant encircling.....your neck.......the tip of which jostling.......over your your silky bosom......I wish i were the little piece of fabric...........touching your soft breast......I wish you were the energy which makes my heartthrob........at your thought........,..........I wish you always lived in my heart........and whenever I wanted to see you........I could just look down and......take a glimpse of your picture.

[peggynevers]

I just love this site. And it is so great that so many are inspired by the deepest emotions of others. Some words penetrate to the core of my being, its so amazing that something so powerful are only appreciated by so few.

[Number7]

My True-Love Hath My Heart

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a bargain better driven.
His heart in me keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
He loves my heart for once it was his own;
I cherish his because in me it bides.
His heart his wound receivèd from my sight;
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Sir Phillip Sidney.

The obvious implication of this poem would in our time be called 'gay', this poem seems to suggest that two men can have a relationship that is mutually beneficial and complimentary although reading this in such a way is to do so through the prism of Twenty First Century Western society. In the Elizabethan era on the other hand this poem could be about number of things, the most obvious being manly love in a religious sense, or even the political and cultural devotion of the poet to his sovereign in an era of widening social and sectarian allegiances.

This could be a poem about trust, a quality we in today;s cynical world have little appreciation of, the poem raises itself above the literal or the contractual, to admire a quality that is given because it comes from deep down and is generously bestowed. In doing this this raises the language of the verse into metaphor above the literal and into a quasi-religious marriage ceremony between the two subjects.

Of course the poem is suffused with the Italian Renaissance Platonism of the time, Sidney being heavily influenced by this philosophy, as were the manners of the aristocratic courtiers of the time.

[kelby_lake]

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes :)

[SkyCetacean]

Someone's already posted it but I absolutely adore Shakepseare's Sonnet 116. To look on tempests and remain unshaken... I think that's a powerful image of the dedication necessary for long-term commitment.

[Irishcrusader95]

i've never really been one for poetry but i always keep coming back to this one, usually because of the loneliness that is in my heart. i love this one for the elequence and smootness of reading it as it ryames so well and speaks os true of lost love.



Do you remember some time ago?
I asked if you were perfect but you said no
Did you ever think that:
In my dreams you're the sweetest thing
In my life you are everything
Still you say you're not
So I ask, why is it so hard to let go?

Everyone thinks I'm strong
But tears were falling from my eyes
On the day you left us and said goodbye
Now I know my feelings I should no longer hide
I love you and I want you to stay by my side

Longing to hold you in my arms so tight that I'll never let go
Wishing to be with you forever, I hope now you know
That when I'm around you, it just feels like heaven
You're my angel and your heart is my safe haven

To live a life that's so incomplete
To live a life with nothing dear to keep
Is that how you want me to be?
You know without you I'm so weak
Because you're the only strength that I seek

So please... don't go, I'm being so bold
Just by saying i need your hand to hold
Don't leave me like this
so broken,so torn, so cold

So as I write this
You're somewhere so far away
A place i can only reach
By loving you this way

credit gos entirly to the author from this site
http://www.best-love-poems.com/poems.php?id=730779

[billysiv]

My Spell of Enchantment

I burn a blood red rose,
In flames divine.
Take Catherine’s heart
And make it mine.
I summon thee beloved one,
Love me more than anyone.
Bind body, heart and soul with mine
Together till the end of time.
These the things I need from you
Be thee loving, loyal, sweet and true.
I invoke the spirits from above
Make me your one and only love.
Sprites of Earth and Wind and Fire
Maketh me your heart’s desire.
Love me true and we shalt be
Entwined thro all eternity

My dreams are the product of my wandering soul, freed from the shackles of my body and conscious thoughts during sleep. These dreams are crucial indications of my secret thoughts and hearts desires. Dearest Catherine you are constantly in my daydreams and a presence in my nocturnal wanderings. You were there before I met you and there you will forever be.
I love you so very much
All my love Bill xxx

[Ser Nevarc]

All good poems are love poems

[Melanie]

My favorite parts by Paul Simon:
___________________________________
FOR EMILY, WHENEVER I MAY FIND HER (parts)

"What a dream I had
Pressed in organdy
Clothed in crinoline of smoky burgundy
Softer than the rain"

also...

"And when you ran to me
Your cheeks flushed with the night
We walked on frosted fields
Of juniper and lamplight"

and...

"...when I awoke
And felt you warm and near
I kissed your honey hair
With my grateful tears"
___________________________________

DANGLING CONVERSATION (parts)

"...And we note our places with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syncopated time"

and...

"You’re a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives"

[cafolini]

Nice parts.

[Darcy88]

They were probably posted somewhere in the preceding 30 pages, but if they weren't here are two of the greatest love poems:

Love's Philosophy

"The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;--
Why not I with thine?
See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven,
If it disdained it's brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

- Shelley


THE GOOD-MORROW.
by John Donne

"I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die."

[Nick Capozzoli]

I cannot chose the "best," but I think that The Exequy by Henry King (1592-1669) is a very great love poem. It's an elegy to his dead wife, so it's not a "happy" poem...and some may find it maudlin. I find it to be both profoundly touching and beautiful. It's too long to quote here entire, but I'll quote a particularly fine passage. To set the scene, King is addressing both his dead wife and Nature, which has claimed her body. It begins:

Accept thou Shrine of my dead Saint,
Instead of dirges, this complaint;
And for sweet flowers to crown they hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse
From thy grieved friend, whom thou might's see
Quite melted into tears for thee.

The 6th stanza is particularly fine:

Mean time, thou hast her, earth: much good
May my harm do thee. Since it stood
With heaven's will I might not call
Her longer mine, I give thee all
My short-lived right and interest
In her, whom living, I loved best:
With a most free and bounteous grief,
I give thee what I could not keep.
Be kind to her, and prithee look
Thou write into thy Dooms-day book
Each parcel of this Rarity
Which in thy Casket shrined doth lie:
See that thou make thy reckoning straight,
And yield her back again by weight;
For thou must audit on thy trust
Each grain and atom of this dust,
As thou wilt answer Him that lent,
Not gave thee, my dear Monument.

The iambic tetrameter of the whole poem, and this passage in particular, is brilliantly modulated. Modern readers may find it inappropriately strange and perhaps silly when King starts demanding that the earth keep track of his dead wife's body and render it back, by weight, on Dooms-day.

I do not find that part of Stanza 6 at all silly. King is taking a tragically heroic stance. A mere mortal, he challenges Nature, which had the power to take his wife, and which will eventually take him. He does this brilliantly, by reminding Nature that it just as subservient to God and God's laws as we are subject to the laws of Nature now and until Dooms-day. He's lost his wife...for now...and he must accept that. He remains, however, unbowed.

The Exequy is not as widely known as it should be. I first encountered it in a college course that used the anthology, Quest For Reality by Winters and Fields.

[veganpoet]

My personal favorite for a very long time has been Pablo Neruda's I Do Not Love You, closely followed by Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee?

[papillondemai]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways ...
I love thee for the heighth
and depth and breadth
that my soul can feel
when feeling out of sight...

[quidoftullamore]

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by ee cummings.


i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you


here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart


i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)