The Best Love Poems of All Time

[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.