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- I love you. because the Earth turns round the sun. because the North wind blows north. sometimes. because the Pope is Catholic. and most Rabbis Jewish. because winters flow into springs.
- As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. King Solomon.
- How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height. My soul can reach… Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
- Come live with me, and be my love; And we will all the pleasures prove. That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields. Christopher Marlowe.
I want what I cannot have,” medieval lovers would have a hard time relating to our contemporary version of love. Lummus said that his study of romance in medieval lyrics and poetry came about because, like today, love is an unavoidable literary theme. However, Lummus said, “love in the Middle Ages wasn’t just about sex or the idealization ...
Oct 21, 2014 · It is said: that East and West shall never meet. but Isabella and I. Meet every day. on our trip in search of others.². So too, Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov’s When Someone Goes Away ...
Feb 7, 2018 · Lewis (1915-44) is one of the best-known English poets of the Second World War. Lewis wrote this beautiful poem of farewell about his first night with his wife: So we must say Goodbye, my darling, And go, as lovers go, for ever; Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels And make an end of lying down together. I put a final shilling in the gas,
- “Since There’S No Help,” by Michael Drayton
- “How Do I Love Thee,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- “Love’s Philosophy,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Love,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns
- “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe
- “Whoso List to Hunt,” by Sir Thomas Wyatt
- “To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell
- “Bright Star,” by John Keats
- “Let Me Not to The Marriage of True Minds”
It may be a bad augury to begin with a poem by a loser, but there it is. Drayton, a contemporary and possible acquaintance of the Bard, evidently had come to the unhappy end of an affair when he penned this sonnet. He begins with a show of stoic indifference: “. . . you get no more of me,” but that can’t last. In the last six lines he shows his tru...
If poetry, as Wordsworth asserted, is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” this sonnet scores high in the former essential but falls short of the latter. Elizabeth may have been the original arts groupie, whose passion for the famous poet Robert Browning seems to have known no limits and recognized no excesses. She loves she says “with my childhoo...
In spite of its title, this very sweet sixteen-line poem has nothing to do with philosophy, as far as I can see. Instead, it promulgates one of the oldest arguments of a swain to a maid: “All the world is in intimate contact – water, wind, mountains, moonbeams, even flowers. What about you?” Since “Nothing in the world is single,” he says with mult...
Here we have another bold attempt at seduction, this one much longer and more complicated than Shelley’s. In this poem, the lover is attempting to gain his desire by appealing to the tender emotions of his object. He sings her a song about the days of chivalry, in which a knight saved a lady from an “outrage worst than death” (whatever that is), is...
Burns’ best-known poem besides “Auld Lang Syne” is a simple declaration of feeling. “How beautiful and delightful is my love,” he says. “You are so lovely, in fact, that I will love you to the end of time. And even though we are parting now, I will return, no matter what.” All this is expressed in a breathtaking excess of metaphor: “And I will love...
Poe shows off his amazing talent in the manipulation of language sounds here, perhaps his best-known poem after “The Raven.” It’s a festival of auditory effects, with a delightful mixture of anapests and iambs, internal rhymes, repetitions, assonances. The story itself is a Poe favorite, the tragic death of a beautiful, loved girl, died after her “...
Supposedly written about Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry VIII, this bitter poem compares his beloved to a deer fleeing before an exhausted hunter, who finally gives up the chase, because, as he says, “in a net I seek to hold the wind.” Besides, he reflects, she is the king’s property, and forbidden anyway. The bitterness comes mainly in the first l...
Yet another seduction attempt in verse, perhaps this poem doesn’t belong on a list like this, since it isn’t about love at all. The lover is trying to convince a reluctant (‘coy”) lady to accede to his importuning, not by a sad story, as in the Coleridge poem, or by an appeal to nature, as in Shelley, but by a formal argument: Sexuality ends with d...
Keats brings an almost overwhelming sensuality to this sonnet. Surprisingly, the first eight lines are not about love or even human life; Keats looks at a personified star (Venus? But it’s not steadfast. The North Star? It’s steadfast but not particularly bright.) Whatever star it may be, the sestet finds the lover “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s rip...
This poem is not a personal appeal but a universal definition of love, which the poet defines as constant and unchangeable in the face of any circumstances. It is like the North Star, he says, which, even if we don’t know anything else about it, we know where it is, and that’s all we need. Even death cannot lord itself over love, which persists to ...
Jul 4, 2012 · In light, and nothing else, awake. CARPE DIEM. These poets, in anticipating goodbyes and endings, find ways to seize the day and enjoy the present moment. “ Ode I.11 ” by Horace. And forget about hope. Time goes running, even. As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair. “ Bronzed ” by Dean Young.
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Nov 8, 2017 · From the medieval courtly love tradition onwards, poets have been treating the subject of unrequited love. Here are ten of the best poems about love that is not reciprocated…. 1. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘ With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies ’. With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies; How silently, and with how ...
