The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: March 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-51193-3

  Contents

  In The 100 Best Love Poemsof All Time

  Also Edited by Leslie Pockell

  Introduction

  La Vita Nuova

  Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

  Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

  Who Ever Loved

  From Paradise Lost (Book IV)

  To Helen

  A Red, Red Rose

  She Tells Her Love while Half Asleep

  Last Night You Left Me and Slept

  I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart

  I Carry Your Heart with Me

  The Avenue

  The Bargain

  The Mirabeau Bridge

  To the Bridge of Love

  She Walks in Beauty

  The Ragged Wood

  Night Thoughts

  The Gardener

  To the Harbormaster

  To a Stranger

  True Love

  Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile

  Jenny Kiss’d Me

  Juliet

  Song to Celia

  Your Catfish Friend

  The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

  Love Song to Alex,1979

  When Sue Wears Red

  Those Who Love

  Reprise

  One Word Is Too Often Profaned

  I Do Not Love You

  Gifts

  At Last

  To Alice B.Toklas

  Valentine

  Love’s Secret

  I Knew a Woman

  Love for a Hand

  It Is the Third Watch

  The Enchantment

  The Silken Tent

  Love Song

  Wild Nights!

  She Comes Not When Noon Is on the Roses

  Between Your Sheets

  The Jewels

  Song 5 to Lesbia

  The Vine

  From The Song of Songs

  Confession

  I Loved You

  FromMerciless Beauty

  He Is More than a Hero

  To His Mistress

  To Little or No Purpose

  Touch

  Lady Love

  Love Poem

  I Want to Breathe

  A Statue of Eros

  Come Quickly

  Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds

  Habitation

  September

  Love Letter

  Marriage Morning

  To My Dear and Loving Husband

  Fulfillment

  How Do I Love Thee?

  Meeting at Night

  Sonnet xxx

  Camomile Tea

  Decade

  Wear Me

  The Marriage

  Married Love

  The River Merchant’s Wife

  To His Coy Mistress

  Nothing Twice

  Strawberries

  True Love

  When I Was One-and-Twenty

  Thunderstorm in Town

  On the Balcony

  Love Song

  Moonlit Night

  Sonnet of Sweet Complaint

  Since There’s No Help

  Love Arm’d

  The Lost Love

  Echo

  Reminiscence

  For Jane

  Funeral Blues

  Vino Tinto

  One Art

  To Fanny Brawne

  A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

  Acknowledgments

  In The 100 Best Love Poems

  of All Time,

  you’ll find . . .

  Seductive pleas...

  Wild nights—wild nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild nights should be

  Our luxury!

  —from “Wild Nights” by Emily Dickinson

  Heart-wrenching tributes...

  Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.

  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

  —from “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden

  Poignant vignettes...

  While my hair was cut straight across my forehead

  I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

  You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  —from “The River Merchant’s Wife” by Li Po

  Passion’s hidden face...

  How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul?

  How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

  —from “Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke

  A lover’s delirium...

  I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

  or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

  I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

  in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

  —from “I Do Not Love You” by Pablo Neruda

  Ardent devotion...

  And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red

  Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like pain.

  —from “When Sue Wears Red” by Langston Hughes

  Also Edited by Leslie Pockell

  The 100 Best Poems of All Time

  The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time

  Introduction

  As with this book’s predecessor, The 100 Best Poems of All Time, our primary objective in assembling these works has been to provide a small, easily portable volume that would contain the essential works that most readers would expect to find in a book of this kind, along with a few discoveries. Love poetry down the years seems to have been written along a spectrum ranging from idealistic romanticism to passionate sensuality, and in this collection we have gathered what we feel are the best examples of both extremes and every variation in between. The poems are arranged in a roughly thematic sequence, including poems of love at first sight, passionate attachment, mutual affection, marriage, and, sadly but inevitably, loss and remembrance. They include representatives from virtually every major language group and date from the early classic period of Greece and Rome up to the present day. Most poems included are complete, but a few are extracts from larger works. Some are examples of high art; others exemplify popular culture.

  To maximize the breadth of the collection, while maintaining a convenient format suitable for browsing through or dipping into at an appropriate moment, we decided to include no more than one poem per poet, with the exception of William Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”) is included primarily as a reference for Howard Moss’s delightful modern gloss of the same title. As the juxtaposition of these two poems suggests, neither the historical period in which a poem is written nor the poetic tradition nor even the language it is written in affect the immediacy with which a great love poem instantly communicates emotion to the contemporary reader. Human nature after all does not change, and first love is as exhilarating and painful today as it was when Sappho wrote almost three thousand years ago “If I meet you suddenly, I can’t speak”; passion today is as overwhelming as when Baudelaire wrote a century and a half ago of love that “was deep and gentle as the seas/And rose to her as to a cliff the tide.”

  The best love poems are those to which we respond by thinking, “That’s the way it was for me!” Not every poem here will strike every reader in that way, since so
many of love’s diverse manifestations are represented. But each of these poems carries within it that same truth, expressed in different ways, for the reader who is, was, or hopes to be in love (which is all of us). And so it is our hope that this collection will speak to every reader, and reassure them that what they feel or felt is as universal as life itself.

  This book would not have been possible without the early and enthusiastic support of Maureen Egen, Jamie Raab, and Amy Einhorn. Karen Melnyk and Sarah Rustin provided essential editorial contributions.

  La Vita Nuova

  Dante Alighieri

  This is a brief excerpt from a larger work blending prose and poetry, in which Dante celebrates his idealized love for Beatrice. Even after seven hundred years it is easy to understand how a new life can seem to begin when lovers meet for the first time.

  In that book which is

  My memory . . .

  On the first page

  That is the chapter when

  I first met you

  Appear the words . . .

  Here begins a new life.

  Shakespeare is the only poet to receive double recognition in this collection, in this case to supply a reference to Howard Moss’s delightful contemporary version of his classic sonnet. Moss, for many years poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine, casts off traditional meter and rhyme in exchange for a colloquial style that expresses a heartfelt exuberance.

  Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

  William Shakespeare

  Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

  Thou are more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

  And every fair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:

  But thy eternal Summer shall not fade

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

  Howard Moss

  Who says you’re like one of the dog days?

  You’re nicer. And better.

  Even in May, the weather can be gray,

  And a summer sub-let doesn’t last forever.

  Sometimes the sun’s too hot;

  Sometimes it is not.

  Who can stay young forever?

  People break their necks or just drop dead!

  But you? Never!

  If there’s just one condensed reader left

  Who can figure out the abridged alphabet,

  After you’re dead and gone,

  In this poem you’ll live on!

  Who Ever Loved

  Christopher Marlowe

  Marlowe, Shakespeare’s only real contemporary rival, is mostly remembered for his powerful verse dramas, such as Dr. Faustus. This perceptive verse shows that he was also an eloquent poet and a keen psychologist of desire.

  It lies not in our power to love or hate,

  For will in us is overruled by fate.

  When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,

  We wish that one should lose, the other win;

  And one especially do we affect

  Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:

  The reason no man knows; let it suffice

  What we behold is censored by our eyes.

  Where both deliberate, the love is slight:

  Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

  From Paradise Lost (Book IV)

  John Milton

  In this tender monologue Eve tells Adam how none of the beauties and wonders of nature mean anything to her without him. Milton’s gorgeous evocation of the pleasures of love in paradise makes the coming temptation and fall of the first man and woman seem all the more poignant.

  With thee conversing I forget all time,

  All seasons and their change, all please alike.

  Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,

  With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun

  When first on this delightful land he spreads

  His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,

  Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth

  After soft showers; and sweet the coming on

  Of grateful evening mild, then silent night

  With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,

  And these the gems of heav’n, her starry train:

  But neither breath of morn when she ascends

  With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun

  On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,

  Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,

  Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night

  With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,

  Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.

  To Helen

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Poe softens his customary pounding rhythms and repetitive rhymes in this delicately romantic evocation of classicism. The poem is an almost prayer-like adoration of a beloved figure, viewed from afar.

  Helen, thy beauty is to me

  Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

  That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

  The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

  To his own native shore.

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,

  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

  To the glory that was Greece,

  And the grandeur that was Rome.

  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

  How statue-like I see thee stand,

  The agate lamp within thy hand!

  Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

  Are Holy-Land!

  A Red, Red Rose

  Robert Burns

  This lyric by Scotland’s greatest poet breathes life into a series of similes that sound as natural as a song, and as sincere as a prayer.

  O my luve’s like a red, red rose,

  That’s newly sprung in June;

  O my luve’s like the melodie

  That’s sweetly played in tune.

  As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

  So deep in luve am I;

  And I will luve thee still, my dear,

  Till a’ the seas gang dry.

  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

  And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:

  O I will love thee still, my dear,

  While the sands o’ life shall run.

  And fare thee weel, my only luve,

  And fare thee weel awhile!

  And I will come again, my luve,

  Though it were ten thousand mile.

  She Tells Her Love while Half Asleep

  Robert Graves

  A lover compares his drowsy loved one and her murmured endearments to early spring blossoms that emerge while the snow is still falling. The rhyme scheme and repetition at the end produce an almost hypnotic effect.

  She tells her love while half asleep

  In the dark hours,

  With half-words whispered low;

  As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

  And puts out grass and flowers

  Despite the snow,

  Despite the falling snow.

  Last Night You Left Me and Slept

  Rumi

  This greatest of all Sufi mystics and poets lived in thirteenth-century Afghanistan, but his love poems have a completely contemporary immediacy, as in this representation of two sharply contrasting sides of a relationship.

  Last night you left me and slept

  you
r own deep sleep. Tonight you turn

  and turn. I say,

  “You and I will be together

  till the universe dissolves.”

  You mumble back things you thought of

  when you were drunk.

  I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart

  Sir John Suckling

  Suckling was one of a group of so-called English cavalier poets in the Court of King Charles I. Here he playfully debates the merits of a heart-to-heart bargain between lovers.

  I prithee send me back my heart,

  Since I cannot have thine;

  For if from yours you will not part,

  Why then shouldst thou have mine?

  Yet now I think on’t, let it lie,—

  To find it were in vain;

  For thou’st a thief in either eye

  Would steal it back again.

  Why should two hearts in one breast lie,

  And yet not lodge together?

  O love, where is thy sympathy,

  If thus our breasts thou sever?

  But love is such a mystery,

  I cannot find it out;

  For when I think I’m best resolved,

  I then am most in doubt.

  Then farewell care, and farewell woe,—

  I will no longer pine;

  For I’ll believe I have her heart

  As much as she hath mine.

  I Carry Your Heart with Me

  e.e.cummings

  Cummings is known for typographic and orthographic experimentation in his verse, but this should not obscure the genuine feeling—and, in this case, tenderness—that characterizes his best poetry.

  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)