The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time Read online

  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 always hear

  Times winged chariot hurrying near:

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast Eternity.

  Thy Beauty shall no more be found,

  Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound

  My echoing song: then Worms shall try

  That long preserv’d Virginity:

  And your quaint Honour turn to dust;

  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 hue

  Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

  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.

  Nothing Twice

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Syzmborska, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, displays in her work a direct, pragmatic vision of cosmic events. Here she celebrates her understanding that although life is fundamentally without rules or order, love makes that fact moot. The translation is by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

  Nothing can ever happen twice.

  In consequence, the sorry fact is

  that we arrive here improvised

  and leave without the chance to practice.

  Even if there is no one dumber,

  if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

  you can’t repeat the class in summer:

  this course is only offered once.

  No day copies yesterday,

  no two nights will teach what bliss is

  in precisely the same way,

  with exactly the same kisses.

  One day, perhaps, some idle tongue

  mentions your name by accident:

  I feel as if a rose were flung

  into the room, all hue and scent.

  The next day, though you’re here with me,

  I can’t help looking at the clock:

  A rose? A rose? What could that be?

  Is it a flower or a rock?

  Why do we treat the fleeting day

  with so much needless fear and sorrow?

  It’s in its nature not to stay:

  Today is always gone tomorrow.

  With smiles and kisses, we prefer to

  seek accord beneath our star,

  although we’re different (we concur)

  just as two drops of water are.

  Strawberries

  Edwin Morgan

  The different senses sometimes overlap and echo each other. In this poem, the sweet, warm taste and texture of strawberries overflow into a different kind of touching and tasting, and a storm breaking in the heavens mirrors tempestuous union on the earth below.

  There were never strawberries

  like the ones we had

  that sultry afternoon

  sitting on the step

  of the open french window

  facing each other

  your knees held in mine

  the blue plates in our laps

  the strawberries glistening

  in the hot sunlight

  we dipped them in sugar

  looking at each other

  not hurrying the feast

  for one to come

  the empty plates

  laid on the stone together

  with the two forks crossed

  and I bent towards you

  sweet in that air

  in my arms

  abandoned like a child

  from your eager mouth

  the taste of strawberries

  in my memory

  lean back again

  let me love you

  let the sun beat

  on our forgetfulness

  one hour of all

  the heat intense

  and summer lightning

  on the Kilpatrick hills

  let the storm wash the plates

  True Love

  Robert Penn Warren

  Call it a rite of passage, when you suddenly recognize the opposite sex for the first time and new worlds of desire awaken. It’s your first love, it’s true love. Robert Penn Warren’s vividly realized depiction shows us how indelible this first experience can be.

  In silence the heart raves. It utters words

  Meaningless, that never had

  A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,

  Freckled. In a big black Buick,

  Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat

  In front of the drugstore, sipping something

  Through a straw. There is nothing like

  Beauty. It stops your heart. It

  Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It

  Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.

  I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.

  I thought I would die if she saw me.

  How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?

  Two years later she smiled at me. She

  Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.

  Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee

  Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced.

  Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.

  Their father was what is called a drunkard.

  Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor

  Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years.

  He never came down. They brought everything up to him.

  I did not know what a mortgage was.

  His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.

  When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing

  An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing.

  The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were

  Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought

  I would cry. I lay in bed that night

  And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.

  The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.

  She never came back. The family

  Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.

  But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives

  In a beautiful house, far away.

  She called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it.

  When I Was One-and-Twenty

  A.E.Housman

  Housman himself apparently lived a rather lonely life, without long-term romantic attachment. Perhaps this explains the poignancy of much of his verse, along with an awareness of the vulnerability that is an unavoidable corollary to unreserved commitment and love.

  When I was one-and-twenty

  I heard a wise man say,

  “Give crowns and pounds and guineas

  But not your heart away;

  Give pearls away and rubies

  But keep your fancy free.”

  But I was one-and-twenty,

  No use to talk to me.

  When I was one-and-twenty

  I heard him say again,

  “The heart out of the bosom

  Was never given in vain;

  ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty

  And sold for endless rue.”

  And I am two-and-twent
y

  And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

  Thunderstorm in Town

  Thomas Hardy

  Here, reluctance to act results in long-term regret, demonstrating how a botched opportunity in love may haunt a person for a lifetime. For Thomas Hardy, who was known for his pessimism about love (and life in general), this reminiscence is quite mild. (See, in contrast, the fond lifelong remembrance of a brief encounter in the previous poem.)

  She wore a “terra-cotta” dress,

  And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

  Within the hansom’s dry recess,

  Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

  We sat on, snug and warm.

  Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

  And the glass that had screened our forms before

  Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

  I should have kissed her if the rain

  Had lasted a minute more.

  On the Balcony

  D.H.Lawrence

  D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, had a turbulent marriage. They fought constantly, mostly because their aff a ir—begun when she was married to another man—caused her to lose custody of her children. The poem reflects the struggles they faced and, more important, expresses Lawrence’s hope of a better tomorrow where they would still have each other.

  In front of the somber mountains,

  a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow

  And between us and it, the thunder;

  And down below in the green wheat,

  the laborers stand like dark stumps,

  still in the green wheat.

  You are near to me, and naked feet

  In their sandals, and through the

  scent of the balcony’s naked timber

  I distinguish the scent of your hair:

  so now the limber

  Lightning falls from heaven.

  Adown the pale-green glacier river floats

  A dark boat through the gloom—

  and whither? The thunder roars

  But still we have each other!

  The naked lightnings in the heavens dither

  And disappear—what have we but each other?

  The boat has gone.

  Love Song

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Rilke ’s poetry reflects his lifelong melancholy—a condition perhaps deepened by the toll that the complexities of modern life took on his sensitive nature. “Love Song,” though among the sweetest of Rilke’s poems, still conveys his interpretation of the world as a place where even intimate relationships aren’t free of a sense of distance. To the poet the consciousness of this distance may play an essential part in sustaining the mystery of love and life.

  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?

  I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,

  in some dark and silent place that doesn’t resonate

  when your depths resound.

  Yet everything that touches us, me and you,

  takes us together like a violin’s bow,

  which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

  Upon what instrument are we two spanned?

  And what musician holds us in his hand?

  Oh sweetest song.

  Moonlit Night

  Tu Fu

  Generally regarded as the greatest of all Chinese poets, Tu Fu lived a life filled with hardship, which perhaps influenced the humanity and compassion found in his best work. This translation is by the modern Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth.

  In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching

  The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill

  With sadness for my children, who can’t think

  Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still.

  Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.

  In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.

  When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,

  Leaning together on our windowsill?

  Sonnet of Sweet Complaint

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  One of Spain’s greatest modern poets, Lorca was brutally killed in 1936 and his work banned by Franco’s regime. In this poem, Lorca expresses sadness and fear after the end of a relationship. Yet his hope is that his life will move forward, not despite his lost love, but because of it.

  Never let me lose the marvel

  of your statue-like eyes, or the accent

  the solitary rose of your breath

  places on my cheek at night.

  I am afraid of being, on this shore,

  a branchless trunk, and what I most regret

  is having no flower, pulp, or clay

  for the worm of my despair.

  If you are my hidden treasure,

  if you are my cross, my dampened pain,

  if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

  never let me lose what I have gained,

  and adorn the branches of your river

  with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

  Since There’s No Help

  Michael Drayton

  This sonnet by a contemporary of Shakespeare is divided into two parts: In the first a lover seems to cheerfully bid his beloved farewell; but the last six lines indicate that a reconciliation might not, after all, be unwelcome.

  Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;

  Nay I have done, you get no more of me,

  And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart

  That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

  Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,

  And when we meet at any time again,

  Be it not seen in either of our brows

  That we one jot of former love retain.

  Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,

  When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,

  When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

  And Innocence is closing up his eyes,

  Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over.

  From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

  Love Arm’d

  Aphra Behn

  Aphra Behn, who lived in seventeenth-century England, was one of the first women known to have made her living by writing. In this allegorical verse she portrays love as an armed tyrant, but one who unfairly harms only her heart, while her lover’s triumphs. It’s interesting to contrast her use of personification with Michael Drayton’s in “Since There’s No Help” (facing page).

  Love in Fantastique Triumph sat,

  Whilst bleeding Hearts around him flow’d,

  For whom Fresh pains he did create,

  And strange Tyranic power he show’d;

  From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,

  Which round about, in sport he hurl’d;

  But ’twas from mine he took desire,

  Enough to undo the Amorous World.

  From me he took his sights and tears,

  From thee his Pride and Crueltie;

  From me his Languishments and Feares,

  And every Killing Dart from thee;

  Thus thou and I, the God have arm’d,

  And sett him up a Deity;

  But my poor Heart alone is harm’d,

  Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.

  The Lost Love

  William Wordsworth

  This lovely lyric introduces its subject, Lucy, as a small, obscure part of the natural world, but the poem ends with a moving affirmation of her ultimate significance.

  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.r />
  She lived unknown, and few could know

  When Lucy ceased to be;

  But she is in her grave, and oh,

  The difference to me!

  Echo

  Christina Rossetti

  Christina Rossetti was the sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but she was a significant artist in her own right. This poem offers a rhapsodic expression of how a bittersweet memory of past love can at the same time provide vivid recollection of a long-ago passion.

  Come to me in the silence of the night;

  Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

  Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

  As sunlight on a stream;

  Come back in tears,

  O memory, hope, love of finished years.

  O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

  Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

  Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;

  Where thirsting longing eyes

  Watch the slow door

  That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

  Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

  My very life again though cold in death:

  Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

  Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

  Speak low, lean low,

  As long ago, my love, how long ago.

  Reminiscence

  Anne Bronte

  Of the three Bronte sisters, the least is known about Anne, the youngest. The first book of theirs published was a collaborative e ffort written under assumed names. Interestingly, just two copies of this book sold when it was published. Now there is hardly a bookstore that doesn’t have many copies of the Brontes’ work. Anne, in this sonnet, reflects on the ways her life was graced by the beloved person buried beneath the church floor she paces.

  Yes, thou art gone! and never more,

  Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;

  But I may pass the old church door,

  And pace the floor that covers thee.

  May stand upon the cold, damp stone,

  And think that, frozen, lies below

  The lightest heart that I have known,

  The kindest I shall ever know.

  Yet, though I cannot see thee more,

  ’Tis still a comfort to have seen;

  And though thy transient life is o’er,

  ’Tis sweet to think that thou hast been;

  To think a soul so near divine,