The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time Read online

  Within a form so angel fair,

  United to a heart like thine,

  Has gladdened once our humble sphere.

  For Jane

  Charles Bukowski

  In his blunt style, Bukowski shows how the death of a lover can cause an anguish ferocious in its power. So profound is his feeling of loss that he becomes oblivious to the grief that surrounds him like tigers.

  225 days under grass

  and you know more than I.

  they have long taken your blood,

  you are a dry stick in a basket.

  is this how it works?

  in this room

  the hours of love

  still make shadows.

  when you left

  you took almost

  everything.

  I kneel in the nights

  before tigers

  that will not let me be.

  what you were

  will not happen again.

  the tigers have found me

  and I do not care.

  Funeral Blues

  W.H.Auden

  Few other poems approach the poignancy of this one in its expression of grief at losing a lover. Its economy and colloquial language only serve to heighten the emotional effect. Many will recall this poem being read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

  Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

  Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

  Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

  Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

  The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  Vino Tinto

  Sandra Cisneros

  Vividly seductive and earthy, Cisneros’s reminiscence is a contemporary narration of sensual love.

  Dark wine reminds me of you.

  The burgundies and cabernets.

  The tang and thrum and hiss

  that spiral like Egyptian silk,

  blood bit from a lip, black

  smoke from a cigarette.

  Nights that swell like cork.

  This night. A thousand.

  Under a single lamplight.

  In public or alone.

  Very late or very early.

  When I write my poems.

  Something of you still taut

  still tugs still pulls,

  a rope that trembled

  hummed between us.

  Hummed, love, didn’t it.

  Love, how it hummed.

  One Art

  Elizabeth Bishop

  In “One Art,” the poet catalogs her losses in such a casual, wry tone as to belie the mounting tension of an escalating tragedy. The poem moves from the triviality of mislaid keys to a disaster so great that in the final line the author must force herself to face it—“(Write it!)”—by putting it on paper.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

  so many things seem filled with the intent

  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

  places, and names, and where it was you meant

  to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

  I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

  next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

  the art of losing’s not too hard to master

  though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

  To Fanny Brawne

  John Keats

  Keats was already dying of tuberculosis when he met and then became engaged to Fanny Brawne. The unsentimental yet passionate expression of his sense of imminent loss makes this poem almost unbearably poignant.

  This living hand, now warm and capable

  Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

  And in the icy silence of the tomb,

  So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

  That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

  So in my veins red life might stream again,

  And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

  I hold it toward you.

  A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

  John Donne

  This is perhaps the highest achievement of this greatest of all the Metaphysical Poets (so-called because of the abstract concepts and intellectualized imagery that characterize their work, often illustrating powerful emotional themes). The central conceit is of two lovers compared to arms of a compass, connected even when apart.

  As virtuous men pass mildly away,

  And whisper to their souls to go,

  Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

  Now his breath goes, and some say, No:

  So let us melt, and make no noise,

  No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

  ’Twere profanation of our joys

  To tell the laity our love.

  Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,

  Men reckon what it did, and meant,

  But trepidation of the spheres,

  Though greater far, is innocent.

  Dull sublunary lovers’ love

  —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit

  Of absence, ’cause it doth remove

  The thing which elemented it.

  But we by a love so much refined,

  That ourselves know not what it is,

  Inter-assured of the mind,

  Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

  Our two souls therefore, which are one,

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to aery thinness beat.

  If they be two, they are two so

  As stiff twin compasses are two;

  Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show

  To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

  And though it in the center sit,

  Yet, when the other far doth roam,

  It leans, and hearkens after it,

  And grows erect, as that comes home.

  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

  Thy firmness makes my circle just,

  And makes me end where I begun.

  Acknowledgments

  “He Is More Than a Hero” by Sappho from Sappho: A New Translation, translated by Mary Bernard. Copyright © 1958 by the Regents of the University of California, renewed 1986 by Mary Bernard.

  “To the Bridge of Love,” by Juan Ramon Jimenez and translated by James Wright, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

  “The Mirabeau Bridge” from Alcools: Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, English translations. Copyright © 1995 by Donald Revell and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

  “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1
926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “Married Love” by Kuan Tao-Sheng, Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, from Women Poets of China, copyright © 1973 by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “Touch” by Octavio Paz, translated by Charles Tomlinson, from Collected Poems 1957–1987, copyright © 1968, 1981 by Octavio Paz and Charles Tomlinson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “Strawberries” by Edwin Morgan, from Poems of Thirty Years (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1982). Reprinted in Collected Poems.

  “Funeral Blues,” copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from W. H. Auden: The Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “True Love” by Judith Viorst. From When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices: Selected Poems from Single to Mid-Life. Published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 1968, 1987 by Judith Viorst. Reprinted by permission of Lescher & Lescher, Ltd.

  “When Sue Wears Red” by Langston Hughes. From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Gregory Orr, “Love Poem” from The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems Copyright © 2002 by Gregory Orr. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-9271.

  “Last Night You Left Me and Slept” by Rumi. From Like This by Rumi, translator Coleman Barks. Copyright © by Coleman Barks.

  “Nothing Twice” from View with a Grain of Sand, copyright 1993 by Vislawa Szymborska, English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 1995 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  “Habitation,” from Selected Poems, 1965–1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1976 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  “Reprise” by Ogden Nash. Copyright © 1949 by Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  “Your Catfish Friend,” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan. Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  “Love Song” by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909–1939, Volume I, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “Valentine” by Donald Hall. Copyright © Donald Hall.

  “Vino Tinto” from Loose Woman. Copyright © 1994 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and originally in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York. All rights reserved.

  “Come Quickly” by Izumi Shikibu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, from One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, copyright © 1976 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “Sonnet XXX” of Fatal Interview by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright © 1931, 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

  “For Jane” from The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1969. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  “Silken Tent” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright 1942 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  “To the Harbormaster” by Frank O’Hara from Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara, with permission of Grove Atlantic.

  “I Knew a Woman,” copyright 1954 by Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “True Love,” by Robert Penn Warren. Copyright © 1989 by Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted with permission of William Morris Agency, Inc. on behalf of the Author.

  “I Loved You . . .” by Alexander Pushkin. Translated by Eugene Gurarie. Reprinted with permission of Eugene Gurarie.

  “Moonlit Night” by Tu Fu from Three Chinese Poets, by Vikram Seth. Copyright © 1992 by Vikram Seth. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “I Do Not Love You” by Pablo Neruda from 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott, copyright © Pablo Neruda 1959 and Fundacion Pablo Neruda. Copyright © 1986 by the University of Texas Press. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

  Goethe, Johann Van, “Night Thoughts.” Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.

  “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

  “Sonnet of Sweet Complaint” from Collected Poems: Revised Edition by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Catharine Brown, William Bryant Logan, Alan T. Trueblood, and Christopher Mauer. Translations © 1989, 1990, 1991, and 2001 by Catherine Brown William Bryant Logan, Alan T. Trueblood, and Christopher Mauer.

  “It Is the Third Watch” first appeared in Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon (1993) Dedalus, Dublin.

  “Love Letter” from Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1962 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  “Love Letter” by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1962 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  “September” by Ted Hughes, from The Hawk in the Rain. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” by Howard Moss. As appeared in the New Yorker.

  Karl Shapiro “Love for a hand” from Selected Poems 1940–53 © Karl Shapiro, by permission of Wieser & Wieser, Inc.

  “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)” copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904– 1 9 6 2 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation .

  “Wear Me” by Robert Kogan. © 1999 Robert E. Kogan.

  “Lady Love” by Paul Eluard, translated by Samuel Beckett, from Collected Poems in English and French. Copyright © 1977 by Samuel Beckett. Reprinted with permission of Grove Atlantic.