greykit.poetry — #love
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1899
[w-b-yeats]
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Eight lines: having neither the heavens' embroidered cloths nor anything but dreams, he spreads the dreams under her feet and asks her to tread softly.
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1898
[thomas-hardy]
Neutral Tones
By a winter pond under a white, chidden sun, Hardy distills the death of a love into a few grey images — the starving sod, the deadest smile, the God-curst sun — that return to him whenever love proves a deceiver.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
When I was one-and-twenty
A young man ignores the wise man's counsel to keep his heart free — and finds out at two-and-twenty that 't is true, 't is true.
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1892
[w-b-yeats]
When You Are Old
Told to a woman who is still young: one day, nodding by the fire, take down this book and remember that one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and the sorrows of your changing face.
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1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
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1850
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
Sonnet 43: How Do I Love Thee?
Barrett Browning counts the ways she loves her husband — to the depth, breadth, and height her soul can reach, with passion, purity, childhood faith, and all her life's breath.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Annabel Lee
Poe's last poem — a love that began in a kingdom by the sea, that the winged seraphs envied, that no angels in heaven above nor demons under the sea can ever dissever.
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1845
[robert-browning]
Meeting at Night
Grey sea, long black land, a boat pushed into slushy sand, three fields crossed to a farm — and the whole approach discharged in a tap at the pane, a scratched match, and two hearts beating each to each.
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1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
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1830
[lord-byron]
So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Written at twenty-nine after the Venice carnival, Byron's three spare stanzas bid farewell to midnight roving — the sword outwears the sheath, and love itself must rest.
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1816
[lord-byron]
When We Two Parted
A parting kept secret and a name now spoken freely by everyone else — so the grief has to stay private too, and the only greeting left, should they meet after long years, is silence and tears.
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1681
[andrew-marvell]
The Definition of Love
A love begotten by Despair upon Impossibility, kept apart by jealous Fate like the two poles of the world — parallel lines, infinite, that can never meet: the conjunction of the mind, and opposition of the stars.
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1633
[john-donne]
A Valediction: forbidding mourning
Parting should be as quiet as the death of virtuous men — no tear-floods, no sigh-tempests — because a love refined beyond the senses only stretches, like gold to airy thinness, or like the two legs of a compass.
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1633
[john-donne]
The Sunne Rising
The sun is scolded through the bedroom curtains as a busy old fool and a saucy pedantic wretch — until the poem swallows the world whole: she is all states, he all princes, and this bed is the centre the sun must warm.
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1633
[john-donne]
The good-morrow
Everything before this love was a sucking on country pleasures, a sleep in the seven sleepers' den; waking, the lovers find each other's faces in each other's eyes and make one little room an everywhere that cannot die.
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1616
[ben-jonson]
Song: To Celia
Drink to me only with thine eyes — a courtship conducted entirely in pledges and substitutions, ending with a rosy wreath sent back not withered but breathing, the poet insists, of her and not of itself.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Love defined by what it refuses to do: it does not alter when it finds alteration, does not bend to the remover, is the fixed star by which a wandering ship is steered — and the poet stakes his whole work on the claim being true.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 130: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
A systematic demolition of every Petrarchan compliment — the eyes, lips, breasts, hair, cheeks, breath and voice all fail the comparison, and the woman walks on the ground — which turns out to be the point: his love is as rare as any belied with false compare.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Three images of ending — bare boughs where the birds sang, the twilight after sunset, a fire dying on the ashes of its own youth — arrive at the paradox that seeing the end makes the love stronger: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.
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1599
[christopher-marlowe]
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my Love — an offer made entirely of beds of roses, caps of flowers, lambswool gowns and coral clasps, with no mention of winter, which is exactly what the Nymph's reply will notice.