Love poems
/ page 664 of 1285 /
Emily Hardcastle, Spinster
© Pindar
We shall come tomorrow morning, who were not to have her love,
We shall bring no face of envy but a gift of praise and lilies
To the stately ceremonial we are not the heroes of.
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
The Ragpickers' Wine
© Charles Baudelaire
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,
Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,
As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,
Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,
Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows
© William Shakespeare
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
from War is Kind [“I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night”]
© Stephen Crane
I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night
The sweep of each sad lost wave
The dwindling boom of the steel thing's striving
The little cry of a man to a man
A shadow falling across the greyer night
And the sinking of the small star.
Amoretti LV: So oft as I her beauty do behold
© Edmund Spenser
Then needs another element inquire
Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky.
For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,
And eke her love is pure immortal high.
Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,
Be like in mercy as in all the rest.
Amoretti I: Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands
© Edmund Spenser
Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might
Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
© William Shakespeare
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
Sonnets from the Portuguese 1: I Thought how Theocritus
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Four-Leaf Clover
© Ella Higginson
I know a place where the sun is like gold,
And the cherry blooms burst with snow,
And down underneath is the loveliest nook,
Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
To His Mistress
© John Wilmot
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Suns enlivening eye?
Revenge
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,
And gaze upon her smile;
Seem as you drank the very air
Her breath perfumed the while:
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
© Christopher Marlowe
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.
A Modest Love
© Sir Edward Dyer
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.
Tropics
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
In the still morning when you move
toward me in sleep for love,
I dream of
His Suicide
© May Swenson
He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair
near his navel, swaying.
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
© John Dryden
Stanza 4
The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
