Love poems
/ page 665 of 1285 /To His Mistress Going to Bed
© John Donne
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
In School-days
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.
Autumn Sky
© Charles Simic
In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey
© James Wright
Smaller than she, he goes
Claw beneath claw beneath
Needles and leaning boughs,
Modern Love: XVI
© George Meredith
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
Hellas: Chorus
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
Sudden Light
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
Hotel François 1er
© Gertrude Stein
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.
Have I come in. Will in suggestion.
They may like hours in catching.
It is always a pleasure to remember.
Modern Love: XX
© George Meredith
I am not of those miserable males
Who sniff at vice and, daring not to snap,
The House of Life: 36. Life-in-Love
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"
© Walt Whitman
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travelld a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once lookd on you,
For I feard I might afterward lose you.
(I found a few old letters...)
© Anselm Hollo
XIV
I found a few old letters of mine carefully hidden in thy boxa few small toys for thy memory to play with. With a timorous heart thou didst try to steal these trifles from the turbulent stream of time which washes away planets and stars, and didst say, These are only mine! Alas, there is no one now who can claim themwho is able to pay their price; yet they are still here. Is there no love in this world to rescue thee from utter loss, even like this love of thine that saved these letters with such fond care?
O woman, thou camest for a moment to my side and touched me with the great mystery of the woman that there is in the heart of creationshe who ever gives back to God his own outflow of sweetness; who is the eternal love and beauty and youth; who dances in bubbling streams and sings in the morning light; who with heaving waves suckles the thirsty earth and whose mercy melts in rain; in whom the eternal one breaks in two in joy that can contain itself no more and overflows in the pain of love.
Tender Only to One
© Stevie Smith
Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?
Clotilde
© Guillaume Apollinaire
Anemone and columbine
Where gloom has lain
Opened in gardens
Between love and disdain
Thinking of Madame Bovary
© Jane Kenyon
The first hot April day the granite step
was warm. Flies droned in the grass.
When a car went past they rose
in unison, then dropped back down. . . .