Love poems
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Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve
© John Betjeman
who took heroin, then sleeping pills, and who lies in a New York hospital
The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea;
Portrait of a Lady
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
"I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
© Jack Spicer
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666
© Anne Bradstreet
Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning
of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of
Night of Love
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
The moon has left the sky, love,
The stars are hiding now,
And frowning on the world, love,
Night bares her sable brow.
Trust
© Lizette Woodworth Reese
I am thy grass, O Lord!
I grow up sweet and tall
But for a day; beneath Thy sword
To lie at evenfall.
from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
© André Breton
Not uselessly employ'd,
I might pursue this theme through every change
Of exercise and play, to which the year
Did summon us in its delightful round.
Maudlin; Or, The Magdalen’s Tears
© Michael Rosen
If faith is a tree that sorrow grows
and women, repentant or not, are swamps,
Insomnia
© Dana Gioia
Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women
© Alexander Pope
Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most Women have no Characters at all."
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.
At the Executed Murderer’s Grave
© James Wright
6
Staring politely, they will not mark my face
From any murderer’s, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.
Sonnet XII: I did but Prompt the Age to Quit their Clogs
© Patrick Kavanagh
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
An Hymn Of Heavenly Beauty
© Edmund Spenser
Rapt with the rage of mine own ravish'd thought,
Through contemplation of those goodly sights,
Pangur Bán
© Pierre Reverdy
From the ninth-century Irish poem
Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.
The Window
© Diane di Prima
you are my bread
and the hairline
noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea
