Selected Love Poetry
ANACREON
Roving god, whose playfellows
Over the mountains' airy brows
In happy chase are led;
Where Love, who breaks the heart of pride,
Or Nymphs amuse thee, violet-eyed,
Or Aphrodite keeps thy side,
The goddess rosy Red---
Lord Dionyse, I kneel to thee;
Stoop to me of thy charity
And this my prayer receive:
Dear Lord, thy best persuasion use,
Bid Cleobulus not refuse
The gift of love I give.
Translated by T. F. Higham
SOPHOCLES
Love, unconquerable
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm nights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.
Surely you swerve upon ruin
The just man's consenting heart,
As here you have made bright anger
Strike between father and son---
And none has conquered but Love!
A girl's glance working the will of heaven:
Pleasure to her alone who mocks us,
Merciless Aphrodite.
Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robe
Sappho
Eros once again, limb-loosener, whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creatures stealing up.
Sappho
Eros shook through my heart
Falling like the stormwind
Upon the mountain oaks.
Sappho
Some say a host of horsemen, other of infantry, and others
of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth:
but I say, it is what you love.
Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all: for
she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty, Helen, her
most noble husband
Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a thought for
her daughter and dear parents. Aphrodite led her from her path...
Which now has put me in mind of Anactoria far away;
Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance of her
changing face, would I rather see than your Lydian chariots
and infantry full-armed.
Sappho
He seems to me as fortunate as the Gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing -- oh it
makes the wings of my heart flutter within my chest
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me.
No, my tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under my skin
in my eyes no sight and drumming fills my ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all over; I am paler than grass
and dead or little short of it
is how I feel.
Sappho
The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the time is going by and I lie alone.
Translated by Edwin Marion Cox
love poem
by Petra Wolfstellar
how can these trees stand idle
and erect
when all i care about is you?
like stiff soldiers
they salute the sky--
while i remain ignorant as water.
dumb trees.
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 102
My love is strengthened though more weak in seeming,
I love not less though less the show appear.
That love is merchandiz'd whose rich esteeming
The owners tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days.
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore, like her, I sometimes hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:--
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 141
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unswayed the likeness of man,
Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be.
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
From James Taylor,
"There We Are"
. . .
Drifting through time
and space
on the face
of a little blue ball
falling around the sun.
One in a million billion
twinkling lights
shining out for no one.
There we are.
. . .
And though we are as nothing
to the stars that shine above,
you are my universe.
You are my love.
There we are.
Walking hand in hand
somewhere on the sand,
on the edge of the land
and the edge of the shining sea.
Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits-- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round the earth's shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
T.S. Eliot
From "The Waste Land"
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest---
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once:
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed:
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
William Blake
The Clod and the Pebble
"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
to bind to another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
and builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
Walt Whitman
I am He that Aches with Love
I am he that aches with amorous love;
Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know.
Walt Whitman
from Song of Myself
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me.
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone,and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.
Swiftly rose and spread about me the peace and knowledge that pass all argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the Spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, head's stones, elder mellein, and poke weed.
Walt Whitman
On the Beach at Night Alone
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universe and the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds.
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colours, barbarisms, civilisations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
©
2006 David
Banach
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
