poems about love

If Heaven would hear my prayer,
My dearest wish would be,
Thy sorrows not to share
But take them all on me;
If Heaven would hear my prayer.

I'd beg with prayers and sighs
That never a tear might flow
From out thy lovely eyes,
If Heaven might grant it so;
Mine be the tears and sighs.

No cloud thy brow should cover,
But smiles each other chase
From lips to eyes all over
Thy sweet and sunny face;
The clouds my heart should cover.

That all thy path be light

Beloved, this the heart I offer thee
Is purified from old idolatry,
From outworn hopes, and from the lingering stain
Of passion's dregs, by penitential pain.

Take thou it, then, and fill it up for me
With thine unstinted love, and it shall be
An earthy chalice that is made divine
By its red draught of sacramental wine.

SHUT out day's wintry beams!
Sleep, brood upon my brain!
For sweet sleep bringeth dreams
And love again!
Love cold and wan and sere
Heaped over with tears and snows;
Lo, born within its bier,
Blooms like a rose!

Its fragrance fills each vein,
Its fervour flushes my heart,
I feel through breast and brain
Its rapturous smart;
The look, the tone, the deep
Supreme smile of delight:
Ah, fickle as love, false sleep,
Why take thy flight?

Whene'er I try to read a book,
Across the page your face will look,
And then I neither know nor care
What sense the printed words may bear.

At night when I would go to sleep,
Thinking of you, awake I keep,
And still repeat the words you said,
Like sick men murmuring prayers in bed.

And when, with weariness oppressed:
I sink in spite of you to rest,
Your image, like a lovely sprite,
Haunts me in dreams through half the night.

I wake upon the autumn morn

Once I smiled when I saw you, when I saw you smile I was glad,
And the joy of my heart was as foam that the sea-wind shakes from the sea;
But the smile of your eyes grows strange, and the smile that my lips have had
Trembles back to my heart, and my heart trembles in me.

Once you laughed when you met me, when you met me your voice was gay
As the voice of a bird in the dawn of the day on a sunshiny tree;
But the sound of your voice grows strange, and the words that you do not say

IF the woodland and the heath,
And the hedgerows thick with may,
And the weed-flowers underneath,
And the clambering honey-sheath,
And the mosses green and grey,

And the flecks of sun and shade
Lying light upon the grass,
And the ripple in the glade,
And the songs that float and fade,
And the joys that come and pass,

If the dog-rose choir of bees
Whirling golden in the sun,
And the sweetness of the breeze,
And the joists of mighty trees,

Ah, that hair no age can dye
That is golden in Love's eye,
And that face time cannot touch
On which Love has gazed so much.
Other hair and faces may
Take on changes and decay:
Hers, if Love endures, must be
Sure of immortality,
Since no changes can occur
In the dream he's made of her.

Downward was the wheeling Bear
Driven by the Waggoner:
Men by powerful sleep opprest,
Gave their busy troubles rest;
Love, in this still depth of night,
Lately at my house did light;
Where, perceiving all fast lock'd,
At the door he boldly knock'd.
'Who's that,' said I, 'That does keep
Such a noise, and breaks my sleep?'
'Ope,' saith Love, 'for pity hear;
'Tis a child, thou need'st not fear,
Wet and weary, from his way
Led by this dark night astray.'
With compassion this I heard;

I think of thee, when golden sunbeams shimmer
Across the sea;
And when the waves reflect the moon's pale glimmer,
I think of thee.

I see thy form, when down the distant highway
The dust-clouds rise;
In deepest night, above the mountain by-way,
I see thine eyes.

I hear thee when the ocean-tides returning
Loudly rejoice;
And on the lonely moor, in stillness yearning,
I hear thy voice.

I dwell with thee: though thou art far removed,
Yet art thou near.

'Tis men who say that through all hurt and pain
The woman's love, wife's, mother's, still will hold,
And breathes the sweeter and will more unfold
For winds that tear it, and the sorrowful rain.
So in a thousand voices has the strain
Of this dear patient madness been retold,
That men call woman's love. Ah! they are bold,
Naming for love that grief which does remain.

Love faints that looks on baseness face to face:
Love pardons all; but by the pardonings dies,