poems about love

Farewell !—we shall not meet again
As we are parting now!
I must my beating heart restrain—
Must veil my burning brow!
Oh, I must coldly learn to hide
One thought, all else above—
Must call upon my woman's pride
To hide my woman's love!
Check dreams I never may avow;
Be free, be careless, cold as thou!
Oh! those are tears of bitterness,
Wrung from the breaking heart,
When two blest in their tenderness
Must learn to live—apart!
But what are they to that long sigh,
That cold and fixed despair,

Tide be runnin' the great world over:
'Twas only last June month I mind that we
Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the lover
So everlastin' as the sea.

Here's the same little fishes that sputter and swim,
Wi' the moon's old glim on the gray, wet sand;
An' him no more to me nor me to him
Than the wind goin' over my hand.

In natures peeces still I see
Some errour, that might mended bee;
Something my wish could still remove,
Alter or adde; but my faire love
Was fram'd by hands farre more divine;
For she hath every beauteous line:
Yet I had beene farre happier,
Had Nature that made me, made her;
Then likenes, might (that love creates)
Have made her love what now she hates:
Yet I confesse I cannot spare,
From her just shape the smallest haire;
Nor need I beg from all the store
Of heaven, for her one beautie more:

My fault, my greatest fault,
O sea-eyed princess,
was to love you
as a child loves.
(The greatest lovers,
after all, are children)

My first mistake
(and not my last)
was to live
in the state of wonder
ready to be amazed
by the simple span
of night and day,

and ready for every woman
I loved to break me
into a thousand pieces to make
me an open city,
and to leave me behind her
as dust.
My weakness was to see
the world with the logic of a child.

One last kiss … then with tender eyes we went
Forth from the shadowy house of scattered light;
As children startled by a gruesome sight,
We wondered what the dim black waggon meant.

“A girl is dead,” we heard, and this was all;
But in my sleepless dreams she flutters past,
Like some unknown lost sister, found at last
Beyond the locked gate of a silent wall.

Had she been loved as I was loved, and died?
(Once in his arms I thought my heart would break!)
Could she not bear the kisses that I bore?

So Love, emergent out of chaos, brought
The world to light!
And gently moving on the waters, wrought
All form to sight!
Love's appetite
Did beauty first excite,
And left imprinted in the air
Those signatures of good and fair,
CHORUS

Which since have flowed, flowed forth upon the sense,
To wonder first, and then to excellence,
By virtue of divine intelligence!

The Ingemination
And Neptune too
Shows what his waves can do,
To call the muses all to play
And sing the birth of Venus' day,
CHORUS

Look at my heart: see how it bleeds with tears,
Love's wound still open all these weary years.
Help me, dear maid, for I am sore distrest;
No surgeon's hand can lull my pain to rest.
I am poor Telephus; you Achilles be
And heal the wound your beauty made in me.

P HAUORINUS vs'd to praise the quartaine-feauer;
Ould, beyond the moone would nutts commend;
Virgill, a gnatt, and Homer, honor'd euer
The fight of froggs, which do the most offend:
If these pure Wits most praise what most abhorre
What maruell ist though Marcus praise his whore.

If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream
Between us, milk-white mistress, I would swim
To you, to show to both my love's extreme,
Leander-like,--yea! dive from brim to brim.
But met I with a buttered pippin-pie
Floating upon 't, that would I make my boat
To waft me to you without jeopardy,
Though sea-sick I might be while it did float.
Yet if a storm should rise, by night or day,
Of sugar-snows and hail of caraways,
Then, if I found a pancake in my way,
It like a plank should bring me to your kays;

The Romaine Publius and Laberins,
(Two poets whome great Cæsar fauorèd).
Their skill that Cæsar held most serious
Though by most Cæsars now disfauourèd:
Why should not poetry please these great Kesars?
It is because those Kesars are no Cæsars.