love poetry

"Come, pretty birds, present your lays,
And learn to chaunt a goddess praise;
Ye wood-nymphs, let your voices be
Employ'd to serve her deity:
And warble forth, ye virgins nine,
Some music to my Valentine.

"Her bosom is love's paradise,
There is no heav'n but in her eyes;
She's chaster than the turtle-dove,
And fairer than the queen of love:
Yet all perfections do combine
To beautifie my Valentine.

"She's Nature's choicest cabinet,

Vnhappy youth, betrayd by Fate
To such a love hath sainted hate,
And damned those celestiall bands
Are onely knit with equal hands;
The love of great ones is a love,
Gods are incapable to prove:
For where there is a joy uneven,
There never, never can be Heav'n:
'Tis such a love as is not sent
To fiends as yet for punishment;
IXION willingly doth feele
The gyre of his eternal wheele,
Nor would he now exchange his paine
For cloudes and goddesses againe.

I.
Long in thy shackels, liberty
I ask not from these walls, but thee;
Left for awhile anothers bride,
To fancy all the world beside.

II.
Yet e're I doe begin to love,
See, how I all my objects prove;
Then my free soule to that confine,
'Twere possible I might call mine.

III.
First I would be in love with PEACE,
And her rich swelling breasts increase;
But how, alas! how may that be,
Despising earth, she will love me?

If spicy-fringed pinks that blush and pale
With passions of perfume, -- if violets blue
That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, --
If perfect roses, each a holy Grail
Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale
Grave raptures round, -- if leaves of green as new
As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew
By Emily when down the Athenian vale
She paced, to do observance to the May,
Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, --
If fruits that riped in some more riotous play

I asked my heart to say
Some word whose worth my love's devoir might pay
Upon my Lady's natal day.

Then said my heart to me:
`Learn from the rhyme that now shall come to thee
What fits thy Love most lovingly.'

This gift that learning shows;
For, as a rhyme unto its rhyme-twin goes,
I send a rose unto a Rose.

In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know
Two springs that with unbroken flow
Forever pour their lucent streams
Into my soul's far Lake of Dreams.

Not larger than two eyes, they lie
Beneath the many-changing sky
And mirror all of life and time,
-- Serene and dainty pantomime.

Shot through with lights of stars and dawns,
And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns,
-- Thus heaven and earth together vie
Their shining depths to sanctify.

Always when the large Form of Love

I.

The storm that snapped our fate's one ship in twain
Hath blown my half o' the wreck from thine apart.
O Love! O Love! across the gray-waved main
To thee-ward strain my eyes, my arms, my heart.
I ask my God if e'en in His sweet place,
Where, by one waving of a wistful wing,
My soul could straightway tremble face to face
With thee, with thee, across the stellar ring --
Yea, where thine absence I could ne'er bewail
Longer than lasts that little blank of bliss

Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands,
And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea,
How long they kiss in sight of all the lands.
Ah! longer, longer, we.

Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun,
As Egypt's pearl dissolved in rosy wine,
And Cleopatra night drinks all. 'Tis done,
Love, lay thine hand in mine.

Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart;
Glimmer, ye waves, round else unlighted sands.
O night! divorce our sun and sky apart

Once, at night, in the manor wood
My Love and I long silent stood,
Amazed that any heavens could
Decree to part us, bitterly repining.
My Love, in aimless love and grief,
Reached forth and drew aside a leaf
That just above us played the thief
And stole our starlight that for us was shining.

A star that had remarked her pain
Shone straightway down that leafy lane,
And wrought his image, mirror-plain,
Within a tear that on her lash hung gleaming.

As Love will carve dear names upon a tree,
Symbol of gravure on his heart to be,

So thought I thine with loving text to set
In the growth and substance of my canzonet;

But, writing it, my tears begin to fall --
This wild-rose stem for thy large name's too small!

Nay, still my trembling hands are fain, are fain
Cut the good letters though they lap again;

Perchance such folk as mark the blur and stain
Will say, `It was the beating of the rain;'

Or, haply these o'er-woundings of the stem