Poem of the Week – A romantic selection
As it is Valentine’s Day on Monday, we have curated a selection of romantic poetry. We hope the poems we have picked will help you express your love for your partners or aid you in your courtship of someone new.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand famously said that; “Providence gave man the gift of speech so that he may conceal his thoughts”. It could also be said that fate gave humanity the power of poetry so that we may reveal our highest feelings and deepest fancies.
Go, Valentine by Robert Southey
Go, Valentine, and tell that lovely maid
Whom fancy still will portray to my sight,
How here I linger in this sullen shade,
This dreary gloom of dull monastic night;
Say, that every joy of life remote
At evening’s closing hour I quit the
throng,
Listening in solitude the ring-dome’s note,
Who pours like me her solitary song;
Say, that of her absence calls the
sorrowing sigh;
Say, that of all her charms I love to speak,
In fancy feel the magic of her eye,
In fancy view the smile illume her cheek,
Court the lone hour when silence stills the grove,
And heave the sigh of memory and of love.
The Love Song of Har Dyal by Rudyard Kipling
Alone upon the housetops to the North
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky–
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die.
Below my feet the still bazar is laid–
Far, far below the weary camels lie–
The camels and the captives of thy raid.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
My father’s wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father’s house am I–
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
Episode of Hands by Hart Crane
The unexpected interest made him flush.
Suddenly he seemed to forget the pain,
—Consented,—and held out
one finger from the others.
The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun
That glittered in and out among the wheels,
Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound.
And as the fingers of the factory owner’s son,
That knew a grip for books and tennis
As well as one for iron and leather,—
As his taut, spare fingers wound the gauze
Around the thick bed of the wound,
His own hands seemed to him
Like wings of butterflies
Flickering in sunlight over summer fields.
The knots and notches,—many in the wide
Deep hand that lay in his,—seemed beautiful.
They were like the marks of wild ponies’ play,—
Bunches of new green breaking a hard turf.
And factory sounds and factory thoughts
Were banished from him by that larger, quieter
handThat lay in his with the sun upon it.
And as the bandage knot was tightened
The two men smiled into each other’s eyes.
Enjoyed this week’s romantic poetry selection? Find more poems of the week here.