Poem of the week – a romantic selection

As it is Valentine’s Day this Sunday, we have chosen a selection of romantic poetry for this week. Adoration often inspires that instinct for self-expression, as much as hatred might inspire a lamentable appetite for destruction. Love links people in the most mysterious way and creates loyalties higher than those paid to any state, idea or faith. Perhaps that is why poetry is such an effective means of communicating romantic feelings.

The critic Owen Barfield insisted that very few qualities unite great poetry, with the exception of mystery. Mystery can proliferate from a poem when a reader is amazed by how a poet can produce an original and beguiling piece of art. The extraordinary possibilities of poetry also allow for accurate and vivid explorations of mysterious subjects. Given the mysterious nature of love, the advantages poetry yields have resulted in innumerable masterpieces pertaining to the profoundest feeling of all. In addition to poetry’s betrothal to mystery is its capacity for praise. With well-arranged words, poets are able to tenderly articulate their gratitude for events, places, individuals, encounters and sensations. What other inner experience warrants as much eloquence as the exultation of romantic love? What better way is there to convey your unconditional affection for another person? Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord said, “Providence gave man the gift of speech so that he may conceal his thoughts.” Well inversely, fate gave humanity the gift of poetry so that we may reveal our highest feelings and deepest fancies. You will find a collection of loving creations below, composed by some of the ablest users of language to date. Love refreshes our fundamental beliefs; elevates and opens our minds; compels and perfects our eagerness for peace. It is the religion we all worship whether we wish to or not.

To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Lullaby by WH Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

A Thunderstorm in Town by Thomas Hardy

She wore a ‘terra-cotta’ dress,

And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

Within the hansom’s dry recess,

Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

And the glass that had screened our forms before

Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

I should have kissed her if the rain

Had lasted a minute more.

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, quiet hand
That lay in his with the sun upon it.
And as the bandage knot was tightened
The two men smiled into each other’s eyes.