Pocket Posh 100 Classic Love Poems

By Jennifer Fox

Find a hundred ways to say “I love you” with a heartwarming collection featuring poets from Shakespeare to Shelley.

“If ever two were one, then surely we.” —Anne Bradstreet

Shakespeare’s sonnets; the elegant words of Robert Browning; the poignant works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the stirring poetry of Christina Rossetti—all are collected here in this celebration of romantic passion and deep abiding love.

Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, Lord Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and other treasured poets provide meaningful, memorable ways to speak the language of the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449423902

Book preview

1 Sonnet 56

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said

Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,

Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,

To-morrow sharpen’d in his former might:

So, love, be thou; although to-day thou fill

Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fullness,

To-morrow see again, and do not kill

The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.

Let this sad interim like the ocean be

Which parts the shore, where two contracted new

Come daily to the banks, that, when they see

Return of love, more blest may be the view;

Else call it winter, which being full of care

Makes summer’s welcome thrice more wish’d, more rare.

—William Shakespeare

2 You’ll Love Me Yet (from Pippa Passes)

You’ll love me yet!—and I can tarry

Your love’s protracted growing:

June reared that bunch of flowers you carry,

From seeds of April’s sowing.

I plant a heartful now: some seed

At least is sure to strike,

And yield—what you’ll not pluck indeed,

Not love, but, may be, like.

You’ll look at least on love’s remains,

A grave’s one violet:

Your look?—that pays a thousand pains.

What’s death? You’ll love me yet!

—Robert Browning

3 Bequest

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.

—Emily Dickinson

4 Sonnet 75

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

but came the waves and washed it away:

again I wrote it with a second hand,

but came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, thou dost in vain assay

a mortal thing so to immortalize;

for I myself shall like to this decay,

and eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so, (quod I) let baser things devise

to die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

my verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

and in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,

our love shall live, and later life renew.

—Edmund Spenser

5 Sonnet 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

6 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with the golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—William Butler Yeats

7 Sonnet 8

Set me where as the sun doth parch the green,

Or where his beams do not dissolve the ice;

In temperate heat where he is felt and seen;

With proud people, in presence sad and wise;

Set me in base, or yet in high degree,

In the long night, or in the shortest day,

In clear weather, or where mists thickest be,

In lost youth, or when my hairs be grey;

Set me in earth, in heaven, or yet in hell,

In hill, in dale, or in the foaming flood;

Thrall, or at large, alive where so I dwell,

Sick, or in health, in ill fame or good:

Yours will I be, and with that only thought

Comfort myself when that my hope is nought.

—Petrarch

8 Love in Autumn

I sought among