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About The Poetry of Love

Love whether fleeting or of the ages, expressed with a look, a touch, or a thought is wanted by us all. Across genders and generations love is both the glue and the accelerant of our lives. Yet once gained we sometimes let it go without recognition of its value or fail to nourish it spiritually. Love needs feeding, needs tending. Love needs love. In today’s easy, ‘always on’ society we wail, whine and weep and forget that accomplishment will involve work, will involve sacrifice but it brings rewards. Rewards larger than our rational understanding but instinctively safe within our souls. And that can make us better people. To ourselves and each other. First love can be electric and consuming. But love matures, passions turn to bonds, amour to armour, to soulmates. A parents’ love is infinite and merciful but always streaked with protection. The march of time makes love dependable despite squabbles and bumps of heartache. But love can be unrequited, love can break, can fail. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, and in many combinations, for an instant and forever. When we speak with our hearts we speak with a rarer truth that the brain can make light of, can reduce to the ephemeral, but love is our greatest ally, our surest need that we are of value to each other and our common humanity. Sometimes love requires many things of us. To bear loss, to retreat, to compromise, to surrender but in every way, it enriches us. Sometimes not even for now but some future gain. Our classic poets did not surrender to the logic of the group or seek advice from others quick to blame but slow to embrace. Their legacy remains because it is true, because in that look, that touch, that thought, that display of words the heart remembers us and treasures us. Here are words and verse of love. For your ears, your loved one’s ears and hearts everywhere. 1 - The Poetry of Love. Speaking from the Heart - An introduction 2 - How Do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 3 - A Red Red Rose by Robert Burns 4 - Go Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller 5 - Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal (from The Princess) by Alfred Lord Tennyson 6 - The Passionate Shepherd To His Love by Christopher Marlowe 7 - I Am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale 8 - Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare 9 - Spiritual Love by Alfred Austin 10 - When You Are Old by W B Yeats 11 - Sonnet 18 - Shall I Compare Thee To A Summers Day by William Shakespeare 12 - Bright Star by John Keats 13 - She Walks In Beauty by Lord Byron 14 - I Love You by Ella Wheeler Wilcox 15 - Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley 16 - The Kiss by Charlotte Dacre 17 - In the Safety of Your Mouth by Daniel Sheehan 18 - To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet 19 - The Good Morrow by John Donne 20 - Oh Lovers by Jalaluddin Rumi 21 - Give All To Love by Ralph Waldo Emerson 22 - The Owl And The Pussycat by Edward Lear 23 - Longing by Matthew Arnold 24 - Helas! by Oscar Wilde 25 - Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe 26 - Remember by Christina Rossetti 27 - If Thou Must Love Me Let It Be For Nought by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 28 - One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon The Strand by Edmund Spenser 29 - He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats 30 - Unending Love by Tagore