love poems

I.

You ask me, What's Love? —Why, that virtue-fed vapour,
 Which poets spread over our longings, like gauze,
May do for a swain who can feed upon paper;
 But flesh is my diet, and blood is the cause.

II.

A delicate tendre , spun into Platonic,
 Suits the feminine fop,—whom no beauties provoke;
But the blood of a Welchman is hot and laconic,
 And he loves as he fights, with a word and a stroke .

III.

Yet, I grant you, there is a sweet madness of passion,
 A raptur'd delirium of mental delight;

Within the gentle heart Love shelters him
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in nature's scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.
For with the sun, at once,
So sprang the light immediately; nor was
Its birth before the sun's.
And Love hath his effect in gentleness
Of very self; even as
Within the middle fire the heat's excess.

The fire of Love comes to the gentle heart
Like as its virtue to a precious stone;
To which no star its influence can impart

You are a sunrise,
If a star should rise instead of the sun.
You are a moonrise,
If a star should come, in the place of the moon.
You are the Spring,
If a face should bloom,
Instead of an apple-bough.
You are my love
If your heart is as kind
As your young eyes now.

Yes , still I love thee! Time, who sets
His signet on my brow,
And dims my sunken eye, forgets
The heart he could not bow,
Where love, that cannot perish, grows
For one, alas! that little knows
How love may sometimes last,
Like sunshine wasting in the skies,
When clouds are overcast.

The dew-drop hanging o'er the rose,
Within its robe of light,
Can never touch a leaf that blows,
Though seeming to the sight;
And yet it still will linger there,
Like hopeless love without despair, —

Years and years I have loved you
And dar'd not speak my love,
Your face was a light to lead my feet
To the crown of the Heav'ns above;
(Lean closer, kiss me again, again,
For this is the Heav'n of love).

Years and years I have waited
And gazed at your face afar,
Set in the dim wide night of my soul
A tremulous silver star.
(Lean closer, love is diviner now

Enfors we us with all our might
To love Seint George, our Lady knight.

Worship of virtu is the mede,
And seweth him ay of right:
To worship George then have we nede,
Which is our soverein Lady's knight.

He keped the mad from dragon's dred,
And fraid all France and put to flight.
At Agincourt — the crownecle ye red —
The French him se formest in fight.

In his virtu he wol us lede
Againis the Fend, the ful wight,
And with his banner us oversprede,
If we him love with all oure might.

A woman's looks
Are barbed hooks,
That catch by art
The strongest heart,
When yet they spend no breath.
But let them speak,
And sighing break
Forth into tears,
Their words are spears
That wound our souls to death.

The rarest wit
Is made forget,
And like a child
Is oft beguiled
With Love's sweet-seeming bait.
Love with his rod
So like a god
Commands the mind
We cannot find,
Fair shows hide foul deceit.

Time, that all things
In order brings,

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

THE WOMAN I am
Hides deep in me
Beneath the woman
I seem to be.

She hides away
From the stranger's eye —
She is not known
To the passers-by.

She goes her way,
The woman I seem,
But the woman I am
Withdraws to dream!

The woman I seem
Goes carelessly —
When love goes by
Does not seem to see.

But the woman I am
Knows sudden fear . . .
And hides more deeply
When love draws near!

For love might look closely
Perhaps . . . and see

With joy all relics of the past I hail;
The heath-bell, lingering in our cultured moor,
Or the dull sound of the slip-shouldered flail,
Still busy on the poor man's threshing floor:
I love this unshorn hedgerow, which survives
Its stunted neighbors, in this farming age:
The thatch and houseleek, where old Alice lives
With her old herbal, trusting every page;
I love the spinning wheel, which hums far down
In yon lone valley, though, from day to day,
The boom of Science shakes it from the town.