love poetry

When with May the air is sweet,
When the forest fair is clad,
All that have a love to meet
Pair in pleasure, lass and lad.
Merrily arm in arm they go,
For the time will have it so.
Love and love, when linked together,
Love goes with to keep them gay:
All the three, this sunshine weather,
They are making holiday.
Sorrow cannot come between
Hearts where Love and May are seen.
Where to love sweet love is plighted,
Constant and with all the soul,
And the pair are so united

When thou, poor Excommunicate
From all the joys of Love, shalt see
The full reward and glorious fate
Which my strong faith shall purchase me,
Then curse thine own inconstancy!

A fairer hand than thine shall cure
That heart which thy false oaths did wound;
And to my soul a soul more pure
Than thine shall by Love's hand be bound,
And both with equal glory crown'd.

Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain
To Love, as I did once to thee;
When all thy tears shall be as vain

When the time comes for me to die,
—To-morrow, or some other day,
If God should bid me make reply,
—“What would'st thou?” I shall say,

O God, Thy world was great and fair;
—Yet give me to forget it clean!
Vex me no more with things that were,
—And things that might have been.

I loved, I toiled, throve ill or well,
——Lived certain years and murmured not.
Now grant me in that land to dwell
—Where all things are forgot.

For others, Lord, Thy purging fires,
—The loves reknit, the crown, the palm.

When summer took in hand the winter to assail,
With force of might and virtue great his stormy blasts to quail,
And when he clothed fair the earth about with green,
And every tree new garmented, that pleasure was to seen,
Mine heart 'gan new revive, and changed blood did stur
Me to withdraw my winter woe, that kept within the door.
"Abroad!' quod my desire; "assay to set thy foot,
Where thou shalt find the savour sweet; for sprung is every root.
And to thy health, if thou were sick in any case,

When Spring comes back to England
—And crowns her brows with May,
Round the merry moonlit world
—She goes the greenwood way:
She throws a rose to Italy,
—A fleur-de-lys to France;
But round her regal morris-ring
—The seas of England dance.

When Spring comes back to England
—And dons her robe of green,
There's many a nation garlanded
—But England is the Queen;
She's Queen, she's Queen of all the world
—Beneath the laughing sky,
For the nations go a-Maying
—When they hear the New Year cry—

When Sol did cast no light,
being darken'd over,
And the dark time of night
did the skies cover,
Running a river by
There were ships sailing,
A maid most fair I spy'd,
crying and wailing.

Unto this maid I stept,
asking what griev'd her,
She answer'd me and wept,
fates had deceiv'd her:
My love is prest, quoth she,
to cross the ocean,
Proud waves to make the ship
ever in motion.

We lov'd seven years and more,
both being sure,
But I am left on shore,
grief to endure.

When shall I see the half-moon sink again
Behind the black sycamore at the end of the garden?
When will the scent of the dim white phlox
Creep up the wall to me, and in at my open window?
Why is it, the long, slow stroke of the midnight bell
(Will it never finish the twelve?)
Falls again and again on my heart with a heavy reproach?

The moon-mist is over the village, out of the mist speaks the bell,
And all the little roofs of the village bow low, pitiful, beseeching, resigned.
— Speak, you my home! what is it I don't do well?

When raging love with extreme pain
Most cruelly distrains my heart,
When that my tears, as floods of rain,
Bear witness of my woeful smart;
When sighs have wasted so my breath
That I lie at the point of death,

I call to mind the navy great
That the Greeks brought to Troye town,
And how the boistous winds did beat
Their ships, and rent their sails adown;
Till Agamemnon's daughter's blood
Appeased the gods that them withstood.

And how that in those ten years' war
Full many a bloody deed was done,

When my love becomes
All-powerful,
I turn inside out
My garments of the night,
Night dark as leopard-flower.

When love's brief dream is done
Pass on. Nor hope to see again
The burnished glow of yesterday
Gone with its setting sun.

Know this, the little while of love
Is fleeting as a cloud,
As lissom as a zephyr's breath,
As fickle as a crowd.

Its gleaming rainbow flames the sky —
Enthralls — then fades from sight:
Love for a day, an hour and then —
Remember through the night.