love poetry

Come, Love, let 's walk into the spring,
Where we may hear the blackbird sing,
The robin-redbreast and the thrush,
The nightingale in thorny bush,
The mavis sweetly carolling,
These to my Love content will bring.

In yonder dale there are fine flowers,
And many pleasant shady bowers,
A purling brook whose silver streams
Are beautified by Phoebus' beams,
Which stealing through the trees for fear,
Because Diana bathes her there.

See where this nymph with all her train
Comes tripping o'er the park amain,

Full ill, I ween, can measured speech reveal
Or thought embody, what true bosoms feel,
For hollow falsehood long has set her sign
On each soft phrase that speaks a love like mine:
The choicest terms are now enfeoff'd to folly,
To vain delight, or wilful melancholy.

Oh! for a virgin speech, a strain untainted
By worldly use, with holy meaning sainted,
Thoughts to conceive, and words devote to tell
The strength divine of love, its secret spell,
Of brother's love, that is within the heart
A spiritual essence, and exists apart

O BEAUTIFUL Stars, when you see me go
Hither and thither, in search of love,
Do you think me faithless, who gleam and glow
Serene and fixed in the blue above?
O Stars, so golden, it is not so.

But there is a garden I dare not see,
There is a place where I fear to go,
Since the charm and glory of life to me
The brown earth covered there, long ago.
O Stars, you saw it, you know, you know.

Hither and thither I wandering go,
With aimless haste and wearying fret;
In a search for pleasure and love? Not so,

Strong as the death it masters, is the hope
That onward looks to immortality:
Let the frame perish, so the soul survive,
Pure, spiritual and loving. I believe
The grave exalts, not separates, the ties
That hold us in affection to our kind.
I will look down from yonder pitying sky,
Watching and waiting those I love on earth,
Anxious in heaven until they too are there.
I will attend your guardian angel's side,
And weep away your faults with holy tears;
Your midnight shall be filled with solemn thought:

‘There springs a rose in Fyvie's yard,
And O but it springs bonny!
There 's a daisy in the middle of it,
Its name is Andrew Lammie.

‘I wish the rose were in my breast,
For the love I bear the daisy;
So blyth and merry as I would be,
And kiss my Andrew Lammie.

‘The first time I and my love met
Was in the wood of Fyvie;
He kissëd and he dawted me,
Calld me his bonny Annie.

‘Wi apples sweet he did me treat,
Which stole my heart so canny,
And ay sinsyne himself was kind,

I NEVER shall henceforth approve
The deity of Love
Since he could be
So far unjust as to wound me,
And leave my mistress free.
As if my flame could leave a print
Upon a heart of flint.
Can flesh and stone
Be e'er converted into one,
By my poor flame alone?
Were he a god, he'd neither be
Partial to her, nor me,
But by a dart
Directed into either's heart
Make both so feel the smart,
That being heated with his subtile fire,
Our loves might make us feel but one desire.

My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love's refinèd gold,
May love's gold coin be current with us still.

May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
In the dear March of a most sacred year.

May what we are be all we might have been,
And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
In our love's acre, comrade, till the end.

See, where the foliage fronts the sky,
How many a meaning we descry
That else had never to the eye
A signal shown!

So we, on life's horizon-line,
To watchers waiting for a sign,
Perchance interpret Love's design,
To us unknown.

Love is the center and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things—'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.

Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin,
As sweet as clover-honey in its cell;
Love is the password whereby souls get in
To Heaven—the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.

Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse
That brands and burdens; it is life and death.
It is the great law of the universe;
And nothing can exist without its breath.

There cannot be two true loves, for the soul
Is smitten by the unity of God
And blooms but once, whether on heaven's sod
Or where the waves of earth's salt craving roll.
But once in an existence shall the whole
Of any heart be sweet between the hands
Of Love,—but once, the vision of fair lands
And far-off Canaanitish meadows stole
Across the enraptured gaze of Moses; he
Was only once permitted to draw near
To God upon the mountain-top and see,
As the blue spaces, distant and austere,