romantic poems

Love me wildly, to distraction,
scare away my huge affliction,
in the cage of an abstraction,
I, an ape, jump up and down,
bare my teeth in malediction,
for I have no faith or fiction,
in the terror of His frown.

Mortal, do you hear my singing,
or mere nature's echoes ringing?
Hug me, don't just stare unseeing
as the sharpened knife comes down--
there's no guardian that's undying
who will hear my song and sighing:
in the terror of His frown.

As a raft upon a river,

The sap of the earth has spread through the branches,
The god of love in the eyes has come to dwell...!
Filling the breasts with voluptuous love to brim,
The connoisseur, the Master of the god of pleasures has indeed arrived!
The sap of the earth has spread through the branches,
The god of love in the eyes has come to dwell...!

He has turned things topsy -turvy, this lord with the garland of flowers,
The one with incomparable might, the sweet ambrosia of the entire universe
He has conferred upon this girl!

This morn I lay a-dreaming,
This morn, this merry morn,
When the cock crew shrill from over the hill,
I heard a bugle horn.

And thro' the dream I was dreaming,
There sighed the sigh of the sea,
And thro' the dream I was dreaming,
This voice came singing to me.

'High over the breakers,
Low under the lee,
Sing ho
The billow,
And the lash of the rolling sea!

'Boat, boat, to the billow,
Boat, boat, to the lee!
Love on thy pillow,
Art thou dreaming of me?

O Gentle Love, ungentle for thy deed,
Thou makest my heart
A bloody mark
With piercing shot to bleed.
Shoot soft, sweet Love, for fear thou shoot amiss,
For fear too keen
Thy arrows been,
And hist the heart where my beloved is.
Too fair that fortune were, nor never I
Shall be so blest,
Among the rest,
That Love shall seize on her by sympathy.
Then since with Love my prayers bear no boot,
This doth remain
To cease my pain,
I take the wound, and die at Venus' foot.

weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,
And press the rue for wine.
A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien,
A feather of the blue,
A doublet of the Lincoln green—
No more of me ye knew,
My Love!
No more of me ye knew.
'This morn is merry June, I trow,
The rose is budding fain;
But she shall bloom in winter snow
Ere we two meet again.'
—He turn'd his charger as he spake
Upon the river shore,
He gave the bridle-reins a shake,

And in that rosy rosy hour,
When bird sang out and scented flower,
Came words to me from heaven above:
'Awake, young heart, awake and love!'

You gave me a rose
last time we met.

I told myself
if it bloomed
our love would bloom,
& if it died-

O I did not
consider
the possibility.

It died.

Though I cut
the stem
on a slant
as my mother
taught me,
though I dropped
an aspirin
in the water,

it hung its head
like a spent cock
& died.

It stands
on my desk now-
straight green stalk,
blood-red clot
of bud
drooping

The treasure at the heart of the rose
is your own heart's treasure.
Scatter it as the rose does:
your pain becomes hers to measure.

Scatter it in a song,
or in one great love's desire.
Do not resist the rose
lest you burn in its fire.

Deep, Love, yea, very deep.
And in the dark exiled,
I have no sense of light but still to creep
And know the breast, but not the eyes. Thy child
Saw ne'er his mother near, nor if she smiled;
But only feels her weep.

Yet clouds and branches green
There be aloft, somewhere,
And winds, and angel birds that build between,
As I believe--and I will not despair;
For faith is evidence of things not seen.
Love! if I could be there!

I will be patient, dear.
Perchance some part of me

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused His work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all His grammar,

I love Him that He did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please Him yet,
Crossed out 'delete' and wrote His patient 'stet'.