Copyright © 2003 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc., Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: March 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-51193-3
Contents
In The 100 Best Love Poemsof All Time
Also Edited by Leslie Pockell
Introduction
La Vita Nuova
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
Who Ever Loved
From Paradise Lost (Book IV)
To Helen
A Red, Red Rose
She Tells Her Love while Half Asleep
Last Night You Left Me and Slept
I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart
I Carry Your Heart with Me
The Avenue
The Bargain
The Mirabeau Bridge
To the Bridge of Love
She Walks in Beauty
The Ragged Wood
Night Thoughts
The Gardener
To the Harbormaster
To a Stranger
True Love
Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile
Jenny Kiss’d Me
Juliet
Song to Celia
Your Catfish Friend
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Love Song to Alex,1979
When Sue Wears Red
Those Who Love
Reprise
One Word Is Too Often Profaned
I Do Not Love You
Gifts
At Last
To Alice B.Toklas
Valentine
Love’s Secret
I Knew a Woman
Love for a Hand
It Is the Third Watch
The Enchantment
The Silken Tent
Love Song
Wild Nights!
She Comes Not When Noon Is on the Roses
Between Your Sheets
The Jewels
Song 5 to Lesbia
The Vine
From The Song of Songs
Confession
I Loved You
FromMerciless Beauty
He Is More than a Hero
To His Mistress
To Little or No Purpose
Touch
Lady Love
Love Poem
I Want to Breathe
A Statue of Eros
Come Quickly
Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
Habitation
September
Love Letter
Marriage Morning
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Fulfillment
How Do I Love Thee?
Meeting at Night
Sonnet xxx
Camomile Tea
Decade
Wear Me
The Marriage
Married Love
The River Merchant’s Wife
To His Coy Mistress
Nothing Twice
Strawberries
True Love
When I Was One-and-Twenty
Thunderstorm in Town
On the Balcony
Love Song
Moonlit Night
Sonnet of Sweet Complaint
Since There’s No Help
Love Arm’d
The Lost Love
Echo
Reminiscence
For Jane
Funeral Blues
Vino Tinto
One Art
To Fanny Brawne
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
Acknowledgments
In The 100 Best Love Poems
of All Time,
you’ll find . . .
Seductive pleas...
Wild nights—wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
—from “Wild Nights” by Emily Dickinson
Heart-wrenching tributes...
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
—from “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden
Poignant vignettes...
While my hair was cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
—from “The River Merchant’s Wife” by Li Po
Passion’s hidden face...
How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
—from “Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke
A lover’s delirium...
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
—from “I Do Not Love You” by Pablo Neruda
Ardent devotion...
And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red
Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like pain.
—from “When Sue Wears Red” by Langston Hughes
Also Edited by Leslie Pockell
The 100 Best Poems of All Time
The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time
Introduction
As with this book’s predecessor, The 100 Best Poems of All Time, our primary objective in assembling these works has been to provide a small, easily portable volume that would contain the essential works that most readers would expect to find in a book of this kind, along with a few discoveries. Love poetry down the years seems to have been written along a spectrum ranging from idealistic romanticism to passionate sensuality, and in this collection we have gathered what we feel are the best examples of both extremes and every variation in between. The poems are arranged in a roughly thematic sequence, including poems of love at first sight, passionate attachment, mutual affection, marriage, and, sadly but inevitably, loss and remembrance. They include representatives from virtually every major language group and date from the early classic period of Greece and Rome up to the present day. Most poems included are complete, but a few are extracts from larger works. Some are examples of high art; others exemplify popular culture.
To maximize the breadth of the collection, while maintaining a convenient format suitable for browsing through or dipping into at an appropriate moment, we decided to include no more than one poem per poet, with the exception of William Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”) is included primarily as a reference for Howard Moss’s delightful modern gloss of the same title. As the juxtaposition of these two poems suggests, neither the historical period in which a poem is written nor the poetic tradition nor even the language it is written in affect the immediacy with which a great love poem instantly communicates emotion to the contemporary reader. Human nature after all does not change, and first love is as exhilarating and painful today as it was when Sappho wrote almost three thousand years ago “If I meet you suddenly, I can’t speak”; passion today is as overwhelming as when Baudelaire wrote a century and a half ago of love that “was deep and gentle as the seas/And rose to her as to a cliff the tide.”
The best love poems are those to which we respond by thinking, “That’s the way it was for me!” Not every poem here will strike every reader in that way, since so
many of love’s diverse manifestations are represented. But each of these poems carries within it that same truth, expressed in different ways, for the reader who is, was, or hopes to be in love (which is all of us). And so it is our hope that this collection will speak to every reader, and reassure them that what they feel or felt is as universal as life itself.
This book would not have been possible without the early and enthusiastic support of Maureen Egen, Jamie Raab, and Amy Einhorn. Karen Melnyk and Sarah Rustin provided essential editorial contributions.
La Vita Nuova
Dante Alighieri
This is a brief excerpt from a larger work blending prose and poetry, in which Dante celebrates his idealized love for Beatrice. Even after seven hundred years it is easy to understand how a new life can seem to begin when lovers meet for the first time.
In that book which is
My memory . . .
On the first page
That is the chapter when
I first met you
Appear the words . . .
Here begins a new life.
Shakespeare is the only poet to receive double recognition in this collection, in this case to supply a reference to Howard Moss’s delightful contemporary version of his classic sonnet. Moss, for many years poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine, casts off traditional meter and rhyme in exchange for a colloquial style that expresses a heartfelt exuberance.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
Howard Moss
Who says you’re like one of the dog days?
You’re nicer. And better.
Even in May, the weather can be gray,
And a summer sub-let doesn’t last forever.
Sometimes the sun’s too hot;
Sometimes it is not.
Who can stay young forever?
People break their necks or just drop dead!
But you? Never!
If there’s just one condensed reader left
Who can figure out the abridged alphabet,
After you’re dead and gone,
In this poem you’ll live on!
Who Ever Loved
Christopher Marlowe
Marlowe, Shakespeare’s only real contemporary rival, is mostly remembered for his powerful verse dramas, such as Dr. Faustus. This perceptive verse shows that he was also an eloquent poet and a keen psychologist of desire.
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censored by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
From Paradise Lost (Book IV)
John Milton
In this tender monologue Eve tells Adam how none of the beauties and wonders of nature mean anything to her without him. Milton’s gorgeous evocation of the pleasures of love in paradise makes the coming temptation and fall of the first man and woman seem all the more poignant.
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heav’n, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
To Helen
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe softens his customary pounding rhythms and repetitive rhymes in this delicately romantic evocation of classicism. The poem is an almost prayer-like adoration of a beloved figure, viewed from afar.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns
This lyric by Scotland’s greatest poet breathes life into a series of similes that sound as natural as a song, and as sincere as a prayer.
O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.
She Tells Her Love while Half Asleep
Robert Graves
A lover compares his drowsy loved one and her murmured endearments to early spring blossoms that emerge while the snow is still falling. The rhyme scheme and repetition at the end produce an almost hypnotic effect.
She tells her love while half asleep
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low;
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
Last Night You Left Me and Slept
Rumi
This greatest of all Sufi mystics and poets lived in thirteenth-century Afghanistan, but his love poems have a completely contemporary immediacy, as in this representation of two sharply contrasting sides of a relationship.
Last night you left me and slept
you
r own deep sleep. Tonight you turn
and turn. I say,
“You and I will be together
till the universe dissolves.”
You mumble back things you thought of
when you were drunk.
I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart
Sir John Suckling
Suckling was one of a group of so-called English cavalier poets in the Court of King Charles I. Here he playfully debates the merits of a heart-to-heart bargain between lovers.
I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then shouldst thou have mine?
Yet now I think on’t, let it lie,—
To find it were in vain;
For thou’st a thief in either eye
Would steal it back again.
Why should two hearts in one breast lie,
And yet not lodge together?
O love, where is thy sympathy,
If thus our breasts thou sever?
But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out;
For when I think I’m best resolved,
I then am most in doubt.
Then farewell care, and farewell woe,—
I will no longer pine;
For I’ll believe I have her heart
As much as she hath mine.
I Carry Your Heart with Me
e.e.cummings
Cummings is known for typographic and orthographic experimentation in his verse, but this should not obscure the genuine feeling—and, in this case, tenderness—that characterizes his best poetry.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)