Love Quotes From Poems
“Not easy to state the change you made/If I’m alive now, then I was dead.” – Sylvia Plath (Love Letter)
“For I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not honour more.” – Richard Lovelace (Tell Me Not, Sweet)
“Her very frowns are fairer far than smiles of other maidens are”. – Hartley Coleridge (She Is Not Fair To Outward View)
“Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 66)
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 116)
“Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, they that love best their loves shall not enjoy.” – William Shakespeare (Venus & Adonis)
“But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.” – Sir Walter Raleigh (The Nymph’s Reply to the Shephard, excerpt)
“But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18, excerpt)
“Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 71, excerpt)
“When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their ántique pen would have expressed
Ev’n such a beauty as you master now.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 106, excerpt)
“Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offenses of affections new.
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely; but by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 110, excerpt)
“‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,
That follow’d it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 145, excerpt)
“‘A thousand kisses buys my heart from me;
And pay them at thy leisure, one by one.
What is ten hundred touches unto thee?
Are they not quickly told and quickly gone?
Say, for non-payment that the debt should double,
Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?” – William Shakespeare (Venus & Adonis)
“‘Sweet boy,’ she says, ‘this night I’ll waste in sorrow,
For my sick heart commands mine eyes to watch.
Tell me, Love’s master, shall we meet to-morrow?
Say, shall we? shall we? wilt thou make the match?’
He tells her, no; to-morrow he intends
To hunt the boar with certain of his friends.” – William Shakespeare (Venus & Adonis)
“‘For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy
Doth call himself Affection’s sentinel;
Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny,
And in a peaceful hour doth cry ‘Kill, kill!’” – William Shakespeare (Venus & Adonis)
“‘Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled,
Since sweating Lust on earth usurp’d his name;
Under whose simple semblance he hath fed
Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;
Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves,
As caterpillars do the tender leaves.
‘Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun;
Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.” – William Shakespeare (Venus & Adonis)
“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever or else swoon to death.” – John Keats (Bright Star, excerpt)
“The Grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning glew,
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow’r.” – Andrew Marvell (To His Coy Mistress, excerpt)
“A Sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:—
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distractión,—
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,—
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,—
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,—
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,—
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.” – Robert Herrick (Sweet Disorder)
“Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.” – Sylvia Plath (Love Is a Parallax, excerpt)
“Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!” – Robert Browning (Meeting at Night, excerpt)
“Ow strongly does my passion flow,
Divided equally ‘twixt two?
Damon had ne’er subdued my heart,
Had not Alexis took his part;
Nor could Alexis powerful prove,
Without my Damon’s aid, to gain my love.” – Aphra Behn (On Her Loving Two Equally, excerpt)
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!” – Stephen Foster (Beautiful Dreamer)
“My river runs to thee.
Blue sea, wilt thou welcome me?
My river awaits reply.
Oh! Sea, look graciously.
I’ll fetch thee brooks
From spotted nooks.
Say, sea,
Take me!” – Emily Dickinson (My River)
“I Held a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: “’T will keep.”
I woke and chid my honest fingers,—
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.” – Emily Dickinson (I Held a Jewel in My Fingers)
“She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Maud, excerpt)
“She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
–Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!” – William Wordsworth (She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways)
“Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.” – Carl Sandberg (Under the Harvest Moon)
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that ’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!” – Lord Byron (She Walks In Beauty)
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