It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Habitation
Margaret Atwood
Rather than viewing marriage as a kind of shelter, Atwood depicts it as a journey through uncharted territory, by which a couple evolves past mere survival.
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
The following two poets were famously married. She committed suicide after he left her for another woman, who also killed herself. Their poems here both deal (in very different ways) with the transformational power of love. His takes its departure from the very end of summer, and hers from the very beginning of spring, yet both sharply communicate the pain as well as the ecstasy of two lovers’ union.
September
Ted Hughes
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.
We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads
Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.
Love Letter
Sylvia Plath
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I’m alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn’t just toe me an inch, no—
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.
That wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter—
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chiseled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn’t convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.
And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I saw was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in a dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn’t know what to make of it.
I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.
Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.
Marriage Morning
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Traditionally, wedding songs praise the bride or the idea of marriage itself. In this work, the poet praises the morning light on his wedding day, as he races to be wed. Is his heart strong enough for the race, for his tireless love? Clearly the answer is yes.
Light, so low upon earth,
You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
All my wooing is done.
Oh, the woods and the meadows,
Woods where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stay’d to be kind,
Meadows in which we met!
Light, so low in the vale
You flash and lighten afar,
For this is the golden morning of love,
And you are his morning star
Flash, I am coming, I come,
By meadow and stile and wood,
Oh, lighten into my eyes and heart,
Into my heart and my blood!
Heart, are you great enough
For a love that never tires?
O heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers,
Over the meadow and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
Flash for a million miles.
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet and her husband were married in 1628; they then immigrated to the United States. Her poems were first published in 1650 when a relative surreptitiously took them to England and had them printed—without her knowledge.
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.
Fulfillment
William Cavendish
William Cavendish understood what is special about love and marriage long before Frank Sinatra sang about it. To this poet, the bonds of matrimony represent the epitome of happiness, a state of endless harmony and unconditional love.
There is no happier life
But in a wife;
The comforts are so sweet
When two do meet.
’Tis plenty, peace, a calm
Like dropping balm;
Love’s weather is so fair,
Like perfumed air.
Each word such pleasure brings
Like soft-touched strings;
Love’s passion moves the heart
On either part;
Such harmony together,
So pleased in either.
No discords; concords still;
Sealed with one will.
By love, God made man one,
Yet not alone.
Like stamps of king and queen
It may be seen:
Two figures on one coin,
So do they join,
Only they not embrace.
We, face to face.
Theirs was a legendary Victorian romance: the sickly maiden past her youth, the dashingly handsome young poet who carried her off to the Tuscan sunshine, where their love flourished. These poems reflect markedly different perspectives: Hers is a song of praise to their love, and his more an evocation of a passionate encounter.
H
ow Do I Love Thee?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Meeting at Night
Robert Browning
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
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!
Sonnet xxx
Edna St.Vincent Millay
Millay’s poetry is often associated with a sense of passionate abandon. In this brief but pointed work she weighs a romantic sense of the value of passion against more pragmatic concerns, and finds the balance tilts in favor of love.
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell you love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Camomile Tea
Katherine Mansfield
Known primarily as a short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield is one of New Zealand’s greatest literary figures. Virginia Woolf once said that Mansfield turned out “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” In “Camomile Tea,” the pleasures of domestic tranquillity are at once magical and commonplace.
Outside the sky is light with stars;
There’s a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.
Enduring love is not the result of a onetime decision; it is making, over and over again, the same choice—the same person. These brief verses have in common an appreciation for a familiar type of love that is born of long-term familiarity and comfort.
Decade
Amy Lowell
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
Wear Me
Robert Kogan
I want you to wear me
comfortably,
as you would a dress,
or the silver necklace that you wear
around your neck.
Comfortably, so that I am always
next to you:
but most important—
something you decide
each morning to select.
The Marriage
Yvor Winters
Winters believed that in order for the mind’s ear to fully appreciate poetry, poems must be read aloud. This is certainly true in the case of “The Marriage”—reading it aloud produces a range of emotions otherwise unfelt. “The Marriage” is uplifting, sad, and hopeful all at once, analogous to a union that endures ups, downs, and everything in between.
Incarnate for our marriage you appeared,
Flesh living in the spirit and endeared
By minor graces and slow sensual change.
Through every nerve we made our spirits range.
We fed our minds on every mortal thing:
The lacy fronds of carrots in the spring,
Their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine
From bitter grapes, which gathered through the vine
The mineral drouth of autumn concentrate,
Wild spring in dream escaping, the debate
Of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights,
Its resolution in naive delights,
The young kids bleating softly in the rain—
All this to pass, not to return again.
And when I found your flesh did not resist,
It was the living spirit that I kissed,
It was the spirit’s change in which I lay:
Thus, mind in mind we waited for the day.
When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand
Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand,
Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust
And know you as a faithful vestige must.
And, in commemoration of our lust,
May our heirs seal us in a single urn,
A single spirit never to return.
Married Love
Tao-Sheng
This ancient poem is a testament to eternal love. Tao-Sheng describes a love that, like fire, is transformative. The fire of this couple’s love forges so complete a union that the two become essentially one, with no boundary between them, in life or in death.
You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share a single coffin.
The River Merchant’s Wife
Li Po
Whether the version of this poem reprinted here owes more to its Chinese creator or its American adaptor is a matter for specialists. What is undeniable is its authentic sentiment of loneliness and longing, an acute awareness of a lover’s absence and the passage of time. The translation i
s by Ezra Pound.
While my hair was still 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.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden,
They hurt me.
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell
Marvell ’s famous poem of seduction is also a meditation on the fragility of human existence and a celebration of the joys of sensual love.
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Should’st rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than Empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze;
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time Page 5