A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy
Near
(for N.D.)
Far, we are near, meet in the rain
which falls here; gathered by light, air;
falls there where you are, I am; lips
to those drops now on yours, nearer …
absence the space we yearn in, clouds
drift, cluster, east to west, north, south;
your breath in them; they pour, baptise;
same sun burning through to harvest
rainfall on skin, there, far; my mouth
opening to spell your near name.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott is about something that's become very pop-culturish, loving yourself after a break-up, but it is beautifully written and I love that it has an affirming quality without being sentimental.
"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Mourid Barghouti
Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) is not famous forso-called "love poetry" but her subtle simplicity shapes any theme she works on. I am fascinated by her poem "Thank-You Note", where she expresses gratitude for "those I don'tlove" because "from a rendezvous to a letter/ is just a few days or weeks, / not an eternity."
As in all her work, the magic in this poem derives from Szymborska's unconventional approach to her theme. When she brings to our attention the easiness we feel in the absence of the raw emotions of love, our hearts and minds travel immediately to the opposite sweet uneasiness when love shakes our whole existence. I always love it when a poet enters through invisible doors.
"Thank-You Note" by Wisława Szymborska
I owe so much
to those I don't love.
The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.
The happiness that I'm not
the wolf to their sheep.
The peace I feel with them,
the freedom –
love can neither give
nor take that.
I don't wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can't,
and forgive
as love never would.
From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.
Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.
And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.
They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.
They themselves don't realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.
"I don't owe them a thing,"
would be love's answer
to this open question.
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
John Burnside
To be in love and to say nothing about it – this seems to me the most elegant (and perhaps the only sensible) form of romantic attachment. It'sa sentiment poetry and music only occasionally address – the best pop song on this theme is The Band's "It Makes No Difference" with the great line, "Now there's no love as true as the love that dies untold" – but Walter Raleigh's "The Silent Lover" keeps its own counsel even more eloquently.
"The Silent Lover" by Walter Raleigh
I
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;
So, when affections yield discourse, it seems
The bottom is but shallow whence they come.
They that are rich in words, in words discover
That they are poor in that which makes a lover.
II
Wrong not, sweet empress of my heart,
The merit of true passion,
With thinking that he feels no smart,
That sues for no compassion;
Since, if my plaints serve not to approve
The conquest of thy beauty,
It comes not from defect of love,
But from excess of duty.
For, knowing that I sue to serve
A saint of such perfection,
As all desire, but none deserve,
A place in her affection,
I rather choose to want relief
Than venture the revealing;
Where glory recommends the grief,
Despair distrusts the healing.
Thus those desires that aim too high
For any mortal lover,
When reason cannot make them die,
Discretion doth them cover.
Yet, when discretion doth bereave
The plaints that they should utter,
Then thy discretion may perceive
That silence is a suitor.
Silence in love bewrays more woe
Than words, though ne'er so witty:
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
May challenge double pity.
Then wrong not, dearest to my heart,
My true, though secret, passion:
He smarteth most that hides his smart,
And sues for no compassion.
AS Byatt
I have always thought that John Donne and RobertGraves were the most enticing writers of love poems – partly because they do seem to write to and about real women. "Air and Angels" is one of the greatest poems in the language: "extreme and scattering bright" in its language and metaphor, and yet anchored in the body – lips, brow, every hair. Graves is a subtle observer of feelings – falling in love does indeed create a new andsurprising sense of mortality and terror of death. I found it hard to choose between "Pure Death" and "O love, be fed with apples while you may". I have chosen the latter because I so love the lines: "Walk between dark and dark – a shining space / With the grave's narrowness though not itspeace."
"Air and Angels" By John Donne
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
Margaret Drabble
The best love poems are written by the most faithless lovers, Burns and Byron. There are so many great Burns and Byron love poems, but my favourite is Byron's poem to a young man at Missolonghi who looked after him in his last illness. It begins "I watched thee when the foe was at our side" and the last stanza has the greatest split infinitive in literature.
Poems of unrequited love are very powerful, and this is one of the best. I also admire "When we two parted in silence and tears" but I guess these aren't very good for St Valentine.
"Love and Death" by Lord Byron
1.
I watched thee when the foe was at our side,
Ready to strike at him – or thee and me,
Were safety hopeless – rather than divide
Aught with one loved save love and liberty.
2.
I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock,
Received our prow, and all was storm and fear,
And bade thee cling to me through every shock;
This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier.
3.
I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes,
Yielding my couch and stretched me on the ground
When overworn with watching, ne'er to rise
From thence if thou an early grave hadst found.
4.
The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,
And men and nature reeled as if with wine.
Whom did I seek around the tottering hall?
For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine.
5.
And when convulsive throes denied my breath
The faintest utterance to my fading thought,
To thee – to thee – e'en in the gasp of death
My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought.
6.
Thus much and more; and yet thou lov'st me not,
And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will.
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.
Helen Dunmore
I love the intensity of feeling and the subtle eroticism of this poem. The story of love's betrayal is obliquely told, charged with pain, yet it speaks straight to us across 500 years. There is a mystery here too. Is Anne Boleyn the woman in the loose gown, who catches the poet in her arms "long and small"? Thomas Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower for alleged adultery with her, and it is thought that from his window he witnessed her execution. The poem is written in rhyme royal, which may be a clue in itself …
"They Flee From Me" by Sir Thomas Wyatt
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Antonia Fraser
When I was eight, I was romantically in love with Jean, my beautiful young nanny. At the same time I discovered the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (in Palgrave's Golden Treasury – a typical north Oxford stocking present). "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" was my favourite. I used to croon it to myself in her honour. I don't know how I would have got through the terrible sadness of the day Jean left us to join the WRNS, if I'd not had Elizabeth Barrett Browning to comfort me.
Much later, Harold's love poems became the delight of my life – best of all "It is Here" – and similarly provide comfort now he is no longer around to recite them to me.
"It Is Here" by Harold Pinter
(for A)
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
Seamus Heaney
William Wordsworth once wrote that he liked the sonnet because he was happy with the formal limits it imposed. He was ready to be "bound / Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground". The great thing about this Thomas Wyatt sonnet, on the other hand, is the way the surge of desire seems to push against the form that "bounds" it, even as it obeys the requirements – 14 lines, octave and sestet, proper Petrarchan rhyme scheme.
"Whoso list to hunt" (an adaptation of a sonnet in Italian by Petrarch) is an allegory, but any suggestion of indirection or emotional distancing which that word contains is banished by the sheer pace and passion of the lines. The deer in the royal park, marked for the king ("Don't touch me, I belong to Caesar"), has long been taken as a figure for Anne Boleyn, and Wyatt assumed to have been the lover/hunter denied all access to her. It is a great love poem because of its rhythmic energy, its syntactical drive, the way the bitter truths of denial and exclusion are transformed – transformed by creative stamina into a work that is lifted above bitterness by the artist's joy in finding the right trope for his predicament. In a way, the final line retells the whole story: a wildness has been tamed in the writing, but it is the wildness that has given the poem its staying power.
"Whoso List to Hunt" by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold though I seem tame."
Nick Laird
Choosing a favourite love poem is a bit tricky – like choosing a favourite toe or finger, if you had hundreds of toes and fingers. And what's a love poem? "Nothing whatever is by love debarred", as Patrick Kavanagh puts it, after flatly stating "A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward of a chest hospital …" Off the top of my head, here are some pretty well-known poems that have meant much to me over the years, and which touch, mostly directly, on the subject of love: "Donal Og" (from the Irish, in the Lady Gregory translation), Elizabeth Bishop's "The Shampoo", George Herbert's "The Pearl", Simon Armitage's "Lines to his Lost Lover", Medbh McGuckian's "The Sofa", Louis MacNeice's "Flowers in the Interval", Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me", WH Auden's "The More Loving One" (and "Lullaby"), Carol Ann Duffy's "Words, Wide Night", EE Cummings's "somewhere I have never travellled, gladly beyond", Don Paterson's "A Private Bottling", James Fenton's "Out of Danger", Seamus Heaney's "The Skunk", Michael Longley's "Swans Mating" … I could yammer on. But today I'll choose Frank O'Hara, though it's a toss up between "Having a co*ke with You", the last five lines of "Hotel Transylvanie", "Gamin" and "Animals". I'll go with "Animals", and it doesn't need me to explain it. I'd just add that even though the poem's a celebration, framing it in the past tense means it's also a great elegy, as great love poems often are.
"Animals" by Frank O'Hara
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage co*cktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
Hilary Mantel
Anyone who has lain hundreds or thousands of miles from home, listening to strangers' rain falling on a stranger's roof, will respond to the vehement longing in this old, mysterious fragment. It is difficult to believe your lover is alive under the same sky, and the more clearly you can see their room, their bed, the more you feel the piercing pain of separation. The writer sounds cold, alone and perhaps in danger; the reunion is not certain. All the complexity of love is in these lines: the lover is not only home but the journey home, both the voyage and the harbour.
Untitled, Anon, before 1530
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
Blake Morrison
Love poems may be addressed to someone in particular but the "you" invariably remains unidentified or is represented only by a body part or item of dress – a sleeping head, a naked foot, an air-blue gown. Thom Gunn's "Touch" is an extreme example of this. His lover is no more than a mound of bedclothes and embraces him in sleepy oblivion ("do / you know who / I am or am I / your mother or / the nearest human being"). This feeling of anonymity is important: it links the two lovers to the rest of us: they're part of a "realm where we walk with everyone". But the poem is also intimate and domestic: here are two people (plus cat) in their own bed – naked, cocooned, "ourselves alone". Gunn was gay but his lover's gender isn't specified, since the theme is the inclusiveness of touch: the way it breaks down the "resilient chilly hardness" we all adopt to function in the outside world. The syllabic form enacts this dissolution or slippage, as the words seep gently from line to line, without the hardness of end stops. The word "love" isn't used; the words "dark" and "darkness" recur three times. But the poem exudes warmth, familiarity and how it feels to lie naked with a fellow creature, whoever he or she may be.
"Touch" by Thom Gunn
You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.
You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.
Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.
You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.
What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you, yet
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
David Nicholls
Not a particularly obscure or original choice, I know. The poem has become a favourite at weddings, though in some ways it's a strange choice. It's not just the snorting and weaning, the schoolboy-pleasing raunch of "suck'd on country pleasures" or the fact that the whole poem is a sort of bedroom scene. There's also that raffish wink at the end of the first stanza. "Yes, there have been others, three or four, but no one quite like you. Honestly."
But in the last two stanzas, Donne changes tone. When I first came across this poem, my preference was for the poetry of unrequited yearning; the please-go-out-with-me school. In"The Good-Morrow", all of that is in the past,thank God. Finally, the poem is a hymn tomutual feeling, understanding, balance, constancy. Perhaps not so out of place at a wedding after all.
"The Good-Morrow" by John Donne
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
Ruth Padel
A serenade, an interestingly broken sonnet, a bravura musical performance, perfect marriage of sound and sensuality; a passionate seduction and one of the loveliest lyrics in the language. The core erotic image is incorporation: being "open to", "slipping into", then "lost in" each other. The craft mirrors the incorporation message: everything comes down to the one word "me". The sonnet feels rhymed but it's not: Tennyson is always innovative and the only rhyme (repeated five times) is "me". Danaë was a Greek princess whose son Perseus was conceived when Zeus raped her in a shower of gold (like summer meteors, Perseids), and on the surface this is all about the outside world: closing flowers, still trees, sleepy goldfish; waking firefly, peaco*cks and flashing stars. But each chunk of thought ends with the lover's insistence (look at me), and by the end the beloved, too is incorporated in that me. It is a brilliant love poem but totally – and justifiedly – also in love with its own music.
"Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens; waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peaco*ck like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
Don Paterson
Lady Katherine Dyer's epitaph for her husband William dates from 1641, when she erected his tomb in St Denys Church in Colmworth, Bedfordshire. It's suffered a few errors of transcription over the centuries: the first half of her verse is rarely, if ever, reproduced (it's expert, if fairly unremarkable), leaving the second to stand as a sort of semi-accidental sonnet. I first read it in Geoffrey Grigson's Faber Book of Love Poems, where line 12 was inadvertently omitted, and I've cheerfully replicated the error several times since. What always stops me in my tracks is the tenderness of the address, and the feeling that I'm eavesdropping and should probably stop: this is the opposite of "public poetry". Dyer couches her great grief in the language of almost playful domestic annoyance: "Couldn't you have just waited up a little longer for me?" I love the way she then wearily refers to herself in the third person – pleased, almost, to think of herself as mere flesh, as a failing, slowing body that will soon join her beloved in the big sleep. The first three words alone manage to say everything about the absurd and paradoxical gift of our human love: timeless in its spirit, but so often wrecked by time, leaving us alone with a feeling unable to take its natural object. A rough deal all round, then – but in their perfect articulation, poems like this offer as much assuagement as there is to find, and keep the fire of love burning way beyond the lovers' own deaths, its raw intimacy as present as ever. When Larkin said "What will survive of us is love", he meant nothing so uncomplicated and unequivocal; but even he put the accent on us.
"Epitaph", by Lady Katherine Dyer
My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer: so that we might either
Sit up, or gone to bed together?
But since thy finished labour hath possessed
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly; and thy widow bride
Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side;
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayer:
Mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old,
The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold.
Draw, draw the closed curtains: and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.
Craig Raine
A transfixed inventory. Erotic hypnosis. The weight, as it were, of an eyelash. When he was Cameron Mackintosh Professor at Oxford, Patrick Marber asked me how tutors resist the charms of their pupils. "You read their essays," I replied. But sometimes youth exacts its tribute and beauty renders all that red ink irrelevant. John Fuller's witty wishful-thinking is purely Platonic: "Sometimes I feel it is my fate / To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower / By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer …"
The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower
Or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I'd like successfully to guess your weight
And win you at a fête.
I'd like to offer you a flower.
I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I'd like your particulars in folders
Marked Confidential).
I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath)
In rows.
I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work.
On hinges …
I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I'd like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I'd like to give you just the right amount
And get some change.
I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you not and hold a teacup.
I like your legs when you unwind them.
Even in trousers I don't mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.
I like the little crease behind them.
I'd always know, without a recap,
Where to find them.
I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I'd like to cross two hemispheres
And have you chase me.
I'd like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I'd like you to embrace me.
I'd like to see you ironing your skirt
And cancelling other dates.
I'd like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I'd like to soothe you when you're hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.
I'd like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I'd let you put insecticide
Into my wine.
I'd even like you if you were Bride
Of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian's
Jekyll and Hyde.
I'd even like you as my Julian
Or Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan.
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of Boolean
Mathematics.
You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.
I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.
Helen Simpson
"Corinnae Concubitus" by Christopher Marlowe (from the Latin of Ovid) is a rare poem about sex in the afternoon. It's rather like a film scene from the lazy 50s or 60s, early Fellini perhaps, though the action described takes place in ancient Rome. A man tells of drowsing on his bed in the heat of the day when his girlfriend arrives wearing next to nothing – and what happens next. The man-to-man intimacy of Ovid's voice is astonishingly modern in its urbanity and hedonism, but the poem's most seductive quality resides in the voluptuous lapidary quality of Latin into Elizabethan English via bold Marlowe. I once bought a woodcut by John Nash because it illustrated this very scene, complete with half-curtained window supported by wittily phallic stanchion.
Extract from Ovid's Elegies, Book I, Elegia V
"Corinnae Concubitus" by Christopher Marlowe
In summer's heat, and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past, and yet not day begun;
Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown:
Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed,
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
I snatched her gown; being thin, the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered therewithal;
And striving thus, as one that would be cast,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me!
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I,
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh!
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well;
I clinged her naked body, down she fell:
Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss;
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.
Ahdaf Soueif
Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed" has got everything: it's sexy, lyrical, learned, visual, witty, romantic. It's on such a large scale ("O my America! My new-found-land") and at the same time so exquisitely detailed – it seems to take on the whole world. I've been in love with Donne for ever because of this poem.
"To His Mistress Going to Bed" by John Donne
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's Zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th'hill's shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann'd,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a Gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array'd;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal'd. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.
Jeanette Winterson
A new love poem in the world is a good thing. This one I like a lot because it deals in the longings and slippage of love. Love as reflection, because we are all narcissists. Love as vision, because the loved one is really there. Love as deception, because the loved one really isn't there. Love as what happens when we are looking for
something else. Love as whatever is in our gaze. Love – where you can't look back or look round (Orpheus, Lot's Wife). Love as surprise – yes, always a surprise.
"Echo" by Carol Ann Duffy
I think I was searching for treasures or stones
in the clearest of pools
when your face …
when your face,
like the moon in a well
where I might wish …
might well wish
for the iced fire of your kiss;
only on water my lips, where your face …
where your face was reflected, lovely,
not really there when I turned
to look behind at the emptying air …
the emptying air.
