Love, Desire and Parting
Explore how poems shape attraction, fidelity, loss, farewell, and changing promises in intimate relationships.
31 items
The Blossom
Love spies a blossom stirred by the wind, the lover envies the air that touches it, and he pleads that breaking his sworn vow for her should not be counted a sin.
Poetry · PoemLove
The song asks where fancy is bred, answers that it is engendered in the eyes and fed with gazing, and rings its knell as it dies in the cradle where it lies.
Poetry · PoemSweet-and-Twenty
A singer asks his roaming mistress to stay and hear her true love, then argues that mirth and kisses belong to the present because what is to come is unsure and youth will not endure.
Poetry · PoemIt was a Lover and his Lass
Across four refrain-bound stanzas, a pair of lovers crossing the green corn-fields and rye is described singing a carol that life is but a flower and that the present time should be taken.
Poetry · PoemThe Shadow
Taking a shadow that flees pursuit and pursues flight as its figure for courtship, the poem twice concludes in a refrain that women are styled the shadows of men.
Poetry · PoemThe Triumph
The speaker calls onlookers to see his lady ride in Love's chariot, praises her eyes, hair and brow, and closes with a run of comparisons drawn from touch, smell and taste.
Poetry · PoemAn Elegy
The poem turns from praising a lady's beauty to praising the virtue that binds her love to one, then addresses her as the deity who has rebuilt Love's fallen temples and asks a spark of her heat for the speaker's own unsatisfied love.
Poetry · PoemSong
A list of impossible errands—catching a falling star, hearing mermaids sing—leads to the claim that no woman is both true and fair, and that even one reported as true would have turned false before the speaker could reach her.
Poetry · PoemThe Ecstasy
Two lovers sit motionless on a violet-topped bank with hands cemented and eye-beams threaded together while their souls go out to negotiate between them, and the text stops with the pair lying silent like tomb statues all day.
Poetry · PoemThe Dream
Woken from a dream of the beloved by her actual arrival, the speaker says she continued rather than broke the dream, takes her at first for an angel, and then doubts her as she rises to leave.
Poetry · PoemTo the Western Wind
The speaker envies the west wind that has kissed Perenna's lip and fanned her hair, and offers to embalm its wings and set them with flowers in exchange for one such kiss.
Poetry · PoemTo Electra
The speaker refuses to ask even for a kiss or a smile, and settles instead for kissing the air that has just touched the beloved.
Poetry · PoemThe Primrose
In two matched stanzas of question and answer, the speaker explains that he sends a dew-covered primrose because love's sweets are mixed with tears, and that the flower's sickly colour and bending stalk show a lover's fainting hopes.
Poetry · PoemCherry-Ripe
A street vendor's cry is turned into a compliment: asked where the cherries grow, the speaker answers that they grow where Julia's lips smile, an isle bearing fruit all year.
Poetry · PoemTo Lucasta, going beyond the Seas
Before a sea voyage the speaker argues that absence would only deserve pity if it truly left them apart, refuses to beg wind or wave for favour, and claims that their faith meets above the highest sphere as spirits greet.
Poetry · PoemTo Amarantha, that she would dishevel her Hair
The speaker asks Amarantha to stop braiding her hair and let it fly loose like the wind's plaything, arguing that tangled tresses are best and that unbinding it will scatter daylight rather than cloud it.
Poetry · PoemSong
A speaker whose finery and smiles have been driven off by love asks for an axe, a spade and a winding-sheet, and says that once the grave is made he will lie down as cold as clay, with the verdict that true love passes away.
Poetry · PoemMary Morison
The speaker asks Mary to come to her window at the appointed hour, recalls sitting at a lighted dance seeing and hearing nothing because she was not there, and finally asks for her love or at least her pity.
Poetry · PoemJean
Of all the directions the wind can blow the speaker prefers the west, where the lass he loves best lives beyond wild woods, rivers and many a hill, and he says that every bonnie flower that springs and every bonnie bird that sings puts him in mind of his Jean.
Poetry · PoemMy Bonnie Mary
Before boarding, the speaker calls for wine in a silver cup to drink a toast to his love, then says that neither the roar of sea and shore nor the noise of war, but only leaving her, makes parting hard.
Poetry · PoemThe Banks o’ Doon
Standing by the flowering banks of Doon, the speaker reproaches the blossom and the singing bird for their brightness, recalls roving there when every bird sang of its love, and ends with a false lover who stole the rose and left the thorn.
Poetry · PoemAe Fond Kiss
A lover marks one last kiss and a final parting, says no star of hope is left him, insists that to see her was to love her for ever, and wishes her every joy while judging that never to have met would have spared the heartbreak.
Poetry · PoemBonnie Lesley
Watching bonnie Lesley go over the Border like Alexander gone to spread her conquests farther, the speaker says that to see her is to love her for ever since Nature never made another like her, hails her as a queen whose subjects men are, imagines even the Devil looking into her face and owning 'I canna wrang thee', and ends by asking her to return to Caledonia so her countrymen may brag of her.
Poetry · PoemPerfect Woman
Over three stages of acquaintance the speaker moves from seeing a woman as a dazzling apparition, to noticing her human household life, to recognizing a capable, enduring person who still keeps something of angelic light.