Valentine's Day Love Poems: A Few More

Happy Valentine's Day! Let's celebrates with three poems suggested by my friends for this season of love.

In this first poem cummings comes as close as any writer I have ever read to put his love into words. "I carry your heart with me"...what woman, what man, would not feel cherished and beloved to have such words written or spoken to them? My thanks to my friend and former co-worker Pam May for sharing this poem with me.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

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by e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

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)

Cummings, you might know, decided to become a poet when he was a child, and between the ages eight years and twenty-two he wrote a poem every day. He explored many forms of poetry and eventually settled into his own unique style.

Friend and blogger Karen Chace submitted this classic of the season:

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

painting by William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910) picture from wikipedia

COME live with me and be my Love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks         

And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There will I make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,  

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull,

Fair linèd slippers for the cold,  

With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds

With coral clasps and amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me and be my Love.  

Thy silver dishes for thy meat

As precious as the gods do eat,

Shall on an ivory table be

Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing  

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my Love.

During Marlowe's short life he managed to become the most well-known writer of tragic drama, and was close with William Shakespeare. I remember the controversy that raged, and is perhaps still raging, as to whether Marlowe actually wrote some or all of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
His death was senseless--and argument, it is believed, over who was to pay the bill for the food and drink that he and several friends consumed during the day at a boarding house. What more might he have written if only he had been somewhere else on that day?

Let's end today with this anonymous short verse was suggested by my friend Kimberley in the Northwest, and the sentiments...how many of us have felt the same?

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) Fog Warning 

O WESTERN wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
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