INCHIVALA PRESS
P O E M S O F L O V E
from sixteen poets
living between 1793 and 1939
This selection comes from various poets writing in English and its dialects between the birth of John Clare (1793) and the death of W. B. Yeats (1939).
The word “love” in the title is used in a broad sense, counting as love poems ones that express love of season and place, or love of language, as well as love of a person.
There are three sections of poems: Love And Loss, Love Of The Earth, and Love Of Poetry, each section containing a mixture of the poets below.
The sixteen poets in Poems of Love are John Clare, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Thoreau, Emily Brontë, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Gerald Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, Charlotte Mew, James Weldon Johnson, D. H. Lawrence.
This one below from Poems Of Love is by Charlotte Mew (1869-1928).
A Q U O I B O N D I R E
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that, say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.