Of all the stimuli that have inspired poets over the centuries, love in all its guises has been an unceasingly rich and varied source of powerful, romantic and exquisite verse. Love poems have retained their popularity through the years by expressing eternal and universal emotions. From Chaucer to Coleridge, Shakespeare to Shelley, the same message of love has been put to verse in a myriad of poetic styles. Classic Love Poems contains a cross section of the true ‘classics’ of the genre, and constitutes a thorough representation of the enduring power of love over all humankind. Poets in this anthology include: Blake, Byron, Chaucer, Coleridge, Donne, Keats, Marlowe, Marvell, Milton and many others.

Of all the stimuli that have inspired poets over the centuries, love in all its guises has been an unceasingly rich and varied source of powerful, romantic and exquisite verse. Love poems have retained their popularity through the years by expressing eternal and universal emotions. We have all been struck by the sheer force of love when it hits: as Chaucer describes it in The Knight’s Tale, “He cast his eye upon Emelya, And therwithal he bleynte and cride, “A!” As though he stongen were unto the herte.” This account of pure, elevated love is typical of the tone adopted by many of the poets. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe gives us possibly some of the most beautiful lines ever written in the English language, in praise of Helen of Troy, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.” Such an attitude is in sharp contrast to the undisguised passionate persuasion of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, “. . . while thy willing Soul transpires At every Pore with instant Fires, Now let us sport us while we may . . .”

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes in her sonnets that love is a distinct and everlasting phenomenon,“But love me for love’s sake that evermore Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.” She contradicts Marvell’s idea that love ends in the grave by stating, “I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” In Echoes And Memories, Shelley hints at a similar theme, “And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.” Shakespeare correctly foresaw that his writings would long outlive his own body. He refers to the longevity of poetry as a medium for expressions of love, far more effective than gravestones or other stone memorials, when he writes, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.” Not all of the poems in this book celebrate the joys of love: some focus on the anguish of lost or unavailable love, some on jealousy, while some would perhaps better be described as poems of ‘lust’. All the poems have been selected to achieve a balance, a cross section of true ‘classics’ of the genre. The resulting mélange consitutes a thorough representation of the enduring power of love over all humankind. Stewart Ferris and Alastair Williams

 

Introduction 7 Richard Allison 9 Sir Robert Ayton 10 William Blake 11 Anne Bradstreet 14 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 15 Robert Browning 26 Robert Burns 29 Lord Byron 33 Thomas Campbell 41 Thomas Campion 42 Thomas Carew 45 William Cartwright 50 Geoffrey Chaucer 52 John Clare 55 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 62 William Congreve 64 Henry Constable 65 George Crabbe 66 Emily Dickinson 67 John Donne 70 Ernest Dowson 74 John Dryden 75 George Etheridge 77 Gerald Griffin 78 Robert Herrick 79 Thomas Hood 84 Lord Houghton 87 Victor Hugo 88Ben Jonson 89 John Keats 92 Thomas Lodge 94 Christopher Marlowe 95 Andrew Marvell 97 George Meredith 99 John Milton 101 Thomas Moore 102 Coventry Patmore 105 Edgar Allen Poe 107 Sir Walter Raleigh 109 Christina Rossetti 112 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 120 Sir Walter Scott 124 Sir Charles Sedley 127 William Shakespeare 128 Percy Bysshe Shelley 141 Sir Philip Sidney 149 Edmund Spenser 152 Robert Louis Stevenson 155 Sir John Suckling 157 Jonathan Swift 158 Algernon Charles Swinburn 159 Alfred Lord Tennyson 161 William Makepeace Thackery 162 Edward Thomas 164 William Winter 165 George Wither 167 William Wordsworth 168 Sir Thomas Wyatt 174 W.B. Yeats 179

 

Classic Love Poems by William Shakespeare
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