Chrissy Posted February 12, 2011 Share Posted February 12, 2011 :wub: LOVE IS IN THE AIR :wub: It's that time of year when Red roses cost an arm and a leg, when chocolates all become heart shaped and people stop signing cards.... Tell us about your favourite romantic poem, your favourite romantic read.....................*sigh* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrissy Posted February 12, 2011 Author Share Posted February 12, 2011 I will kick things off with one of my favourite all time poems. It's 'Words, Wide Night' by Carol Ann Duffy Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon. This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear. La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poppyshake Posted February 12, 2011 Share Posted February 12, 2011 (edited) :wub: LOVE IS IN THE AIR :wub: It's that time of year when Red roses cost an arm and a leg, when chocolates all become heart shaped and people stop signing cards.... Tell us about your favourite romantic poem, your favourite romantic read.....................*sigh* oh fiddlesticks .. I forgot to not sign .. still, he would have known it was me anyway .. I've written too many 'Honey do' lists. It's probably a bit obvious but I do love Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet 'How Do I Love Thee' How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Edited February 12, 2011 by poppyshake Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BookJumper Posted February 12, 2011 Share Posted February 12, 2011 My favourite romantic poem? Simple, easy, no contest: today, tomorrow and for the next 100 years (to say it with a well known diamond ring ad), it'd have to be Billie's Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. My favourite romantic read, however, is undoubtedly the 'Heart Beneath a Stone' chapter in Hugo's Les Miserablés, which contains the letter with which Marius declares his love to Cosette: The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love. Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars. How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love! What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love. The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams. God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent. Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees. Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages. Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her. The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite. Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven. Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men. God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in Intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man. You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman. All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul. When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar. On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you. What love commences can be finished by God alone. True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little. If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love. Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven. Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness. "Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone to dwell?" "She did not say." What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul! Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child of him! There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away. Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity! Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it. Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony. Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing. Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise. Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again. I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul. What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake. If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poppy Posted February 13, 2011 Share Posted February 13, 2011 (edited) I'm not a gooey romantic type of person (I generally dislike chic flicks and chic lit) but this is my sort of love poem. Wild Daisies by Bub Bridger If you love me Bring me flowers Wild daisies Clutched in your fist Like a torch No orchids or roses Or carnations No florist's bow Just daisies Steal them Risk you life for them Up the sharp hills In the teeth of the wind If you love me Bring me daisies That I will cram In a bright vase And marvel at Edited March 2, 2011 by poppy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kidsmum Posted February 13, 2011 Share Posted February 13, 2011 My favourite romantic poem? Simple, easy, no contest: today, tomorrow and for the next 100 years (to say it with a well known diamond ring ad), it'd have to be Billie's Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. I absolutely love this Bookjumper it made me cry. I'm going to give it to my hubby tomorrow it says I love you so much better than a soppy card Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BookJumper Posted February 13, 2011 Share Posted February 13, 2011 I absolutely love this Bookjumper it made me cry. I'm going to give it to my hubby tomorrow it says I love you so much better than a soppy cardAwww bless you both. My work here is done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kidsmum Posted February 14, 2011 Share Posted February 14, 2011 Awww bless you both. My work here is done. Well I gave Hubby the poem this morning at breakfast & he liked it so much he's spent the morning sorting out my bookshelves & putting all the books in alphabetical order,so I now have very neat & tidy shelves & the overflow books I've crated & put under our bed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inver Posted February 26, 2011 Share Posted February 26, 2011 (edited) Fae the bard himsel.....Rabbie Burns.... A Red, Red Rose My love is like a red red rose That’s newly sprung in June; My love is like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune. So fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I; And I will love thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: And I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only love And fare thee weel, a while! And I will come again, my love, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile. And you can listen to it being Edited February 26, 2011 by Inver Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Janet Posted March 2, 2011 Share Posted March 2, 2011 Had I read this earlier, I too would have mentioned both the Elizabeth Barrett Browning one that Poppyshake quoted, and Sonnet 116 quoted by Giulia. Wild Daisies by Bub Bridger If you love me Bring me flowers Wild daisies Clutched in you fist Like a torch No orchids or roses Or carnations No florist's bow Just daisies Steal them Risk you life for them Up the sharp hills In the teeth of the wind If you love me Bring me daisies That I will cram In a bright vase And marvel at I have never heard this before - it's beautiful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poppy Posted March 2, 2011 Share Posted March 2, 2011 Janet, she was a NZ poet, that's probably why it's not familiar. I love the poem's simplicity and I must look up some more of her poetry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrissy Posted March 2, 2011 Author Share Posted March 2, 2011 I think what makes it so brilliant to me Poppy is that I had a physical reaction when I read it. My heart pounded, my breathing hastened and the one thought in my head whilst reading it was "YES!"~ I Love 'Wild Daisies' !!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ooshie Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 Well I gave Hubby the poem this morning at breakfast & he liked it so much he's spent the morning sorting out my bookshelves & putting all the books in alphabetical order,so I now have very neat & tidy shelves & the overflow books I've crated & put under our bed. Result! I will need to try this myself once the rewiring is finished and I'm trying to organise my books again! (Actually, it reminds me of the twice I did ironing for my hubby, both times he was so surprised he gave me a present... ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kidsmum Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Result! I will need to try this myself once the rewiring is finished and I'm trying to organise my books again! (Actually, it reminds me of the twice I did ironing for my hubby, both times he was so surprised he gave me a present... ) Wow presents for ironing I can see I've been selling myself short Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Weave Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell, I like how everything works out for all of the characters, I lost count how many times I have read it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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