We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
BEI HENNEF
by D. H. Lawrence
The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
This is almost bliss.
And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
Gone under the twilight.
Only the twilight now, and the soft “Sh!” of the river
That will last forever.
And at last I know my love for you is here,
I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,
It is large, so large, I could not see it before
Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,
Troubles, anxieties, and pains.
You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else—it is perfect enough,
It is perfectly complete,
you and I.
Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!
SONNET XVI
by Pablo Neruda
I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe
Your wide eyes, are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.
Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun’
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,
was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you—compact and planetary, my dove, my globe
WILD NIGHTS – WILD NIGHTS!
by Emily Dickinson
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart.
Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but - moor - tonight -
In thee!
DEEP IN LOVE
by Bhavabhuti
Deep in love
cheek leaning on cheek we talked
of whatever came to our minds
just as it came
slowly oh
slowly
with our arms twined
tightly around us
and the houses passed and we
did not know it
still talking when
the night was gone
A GLIMPSE
by Walt Whitman
A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around
the stove late of a winter night,
and I unremark’d seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently
approaching and seating himself near,
that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of
drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking
little, perhaps not a word.
LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS (SONNET 116)
by William Shakespeare
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-fixed 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 prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
HOW DO I LOVE THEE? (SONNET 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.
MEETING AT NIGHT
by Robert Browning
I
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
and quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
II
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
HARMONY IN THE BOUDOIR
by Mark Strand
After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything he says, there is more he does not say, that behind each word he utters, there is another word, and hundreds more behind that one. All those unsaid words, he says contain his true self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her. “So you see,” he says, kicking off his slippers, “I am more than what I have led you to believe I am.” “Oh, you silly man,” says his wife, “of course, you are. I find that just thinking of you having so many selves receding into nothingness is very exciting. That you barely exist as you are couldn’t please me more.”
LOVE SONG
by Rainer Maria Rilke
How shall I maintain my soul in order
that it might not mix with yours? How shall
I lift it over you toward other things?
Ah, but I would gladly give it shelter
with something lost in the dapplings
of a strange and quiet place that will
not waver with your deepest shudder.
Yet all that brings the two of us low
takes us together like the stroke of a bow
that from two strings draws one harmony.
On what instrument are we splayed?
And what player’s hand has played?
Oh sweet melody.
THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT
by Edward Lear
I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to the sea
In a beautiful p
ea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
II
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!”
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long have we tarried:
But what we shall do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
III
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
A WORD TO HUSBANDS
by Ogden Nash
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
CAMOMILE TEA
by Katherine Mansfield
Outside the sky is light with stars;
There’s a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.
FOR LOVE
by Robert Creeley
Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all
that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,
different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.
If the moon did not . . .
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not
do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not
now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything
as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.
Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous
self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.
Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.
Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in
some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.
Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you
also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to
say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.
TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND
by Anne Bradstreet
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.
OUR MASTERPIECE IS THE PRIVATE LIFE
by Mark Strand
I
Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?
Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its rainbows over the
coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the air? Why look
for
more?
II
And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.
True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next
door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you
speak,
In that low voice, our late night disclosures . . . why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.
III
Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star
Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling
Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed
Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old
days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road
Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep . . .
CREDITS
Conrad Aiken, “Bread and Music” from Collected Poems, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
Anna Akhmatova, [“The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint”] from Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder. Copyright © 1989, 1992, 1997 by Judith Hemschemeyer. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Zephyr Press, www.zephyrpress.org.
A. Anupama, Verses 220 [Poem from the jasmine-filled woods] and 237 [Poem from the desert road], translated from Kuruntokai, from Numéro Cinq Magazine 2, no 9. Translations copyright © A. Anupama. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.
Djuna Barnes, “This Much and More” from The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Green Integer, www.greeninteger.com.
Charles Baudelaire, “Sorrows of the Moon” from Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen, translated by William H. Crosby. Copyright © 1991 by William H. Crosby. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Bhavabhuti, “Deep in Love” from Sanskrit Love Poetry, translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson. Copyright © 1977 by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson. Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2013 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Publisher’s Note and compilation © 2011 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC and Penguin Random House (UK) Ltd.
Joseph Brodsky, “Love Song” from Collected Poems in English, 1972–1999. Copyright © 1999 by Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC and Carcanet Press, Ltd.