How do I love thee? – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.
A Red, Red Rose – Robert Burns
So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote Her Name – Edmund Spenser
“… My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
To My Dear and Loving Husband – Anne Bradstreet
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.
Before You Came – Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Don’t leave now that you’re here–
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
Heart to Heart – Rita Dove
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.
For Keeps – Joy Harjo
We know ourselves to be part of mystery.
It is unspeakable.
It is everlasting.
It is for keeps.
Yours – Daniel
Without you I’d be an unleafed tree
Blasted in a bleakness with no Spring.
Your love is the weather of my being.
What is an island without the sea?
Rondel of Merciless Beauty – Geoffrey Chaucer
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen. Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean
Married Love – Kuan Tao-Sheng
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one bed.
