book excerptise:   a book unexamined is not worth having

A book of love poetry

Jon Stallworthy (ed.)

Stallworthy, Jon (ed.);

A book of love poetry

Oxford University Press US, 1986, 416 pages  [gbook]

ISBN 0195042328, 9780195042320

topics: |  poetry | romance | anthology


Turn from page to page, from Hafiz to Betjeman.  Love never goes stale,
I guess.

EXCERPTS

Austin Clark: Penal Law


	Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find
	A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart
	All that the clergy banish from the mind,
	When hands are joined and head bows in the dark

Hafiz: The lips of the one I love are my perpetual pleasure

		(tr. from Persian : Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs)

	The lips of the one I love are my perpetual pleasure:
	The Lord be praised, for my heart's desire is attained.

	O Fate, cherish my darling close to your breast:
	Present now the golden wine-cup, now the rubies of those lips.

	They talk scandal about us, and say we are drunks -
	The silly old men, the elders lost in their error.

	But we have done pennance on the pious man's behalf,
	And ask God's pardon for what the religious do.

	O my dear, how can I speak of being apart from you?
	The eyes know a hundred tears, and the soul has a hundred sighs.

	I'd not have even an infidel suffer the torment of your beauty has caused
	To the cypress which envies your body, and the moon that's outshone by your face.

	Desire for your lips has stolen from Hafiz' thought
	His evening lectionary, and reciting the Book at dawn.
			p.108-109

Bhartrihari: She who is always in my thoughts

		       [Bhartrhari] (John Brough)

	She who is always in my thoughts prefers
	Another man, and does not think of me.
	Yet he seeks for another's love, not hers;
	And some poor girl is grieving for my sake.
	Why then, the devil take
	Both her and him; and love; and her; and me.
		p. 218

In former days we'd both agree


	In former days we'd both agree
	That you were me, and I was you.
	What has now happened to us two,
	That you are you, and I am me?
		p.211

Pablo Neruda: Drunk as Drunk on turpentine


	Drunk as drunk on turpentine
	From your open kisses,
	Your wet body wedged
	Between my wet body and the strake
	Of our boat that is made of flowers,
	Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
	Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
	Over the sky's hot rim,
	The day's last breath in our sails.

	Pinned by the sun between solstice
	And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
	We drifted for months and woke
	With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
	Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
	And the sound of a rope
	Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
	We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
	And lay like fish
	Under the net of our kisses.
			(tr. Christopher Logue)

Alexander Pushkin: I loved you; even now I may confess


	I have loved you; even now I may confess,
	   Some embers of my love their fire retain
	but do not let it cause you more distress,
	   I do not want to sadden you again.
	Hopeless and tonguetied, yet, I loved you dearly
	   With pangs the jealous and the timid know;
	So tenderly I loved you- so sincerely;
	   I pray God grant another love you so.
			(tr. Reginald Mainwaring Hewitt)

William Barnes (1801-1806): A Zong: O Jenny, don't sobby!


	O Jenny, don't sobby! vor I shall be true;
	Noo might under heaven shall peart me vrom you.
	My heart will be cwold, Jenny, when I do slight
	The zwell o' thy bosom, the eyes' sparklen light.

	My kinsvo'k would fain zee me teake for my meate
	A maid that ha' wealth, but a maid I should heate;
	But I'd sooner leabour wi' thee vor my bride,
	Than live lik' a squier wi' any bezide.

	Vor all busy kinsvo'k, my love will be still
	A-zet upon thee lik' the vir in the hill;
	An' though they mid worry, an' dreaten, an' mock,
	My head's in the storm, but my root's in the rock.

	Zoo, Jenny, don't sobby! vor I shall be true;
	Noo might under heaven shall peart me vrom you.
	My heart will be cwold, Jenny, when I do slight
	The zwell o' thy bosom, thy eyes' sparklen light.

	[William Barnes wrote many poems in the Dorset dialect.]

Anthony Hecht: Going the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem

	Some people cannot endure
	Looking down from the parapet atop the Empire State
	Or the Statue of Liberty–they go limp, insecure,
	The vertiginous height hums to their numbered bones
	Some homily on Fate;
	Neither virtue past nor vow to be good atones

	To the queasy stomach, the quick,
	Involuntary softening of the bowels.
	“What goes up must come down,” it hums: the ultimate, sick
	Joke of Fortuna. The spine, the world vibrates
	With terse, ruthless avowals
	From “The Life of More”, “A Mirror For Magistrates.”

	And there are heights of spirit.
	And one of these is love. From way up here,
	I observe the puny view, without much merit,
	Of all my days. High on the house are nailed
	Banners of pride and fear.
	And that small wood to the west, the girls I have failed.

	It is, on the whole, rather glum:
	The cyclone fence, the tar-stained railroad ties,
	With, now and again, surprising the viewer, some
	Garden of selflessness or effort. And, as I must,
	I acknowledge on this high rise
	The ancient metaphysical distrust.

	But candor is not enough,
	Nor is it enough to say that I don’t deserve
	Your gentle, dazzling love, or to be in love.
	That goddess is remorseless, watching us rise
	In all our ignorant nerve,
	And when we have reached the top, putting us wise.

	My dear, in spite of this,
	And the moralized landscape down there below,
	Neither of which might seem the ground for bliss,
	Know that I love you, know that you are most dear
	To one who seeks to know
	How, for your sake, to confront his pride and fear.

Archibald MacLeish: Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments


    The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,
    Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes,
    Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:
    These were lies.

    The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.
    The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.
    The sleek throat is gone -- and the breast that was troubled to listen:
    Shadow from door.

    Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
    Telling you men shall remember your name as long
    As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
    Rings from a tongue.

    I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlett:
    I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
    Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
    Nor the click of your shoe.

    Not with my hand's strength, not with difficult labor
    Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
    And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
    And the beat to your haste
    Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.

    (What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
    Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation
    Like dream words most)

    Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
    I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
    And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
    And a leaf on your hair --

    I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
    I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
    Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
    Look! It is there!

Rudaki (d. 954 AD): Came to me

	(tr. Basil Bunting, 1900-1985)

			Came to me –
			            Who?
			She.
			            When?
			In the dawn, afraid.

			            What of?
			Anger.
			            Whose?
			Her father’s.
			            Confide!

			I kissed her twice.
			            Where?
			On her moist mouth.

			No.
			           What then?
			Cornelian.
			           How was it?
			Sweet.

	[cornelian is a red stone.  what does it stand for, I wonder.]

	[Persian poet Mohammad Rudaki (Rudagi or Rudhagi), (858-941), court
	 poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara, but the king
	 was ousted and he may have been blinded; died in poverty. ]

Ovid: Elegy 5

	(tr. Christopher Marlowe)

		In summer's heat, and mid-time of the day,
		To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;
		One window shut, the other open stood,
		Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
		Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
		Or night being past, and yet not day begun.
		Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
		Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.
		Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,
		Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
		Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed
		Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
		I snatched her gown: being thin, the harm was small,
		Yet strived she to be covered there withal.
		And striving thus, as one that would be cast,
		Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
		Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
		Not one wen in her body could I spy.
		What arms and shoulders did I touch and see!
		How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me!
		How smooth a belly under her waist saw I,
		How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh!
		To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
		I clinged her naked body, down she fell:
		Judge you the rest; being tired she bade me kiss;
		Jove send me more such afternoons as this!


i like my body when it is with your : e.e. cummings p. 148


i like my body when it is with your
body.  It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smoothness which i will
again and again and again
kiss,  i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

edward estlin cummings (1894-1962) born in Cambridge, Massachusetts,USA, son
of a pastor.  his mother encouraged him from an early age to write
verse and keep a journal. graduated magna cum laude in Greek and English
from Harvard (A.B. in 1915, M.A. in 1916).

inducted into world war I, spent time in paris as ambulance assistant.
imprisoned for being a possible spy.  a number of inmates were kept in a
large room - wrote the enormous room - where he describes the inmates in
his room - many of whom were imprisoned just because they couldn't speak
the language, and many others who were outright insane.

experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax,
abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly
idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.

Contents

Introduction							19 (10)

Ezra Pound :            Commission                      	29 (4)

Intimations


    Roy Campbell:           The Sisters                             33
    Laurie Lee:             Milkmaid                                34
    Thomas Randolph:        The Milkmaid's Epithalamium             34
    W. B. Yeats:            Brown Penny                             36
    Sir John Betjeman:      Myfanwy                                 36
    Patrick MacDonogh:      She Walked Unaware                      38
    Charles Cotton:         Two Rural Sisters                       39
    Richard Crashaw:        Wishes to His Supposed Mistress         40
    Austin Clarke:          Penal Law                               44
    Robert Graves:          Symptoms of Love                        45

Declarations

    John Berryman:          Go, ill-sped book, and whisper to her or 49
    John Clare:             First Love                              49
    Christina Rossetti:     The First Day                           50
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning:  How do I love thee? Let me
              count the Ways (Sonnet xliii, from the Portuguese)    51
    William Barnes:         A Zong: O Jenny, don't sobby!
                                    vor I shall be true             51
    Robert Burns:   Song: O whistle, and I'll come to ye, my lad    52
    Henry Carey:            Sally in our Alley              53 (2)
    Anthony Hecht:          Going the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem   55
    William Shakespeare:    Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 56
    Edmund Spenser:         One day I wrote her name upon the strand 57
    Archibald Macleish:     `Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments'   57
    W.B. Yeats:             A Drinking Song                         59
    Ben Jonson:             To Celia                                59
    Edgar Allan Poe:        To Helen                                60
    Lord Byron:             She Walks in Beauty                     61
    Sir Henry Wotton:       Elizabeth of Bohemia                    61
    Thomas Campion:         Cherry-Ripe                             62
    Sir Charles Sedley:     To Cloris                               63
    William Shakespeare: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun 64
    Geoffrey Chaucer:       from Merciless Beauty                   64
    Walter Davison         Ode: At her fair hands how have
                                            I grace entreated       65
    John Keats:     I cry your mercy - pity - love! - aye, love!    66
    Edmund Spenser:         Iambicum Trimetrum                      67
    Thomas Campion:         Vobiscum est Iope                       68
    Alexander Pushkin:      I loved you; even now I may confess     68
    Robert Graves:          Love Without Hope                       69
    Percy Bysshe Shelley:   To---                                   69
    William Shakespeare:    That time of year thou
                                            may'st in me behold     70
    T.S. Eliot:             A Dedication to My Wife                 70

Persuasions

    Robert Herrick:         To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time    75
    John Fletcher:          Love's Emblems                          75
    Sir Richard Fanshawe:   Of Beauty                               76
    Pierre De Ronsard:      Corinna in Vendome                      77
    Edmund Waller:          Go, lovely Rose                         77
    William Shakespeare:    Feste's Song from Twelfth Night         78
    Thomas Hood:            Ruth                                    79
    Percy Bysshe Shelley:   Love's Philosophy                       80
    Andrew Marvell:         To His Coy Mistress                     80
    Thomas Moore:           An Argument                             82
    John Donne:             The Flea                                82
    John Wilmot:            Written in a Lady's Prayer Book         83
    Christopher Marlowe:    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love     84
    Sir Walter Ralegh:      Her Reply                               85
    Cecil Day Lewis:        Come, live with me and be my love       86
    Louis MacNeice:         For X                                   87
    John Keats:             This living hand, now warm and capable  88
    Sir Thomas Wyatt:       To His Lute                             88
    John Heath-Stubbs:      Beggar's Serenade                       90
    John Crowe Ransom:      Piazza Piece                            90
    Christopher Smart:      The Author Apologizes to a Lady
                                for His Being a Little Man          91
    William Walsh:          Lyce                                    92
    John Donne:             To His Mistress Going to Bed            93

Celebrations

    Robert Graves:          from The Song of Solomon: Chapter 2     97
    St John of the Cross:   Upon a gloomy night                     99
    Robert Browning:        Meeting at Night                        100
    F.T. Prince:            The Question                            101
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Sudden Light                            102
    Anon:                   Plucking the Rushes                     102
    Sir John Betjeman:      A Subaltern's Love-song                 103
    Charles of Orleans:     My ghostly father, I me confess         105
    Sir Thomas Wyatt:       Alas! madam, for stealing of a kiss     105
    Coventry Patmore:       The Kiss                                106
    Thomas Moore:           Did Not                                 106
    Petronius Arbiter:      Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short  107
    John Berryman:  Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when     107
    Robert Browning:        from In a Gondola                       108
    Hafiz:  The lips of the one I love are my perpetual pleasure    108
    Hugo Williams:          Some Kisses from The Kama Sutra         109
    Rudaki:                 Came to me                              110
    Pablo Neruda:           Drunk as Drunk on turpentine            111
    Alfred Lord Tennyson:   from The Princess                       112
    D.H. Lawrence:          New Year's Eve                          112
    Theodore Roethke:       She                                     113
    Ovid:                   Elegy 5                                 115
    Algernon Charles Swinburne:     In the Orchard                  115
    John Berryman:          Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests
                                    were applying                   117
    Robert Graves:          Down, Wanton, Down!                     117
    Anon:                   I gently touched her hand: she gave     118
    e.e. cummings:          may i feel said he                      119
    Thomas Carew:           On the Marriage of T.K. and C.C.
                                    the Morning Stormy              120
    Edmund Spenser:         Epithalamion                            121 (14)
    Walt Whitman:           From pent-up, aching rivers             135
    A.D. Hope:              The Gateway                             138
    Stephen Spender:        Daybreak                                138
    Richard Brinsley Sheridan:      The Geranium                    139
    Abraham Cowley: Dialogue: After Enjoyment                       141
    Sir Charles Sedley:     On the happy Corydon and Phyllis        143
    Catullus:               Phyllis Corydon clutched to him         145
    Fleur Adcock:           Note on Propertius 1.5                  146
    Richard Duke:           After the fiercest pangs of hot desire  147
    John Dryden:            Song: Whilst Alexis lay pressed         147
    e.e. cummings:          i like my body when it is with your     148
    John Donne:             The Ecstasy                             149 (3)
    William Davenant:       Under the Willow-Shades                 152
    Boris Pasternak:        Hops                                    152
    W.R. Rodgers:           The Net                                 153
    Algernon Charles Swinburne:     Love and Sleep                  154
    W.H. Auden:             Lay your sleeping head, my love         155
    W.B. Yeats:             Lullaby                                 156
    Alan Ross:              In Bloemfontein                         157
    Robert Graves:          She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep    158
    Elizabeth Jennings:     Winter Love                             159
    John Donne:             The Sun Rising                          159
    John Donne:             The Good Morrow                         160
    Jacques Prevert:        Alicante                                161
    W.H. Auden:             Fish in the unruffled lakes             161
    John Heath-Stubbs:      The Unpredicted                         162
    Petronius Arbiter:      Good God, what a night that was         163
    Lawrence Durrell:       This Unimportant Morning                163
    Robert Graves:          The Quiet Glades of Eden                164
    Lawrence Ferlinghetti:  Away Above a Harborful                  165
    Harry Fainlight:        A Bride                                 166
    C.P. Cavafy:            On the Street                           167
    Robert Creeley:         The Way                                 167
    Robert Lowell:          Man and Wife                            168
    Sir John Harington:     The Author to His Wife, of a
                                            Woman's Eloquence       169
    Anon Madrigal:          My Love in her attire doth show her wit 169
    Octavio Paz:            Touch                                   170
    Charles Baudelaire:     The Jewels                              170
    J.M. Synge:             Dread                                   171
    Ted Hughes:             September                               172
    Guillaume Apollinaire:  The Mirabeau Bridge                     173
    Andrei Voznesensky:     Dead Still                              174
    e.e. cummings:          Somewhere i have never travelled,
                                    gladly beyond                   175
    Sir Thomas Wyatt:       Once as methought Fortune me kissed     175
    Sir Philip Sidney:      My true love hath my heart, and I
                                            have his                177
    Edwin Muir:             In Love for Long                        177
    Sir Walter Scott:       An Hour with Thee                       179
    John Donne:             The Anniversary                         180
    Theodore Roethke:       I Knew a Woman                          181
    John Wilmot:    A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover     182
    Lord Byron:             So, we'll go no more a-roving           183
    Fyodor Tyutchev:        Last Love                               183
    Robert Burns:           John Anderson my Jo                     184
    W.B. Yeats:             A Last Confession                       185

Aberrations

    William Congreve:       Song: Pious Selinda goes to prayers     189
    Anon:           Fragment of a Song on the Beautiful Wife of Dr
                                    John Overall, Dean of St Paul's 189
    Sir John Harington:     Of an Heroical Answer of a Great Roman
                                            Lady to Her Husband     190
    Federico Garcia Lorca:  The Faithless Wife                      190
    Abraham Cowley:         Honour                                  192
    John Wilmot:            The Imperfect Enjoyment                 193
    Thomas Hardy:           The Ruined Maid                         195
    Thomas Randolph:        Phyllis                                 196
    Matthew Prior:          Chaste Florimel                         197
    Alexander Pope:    Two or Three: a Recipe to make a Cuckold     198
    Ovid:                   To His Mistress                         199 (3)
    Ezra Pound:             The Temperaments                        202
    John Berryman:          Filling her compact & delicious body    202
    Hilaire Belloc: Juliet                                          203
    John Press:     Womanisers                                      203
    Edna St Vincent Millay: I, being born a woman and distressed    204
    Robert Henryson:        Robene and Makyne                       205 (5)
    George Wither:          A Lover's Resolution                    210
    A.E. Housman:           Oh, when I was in love with you         211
    Bhartrhari:             In former days we'd both agree          211
    Robert Graves:          The Thieves                             212
    Abraham Cowley:         The Welcome                             212
    Sir John Suckling:      Out upon it, I have loved               214
    John Wilmot:            Love and Life                           214
    Richard Lovelace:       The Scrutiny                            215
    Martial:                Lycoris darling, once I burned for you  216
    John Donne:             The Indifferent                         216
    D.H. Lawrence:          Intimates                               217
    Bhartrhari:     She who is always in my thoughts prefers        218
    Walter Savage Landor:   You smiled, you spoke, and I believed   218
    Richard Weber:          Elizabeth in Italy                      219
    John Wilmot:    A Song: Absent from thee, I languish still      220
    Robert Graves:          A Slice of Wedding Cake                 220

Separations

    Anon:                   Walking in a meadow green               225
    Thom Gunn:              Carnal Knowledge                        226
    Anon:                   She lay all naked in her bed            228
    Anon:                   Anbade                                  229
    John Donne:             Song: Sweetest love, I do not go        229
    Robert Burns:           A Red Red Rose                          231
    Hart Crane:             Carrier Letter                          232
    e.e. cummings:          it may not always be so; and i say      232
    Alun Lewis:             Postscript: For Gweno                   233
    W.H. Auden:             Dear, though the night is gone          233
    Robert Browning:        The Last Ride Together                  234 (4)
    Robert Browning:        The Lost Mistress                       238
    Michael Drayton:        Since there's no help, come let us
                                            kiss and part           239
    Ernest Dowson:          A Valediction                           239
    Coventry Patmore:       A Farewell                              240
    Alun Lewis:             Goodbye                                 241
    John Donne:             On His Mistress                         242
    John Gay:       Sweet William's Farewell to Black-eyed Susan    244
    Robert Burns:           Song: Ae fond kiss, and then we sever   246
    Emily Dickinson:        My life closed twice before its close   247
    Edward Thomas:          Like the Touch of Rain                  247
    Harold Monro:           The Terrible Door                       248
    Thomas Hardy:           In the Vaulted Way                      248
    Anna Akhmatova:         I wrung my hands under my dark veil     249
    Brian Patten:           Party Piece                             250
    Yehuda Amichai:         A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention   250
    Lord Byron:             When we two parted                      251
    Alice Meynell:          Renouncement                            252
    Alain Chartier:         I turn you out of doors                 253
    Alexander Pope:         Epistle to Miss Blount, on her Leaving
                               the Town, after the Coronation       254
    Walter Savage Landor:   What News                               255
    Li Po [Rihaku:          The Wife's Complaint                    257
                            The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter     256
    Anon:                   The Wife's Complaint                    257
    Ernest Dowson:          Exile                                   259
    Lady Heguri:            A thousand years, you said              260
    Christina Rossetti:     Remember                                260
    Christina Rossetti:     Song: When I am dead, my dearest        261
    Philip Bourke Marston:  Inseparable                             262
    e.e. cummings:  if i should sleep with a lady called death      263
    John Cornford:          Huesca                                  264
    Henry King:             The Surrender                           265
    R.S. Thomas:            Madrigal: Your love is dead, lady, your
                                        love is dead                266
    Luis de Camoens:        Dear gentle soul, who went so soon away 266
    Lady Catherine Dyer:    Epitaph on the Monument of Sir
                                    William Dyer at Colmworth, 1641 267
    Henry King:             Exequy on His Wife                      268 (3)
    John Milton:            Methought I saw my late espoused saint  271
    Sir Henry Wotton:       Upon the Death of Sir Albert
                                    Morton's Wife                   272

Desolations

    Sappho:                 Mother, I cannot mind my wheel          275
    Sir Philip Sidney:      With how sad steps, O moon, thou
					climb'st the skies!	    275
    Sir John Suckling:      A Doubt of Martyrdom                    276
    Matthew Arnold:         To Marguerite -- Continued              277
    Andrew Marvell:         The Definition of Love                  278
    Petrarch:               Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind 279
    Sir Thomas Wyatt:       I abide and abide and better abide      280
    Thomas Campion:         Kind are her answers                    280
    Catullus:       Lesbia loads me night & day with her curses     281
    Meleager:              Busy with love, the bumble bee           281
    William Blake:         My Pretty Rose Tree                      282
    William Walsh:         Love and Jealousy                        282
    Sir John Suckling:     Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?   282
    Tony Connor:           Apologue                                 283
    Donald Justice:        In Bertram's Garden                      284
    Louis MacNeice:         Christina                               284
    Oliver Goldsmith:       Song: When lovely woman stoops to folly 285
    John Dryden:            Farewell ungrateful traitor             286
    Anon:                   Oh! the time that is past               287
    Charles Baudelaire:     Damned Women                            288 (4)
    A.E. Housman:           When I was one-and-twenty               292
    W.B. Yeats:             Never Give All the Heart                292
    Christina Rossetti:     Mirage                                  293
    Robert Burns:           The Banks o'Doon                        293
    William Blake:          The Sick Rose                           294
    Sir Walter Ralegh:      A Farewell to False Love                295
    Yehuda Amichai:         Quick and Bitter                        296
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti: from The House of Life: Severed Selves  297
    W.D. Snodgrass:         No Use                                  297
    Hugh MacDiarmid:        O Wha's the Bride?                      298
    Charlotte Mew:          The Farmer's Bride                      299
    Louis MacNeice:         Les Sylphides                           301
    Jonathan Price:         A Considered Reply to a Child           302
    Philip Larkin:          Talking in Bed                          303
    Edward Thomas:          And You, Helen                          303
    George Meredith:        from Modern Love                        304
    George MacDonald:       A Mammon-Marriage                       305
    Robert Graves:          Call It a Good Marriage                 307
    Thomas Hardy:           The Newcomer's Wife                     308
    Anon:                   Bonny Barbara Allan                     309
    Mary Coleridge: `My True Love Hath My Heart and I Have His'     310
    Thomas Hardy:           Bereft                                  311
    Francis William Bourdillon: The night has a thousand eyes       312 (3)

Reverberations

    W.B. Yeats:             When You Are Old                        315
    Robert Burns:           Song: It was upon a Lammas night        315
    Paul Eluard:            Curfew                                  317
    W.B. Yeats:             Whence Had They Come?                   317
    Robert Graves:          Never Such Love                         318
    Meleager:               Love's night & a lamp                   319
    Hedylos:                Seduced Girl                            319
    Maturai Eruttalan Centamputan:  What She Said                   320
    Alexander Scott:        A Rondel of Love                        320
    George Granville Baron Lansdowne:       Love                    321

    William Congreve:       False though she be to me and love      322
    Sir Walter Ralegh:      Walsingham                              322
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Old Song Ended                       324
    Francois Villon:        The Old Lady's Lament for Her Youth     325 (3)
    W.B. Yeats:     Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop                328
    Horace: The young bloods come round less often now              328
    Queen Elizabeth:        When I was fair and young and favour
                                   graced me                        329
    Louis Simpson:          As birds are fitted to the boughs       330
    Henry Reed:     from Lessons of the War: Judging Distance       331
    Thomas Hardy:           Under the Waterfall                     332
    Edwin Morgan:           Strawberries                            334
    Thomas Hardy:           A Thunderstorm in Town                  335
    Wilfrid Blunt:          Farewell to Juliet                      336
    Stevie Smith:           I Remember                              336
    Arthur Symons:          White Heliotrope                        337
    W.B. Yeats:             Chosen                                  337
    Yehuda Amichai:         We Did It                               338
    Louis Simpson:          The Custom of the World                 339
    William Soutar:         The Trysting Place                      340
    Paul Dehn:              At the Dark Hour                        341
    Sir Edward Dyer:        A Silent Love                           341
    W.H. Auden:             Song of the Master and Boatswain        342
    Thomas Hardy:           The Ballad-Singer                       343
    Edna St Vincent         Millay: What lips my lips have kissed, and
                            where, and why                          343
    Derek Mahon:            Girls in Their Seasons                  344
    John Wilmot:            The Disabled Debauchee                  345
    Sir Thomas Wyatt:       Remembrance                             347
    Robert Graves:          The Wreath                              348
    Lord Byron:             Remember thee! remember thee!           348
    Arthur Symons:          A Tune                                  349
    Ernest Dowson:  Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae     349
    A.E. Housman:           The rainy Pleiads wester                350
    Anon:                   Western wind, when will thou blow       350
    W.B. Yeats:             After Long Silence                      351
    Donald Davie:           Time Passing, Beloved                   351
    George Crabbe:          A Marriage Ring                         352
    John Donne:             The Funeral                             352
    Robert Lowell:          The Old Flame                           353
    Anonymous Frontier Guard:       While the leaves of the
                            bamboo rustle                           355
    Thomas Hardy:           Two Lips                                355
    William Wordsworth:     She dwelt among the untrodden ways      355
    William Barnes:         The Wife A-Lost                         356
    Emily Bronte:           Remembrance                             357
    Paul Verlaine:  You would have understood me, had you waited    358
    Edgar Allan Poe:        To One in Paradise                      360
    William Wordsworth:     Surprised by joy -- impatient as the wind 361
    William Barnes: Sonnet: In every dream thy lovely features rise 361
    John Clare:             To Mary: It Is the Evening Hour         362
    Alfred Lord Tennyson:   In the Valley of Cauteretz              363
    Thomas Hardy:           The Voice                               363
    Alfred Lord Tennyson:   Oh! that 'twere possible                364 (3)
    Walter Savage Landor:   Rose Aylmer                             367
    Christina Rossetti:     Echo                                    368
    Pablo Neruda:           Tonight I can write the saddest lines   369
    C.P. Cavafy:            To Remain                               370
    Dylan Thomas:           In My Craft or Sullen Art               371
    Thomas Hard:            In Time of `The Breaking of Nations'    372

    Index of Poets and Translators				    373	(6)
    Index of Titles and First Lines 				    379

Reviews

"Stallworthy's book of love poetry, ranging across more than twenty centuries
of writing about love 'till the stars have run away' establishes beyond the
eye-shadow of a doubt that love is, has been and always will be
blind."--Christian Science Monitor

"A very thorough job...eccentric and entertaining."--Times Literary Supplement


amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail.com) 2011 Jul 30