It's only words... Poetry of Love

Here we are, face to face on the day of love. I’m going to play cupid this time and give you something for your valentine: Handpicked poems of love— a timeless gift never outdone.

We could begin with this stanza from Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy – an ode to the presence of love in nature, and a plea for the meeting of hearts. It speaks of the winds and waters of the earth all mingling to become one:

Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle - 
Why not I with thine?

Then there’s Keats’s Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast As Thou Art, sensual lines that weave images and lay bare the eternal desire of the heart. It alludes to a star watching over the earth, “like Nature’ sleepless Ermite,” gazing forever over oceans doing their “priestlike task” of cleansing the earth’s shores. But that’s where love is ever more steadfast; for all it wants is each breath spent in love’s embrace:

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever --or else swoon to death

Closer home, Tagore love poems are an act of complete submission; the offering of heart and soul in entirety and without restraint. There is a fragile quality to the emotion, which never asks, only gives. He often compares the offerings of love to flowers or songs— both objects that create the feeling of an act of worship. This one is taken from Lover’s Gift:

I filled my tray with whatever I had, and gave it to you. What shall I bring to your feet tomorrow, I wonder. I am like the tree that, at the end of the flowering summer, gazes at the sky with its lifted branches bare of their blossoms.

But in all my past offerings is there not a single flower made fadeless by the eternity of tears?

Will you remember it and thank me with your eyes when I stand before you with empty hands at the leave-taking of my summer days?

In contrast with the vulnerable, quiet nature of these lines, Oscar Wilde’s We Are Made One With What We Touch And See is a joyous celebration of love, with image upon image bursting forth. In the last stanza he talks of them as notes of the universe’s symphony, their love merging with Nature itself. 

And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

But none can speak on immortality like Amir Khusrau, with his lines drenched in mystic love:

Man tu shudam, tu man shudi/Man tan shudam, tu jaan shudi/

Ta kas na goya bad azan/Man deegaram too deegari

I have become you, you have become me

I have become body, you have become soul

So that no one can ever say

I am other than you, you other than me. 

This, then, is the utmost offering of love: the longing to be fanaa — to be destroyed… lose yourself within your lover…the union beyond earthly realm. At the end, isn’t that what we really seek?