My Favorite Poems: Love

 When I was little I had a book called  Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: A Collection of Family Poems

This book was filled with the sweetest and warmest poems in the whole world. Each poem carried so much meaning and feeling, and each one helped foster in me, a love for poetry.

Here are two of my favorite poems. The first I equate with young love, and the second with the love that we all hope to have one day.

The Look-Sara Teasdale

Stephon kissed me in the spring,

      Robin in the fall,

But Colin only looked at me

      And never kissed at all.

Stephon's kiss was lost in jest,

      Robin's lost in play,

But the kiss in Colin's eyes

      Haunts me night and day. 

My thoughts: This poem is so simple and perfect. Any girl or guy could read this poem and connect their past or present to it. I remember reading this poem for the first time when I was like ten years old, and even then I was just like 'aint that life!'

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun. 

My thoughts: This poem combines the use of similes, metaphors, intellect and faith to synthesize a love that is so strong that neither distance nor time can affect its strength. Donne’s concept of true love is captured and depicted in a symbolic poem that emphasizes the assets of the immensely strong union. He allows the reader to peak into a romance where neither distance, physicality, nor absents affect its strength.  The love he describes is not separated into two people’s emotions and souls, but instead coexists in one shared soul. True love is remarkably self assured and needs no proof of validity, for it harbors deep emotional connections that no physicality like distance could ever diminish.