Day 573: The Love Poem

 

When I started posting love themed poems this week, I kept thinking what I would post today on Valentine's. What would be the ultimate love poem? 

Last year the day's post was Carol Ann Duffy's witty 'Valentine', a poem in which she talks about giving her lover an onion as a gift. (Intriguing yes, you can read it here )

This year, it has to be Carol Ann Duffy again, this time with a poem from her collection 'Rapture'. 'The Love Poem' I think, is the ultimate in love poems. Its content is composed of references from all the popular love poems throughout the centuries, lines from the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, and Wordsworth mixed in to the poet's own text. See if you can spot them all!

Happy Valentine's!

The Love Poem - Carol Ann Duffy

Till love exhausts itself, longs

for the sleep of words - 

                                          my mistress' eyes - 

to lie on a white sheet, at rest

in the language - 

                             let me count the ways - 

or shrink to a phrase like an epitaph - 

                                                                come live

with me - 

or fall from its own high cloud as syllables

in a pool of verse - 

                                    one hour with thee. 

Till love gives in and speaks

in the whisper of art - 

                                        dear heart,

how like you this? - 

love's lips pursed to quotation marks

kissing a line - 

                             look in thy heart

and write - 

love's light fading, darkening, 

black as ink on a page - 

                                           there is a garden

in her face.

Till love is all in the mind - 

                                                 O my America!

my new-found land - 

or all in the pen

in the writer's hand - 

                                      behold, thou art fair - 

not there, except in a poem,

known by heart like a prayer,

both near and far,

near and far - 

                           the desire of the moth

for the star.