Old Poems about Love

Enjoy these quiet little love poems (mostly) written when I was younger. Don’t forget that “juvenilia” can be (as the word implies) juvenile (and not very good)!

O, my love, a little star
is blinking in the wild pass –
I would it were with me!
But, alack, the night is done
and you are gone away.
If I but had fairer face
I wonder, would it stay?

St. Valentine

It was the mid-afternoon
and, being distraught,
I stomached the evidence
of a compassionate soul
and gave myself
an uncomfortable gut
and the knowledge that
the mind inhabits a
cloistered brain
and hardly looks down
from its tower,
where it lives to think
and to sleep.

Good-night good-night
my paupered prince
may slumbers bring you rest –
I’ll speak ten thousand words today!
but these ones I mean best.

If I forget thy name, what of my heart?
The colder could not be the frost of wind
That shook the eaves and blew our souls apart;
And rue the day I have so idly sinned!
For scarcely can I think so fine
A name so sweetly sung as thine.

One solitary evening
Below the little stars
I stole across the flowers
That blossomed up in bars
All along the quiet lane –
The place we used to walk
Half-tired out by laughing hours,
Too merry then for talk!

How now, I gathered in my skirt
A munificent array
Of bluebells and cockleshells
And lilies of the day,
The sweetest man could e’er find
In Cities of No-Telling
Where all the speaking made a din
And peddlars did their selling.

Look how the moon was shining down,
That marvelled ball of light!
I ambled softly o’erground
Carrying flowers thru the night;
When soon I reached a craggy ledge
I thought upon thy face,
And sweetly stepped across the edge –
Good eve, my resting place!

My mem’ry is but naught to thee,
Who are so lonesome smiling –
My pocket-chief is filled with grief,
The flowers have all gone, flying –

A thousand or more are calling to flight
The will of thy hands, thy heart, and thy sight;
What chorus of hours is singing the while!
A flower grows mad inside of thy smile
And nary a soul shall silence his lips –
Would thou could stopper with firm fingertips!
The birth of the buzz inside of thy brain,
How often it plays, it plagues thee amain!

Beautiful flower, thou art the breath of my morning,
I cannot wake but for thee. – And if thou art gone flying,
I lengthen my dreams if only to ride
The petals thou droppest for me
The petals slow dropping for me!

I know the way to your heart:
Is it through a loaf of bread?
Or have all the other bakers
Gone and left you now for dead?

Don’t take your eyes off her.
Can’t you hear the saxophone singing?
Oh, my friend, I think
You’re about to fall in love.

I love thee, not faint, but quietly,
Inside my cupboard door;
I never speak but short to thee,
I would we loitered more!

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