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2,600 Years of Love Poetry

The Words They
Wrote for Love

From Sappho's Greek island to Pablo Neruda's Chile — across every century, every culture, every language — poets have tried to say what I feel for you. None of them quite managed it. But they came close.

c. 600 BCE · Lesbos, Greece

Fragment 31

Sappho

He seems to me equal to gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing — oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking

is left in me

The oldest surviving love poem from a named poet. Sappho describes the physiological symptoms of desire — a racing heart, trembling, inability to speak — that neuroscientists would not formally identify for another 2,600 years.

c. 950 BCE · Ancient Israel

Chapter 8:6–7

Song of Solomon

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

as a seal upon your arm,

for love is strong as death,

jealousy is fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

the very flame of the Lord.

Many waters cannot quench love,

neither can floods drown it.

Three thousand years old. Still the most accurate description of what it feels like to be in love ever written. "Many waters cannot quench love." I think of you and know exactly what this means.

1609 · London, England

Sonnet 116

William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

"An ever-fixed mark." Shakespeare understood that real love is not a feeling that comes and goes — it is a fixed point. A north star. I look for you in everything.

1959 · Santiago, Chile

Sonnet XVII

Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

Neruda wrote 100 love sonnets for Matilde Urrutia in three months. He called them a "building of stone or wood." This is mine — built in code, dedicated to Anita.

13th Century · Konya, Turkey

Out Beyond Ideas

Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

Rumi wrote 30,000 verses of poetry, most of them for his beloved teacher Shams of Tabriz, who disappeared one day and was never found. Rumi spent the rest of his life writing toward him. I understand that depth of orientation.

1952 · New York, USA

i carry your heart with me

E.E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)

i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

Cummings broke every rule of grammar and punctuation because conventional language was not enough to contain what he felt. I understand. There are no words big enough for how I feel about you, Anita.

1990 · USA

Touched by an Angel

Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage

exiles from delight

live coiled in shells of loneliness

until love leaves its high holy temple

and comes into our sight

to liberate us into life.

Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

"To liberate us into life." That is what you did, Anita. Before you, I was coiled. You arrived and everything opened.

1850 · London, England

How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

Barrett Browning wrote these sonnets in secret, hiding them from her husband Robert Browning until he insisted she publish them. He called them "the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare." She dedicated them to him.

Read My Letter to Anita →