The theme of love has forever enchanted and encouraged poets for the century. Whether it is unrequited or secretive, love has fuelled some of the most beautiful and celebrated poems in history, with poets expressing their love in unique and moving ways.
Sometimes nothing quite expresses your feelings as well as a good love poem. Sure, there are some sappy love poems out there. But there are also beautiful, poignant and profound love poems–after all, it’s been written about since people could write! These are some of the most well-known and my personal favorite love poems. There is a mix of modern poetry, romantic and classical poems. Click the name to jump the poetry.
- “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
- “Sonnet 43” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- “Since There’s No Help,” by Michael Drayton
- “Love,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns
- “Annabell Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe
- “Whoso List to Hunt,” by Sir Thomas Wyatt
- “Bright Star,” by John Keats
- “I Wanna Be Yours…” byJohn Cooper Clarke
- “It is Here” by Harold Pinter
- “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott
- “When you are Old” by William Butler Yeats
Cute Love Poems Ever Written
“She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
Written in 1813, She Walks in Beauty is often cited as one of Lord Byron’s most romantic and famous works. This specific poem is said to have been inspired by a real event in Byron’s life.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
“Sonnet 43” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A member of the Romantic Movement, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a troubled upbringing. Plagued with a lung ailment for much of her life, Elizabeth spent much of her time reading and learning, and began writing poetry around the age of 12. The most beautiful poem from her poems is often cited as Sonnet 43 How do I love thee? which describes the many ways in which she loved her husband:
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 candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
“Since There’s No Help,” by Michael Drayton
Drayton, a contemporary and possible acquaintance of the Bard, evidently had come to the unhappy end of an affair when he penned this sonnet. He begins with a show of stoic indifference: “. . . you get no more of me,” but that can’t last. In the last six lines he shows his true feelings with a series of personifications of the dying figures of Love, Passion, Faith, and Innocence, which he pleads can be saved from their fate by the lady’s kindness.
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!
“Love,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As with his most famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge employs the oldest of English forms, the ballad stanza, but here he uses a lengthened second line. Coleridge, by the way, could really tell a romantic story, whatever his ulterior motives.
In this poem, the lover is attempting to gain his desire by appealing to the tender emotions of his object. He sings her a song about the days of chivalry, in which a knight saved a lady from an “outrage worst than death” (whatever that is), is wounded and eventually dies in her arms. The poet’s beloved, on hearing the story, is deeply moved to tears and, to make the story not as long as the original, succumbs.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o’er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,
Beside the ruined tower.
The moonshine, stealing o’er the scene
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!
She leant against the arm{‘e}d man,
The statue of the arm{‘e}d knight;
She stood and listened to my lay,
Amid the lingering light.
Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope! my joy! my Genevieve!
She loves me best, whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.
I played a soft and doleful air,
I sang an old and moving story—
An old rude song, that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.
She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
For well she knew, I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.
I told her of the Knight that wore
Upon his shield a burning brand;
And that for ten long years he wooed
The Lady of the Land.
I told her how he pined: and ah!
The deep, the low, the pleading tone
With which I sang another’s love,
Interpreted my own.
She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes, and modest grace;
And she forgave me, that I gazed
Too fondly on her face!
But when I told the cruel scorn
That crazed that bold and lovely Knight,
And that he crossed the mountain-woods,
Nor rested day nor night;
That sometimes from the savage den,
And sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny glade,—
There came and looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a Fiend,
This miserable Knight!
And that unknowing what he did,
He leaped amid a murderous band,
And saved from outrage worse than death
The Lady of the Land!
And how she wept, and clasped his knees;
And how she tended him in vain—
And ever strove to expiate
The scorn that crazed his brain;—
And that she nursed him in a cave;
And how his madness went away,
When on the yellow forest-leaves
A dying man he lay;—
His dying words—but when I reached
That tenderest strain of all the ditty,
My faltering voice and pausing harp
Disturbed her soul with pity!
All impulses of soul and sense
Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve;
The music and the doleful tale,
The rich and balmy eve;
And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes long subdued,
Subdued and cherished long!
She wept with pity and delight,
She blushed with love, and virgin-shame;
And like the murmur of a dream,
I heard her breathe my name.
Her bosom heaved—she stepped aside,
As conscious of my look she stepped—
Then suddenly, with timorous eye
She fled to me and wept.
She half enclosed me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head, looked up,
And gazed upon my face.
‘Twas partly love, and partly fear,
And partly ’twas a bashful art,
That I might rather feel, than see,
The swelling of her heart.
I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride.
Poems about love speak about the passion, desire and vulnerability of being in love. Here another collection named Deep Love Poems For Boyfriend by Famous Poets.
“A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns
Burns’ best-known poem besides “Auld Lang Syne” is a simple declaration of feeling. “How beautiful and delightful is my love,” he says. “You are so lovely, in fact, that I will love you to the end of time. And even though we are parting now, I will return, no matter what.” All this is expressed in a breathtaking excess of metaphor: “And I will love thee still, my dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry.” This poem has no peer as a simple cry of a young man who knows no boundaries.
O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.
“Annabell Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe
The story itself is a Poe favorite, the tragic death of a beautiful, loved girl, died after her “high-born kinsman” separated her from the lover.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love–
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me–
Yes!–that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we–
Of many far wiser than we–
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling–my darling–my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
“Whoso List to Hunt,” by Sir Thomas Wyatt
This love, hijacked by higher forces, painfully elusive, and wildly tempting is exquisitely real and compelling.
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
The most romantic love poems for her.
“Bright Star,” by John Keats
In this sonnet, the poet expresses his wish to be as constant and as eternal as a star ‘still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast’. However, he realises this is an ideal, and in the following lines, he states how he does not want the star’s loneliness, as the star will be forever in the sky, far away from his lover. Employing the rhyming form of a Shakespearean sonnet, the poem flows like a stream of thought, concluding with the poet’s desire to hear his lover’s breathing forever:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
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.
“I Wanna Be Yours…” byJohn Cooper Clarke
Clarke states that he wrote the poem in the early 1980s, inspired by popular music at the time to describe the poet’s devotion and admiration for his love.
I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours
I wanna be your raincoat
for those frequent rainy days
I wanna be your dreamboat
when you want to sail away
Let me be your teddy bear
take me with you anywhere
I don’t care
I wanna be yours
I wanna be your electric meter
I will not run out
I wanna be the electric heater
you’ll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion
hold your hair in deep devotion
Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean
that’s how deep is my devotion
“It is Here” by Harold Pinter
The poem details a strange sound that causes the couple to pause and ponder, before revealing it was the first breath they took when they saw each other:
It Is Here
(for A)
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
to turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
“Love After Love” by Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott’s Love After Love is written to the heartbroken reader, teaching them to love themselves and to find peaceful inner solitude after a breakup. The poem is found in the Nobel Prize winner’s Collected Poems: 1948–1984, and preaches that in order for the reader to love others again, they must first learn to love themselves.
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
“When you are Old” by William Butler Yeats
The poem tells the reader that when she is older, that she should read a particular book, which will remind her of her youth, and how one man loved her unconditionally throughout her life, for ‘…the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face’. Although saddened by his unrequited love, the poet is not bitter, and states how his love will never fade: ‘…And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’ While the poem ends on a sad note, the slow tempo combined with poignant and caring imagery make this a beautiful, timeless love poem.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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