PENGUIN BOOKS

THE NEW PENGUIN BOOK OF LOVE POETRY

Jon Stallworthy was educated at Rugby, in the West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. His books include two critical studies of Yeats's poetry, The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry, The Oxford Book of War Poetry, editions of Wilfred Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments and War Poems, and two biographies: Wilfred Owen (which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the WH Smith Award and the E. M. Forster Award) and Louis MacNeice (which won the Southern Arts Literary Prize). With Peter France, he translated Alexander Blok's The Twelve and Other Poems and Pasternak's Selected Poems, and, with Jerzy Peterkiewicz, poems for the second edition of Five Centuries of Polish Poetry. Most recently, he has published Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and the Singing School, ‘the autobiography we would like all poets to write’ (Oxford Today). He has been a Professor of English Literature at Cornell and Oxford, and is now a Senior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

The New Penguin Book of
LOVE POETRY

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY JON STALLWORTHY

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Allen Lane 1973

First published in the United States of America with the title A Book of Love Poetry by Oxford University Press New York 1974

Published in Penguin Books 1976

This new edition published in Penguin Books 2003

8

Introduction and selection copyright © Jon Stallworthy, 1973, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192661-2

Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

INTRODUCTION

EZRA POUND Commission

INTIMATIONS!

ROY CAMPBELL The Sisters

LAURIE LEE Milkmaid

THOMAS RANDOLPH The Milkmaid's Epithalamium

W.B. YEATS Brown Penny

SIR JOHN BETJEMAN Myfanwy

PATRICK MACDONOGH She Walked Unaware

CAROL ANN DUFFY Warming Her Pearls

CHARLES COTTON Two Rural Sisters

RICHARD CRASHAW Wishes to His Supposed Mistress

AUSTIN CLARKE Penal Law

ROBERT GRAVES Symptoms of Love

ROBERT GRAVES The Foreboding

DECLARATIONS

JOHN BERRYMAN Go, ill-sped book, and whisper to her or

JOHN CLARE First Love

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI The First Day

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING Sonnet xliii, from the Portuguese: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

JOHN KEATS Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art –

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Let me not to the marriage of true minds

WILLIAM BARNES A Zong: O Jenny, don't sobby! vor I shall be true

ROBERT BURNS Song: O whistle, and I'll come to ye, my lad

HENRY CAREY Sally in our Alley

ANTHONY HECHT Going the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

EDMUND SPENSER One day I wrote her name upon the strand

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH ‘Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments’

W. B. YEATS A Drinking Song

BEN JONSON To Celia

ADRIAN MITCHELL Celia Celia

EDGAR ALLAN POE To Helen

LORD BYRON She Walks in Beauty

SIR HENRY WOTTON Elizabeth of Bohemia

THOMAS CAREW Song: Ask me no more where Jove bestows

THOMAS CAMPION Cherry-Ripe

ANON There is a lady sweet and kind

SIR CHARLES SEDLEY To Cloris

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

GEOFFREY CHAUCER from Merciless Beauty

JOHN KEATS I cry your mercy – pity – love! – aye, love!

EDMUND SPENSER Iambicum Trimetrum

THOMAS CAMPION Vobiscum est lope

RUPERT BROOKE Sonnet: Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire

ROBERT GRAVES Love Without Hope

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY To —

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE That time of year thou may'st in me behold

JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE I'll Never Love Thee More

T. S. ELIOT A Dedication to My Wife

PERSUASIONS

ROBERT HERRICK To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

JOHN FLETCHER Love's Emblems

SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE Of Beauty

PIERRE DE RONSARD Corinna in Vendome

EDMUND WALLER Go, lovely Rose –

DOROTHY PARKER One Perfect Rose

WENDY COPE Flowers

CAROL ANN DUFFY Valentine

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Feste's Song from Twelfth Night

THOMAS HOOD Ruth

JOHN WILBYE Love Not Me

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Love's Philosophy

ANDREW MARVELL To His Coy Mistress

THOMAS MOORE An Argument

JOHN DONNE The Flea

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER Written in a Lady's Prayer Book

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

SIR WALTER RALEGH Her Reply

CECIL DAY LEWIS Come, live with me and be my love

JAMES FENTON Hinterhof

JOHN KEATS This living hand, now warm and capable

SIR THOMAS WYATT To His Lute

JOHN HEATH-STUBBS Beggar's Serenade

JOHN CROWE RANSOM Piazza Piece

CHRISTOPHER SMART The Author Apologizes to a Lady for His Being a Little Man

WILLIAM WALSH Lyce

JOHN DONNE To His Mistress Going to Bed

CELEBRATIONS

from The Song of Solomon: Chapter 2

ROBERT GRAVES Sick Love

ROBERT BROWNING Meeting at Night

LOUIS MACNEICE Meeting Point

F. T. PRINCE The Question

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Sudden Light

ANON Plucking the Rushes

SIR JOHN BETJEMAN A Subaltern's Love-song

CHARLES OF ORLEANS My ghostly father, I me confess

SIR THOMAS WYATT Alas! madam, for stealing of a kiss

COVENTRY PATMORE The Kiss

THOMAS MOORE Did Not

PETRONIUS ARBITER Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short

JOHN BERRYMAN Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when

ROBERT BROWNING from In a Gondola

HUGO WILLIAMS Some Kisses from The Kama Sutra

RUDAKI Came to me

PABLO NERUDA Drunk as drunk on turpentine

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON from The Princess

D. H. LAWRENCE New Year's Eve

THEODORE ROETHKE She

OVID Elegy 5

JOHN BERRYMAN Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying

ROBERT GRAVES Down, Wanton, Down!

ANON I gently touched her hand: she gave

CRAIG RAINE Sexual Couplets

E. E. CUMMINGS may i feel said he

THOMAS CAREW On the Marriage of T.K. and C.C. the Morning Stormy

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON Marriage Morning

PHILIP LARKIN Wedding-Wind

WALT WHITMAN From pent-up, aching rivers

A. D. HOPE The Gateway

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN The Geranium

ABRAHAM COWLEY Dialogue: After Enjoyment

SIR CHARLES SEDLEY On the Happy Corydon and Phyllis

CATULLUS Phyllis Corydon clutched to him

FLEUR ADCOCK Note on Propertius 1.5

RICHARD DUKE After the fiercest pangs of hot desire

JOHN DRYDEN Song: Whilst Alexis lay pressed

E. E. CUMMINGS i like my body when it is with your

JOHN DONNE The Ecstasy

WILLIAM DAVENANT Under the Willow-Shades

BORIS PASTERNAK Hops

W. R. RODGERS The Net

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE Love and Sleep

W. H. AUDEN Lullaby: Lay your sleeping head, my love

W. B. YEATS Lullaby: Beloved, may your sleep be sound

ANNA WICKHAM The Fired Pot

ALAN ROSS In Bloemfontein

JAMES FENTON In Paris with You

ROBERT GRAVES She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep

ELIZABETH JENNINGS Winter Love

JOHN DONNE The Sun Rising

JOHN DONNE The Good Morrow

JACQUES PRÉVERT Alicante

W. H. AUDEN Fish in the unruffled lakes

JOHN HEATH-STUBBS The Unpredicted

PETRONIUS ARBITER Good God, what a night that was

LAWRENCE DURRELL This Unimportant Morning

MICHAEL LONGLEY The Linen Industry

D. H. LAWRENCE Gloire de Dijon

DICK DAVIS A Monorhyme for the Shower

ROBERT GRAVES The Quiet Glades of Eden

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI Away Above a Harborful

HARRY FAINLIGHT A Bride

ROBERT CREELEY The Way

ROBERT LOWELL Man and Wife

SEAMUS HEANEY The Skunk

SIR JOHN HARINGTON The Author to His Wife, of a Woman's Eloquence

ANNE BRADSTREET To My Dear and Loving Husband

ANON Madrigal: My Love in her attire doth show her wit

OCTAVIO PAZ Touch

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE The Jewels

J. M. SYNGE Dread

TED HUGHES September

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE The Mirabeau Bridge

ANDREI VOZNESENSKY Dead Still

SIR THOMAS WYATT Once as methought Fortune me kissed

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY My true love hath my heart, and I have his

EDWIN MUIR In Love for Long

CATHERINE TUFARIELLO After All

SIR WALTER SCOTT An Hour with Thee

JOHN DONNE The Anniversary

THEODORE ROETHKE I Knew a Woman

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover

LORD BYRON So, we'll go no more a-roving

FYODOR TYUTCHEV Last Love

ROBERT BURNS John Anderson My Jo

KENNETH FEARING Love 20¢ the First Quarter Mile

ABERRATIONS

WILLIAM CONGREVE Song: Pious Selinda goes to prayers

ANON Fragment of a Song on the Beautiful Wife of Dr John Overall, Dean of St Paul's

SIR JOHN HARINGTON Of an Heroical Answer of a Great Roman Lady to Her Husband

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA The Faithless Wife

ABRAHAM COWLEY Honour

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER The Imperfect Enjoyment

THOMAS HARDY The Ruined Maid

MATTHEW PRIOR Chaste Florimel

ALEXANDER POPE Two or Three: A Recipe to make a Cuckold

OVID To His Mistress

ROBERT BROWNING Porphyria's Lover

EZRA POUND The Temperaments

JOHN BERRYMAN Filling her compact & delicious body

HILAIRE BELLOC Juliet

JOHN PRESS Womanisers

MARY JO SALTER Video Blues

EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY I, being born a woman and distressed

SOPHIE HANNAH She Has Established Title

SOPHIE HANNAH Credit for the Card

SEAMUS HEANEY A Dream of Jealousy

ROBERT HENRYSON Robene and Makyne

GEORGE WITHER A Lover's Resolution

A. E. HOUSMAN Oh, when I was in love with you

BHARTRHARI In former days we'd both agree

ROBERT GRAVES The Thieves

ABRAHAM COWLEY The Welcome

SIR JOHN SUCKLING Out upon it, I have loved

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER Love and Life

TONY HARRISON The Bedbug

RICHARD LOVELACE The Scrutiny

MARTIAL Lycóris darling, once I burned for you

JOHN DONNE The Indifferent

D. H. LAWRENCE Intimates

BHARTRHARI She who is always in my thoughts prefers

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR You smiled, you spoke, and I believed

RICHARD WEBER Elizabeth in Italy

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER A Song: Absent from thee, I languish still

ROBERT GRAVES A Slice of Wedding Cake

FLEUR ADCOCK Against Coupling

SEPARATIONS

ANON Walking in a meadow green

THOM GUNN Carnal Knowledge

ANON She lay all naked in her bed

ANON Aubade

JOHN DONNE Song: Sweetest love, I do not go

ROBERT BURNS A Red Red Rose

HART CRANE Carrier Letter

E. E. CUMMINGS it may not always be so; and i say

ALUN LEWIS Postscript: For Gweno

W. H. AUDEN Dear, though the night is gone

ROBERT BROWNING The Lost Mistress

MICHAEL DRAYTON Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part –

COVENTRY PATMORE A Farewell

ALUN LEWIS Goodbye

FRANCES CORNFORD Parting in Wartime

JOHN GAY Sweet William's Farewell to Black-eyed Susan

ROBERT BURNS Song: Ae fond kiss, and then we sever

EMILY DICKINSON My life closed twice before its close

EDWARD THOMAS Like the Touch of Rain

HAROLD MONRO The Terrible Door

THOMAS HARDY In the Vaulted Way

ANNA AKHMATOVA I wrung my hands under my dark veil

BRIAN PATTEN Party Piece

YEHUDA AMICHAI A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

LORD BYRON When we two parted

ALICE MEYNELL Renouncement

ALAIN CHARTIER I turn you out of doors

ALEXANDER POPE Epistle to Miss Blount, on her Leaving the Town, after the Coronation

WENDY COPE After the Lunch

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR What News

LI PO [RIHAKU] The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

ANON The Wife's Complaint

ERNEST DOWSON Exile

KIT WRIGHT Campionesque for Anna

LADY HEGURI A thousand years, you said

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Remember

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Song: When I am dead, my dearest

PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON Inseparable

E. E. CUMMINGS if i should sleep with a lady called death

JOHN CORNFORD Huesca

HENRY KING The Surrender

R. S. THOMAS Madrigal: Your love is dead, lady, your love is dead

LUIS DE CAMOËNS Dear gentle soul, who went so soon away

LADY CATHERINE DYER Epitaph on the Monument of Sir William Dyer at Colmworth, 1641

HENRY KING The Exequy

PETER PORTER An Exequy

JOHN MILTON Methought I saw my late espousèd saint

SIR HENRY WOTTON Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton's Wife

DESOLATIONS

SAPPHO Mother, I cannot mind my wheel

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb'st the skies!

SIR JOHN SUCKLING A Doubt of Martyrdom

MATTHEW ARNOLD To Marguerite – Continued

ANDREW MARVELL The Definition of Love

PETRARCH Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind

SIR THOMAS WYATT I abide and abide and better abide

THOMAS CAMPION Kind are her answers

KIT WRIGHT My Version

CATULLUS Lesbia loads me night & day with her curses

MELEAGER Busy with love, the bumble bee

WILLIAM BLAKE My Pretty Rose Tree

WILLIAM WALSH Love and Jealousy

SIR JOHN SUCKLING Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

TONY CONNOR Apologue

DONALD JUSTICE In Bertram's Garden

LOUIS MACNEICE Christina

OLIVER GOLDSMITH Song: When lovely woman stoops to folly

JOHN DRYDEN Farewell ungrateful traitor

ANON Oh! the time that is past

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Damned Women

A. E. HOUSMAN When I was one-and-twenty

W. B. YEATS Never Give All the Heart

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Mirage

WENDY COPE Bloody Men

ROBERT BURNS The Banks o'Doon

WILLIAM BLAKE The Sick Rose

YEHUDA AMICHAI Quick and Bitter

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI from The House of Life: Severed Selves

W. D. SNODGRASS No Use

ELIZABETH BISHOP One Art

HUGH MACDIARMID O Wha's the Bride?

CHARLOTTE MEW The Farmer's Bride

D. H. LAWRENCE Love on the Farm

LOUIS MACNEICE Les Sylphides

JONATHAN PRICE A Considered Reply to a Child

PHILIP LARKIN Talking in Bed

EDWARD THOMAS And You, Helen

GEORGE MEREDITH from Modern Love

GEORGE MACDONALD A Mammon-Marriage

ROBERT GRAVES Call It a Good Marriage

THOMAS HARDY The Newcomer's Wife

ANON Bonny Barbara Allan

W. H. AUDEN from Twelve Songs

THOMAS HARDY Bereft

MARY COLERIDGE ‘My True Love Hath My Heart and I Have His’

JOHN KEATS La Belle Dame sans Merci

REVERBERATIONS

W. B. YEATS When You Are Old

ROBERT BURNS Song: It was upon a Lammas night

PAUL ÉLUARD Curfew

W. B. YEATS Whence Had They Come?

ROBERT GRAVES Never Such Love

DOROTHY PARKER Unfortunate Coincidence

MELEAGER Love's night & a lamp

HEDYLOS Seduced Girl

ALEXANDER SCOTT A Rondel of Love

GEORGE GRANVILLE, BARON LANSDOWNE Love

WILLIAM CONGREVE False though she be to me and love

LOUIS MACNEICE The Sunlight on the Garden

SIR WALTER RALEGH Walsingham

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI An Old Song Ended

FRANÇOIS VILLON The Old Lady's Lament for Her Youth

W. B. YEATS Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

HORACE The young bloods come round less often now

QUEEN ELIZABETH I When I was fair and young and favour gracèd me

LOUIS SIMPSON As birds are fitted to the boughs

HENRY REED from Lessons of the War: Judging Distances

THOMAS HARDY Under the Waterfall

EDWIN MORGAN Strawberries

ANDREW MOTION On the Table

THOMAS HARDY A Thunderstorm in Town

WILFRID BLUNT Farewell to Juliet

SEAMUS HEANEY from Glanmore Sonnets

STEVIE SMITH I Remember

ARTHUR SYMONS White Heliotrope

W. B. YEATS Chosen

YEHUDA AMICHAI We Did It

LOUIS SIMPSON The Custom of the World

WILLIAM SOUTAR The Trysting Place

PAUL DEHN At the Dark Hour

SIR EDWARD DYER A Silent Love

W. H. AUDEN Song of the Master and Boatswain

THOMAS HARDY The Ballad-Singer

EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why

DEREK MAHON Girls in Their Seasons

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER The Disabled Debauchee

SIR THOMAS WYATT They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

ROBERT GRAVES The Wreath

LORD BYRON Remember thee! remember thee!

ERNEST DOWSON Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

A. E. HOUSMAN The rainy Pleiads wester

EMILY DICKINSON Wild nights! Wild nights!

ANON Western wind, when will thou blow

ANTHONY ASTBURY What Wouldn't I Give?

W. B. YEATS After Long Silence

THOM GUNN The Hug

DONALD DAVIE Time Passing, Beloved

GEORGE CRABBE A Marriage Ring

SIMON ARMITAGE About His Person

JOHN DONNE The Funeral

ROBERT LOWELL The Old Flame

ANONYMOUS FRONTIER GUARD While the leaves of the bamboo rustle

THOMAS HARDY Two Lips

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH She dwelt among the untrodden ways

WILLIAM BARNES The Wife A-Lost

EMILY BRONTË Remembrance

PAUL VERLAINE You would have understood me, had you waited

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind

WILLIAM BARNES Sonnet: In every dream thy lovely features rise

DOUGLAS DUNN France

JOHN CLARE To Mary: It Is the Evening Hour

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON In the Valley of Cauteretz

THOMAS HARDY The Voice

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Rose Aylmer

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Echo

DYLAN THOMAS In My Craft or Sullen Art

THOMAS HARDY In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

Acknowledgements

Index of Poets and Translators

Index of Titles and First Lines

Preface to the Second Edition

Rereading the Introduction to this book, written more than a quarter of a century ago, I find it says almost all that I have to say on the subject of love poetry (or, in The New York Times's formulation, All the News that's Fit to Print): almost, but not quite all. It is now my perception – one that prompts this new edition – that the last quarter century has seen good harvests from the poets, and it is a pleasure to bring into my granary sheaves from a dozen or more who had no harvests to their name in the early seventies or, at any rate, had not written the poems I can now include: poems by Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, James Fenton, Sophie Hannah, Seamus Heaney, and others. Half of these are women, and adding to their representation poems by some – to my shame – not represented in the first edition (Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Bradstreet, and Dorothy Parker), together with more poems by some who were (Fleur Adcock and Emily Dickinson), makes for an astringent, tender counterpoint to the dominant melody of the male-voice choir.

The 53 new poems added to this edition, a high proportion written in the last quarter century, suggest that poetry is in good health and that the poets' experience of love is as gladdening, maddening, and saddening as ever.

JON STALLWORTHY
Wolfson College, Oxford
December 2001

Introduction

‘What is Love?’ 'tis not hereafter’; ‘love is heaven, and heaven is love’; ‘Love is a sickness full of woes’; ‘Love is a growing or full constant light’; ‘love it is but lust’; ‘love is more cruel than lust’; ‘Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds’; ‘Love is like linen often chang'd, the sweeter.’

The evidence of the poets is as conflicting as it is voluminous. Even if one sets aside poems about the love of Country, poems about the love of Nature, poems about the love of God, one is left with a mountain of poems about the Beloved, beside which the poems on any other single subject seem but a molehill. And there are almost as many definitions of love as there are poets, because most poets, like most other men and women, have something to say on the subject. In a strikingly high proportion of cases, what they have to say is said better, more freshly, than anything on any other subject. They say it because they have to. Like any other actors in the human comedy, they speak most piercingly when they speak most personally, and because they speak personally their statements are as various as their fingerprints.

Love [Old English lufu, Indo-European *leubh, from the same root as Sanskrit lubh, to desire] of the Beloved accounts for many of the most intense moments in most lives; moments generating the emotion that, recollected in tranquillity, may crystallize into poems. Given the high premium that artists set upon intensity, given the relationship between creative and sexual energy, the artist is likely to have more intense moments and more emotion to recollect than most of his fellow men or women. An artist, moreover, is a maker; one who assembles existing materials to give a substance and a name to something that did not exist before, or something that existed unperceived. Poets assemble words into the likeness of a world, whether it is that seen from the window or with the inward eye. They bring them together into conjunctions, into harmonies, that are a paradigm of love; and at moments in the act of making a poem experience an intensity of awareness and an exaltation comparable to those experienced in making love. The one may even become a substitute for the other. An ageing poet will literally recall the Beloved of his youth and, in writing of her, bring her to life again.

For these reasons, poets through the ages have written so much, so variously, and so well on this particular theme. But if they cannot themselves agree on a definition of love, no one else is going to be able to agree on any definition of a love poem other than one, like a seine net, large enough to take in all. So I consider a love poem to be not only the lover's ‘ballad/Made to his mistress' eyebrow’, but any poem about any aspect of one human being's desire for another.

Love is a country where anything can happen, and among the multitudes who have crossed its shimmering frontiers since first

there have always been those who made poems of what they found. More than a thousand years before Christ, an Egyptian poet wrote or caused to be written characters on papyrus, which translated read:

Before ever man learnt to make graphic symbols of his sounds, he had his love songs as well as his war songs and his reaping songs.

In a celebrated statement about love poetry, one received as gospel by generations of undergraduates, C. S. Lewis declared:

Everyone has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described.¹ With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often ‘aureate’ or deliberately enigmatic, we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.²

Since the publication of The Allegory of Love in 1936, a number of scholars have questioned, modified, and qualified Lewis's magisterial pronouncements on the phenomenon now known as courtly love. A medieval Spanish and Portuguese tradition of love-songs in which the woman speaks, or in which she is the dominant figure, has been shown to have parallels in ancient Egypt, China, Greece, Scandinavia, Serbia, and Russia.³ Again, in the most fascinating of all correctives and complements to The Allegory of Love, Professor Peter Dronke examines a second archetype of the lyric of courtly love: one presenting what is essentially a man's courtly conception of love. This he traces to ancient Egypt, eighth-century Islam and Mozarabic Spain, twelfth-century Byzantium and Georgia, as well as medieval France and Germany.⁴ There is no suggestion of a single torch, kindled in ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, being passed from one civilization to another. Rather, it is clear that feelings of passionate love common to all mankind have, generally by a process of internal combustion, kindled the poets of different periods and places.

There have, however, been instances of chain reaction, the most notable in the case of our own literature. It is a commonplace that the first poets in these islands to leave a permanent record of their work welded and wielded a language ‘loud with the clashing of swords’. Like any heroic society, theirs was a man's world. They celebrated the bond between father and son, uncle and nephew, liegeman and lord, the links in the armoured corselet on which the life of the werod, the troop, depended. Their poems reflected that society, not only in their choice of subject but in the linked alliteration of their lines. Then, in one of the stranger tidal movements of history, Anglo-Saxon as a literary language died on the battlefield of Hastings just as the language of the conquerors was flowering in Languedoc. The songs of the provençal troubadours crossed the Channel in the wake of Duke William's armies; a poetry of soft vowels to be sung beneath a lady's window, rather than declaimed in a raftered hall. And slowly, in the way of such ‘conquests’, the language of the conquerors became grafted on to the native stump, which then put forth a new and vigorous flower. Three hundred years after Harold's thanes, true to their oaths, boasts, and traditions, died defending the corpse of the last of the Saxon kings, an English poet wrote in a language those warrior forebears would not have understood:

Chaucer's language was new not only in its marriage of vowel and consonant, but in its quieter tone. Though no poet was ever more skilled in the art of rhetoric or had a deeper intuitive understanding of literary decorum, the language came alive under his hand. In some of the first great love poems in the language he reproduced the authentic accents of the spoken word:

For Chaucer, with his inexhaustible delight in the human comedy, love in all its aspects was to be celebrated as the main source of action; and for the poets that followed him, love was the great theme. The Religion of Love produced nobler hymns from Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Ralegh, than did the love of God, yet in language the two religions had much in common. The Song of Solomon, as ‘mystically’ interpreted, provided the love-poets and the spiritual writers with a seemingly impeccable precedent for elaborating either theme in the language of the other. Donne was surely not the first poet to be led to the love of God by way of the love of woman.

As the new science of the seventeenth century, the doubts that it engendered, and ‘the continuous coarse Sand-laden wind, time’ began their erosion of the rock on which the Church was founded, so the Religion of Love was imperceptibly eroded too. Its liturgy, cheapened by loss of belief and by over-use, became increasingly used in a decorative or ironic context. And yet, in the sensual heyday of the Restoration, that tradition retained something of its potency even in the mouth of the bawdiest of the great English love poets, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

It retains that potency still in the work of poets as dissimilar as John Berryman and Robert Graves.

Just as the language of the Church lost its first voltage, so too did the language of the Court. The Elizabethan poets still cast their lovers in the roles of servant, vassal, and thrall, but the old feudal idioms had lost their force. Over the years, courtship became no longer courtly and the verb to enthrall a shadow of its feudal self. The energizing forces of Elizabethan society were largely materialistic and, naturally enough, they penetrated and then permeated its poetry.

When William Drummond dreams of love, it is of

Edmund Spenser's lady is

and Sir Philip Sidney's celebration of the beauty of Lady Rich – ‘rich, naming my Stella's name’ – is itself a metaphor of this newly predominant condition of human awareness.¹

Good poets more often than not speak the language of their time and reflect something of the changing nature of their society, but a survey of their love poems reveals much that has not changed in three thousand years. The poet in ancient Egypt apostrophized his love:

The first and last word of this song is ‘the one’, and at its second appearance it refers to ‘the sole eye of heaven, the Sun’.² The poet, singing the praise of his love, can only describe her in terms of extravagant hyperbole. We are told that she has ‘lucent skin’, but are offered no more detail on which to feast the inward eye. It is a strange fact that poets who, from the civilization of the Lower Nile to that of the Lower Hudson, have pursued an ideal of precise language, should with so few exceptions have failed to describe the objects of their strongest affections. We look in vain for the features, lineaments of a living woman; for distinguishing marks such as Iachimo reported of Imogen:

Why should this be? Can it be reticence in Sappho, Catullus, Donne, Rochester, Byron, Graves? I think not. Love is by tradition blind and, just as the religious mystic is dazzled by ‘the darkness visible’ of God, so the lover is dazzled by a vision of his goddess, his ideal woman. Moreover, the poet in love and celebrating the fact is often writing for an audience of one; and all too often is only moved to define and describe his love more precisely when he has lost that audience or that vision.

Surveying the great body of love poetry written in English, or translated into English, one looks for patterns, common factors of this kind, but they are few. It is hard to generalize even about love poems written by women as against those written by men. When women write about love, and for centuries they rarely did, they tend to be less afraid to reveal themselves than men; though only Kingsley Amis would dare to say:

Poets are in the nature of things exceptions, resistant to the constraints of bureaucracy, and their poems will not nest in pigeonholes. This admirable independence presents the bureaucratic anthologist with a problem, if he does not want his book to resemble the pavement of Trafalgar Square. I have elected for what seemed to me a minimum of categories, given that I wanted an arrangement more ambitious than an alphabetical or a chronological one. I expressly wanted, in fact, to disrupt chronology and, by setting the poems in a thematic continuum, to demonstrate men and women's changeless responses to the changeless changing seasons of the heart. A night whisper from the sixteenth century, ‘Christ, if my love were in my arms’, is as audible and as urgent as any uttered four centuries later.

The anthologist's principal problem – what to leave out – is particularly acute in a collection of this kind. There are enough great narrative love poems in the language to make a book on their own, but because these for the most part are well-known or readily accessible, and because I don't like taking scissors to a tapestry, I have confined myself to shorter poems, sadly setting aside Chaucer's ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, Marlowe's ‘Hero and Leander’ (completed by George Chapman), Shakespeare's ‘Lucrece’ and ‘Venus and Adonis’, Keats's ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Don Leon’ by George Colman the younger, ‘The True Confession of George Barker’, Allen Tate's translation of ‘Pervigilium Veneris’, and Elaine Feinstein's ‘Poem of the End’ from the Russian of Marina Tsvetayeva. In a very few cases, I have allowed myself to break my rule; scissoring a chapter from ‘The Song of Solomon’, for instance, on the grounds that it was a cycle of love poems rather than a single work. This and other translations I have admitted where they can stand in their own right as English poems. In the final winnowing, many such exotics gave place to sturdier home-grown plants, but I hope a sufficient number remain to show that, just as the cycle of the heart's seasons has not changed in 3,000 years, its spring can be as brilliant in Dorset as in Persia, its winter as cold.

I embarked upon this anthology of love poetry to sweeten an imagination otherwise occupied with the war poems of Wilfred Owen. My thanks are due to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, under whose hospitable roof most of my reading was done, and to the unfailingly helpful staff of the Bodleian Library.

My greatest debts, however, are to Carol Buckroyd, who helped me plan the book, to my sister Wendy, who assisted me in my researches and my editing, and to those other friends who fed me with poems I should otherwise have overlooked: Mr Nicolas Barker, Professor J. A. W. Bennett, Miss Catharine Carver, Mr Sydney Clouts, Professor Richard Ellmann, Dame Helen Gardner, Miss Monica Jones, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Mrs Anne Lonsdale, Mr Nikos Stangos, Mr Charles Tomlinson, and Dr J. R. Watson. For the poems that should be here and are not, there is no one to blame but

JON STALLWORTHY
The Mill House, Wolvercote
December 1972

Ezra Pound

COMMISSION

INTIMATIONS

Roy Campbell

THE SISTERS

Laurie Lee

MILKMAID

Thomas Randolph

THE MILKMAID'S EPITHALAMIUM

W. B. Yeats

BROWN PENNY