greykit.poetry — #love
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1898
[thomas-hardy]
Neutral Tones
By a winter pond under a white, chidden sun, Hardy distills the death of a love into a few grey images — the starving sod, the deadest smile, the God-curst sun — that return to him whenever love proves a deceiver.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
When I was one-and-twenty
A young man ignores the wise man's counsel to keep his heart free — and finds out at two-and-twenty that 't is true, 't is true.
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1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
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1850
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
Sonnet 43: How Do I Love Thee?
Barrett Browning counts the ways she loves her husband — to the depth, breadth, and height her soul can reach, with passion, purity, childhood faith, and all her life's breath.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Annabel Lee
Poe's last poem — a love that began in a kingdom by the sea, that the winged seraphs envied, that no angels in heaven above nor demons under the sea can ever dissever.
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1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
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1830
[lord-byron]
So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Written at twenty-nine after the Venice carnival, Byron's three spare stanzas bid farewell to midnight roving — the sword outwears the sheath, and love itself must rest.