Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Love Poems - The Guardian

For the day that's in it. Last Saturday's Guardian had a feature entitled Love poems: writers choose their favourites for Valentine's Day - Is there a perfect love poem? Authors and poets choose those verses that have special meaning for them. It included the full text of all the poems.

An interesting selection with fewer moderns than you might expect. The absence of Yeats is unexpected and lamentable.

Seamus Heaney chooses "Whoso List to Hunt" by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt gets two poems in the piece but John Donne has three.

Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet and writer, chooses a poem by recently deceased Wisława Szymborska Thank-You Note" where she expresses gratitude for "those I don't love" because "from a rendezvous to a letter / is just a few days or weeks, / not an eternity."

The full list:
"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott
"Thank-You Note" by Wisława Szymborska
"The Silent Lover" by Walter Raleigh
"Air and Angels" By John Donne
"Epitaph", by Lady Katherine Dyer
"Love and Death" by Lord Byron
"They Flee From Me" by Sir Thomas Wyatt
"It Is Here" by Harold Pinter
"Whoso List to Hunt" by Sir Thomas Wyatt
"Animals" by Frank O'Hara
Untitled, Anon, before 1530
"Touch" by Thom Gunn
"The Good-Morrow" by John Donne
"Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Valentine" by John Fuller
"Corinnae Concubitus" by Christopher Marlowe
"To His Mistress Going to Bed" by John Donne
"Echo" by Carol Ann Duffy

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