The Many Facades of Love: A Handpicked Collection of Love Poems

Written by Yunqin Wang

What is Love? Poets try to answer the question with one love poem and announce their “failure” by writing another after another… Our history is full of love poems, and yet our urge is still to sing about love, and to untangle the very idea of love.

On this first Valentine’s day in the time of a pandemic, we selected for you a series of love poems to relish in your bed, dining table, metro station... Some are romantic, some bitter, some mysterious, some lonely. O, how love has so many sounds, and so many shapes.

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[love is more thicker than forget], by E.E. Cummings

In this bizarre little poem, love is compared to a hundred things, and yet the comparisons only reveal the impossibility to actually describe love… Written in a strict quatrain, the poem seeks to give a neat answer to love’s puzzle, but only inevitably comes out as another mystery. 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

Corona, by Paul Celan

Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in a letter to Celan that, “I have often reflected that ‘Corona’ is your most beautiful poem; it is the complete anticipation of a moment in which everything turns to marble, and remains forever.” One of my all time favorites, ‘Corona’, a postwar love poem, truly has the magic to make readers see a new world springing out of a pair of embracing lovers.

Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand.

We are friends.

We shell time from the nuts and teach them to walk.

Time returns into its shell.

In the mirror is Sunday.

In dreams come sleeping–

the mouth speaks true.

My eye moves down to my lover’s loins.

We gaze at each other and we speak dark things.

We love one another like poppy, like memory

we slumber like wine in the sea shells

like the sea in the moon’s blood jet.

One heart beat for unrest.

We stand at the window embracing.

People watch us from the street.

It is time people knew. It is time

the stone consented to bloom.

It is time it came time.

It is time.

The Privilege of Being, by Robert Hass

In ‘Corona’, the love between the embracing lovers is eternalized through the eyes of people watching them from outside the window. In this gorgeous poem by Robert Hass, it’s the angels who are watching the lovers. With this geometry formed among the “illiterate angels”, the man and the woman, Hass contemplates the idea of love, desire and union.

Many are making love. Up above, the angels

in the unshaken ether and crystal

of human longing

are braiding one another’s hair, which is

strawberry blond

and the texture of cold rivers. They glance

down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--

it must look to them like featherless birds

splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--

and then one woman, she is about to come,

peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,

look at me, and he does. Or is it the man

tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?

Anyway, they do, they look at each other;

two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,

startled, connected at the belly

in an unbelievably sweet

lubricious glue, stare at each other,

and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They

shudder pathetically

like lithographs of Victorian beggars

with perfect features and alabaster

skin hawking rags

in the lewd alleys of the novel.

All of creation is offended by this distress.

It is like the keening sound

the moon makes sometimes,

rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,

it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that

they close their eyes again and hold

each other, each

feeling the mortal singularity of the body

they have enchanted out of death

for an hour or so,

and one day, running at sunset, the woman

says to the man,

I woke up feeling so sad this morning

because I realized

that you could not, as much as I love you,

dear heart, cure my loneliness,

wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him

that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.

And the man is not hurt exactly,

he understands that life has limits, that people

die young, fail at love,

fail of their ambitions. He runs beside

her, he thinks

of the sadness they have gasped and crooned

their way out of

coming, clutching each other with old, invented

forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready

to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely

companionable like the couples

on the summer beach

reading magazine articles about intimacy

between the sexes

to themselves, and to each other,

and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Summer, by Louise Glück

There are countless of beautiful love poems by Glück. Some of my favorites include ‘Eros’, ‘From a Journal’, ‘Moonbeam’, ‘The Balcony’… But here, I’m introducing ‘Summer’ to be read side by side with Hass’ poem above. In ‘Summer’, we will drift along with the poet into a cycle of love. From the stage of passion to the later days of companionship, this journey, soothes and glows.

Remember the days of our first happiness,

how strong we were, how dazed by passion,

lying all day, then all night in the narrow bed,

sleeping there, eating there too: it was summer,

it seemed everything had ripened

at once. And so hot we lay completely uncovered.

Sometimes the wind rose; a willow brushed the window.

But we were lost in a way, didn't you feel that?

The bed was like a raft; I felt us drifting

far from our natures, toward a place where we'd discover nothing.

First the sun, then the moon, in fragments,

stone through the willow.

Things anyone could see.

Then the circles closed. Slowly the nights grew cool;

the pendant leaves of the willow

yellowed and fell. And in each of us began

a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,

of the absence of regret.

We were artists again, my husband.

We could resume the journey.

Claustrophilia, by Alice Fulton

Alice Fulton talks about love in a different tone. Written in a voice at times ironic and humorous, Claustrophilia juxtaposes everyday love with specialized terms such as “moxibustion”, “analgesia”, evoking the question of proximity and closeness in love relationships. How close can we get? How far can we be?

It's just me throwing myself at you,

romance as usual, us times us,

not lust but moxibustion,

a substance burning close

to the body as possible

without risk of immolation.

Nearness without contact

causes numbness. Analgesia.

Pins and needles. As the snugness

of the surgeon's glove causes hand fatigue.

At least this procedure

requires no swag or goody bags,

stuff bestowed upon the stars

at their luxe functions.

There's no dress code,

though leg irons

are always appropriate.

And if anyone says what the hell

are you wearing in Esperanto

—Kion diable vi portas?—

tell them anguish

is the universal language.

Stars turn to trainwrecks

and my heart goes out

admirers gush. Ground to a velvet!

But never mind the downside,

mon semblable, mon crush.

Love is just the retaliation of light.

It is so profligate, you know,

so rich with rush.

If you like Fulton’s work, here is another short poem called ‘Yours & mine’ which appeared in her first collection. It indeed captures one kind of distance between lovers, created by their different ways of loving, different ways looking after each other.

Yours & mine



Through your lens the sequoia swallowed me   

like a dryad. The camera flashed & forgot.

I, on the other hand, must practice my absent-

mindedness, memory being awkward as a touch   

that goes unloved. Lately your eyes have shut

down to a shade more durable than skin’s. I know you   

love distance, how it smooths. You choose an aerial view,   

the city angled to abstraction, while I go for the close   

exposures: poorly-mounted countenances along Broadway,   

the pigweed cracking each hardscrabble backlot.   

It’s a matter of perspective: yours is to love me   

from a block away & mine is to praise the grain-

iness that weaves expressively: your face.

New York Address, by Linda Gregg

If you are alone, or if you are walking in the New York sunset, or if your love is yet on the other side, I have this cup of Linda Gregg for you.

The sun had just gone out 

and I was walking three miles to get home. 

I wanted to die. 

I couldn't think of words and I had no future 

and I was coming down hard on everything. 

My walk was terrible. 

I didn't seem to have a heart at all 

and my whole past seemed filled up. 

So I started answering all the questions 

regardless of consequence: 

Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won't speak. 

No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won't love. 

Yes I will bless. No I won't close. Yes I won't give. 

Love is on the other side of the lake.

It is painful because the dark makes you hear 

the water more. I accept all that. 

And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance. 

Having finished with it all, now I am not listening. 

I wait for the silence to resume. 

I cannot live with you, by Emily Dickinson

I would like to end this love journey on a classic note with Dickinson’s I cannot live with you. In only a span of a poem, we traversed with the poet through life, death, and resurrection. Passion and anguish crush on your shoulder at the same time. Yet, in Dickinson’s love song, despair is not a closed room of darkness, but a door, a white substance.

I cannot live with You –

It would be Life –

And Life is over there –

Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to –

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain –

Like a Cup –

Discarded of the Housewife –

Quaint – or Broke –

A newer Sevres pleases –

Old Ones crack –

I could not die – with You –

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down –

You – could not –

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze –

Without my Right of Frost –

Death’s privilege?

Nor could I rise – with You –

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ –

That New Grace

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye –

Except that You than He

Shone closer by –

They’d judge Us – How –

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to –

I could not –

Because You saturated Sight –

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be –

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame –

And were You – saved –

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not –

That self – were Hell to Me –

So We must meet apart –

You there – I – here –

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer –

And that White Sustenance –

Despair –

We wish you，on this beautiful day, as Auden wishes too, to be the more loving one. 

Clickbait Review: Kathleen McClung’s A Juror Must Fold in on Herself

We at PSNY promise to publish only the most sincere book reviews and to only recommend products that we love. In the spirit of Clickbait, however, we want you to know that we will likely receive a portion of sales from products purchased through this article. Each click helps to support PSNY and Clickbait's writers directly, so we hope that you will use the links herein. Thank you for your support, dear readers!

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Kathleen McClung’s chapbook A Juror Must Fold in on Herself couldn’t have arrived at a better time for this sequestered reader, a juror in her own right. Several months into quarantine, interfacing with an unjust country from semi-permeable safety of my own solitude, I was turning in on myself, much like the sequestered juror of McClung’s bounded universe writing form poem after form poem. McClung writes in “Superior Court Ghazal,” “okay, so I may be over-/thinking here, but that’s what goes on in our little box.” At this point in time, who isn’t overthinking from her little box?

Some infinities are larger than others, but from where I’m sitting this still means that our small universes are infinite. If free verse is a large infinity, form poems are smaller ones. A villanelle, with its two repeating lines and strict rhyme scheme, seems restrictive, but the eternal lies here too. As poets know, no repetition is the identical. We cannot say the same thing twice. There is freedom to be found in restraint, and if we fold enough times we will soon be ten miles high. 

This brief collection, restrained as it were, shifts voice poem by poem, from the District Attorney to the Public Defender to the Forewoman. Mostly we stick with the perspective of the Sequestered Juror, though, who figures in many forms: a rondeau, a pantoum, a sestina, a cento, a lament. She attempts time and again to order the tragedy at the centre of the book--what justice might be done about the death of a child--as though by organizing she might make sense of the senseless. We catch mere glimpses of the juror’s personhood; only small pieces of her life unfold: her mild attention to the “lanky prosecutor who doesn’t wear a ring,” her affection for her dog Alegria, her literary inclinations. We learn practically nothing of the defendant. 

The chapbook meditates on voice, how difficult it is to restrain our voices, how many of our voices are restrained by society. From the very first poem, “Field Notes, Hall of Justice Parking Lot,” the juror longs to talk with the defendant but must not, for fear of being held in contempt of court. The Public Defender claims of the defendant, “his silence is his right” and later, “his silence is his choice,” though it does not seem like a choice. Meanwhile the Public Defender claims, “but me, I talk a lot,” and it’s unclear whether or not he is pleased with his own speech. An entire poem is composed of notes the juror does not write down; the poem is negative space, an absence, what could have been but was not, was held back. In the cento, she writes, “There are no words in our language to say this,” and yet what follows must certainly be the “this” she is saying. In the lament, speaking is one activity among a list of actions the jurors must not make. In the end, the juror prints her verdict on paper, and ultimately only the Forewoman speaks. At every point there is tension between silence and speech; a poem is never entirely one nor the other. A Juror Must Fold in on Herself builds the infinite into each small box. 

All these meditations on silence, all these linguistic explorations of restraining the voice, all these foldings in on herself, open up into a sonnet crown ominously titled “Summons,” where the narrator seeks advice from her late grandmother, a courthouse stenographer, on how to conduct her legally imposed silence. Here it is the narrator who speaks, despite her enforced silence, while the grandmother, called on for advice, remains silent. Here we truly meet the narrator for the first time, see the fuller fabric of her life intertwined through her grandmother’s, and we see in parallel the humanization of the legal proceedings. The play of the title, the narrator invoking the presence of her dead ancestor and the court requiring one’s presence, emphasizes this entwining.

Though the grandmother does not give advice, the collection ultimately does, ending on two sonnets titled, “Advice for the Ghost Ship Jurors,” addressing the fire that broke out in an artists’ collective in Oakland in 2016 and killed 36 people. These final poems emphasize the jurors’ humanity in the face of mass, senseless tragedy. As readers trapped in my own small boxes, perhaps enduring forced silences of our own, these final poems serve as reminders that we are jurors of mass, mass tragedy. They urge us to expand. While this collection may resonate particularly well in our time of quarantine and a renewed social awareness of injustice, irreconcilable tragedies are a permanent feature of our lives, and McClung’s treatise with these poems is that we must not lose our humanity when we respond to them, and we must never descend into silence.

Learn more about McClung and her work here.

Written by Anna Winham