Robert Herrick
A country vicar and the most original of Ben Jonson’s followers, Robert Herrick packed his one book, Hesperides, with carpe diem lyrics like “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” before fading from view for a century.
Theme
love
27 poems
love
Andrew Marvell
Poet, satirist, and MP for Hull, Andrew Marvell wrote some of English poetry’s wittiest lyrics — including “To His Coy Mistress” — yet his verse stayed in shadow for two centuries before its rediscovery.
Robert Burns
Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns rose from a failing Ayrshire farm to literary fame, rescued the nation’s songs, and gave the world Auld Lang Syne before dying at thirty-seven.
The Good-Morrow
One of Donne’s greatest love poems. Waking beside his beloved, the speaker calls everything before this love a childish sleep, and argues that their joined love makes one little room a whole world that cannot die.
A Birthday
The poet of renunciation wrote one great burst of joy. “A Birthday” overflows with similes, then demands a jewelled throne — and its imagery is so sacred that the love who “is come” may be earthly, divine, or both.
Endymion
Keats’s longest poem opens “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” A reading of his 1818 romance: the shepherd Endymion’s quest for the moon goddess, its lush couplets, and its harsh critical reception.
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
Facing the dread of an early death, Keats fears dying before his pen empties his teeming brain, before he traces the sky’s visions, before he loves. A reading of his 1818 sonnet on mortality, ambition, and love.
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Twelve short lines of open desire. Dickinson casts longing as a storm to revel in and a harbor to reach, ending on a single wish: to moor, tonight, in thee.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” reshapes a Scots folk song into a vow that grows past all reason — love measured against drying seas, melting rocks, and the whole run of a life. In four short quatrains it moves from a single image (a rose newly sprung in June) to an oath against the end of the world, and closes not on grand impossibility but on a simple, human promise: to come again, though it were ten thousand mile.
John Donne
Foremost of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne fused intellect, passion, and faith — from audacious love lyrics to the Holy Sonnets and the sermons that made him Dean of St Paul’s.
The Flea
A man argues a woman into bed using a flea that bit them both. It’s the most dazzling sophistry in English, and a sly comedy in which she acts while he only talks, kills the flea, and demolishes his logic with a fingernail.
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” reflects on memory, loss, and the quiet ache of vanished love.