SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jelousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares -
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such grief
At any hand but hers?
ROBERT GRAVES
IN LOVE FOR LONG
I've been in love for long
With what I cannot tell
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mould or shape,
From whish there's no escape.
It is not even name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as still
As the established hill.
It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss,
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?
This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays ahd morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world's vice.
And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world's day long.
This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Ia like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger's paws
And windicates its cause.
EDWIN MUIR
LOVE IS NOT
Love is not just a function of the eyes.
Beutiful objects will, of course, inspire
Possessive urges - you need despise
Your taste. But when insatible desire
Inflames you for a girl who's out of fashion,
Lacking in glamour - plain, in fact - that fire
Is genuine; that's the authentic passion.
Beauty, though, any critic can admire.
AH, YOU THOUGHT
Ah - you thought I'd be the type
You could forget,
And that praying and sobbing, I'd throw myself
Under the hooves of bay.
Or I would beg from the witches
Some kind of root in charmed water
And send you a terrible gift -
My intimate, scented handkerchief.
Damned if I will.Niether by glance nor by groan
Will I touch your cursed soul,
But I vow to you by the garden of angeles,
By the miraculous icon I vow
And by fiery passion of our nights -
I will never return to you.
ANNA AKHMATOVA
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