5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect as a Valentine's Day Present, February 2, 2011
This review is from: 101 Classic Love Poems (Hardcover)
If you enjoy a collection of poems featuring Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Moore, then many of these poems may already be very familiar. There is comfort in reading familiar poems and yet I'm always eager to find new poems.
Patterns by Amy Lowell is a completely new poem to me and the descriptions of ribboned shoes, lime trees and daffodils invited me to read this poem more than once. What is truly stunning about this particular poem is the way in which Amy Lowell expresses her grief through the beauty of nature. She becomes the images as if she stepped into the painting and became the soul of nature.
I also enjoyed "Of My First Love" by Hugh MacDiarmid:
Silhouetted against grim black rocks
This foaming mountain torrent
With its source in desolate tarns
Is savage in the extreme
As its waters with one wild leap
Hurl over the dizzy brink
Of the perpendicular cliff-face
In that great den of nature
To be churned into spray
In the steaming depths below
After describing this waterfall, he then describes the water as a lover's waving hair in a tremendous cascade and then turns this into a description of great passion for his lover's golden hair rippling out between his fingers.
William Shakespeare makes his appearance in "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" I finally copied "Meeting at Night" by Robert Browning into my journal because I love the way the words sound like they are rowing through the gray sea to the warm sea-scented beach.
So while every Classic collections seems to present The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and Love's Philosophy, you will also find The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter by Li T'ai Po and The Mirabeau Bridge by Guillaume Apollinaire.
One Hundred and One Classic Love Poems will comfort you with classics and surprise you with poems you may have yet to discover.
~The Rebecca Review
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