Poets seem to have the final say on the subject of love, as this selection of the very best love quotes by poets shows. We all have the same feelings that poets have, but it’s their ability to find the language to match the feelings that make them appear to feel more intensely than the rest of us. They express their feelings in poetry but they also make casual observations about love.
Here is a collection of sixty of the finest love quotes by poets, drawn from the pens of bards of many historical periods and several nationalities (we’ve saved these Shakespeare quotes about love for another article). Those who have not written these love quotes and verses in English appear here in translation:
1. I love you
because the Earth turns round the sun
because the North wind blows north
sometimes
because the Pope is Catholic
and most Rabbis Jewish
because winters flow into springs
and the air clears after a storm
Nikki Giovanni
2. As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.
As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among young men.
King Solomon
3. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
4. Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
5. Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to Love.
6. Ah love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet
the bitterness or the sweetness,
none has spoken it.
Hilda Doolittle
7. Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score;
Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:
A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,
To make that thousand up a million.
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
Robert Herrick
8. A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!
Omar Khayyam
9. Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
10. And given you in earnest words I flung in jest.
Edna St.Vincent Millay
11. O, my Luve is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve is like the melodie,
That’s sweetly played in tune.
Robert Burns
12. Before you kissed me only winds of heaven
Had kissed me, and the tenderness of rain—
Now you have come, how can I care for kisses
Like theirs again?
Sara Teasdale
13. With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
14. Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
Matthew Arnold
15. Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Emily Dickinson
16. Your eyen two will slay me suddenly,
I may the beauty of them not sustain,
So woundeth it throughout my herte kene.
17. Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near…
Andrew Marvel
18. …for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.
James Weldon Johnson
19. If things on earth may be to heaven resembled,
It must be love, pure, constant, undissembled.
Aphra Behn
20. Your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
E. E. Cummings
21. Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle:—
Why not I with thine?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
22. At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Li Po
23. Grow old along with me
the best is yet to be.
Robert Browning
24. Through all eternity to thee
A joyful song I’ll raise,
For oh! Eternity is too short
To utter all thy praise.
Joseph Addison
25. Love doesn’t make the world go round,
Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
26. With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
William Butler Yeats
27. Her gesture, motion, and her smiles,
Her wit, her voice my heart beguiles,
Beguiles my heart, I know not why,
And yet, I’ll love her till I die.
Thomas Ford
28. I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling
I fear
E.E. Cummings
29. I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season it might be;
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So, unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to forsee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom, yet, for many a May.
Christina Rossetti
30. Her voice is low and sweet
And she’s all the world to me
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and die.
William Douglas
31. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love, thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
32. She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
Lord Byron
33. How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
William Butler Yeats
34. Where true Love burns Desire is Love’s pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.
35. I love thee as I love the tone
Of some soft-breathing flute
Whose soul is wak’d for me alone,
When all beside is mute.
Eliza Acton
36. Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.
37. I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling place
And can return no more.
John Clare
38. He brought me to the banqueting house,
and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples:
for I am sick of love.
Solomon
39. Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde
40. Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
Goethe
41. A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.
Rupert Brooke
42. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
43. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Tennyson
44. Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Robert Frost
45. Absence – that common cure of love.
Lord Byron
46. Everything is clearer when you’re in love.
John Lennon
47. It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
48. True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
49. Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
50. For not many men, the proverb saith, can love a friend whom fortune prospereth unenvying.
Aeschylus
51. Love is the only gold.
Tennyson
52. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.
William Blake
53. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
54. Soul meets soul on lover’s lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelly
55. All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
56. One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.
Sophocles
57. Hearts are not to be had as a gift – hearts are to be earned.
William Butler Yeats
58. Love can excellent convince.
Petrarch
That’s your lot for love quotes by poets. What do you think – any great ones we’re missing? Let us know in the comments below!
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs, That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms, In life after life, in age after age, forever