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Timeless Drama of Love Poems

The Sister of the Wind, And Other Poems (by Norton, Grace Fallow)
Rivers to the sea (by Teasdale, Sara)
The Answering Voice : One Hundred Love L... (by Sara Teasdale)
Poems by Emily Dickinson (by Dickinson, Emily)
Selection of Poems (by Hogan, Anastasia)
The Garden of Love; Flowers Gathered fro... (by Byron, May Clarissa Gillington)
Modern Love : An Anthology (by Kennerley, Mitchell)

Love. Does it change over time, over country borderlines, across generations and cultures? Or is it the one all-encompassing trait of humanity? If it doesn't change, is there a simple cipher we can use to access old love poetry?

The love poems from the English and American women of 19th and early 20th centuries ring with much the same themes as today: longing, unrequited love, joy, freedom, the relief and torment of expressing feelings of love, and the drama as Grace Fallow Norton writes in her poem of the same name, "Love is a terrible thing!"

Sara Teasdale compiled a book of her recent or contemporary poets in The Answering Voice: One Hundred Love Lyrics by Women in 1917. It must have been a breath of fresh air in a literary tradition rife with the declarations of love from men. Teasdale, a strong English poet herself, meant to exhibit the feminine side of love and, even further, to represent love as an evolving dialogue, not just a momentary declaration.

Oftentimes we hear about (especially with the modern interpretation of love) how desire and passion take over our freedom of choice. A visceral and unforgiving fate characterize the theme of love. But Emily Dickinson's poem "Choice" invokes the opposite (with a humble jab at all the other men she has not chosen in the last line):

Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit flies away,
And subterfuge is done;

When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand,
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is shifted like a sand;

When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,–
Behold the atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay! (The Answering Voice, p. 19)

Others might prefer their love poems to be a bit more obscure and full of the abandon of longing. Love and desire, when examined, are not so concrete. In “To One Unknown,” Helen Dudley explicates upon the power of love without a lover:

I have dreamed unwonted things,
Visions that Witches brew,
Spoken with images,
Never with you. (The Answering Voice, p. 3)

In “Red May”, by A Mary F. Robinson uses a the image of a “crimson May” to double effect, showing how love’s passing is two-faced:

Out of the window the trees in the Square
Are covered with crimson May -
You, that were all of my love and my care,
Have broken my heart to-day.

But though I have lost you and though I despair
Till even the past looks gray--
Out of the window the trees in the Square
Are covered with Crimson May. (The Answering Voice, p. 7)

By Thad Higa