Poems About Love Each of the following poems contains a message of L-U-V. Read through the poems, then choose two to TPCASTT with a partner. When in the “connotations” portion of analysis, be sure to cover the figurative language in the poem—identify the use AND how it affects the overall meaning of the poem (Hint: Each poem is a good example of metaphor, simile, or personification). Simile What did we say to each other that now we are as the deer who walk in single file with heads high with ears forward with eyes watchful with hooves always placed on firm ground in whose limbs there is latent flight N. Scott Momaday
The Taxi By Amy Lowell 1874–1925 When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? Amy Lowell, “The Taxi” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot, Esquire. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
I Am Offering This Poem
since feeling is first
Jimmy Santiago Baca
e.e. cummings since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis
I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give. Keep it like a warm coat, when winter comes to cover you, or like a pair of thick socks the cold cannot bite through, I love you, I have nothing else to give you, so it is a pot full of yellow corn to warm your belly in the winter, it is a scarf for your head, to wear over your hair, to tie up around your face, I love you, Keep it, treasure it as you would if you were lost, needing direction, in the wilderness life becomes when mature; and in the corner of your drawer, tucked away like a cabin or a hogan in dense trees, come knocking, and I will answer, give you directions, and let you warm yourself by this fire, rest by this fire, and make you feel safe, I love you, It's all I have to give, and it's all anyone needs to live, and to go on living inside, when the world outside no longer cares if you live or die; remember, I love you.
The Voice of the Wild Goose Ancient Egyptian Poem Translated by William Kelly Simpson The voice of the wild goose, caught by the bait, cries out. Love of you holds me back, and I can’t loosen it at all. I shall set aside my nets. But what can I tell my mother To whom I return every day When I am laden with catch? I did not set my traps today Love of you has thus entrapped me
Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924. Part Three: Love
XLVII HEART, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!
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Three Japanese Tankas Ono Komachi, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani
1 Sent anonymously to a man who had passed in front of the screens of my room Should the world of love end in darkness, without our glimpsing that cloud-gap where the moon’s light fills the sky? 2 Sent to a man who seemed to have changed his mind Since my heart placed me on board your drifting ship, not one day has passed that I haven’t been drenched in cold waves. 3 Sent in a letter attached to a rice stalk with an empty seed husk How sad that I hope to see you even now, after my life has emptied itself like this stalk of grain into the autumn wind.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
ODE TO MY SOCKS Pablo Neruda Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted with her own sheepherder hands, two socks as soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if they were two cases knitted with threads of twilight and the pelt of sheep. Outrageous socks, my feet became two fish made of wool, two long sharks of ultramarine blue crossed by one golden hair, two gigantic blackbirds, two cannons: my feet
were honored in this way by these heavenly socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that embroidered fire, of those luminous socks. Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation to save them as schoolboys keep fireflies, as scholars collect sacred documents, I resisted
the wild impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and chunks of pink melon. Like explorers in the jungle who hand over the rare green deer to the roasting spit and eat it with remorse, I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks and then my shoes. And the moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good when it's a matter of two woolen socks in winter.
