#poems

If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say 'I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day' For these things in themselves, Beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. 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 may'st love on, through love's eternity. ↗

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#poems #sonnets #change

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. ↗

— Jane Yolen

#emotion #fiction #poems #poetry #reading

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#done #entirely #gets #i #ignored

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience. ↗

— Sharon Olds

#anyone #care #close #else #even

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#bad #created #during #few #great

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems. ↗

— Muriel Rukeyser

#brought #failed #our #poems #readers

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors. ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#brooks #corner #editors #i #later

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ↗

— Joan Miro

#colors #i #like #music #notes

O Deus Ego Amo Te Oh God, I love Thee mightily, Not only for Thy saving me, Nor yet because who love not Thee Must burn throughout eternity. Thou, Thou, my Jesu, once didst me Embrace upon the bitter Tree. For me the nails, the soldier's spear, With injury and insult, bear- In pain all pain exceeding, In sweating and in bleeding, Yea, very death, and that for me A sinner all unheeding! O Jesu, should I not love Thee Who thus hast dealt so lovingly- Not hoping some reward to see, Nor lest I my damnation be; But as Thyself hast loved me, So love I now and always Thee, Because my King alone Thou art, Because, O God, mine own Thou art! ↗

— Robert Hugh Benson

#jesus #poems #art

This wobbly world host to insects and lint and a thousand pithy ways to feel unserious each minute It brings about a great softening of the mind, like the clouded edges of sea glass (this filter you could download and apply) A poultice or an opiate, rigidly individual. Alone and erasing sentences to splinters. (Poem No. 5) ↗

— Erin J. Watson

#life #mind #poems #poetry #world