Poem Sampler

Facebook Love

For Valentines Day, our Facebook fans picked their favorite poems from our archive.

BY The Editors

Originally Published: February 09, 2011
Sonnets from the Portuguese 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

The Delicacy by Sandra McPherson

Friend, remember how you showed us beasts love beauty?
We were wading in your lake with bluegills and you said,

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

Robeson at Rutgers by Elizabeth Alexander

Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees
are taller still than Robeson. Outside

I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

[I married] by Lorine Niedecker

I married

in the world’s black night

A Color of the Sky by Tony Hoagland

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.

Wild nights - Wild nights! (269) by Emily Dickinson

Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee

The Ache of Marriage by Denise Levertov

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,

[love is more thicker than forget] by E. E. Cummings

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall

She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron (George Gordon)

She walks in beauty, like the night
   Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

Recreation by Audre Lorde

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat

The Good-Morrow by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

When I Heard at the Close of the Day by Walt Whitman

In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy.

Malayan Figures by W.S. Merwin

I would die
of your fingers
if I could be buried in your palm

For C. by Richard Wilbur

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,

The Hush of the Very Good by Todd Boss

You can tell by how he lists
                                             to let her

The Language by Robert Creeley

Locate I
love you some-

The editorial staff of the Poetry Foundation. See the Poetry Foundation staff list and editorial team masthead.

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