poetry from the anti-romantic side

[honeymonster]

From a couple library books I got recently.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as i speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love Song

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
   And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
   And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled--
   Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world--
   And I wish I'd never met him.

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
   And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
   And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
   As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams--
   And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
   And he makes no friends of sorrows,
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
   In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
   Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart--
   And I wish somebody's shoot him.

--Dorothy Parker

One Perfect Rose

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
   All tenderly his message he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet--
   One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
   "My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
   One perfect rose.

Why is is no one ever sent me yet
   One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah, no, it's always just my luck to get
   One perfect rose.

--Dorothy Parker