Famous Love Poetry has some of the most popular love poetry written.

My page on various examples of famous love poetry concludes here. James Whitcomb Riley, Edmund Waller, Margaret Walker and Andrew Young are the poets who bring this segment to an end.

By the time he died in 1916, James Whitcomb Riley had become one of the most loved American poets. This is his famous love poetry, "The Lost Thrill":

The Lost Thrill

by James Whitcomb Riley

I grow so weary, someway, of all things

That love and loving have vouchsafed to me,

Since now all dreamed-of sweets of ecstasy

Am I possessed of: The caress that clings—

The lips that mix with mine with murmurings

No language may interpret, and the free,

Unfettered brood of kisses, hungrily

Feasting in swarms on honeyed blossomings

Of passion's fullest flower—For yet I miss

The essence that alone makes love divine—

The subtle flavoring no tang of this

Weak wine of melody may here define:—

A something found and lost in the first kiss

A lover ever poured through lips of mine.

Edmund Waller 1606–1687, was an English poet and parliamentarian who led an eventful life. His lyrics were at one time admired to excess, but in the main, his popularity has waned apart from one or two exceptions such as "Go, lovely Rose" which is included here as an example of famous love poetry:

Go, Lovely Rose

by Edmund Waller

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that 's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired:

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die—that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

The famous love poetry of Margaret Walker (1915-1998) is next. She was a novelist and essayist whose career spanned the Black American cultural revolutions of the 20th Century, from the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties to the Black Arts movement of the sixties.

Born and brought up in the deep south (Birmingham, Ala.), as a black child she experienced firsthand the rabid rascism of the now-infamous Jim Crow legislation.

A greatly gifted writer whose works reflected her passion for elevating negro culture to great heights, she is most famed for her poem "For My People,"published in 1942, and her best-selling novel, Jubilee, based on her family's experiences during slavery and immediately after the American Civil War, published in 1966. Love Song for Alex is her contribution to famous love poetry:

Love Song for Alex

Margaret Walker (1915-1998)

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;

the lover of my life, my youth and age.

My heart belongs to him and to him only;

the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage

Now grown to years advancing through the dozens

the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire

fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder

but all my days of Happiness and wonder

are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.

They carry us under the waters of the world

out past the starposts of a distant planet

And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean

they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories

where we have been together, you and I.

Andrew Young's short but finely constructed Beauty and Love brings my page on examples of various famous love poetry to a close in a rather marvelous manner:

Beauty and Love

- Andrew Young

Beauty and love are all my dream;

They change not with the changing day;

Love stays forever like a stream

That flows but never flows away;

And beauty is the bright sun-bow

That blossoms on the spray that showers

Where the loud water falls below,

Making a wind among the flowers.

Edgar Allan Poe

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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