collection

It’s Complicated: Love Poems

Love, I’m done with you!

By The Editors

A heart encompassing mathematic equations on a grid.

Love isn’t all roses and candlelight. Love is complicated, and poetry has a unique ability to express the power and pain of that mess of feeling. This selection of poems shows love’s less idealistic side in all its difficulty, humor, grief, and possibility.

For more poems about love, explore our archive.

ANTI-LOVE

- [Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up
Bernadette Mayer
- What Isn’t Mine
Jill Alexander Essbaum
- Epithalament
Brenda Shaughnessy
- from “An Attempt at Jealousy”
Marina Tsvetaeva
- Modern Love
John Keats
- Farewell Love and all thy Laws for ever
Sir Thomas Wyatt
- The Editor’s Ex
Caitlin Doyle
- Song: “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more”
William Shakespeare
- A Fixed Idea
Amy Lowell
- Never give all the Heart
William Butler Yeats
- To my Inconstant Mistress
Thomas Carew

BREAKUP

- After Love
Sara Teasdale
- Movement Song
Audre Lorde
- A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
Yehuda Amichai
- I’ll Open the Window
Anna Swir
- The Glass Essay
Anne Carson
- when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story
Gwendolyn Brooks
- The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi
Brian Gyamfi
- The Flurry
Sharon Olds
- Love, I'm Done with You
Ross Gay
- Cuckoldom
BJ Ward
- After Eden
Rachel Wetzsteon
- Oh God
Michelle Tea
- Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another
Jan Heller Levi
- Meditations in an Emergency
Frank O'Hara
- ain't that easy
Erica Lewis
- For a Traveler
Jessica Greenbaum
- December
Michael Miller
- The Darker Sooner
Catherine Wing
- Poem
Jill Alexander Essbaum
- The Nails
W. S. Merwin
- A Communication Which the Author Had to London, Before She Made Her Will
Isabella Whitney
- Neutral Tones
Thomas Hardy
- the smell
Emelihter Kihleng

IRONY & HUMOR

- The Quiet World
Jeffrey McDaniel
- A Maul for Bill and Cindy’s Wedding
Gary Snyder
- Love Explained
Jennifer Michael Hecht
- The Wounded Cupid. Song
Anacreon
- Windchime
Tony Hoagland
- Video Blues
Mary Jo Salter
- Love Song
Dorothy Parker
- Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
William Shakespeare
- The Lady's Yes
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Errata
Kevin Young
- To a Young Lady, With Some Lampreys
John Gay

HEARTACHE & VEXATION

- A Valentine
Robert Graves
- Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
- Permanent Press
Alice Friman
- Stolen Moments
Kim Addonizio
- You left me – Sire – two Legacies – (713)
Emily Dickinson
- “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Vietnam Ghost Story: Đà Lạt Lovers
Hoa Nguyen
- “No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved”
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
- Semele Recycled
Carolyn Kizer
- Endless Summer
Nate Pritts
- Blues for Almost Forgotten Music
Roxane Beth Johnson
- Still Start
Kay Ryan
- Snowshoe to Otter Creek
Stacie Cassarino
- Hour
Reginald Gibbons
- History
Aleida Rodríguez
- Semi-Splendid
Tracy K. Smith
- Absences
Donald Justice
- No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
- As from a Quiver of Arrows
Carl Phillips
- What’s Left
W. S. Di Piero
- Anniversary
Louise Glück
- Yours & Mine
Alice Fulton
- Somewhere or Other
Christina Rossetti
- Venice, Unaccompanied
Monica Youn
- A Broken Appointment
Thomas Hardy
- palindrome
Nate Marshall
- Later
Raymond Luczak
- “If no love is, O God, what fele I so?”
Petrarch
- A Farewell to False Love
Sir Walter Raleigh
- Claustrophilia
Alice Fulton

UNREQUITED & PINING

- I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t
Richard Brautigan
- Love and Death
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
- The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe
- My Life’s Delight
Thomas Campion
- What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
- A Bird in Bishopswood
John Tickhill
- When Last We Parted
Catherine Maria Fanshawe
- The Breather
Billy Collins
- The Consolations of Sociobiology
Bill Knott
- Sometimes with One I Love
Walt Whitman
- Solitary Vice
Valerie Wetlaufer
- Nocturnal Admissions
Chip Livingston
- Virginity
Anna Swir
- Never the Time and the Place
Robert Browning
- Poem
Lucy Ives
- The Dream
John Donne
- Song: “Take, oh take those lips away”
William Shakespeare
- I Dreamed That I Was Old
Stanley Kunitz
- They Flee From Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt
- Another Insane Devotion
Gerald Stern

LONELINESS

- The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
Anne Sexton
- Dear One Absent This Long While
Lisa Olstein
- I Don't Miss It
Tracy K. Smith
- Winter Love
Linda Gregg
- The friend
Marge Piercy
- Sonnet
Robert Hass
- Rain
Kazim Ali
- In Golden Gate Park That Day . . .
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance
Li Bai
- Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing
Robert Duncan
- Evening Lounge
Afaa Michael Weaver

DOMESTICITY & RELATIONSHIPS

- The Ache of Marriage
Denise Levertov
- Wife
Ada Limón
- About God & Things
Wanda Coleman
- Dyed Carnations
Robyn Schiff
- Marriage
Ellen Bass
- Baked Goods
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Sonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth
William Shakespeare
- A Man's Requirements
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Who's on First?
Lloyd Schwartz
- [I married]
Lorine Niedecker
- A Marriage
Robert Creeley
- To have without holding
Marge Piercy