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Love Poems

Classic and contemporary love poems to share.

By The Editors

Two women on white wedding gowns

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From Sappho’s ancient Greek poems to contemporary Sapphic poetry, from Byron to Browning, and everywhere in between, poets have given us language for love. Whether you’re searching for a poem for an occasion like an anniversary, a wedding, or Valentine’s Day, or because you need a pick-me-up or a forget-me-not, here’s a diverse selection of love poems.

For more poems about love, explore our archive.

FAVORITES & CLASSICS

Including selections from the Facebook Love Poems Sampler.

- [love is more thicker than forget]
E. E. Cummings
- Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
William Shakespeare
- A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns
- When I Heard at the Close of the Day
Walt Whitman
- She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
- Love
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- from Endymion
John Keats
- On Love
Kahlil Gibran
- Song (“Love has crept...”)
D. H. Lawrence
- The Language
Robert Creeley
- Song: to Celia [“Drink to me only with thine eyes”]
Ben Jonson
- Sonnet 40: Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all
William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
William Shakespeare
- The House of Life: 22. Heart's Haven
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Aimless Love
Billy Collins
- "I loved you first: but afterwards your love"
Christina Rossetti
- The Anniversary
John Donne
- I Knew a Woman
Theodore Roethke

WEDDING POEMS

See our Queer Love Poems collection and Wedding Poems sampler for more wedding poems.

- You, Therefore
Reginald Shepherd
- Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare
- Now
Robert Browning
- [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
E. E. Cummings
- Invitation to Love
Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Superbly Situated
Robert Hershon
- “Hope” is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson
- Wedding Hymn
Sidney Lanier
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
- Filling Spice Jars as Your Wife
Kai Coggin
- A Birthday
Christina Rossetti
- To My Dear and Loving Husband
Anne Bradstreet

ROMANTIC

- Malayan Figures
W. S. Merwin
- Nicole Sealey reads Object Permanence
From Ours Poetica
- Bird-Understander
Craig Arnold
- i love you to the moon &
Chen Chen
- Poem for My Love
June Jordan
- A-
Samuel Menashe
- When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats
- Lines Depicting Simple Happiness
Peter Gizzi
- Flirtation
Rita Dove
- To Helen
Frank Marshall Davis
- A Memory of Us
Safia Elhillo
- A Glimpse
Walt Whitman
- When Lucille Bogan Sings "Shave 'Em Dry"
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- I Love You
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- Of Love
Robert Herrick
- O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again
James Laughlin
- The Hush of the Very Good
Todd Boss

EROTIC

- Not Everything Is Sex
Lauren Whitehead
- Recreation
Audre Lorde
- First Kiss
Kim Addonizio
- The Imperfect Enjoyment
John Wilmot Earl of Rochester
- Aubade
Amber Flora Thomas
- Mira’s Colors
Mirabai
- Red Rum
Dorothea Lasky
- After Making Love in Winter
Sharon Olds
- Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)
Emily Dickinson
- James Dean with Pig
Sam Sax
- Upon Julia’s Breasts
Robert Herrick
- [Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]
Marilyn Hacker
- [Lying in bed I think about you]
Joshua Beckman
- To You, from Your Secret Admirer
Sharon Olds
- Do-rag
Phillip B. Williams
- Heat
Jane Hirshfield

SELF-LOVE

- Phenomenal Woman
Maya Angelou
- anthem for my belly after eating too much
Kara Jackson
- Loving the “I”
Kim Moore
- "Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust"
Sir Philip Sidney
- Megan Married Herself
Caroline Bird
- How to Triumph Like a Girl
Ada Limón
- 30th Birthday
Alice Notley
- O Me! O Life!
Walt Whitman

FAMILY LOVE

- the world is about to end and my grandparents are in love
Kara Jackson
- The Same City
Terrance Hayes
- Mothers
Nikki Giovanni
- Lines Composed upon Changing a Diaper
Jaswinder Bolina
- Today
Victoria Chang
- Sweet Daddy
Patricia Smith

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP

- Four-Eyed Girls
Nancy Lee
- Inviting a Friend to Supper
Ben Jonson
- Sonnet: I Thank You
Henry Timrod
- Blue Ridge
Ellen Bryant Voigt
- Love and Friendship
Emily Brontë

MISSING YOU

- This
Ralph Angel
- “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- "The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!"
John Keats
- Valentine
Lorna Dee Cervantes
- Dear One Absent This Long While
Lisa Olstein
- Country Love Song
Melanie Almeder
- Then
Roddy Lumsden
- [Fortune Hath Taken Thee Away, My Love]
Sir Walter Raleigh

IN LOVING MEMORY

- The Language of Dust
Assotto Saint
- To One in Paradise
Edgar Allan Poe
- Later
Raymond Luczak
- We Never Know
Yusef Komunyakaa
- Love Letter (Clouds)
Sarah Manguso
- Sonnet 23: Methought I saw my late espoused saint
John Milton
- You Were You Are Elegy
Mary Jo Bang
- An Elegy
Ben Jonson