Happy Valentine’s Day…

… and I have some of my favourite romantic pieces for you…

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W B Yeats

Love has had his way with me.

This my heart is torn and maimed

Since he took his play with me.

Cruel-well the bow-boy aimed,

Shot, and saw the feathered shaft

Dripping bright and bitter red.

He that shrugged his wings and laughed-

Better had he left me dead.

Dorothy Parker

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

                                                                    Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

                                                                    Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade

                                                                   When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

                                                                   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

                                                                   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

                                                            William Shakespeare

Absent from you – absent from sight and sound – 

Clouds are but clouds and the ground is only ground;

Say you that birds yet sing? Or that the heart is boundless?

Mervyn Peake