Classic Love Poems
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, literary critic, and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England. Though he was already married, in 1799, he met and fell in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson. It was for Sara he wrote To Asra and other love poems. He is best known for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and the fragmented Kubla Khan (1816)—which Coleridge admitted was written while in an opium trance—as well as his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817).
“Hope Deferred”
(Based on Coleridge’s poem, Love)
Etching by Charles West Cope, 1877
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“Ancient Mariner” (Page One)
From POEMS CHOSEN OUT OF
THE WORKS OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896
To Asra
Are there two things, of all which men possess,
That are so like each other and so near,
As mutual love seems like to happiness?
Dear Asra, woman beyond utterance dear!
This love which ever welling at my heart,
Now in its living fount doth heave and fall,
Now overflowing pours thro’ every part
Of all my frame, and fills and changes all,
Like vernal waters springing up through snow,
This love that seeming great beyond the power
Of growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow,
Could I transmute the whole to one rich dower
Of happy life, and give it all to thee,
Thy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, eternity!
The Presence of Love
And in life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee,
The heart’s self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading love-throb in the heart
Thro’ all my being, thro’ my pulses beat;
You lie in all my many thoughts, like light,
Like the fair light of dawn, or summer eve
On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the lot, that made me love you.
The Sigh
When youth his faery reign began
Ere sorrow had proclaim’d me man;
While pace the present hour beguil’d,
And all the love prospect smil’d;
Then Mary! ‘mid my lightsome glee
I heav’d the painless sigh for thee.
And when, along the waves of woe,
My harass’d heart was doom’d to know
The frantic burst of outrage keen,
And the slow pang that gnaws unseen;
Then shipwreck’d on life’s storney sea
I heaved an anguish’d sigh for thee.
But soon reflection’s power imprest
A stiller sadness on my breast;
And sickly hope with waning eye
Was well content to droop and die:
I yielded to the stern decree,
Yet heaved a languid sign for thee!
And though in distant climes to roam,
A wandered from my native home,
I fain would soothe the sense of care
And lull to sleep the joys that were!
They image may not banish’d be—
Still, Mary! still I stigh for thee.
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