It was a cosy idea, it was a special pink feather in the modern European cap, that Provencal song-makers had invented the love lyric, which corresponded to the new amour courtois, the new mutuality of tenderness, which had been invented in the South all of a sudden at the beginning of the twelfth century. And of course one's thought about such poems scurries straightaway to 'It was the lark, the herald of the morn' or across another four centuries to Provene, to the alba, the poem of the night of love and then the white dawn (which is what alba first means) and the watchman who calls out that the day is showing in fact to the one particular, famous alba (so well translated by Ezra Pound, love. Or you reject me, and I return, with whatever reluctance and relief, to my senses, and reject love. I love you, or I long for you and you don't love me, or we love each other, isn't it wonderful, or we have to separate, what misery for us, or I love you for ever, or I write this poem about you in which our loving each other and your exquisiteness will be embalmed in spices of image and sound. They are the poems of situation, drama, instantaneity. The in-love poems are more numerous, as they should be.
INTRODUCTION There are love poems, in-love poems, that is to say, and poems about Both have been included in this collection, but not one for one. Published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in it is Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic All rights reserved
The Plagues of Loving-* Love Continued-* Absences, Doubts, Division-* The Faber Book of Popular Verse The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse The Faber Book of Poems and Places The Faber Book of Reflective Verse