Pride and Prejudice

When she was only fifteen, there was a gentleman at my brother Gardiner's in town, so much in love with her, that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But however he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.''

``And so ended his affection,'' said Elizabeth impatiently. ``There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!''

``I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,'' said Darcy.

``Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Every thing nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.''

Snowflakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

even as our cloudy fancies take

Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

In the white countenance confession,

The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

this is the secret of despair,

Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

now whispered and revealed

to wood and field.

Gitanjali: Song 84

It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky. 

It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence all nights from star to star and becomes lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July. 

It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joy in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart.

Don't go far off, not even for a day

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell; 

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it; for I love you so, 

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O, if (I say) you look upon this verse, 

When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

But let your love even with my life decay,

Lest the wise world should look into your moan, 

And mock you with me after I am gone.

When I am dead, my dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,

         Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

         Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

         With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

         And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

         I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

         Sing on, as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

         That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

         And haply may forget. 

Christina G Rossetti

Mayan Prophecy 2012