Love poetry out loud / edited by Robert Alden Rubin.

Why love poetry?
1. Silly love songs
Litany / Billy Collins
For an amorous lady / Theodore Roethke
She's all my fancy painted him / Lewis Carroll
The Lingam and the Yoni / A.D. Hope
To an usherette / John Updike
Love under the Republicans (or Democrats) / Ogden Nash
Love : two vignettes / Robert Penn Warren
Resignation / Nikki Giovanni
"O mistress mine" (from Twelfth night) / William Shakespeare
Nothing but No and I / Michael Drayton
2. Hello, I love you
The good morrow / John Donne
"Wild nights, wild nights!" / Emily Dickinson
Meeting and passing / Robert Frost
The greeting / R.H.W. Dillard
The light / Common
"The twenty-ninth bather" (from Song of myself) / Walt Whitman
Thine eyes still shined / Ralph Waldo Emerson
Surprised by joy / William Wordsworth
Love's philosophy / Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poem / Seamus Heaney
3. The comedy of Eros
Pucker / Ritah Parrish
Love portions / Julia Alvarez
Lonely hearts / Wendy Cope
"I, being born a woman" / Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love song : I and thou / Alan Dugan
Love song / Dorothy Parker
The nymph's reply to the shepherd / Sir Walter Raleigh
Portrait of a lady / William Carlos Williams
Where be ye going, you Devon maid? / John Keats
Brown penny / W.B. Yeats


4. Eye of the beholder
How do I love thee? / Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Juke box love song / Langston Hughes
To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet
From Homage to Mistress Bradstreet / John Berryman
Song : to Celia / Ben Jonson
A red, red rose / Robert Burns
Ask me no more / Thomas Carew
A girl in a library / Randall Jarrell
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments" / William Shakespeare
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments" / Archibald MacLeish
5. Loves me
A birthday / Christina Georgina Rossetti
Thou art my lute / Paul Laurence Dunbar
Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond / E.E. Cummings
Love poem / Connie Voisine
The song of songs (7:1-8:3) / The New English Bible
"If I profane with my unworthiest hand" (from Romeo and Juliet) / William Shakespeare
Now sleeps the crimson petal / Alfred, Lord Tennyson
When we two parted / George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Joy of my life, full oft for loving you" / Edmund Spenser
The changed man / Robert Phillips


6. Loves me not
Then came flowers / Rita Dove
The defiance / Aphra Behn
A valediction : forbidding mourning / John Donne
When you are old / W.B. Yeats
I will not give thee all my heart / Grace Hazard Conkling
Neutral tones / Thomas Hardy
"I hear an army charging upon the land" / James Joyce
Silentium amoris / Oscar Wilde
Variations on the word love / Margaret Atwood
Taking off my clothes / Carolyn Forché
7. Pleasures of the flesh
Wrestling / Louisa S. Bevington
Wet / Marge Piercy
Down, Wanton, down! / Robert Graves
Poem for Sigmund / Lorna Crozier
Lullaby / W.H. Auden
Green / Paul Verlaine
Coral / Derek Walcott
Her lips are copper wire / Jean Toomer
"Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy" / John Donne
The aged lover discourses in the flat style / J.V. Cunningham
8. Will you miss me when I'm gone?
The river-merchant's wife : a letter / Ezra Pound
Letter home / Stephen Dunn
The voice / Thomas Hardy
I will not let thee go / Robert Bridges
The meeting / Katherine Mansfield
Still looking out for number one / Raymond Carver
Bearded oaks / Robert Penn Warren
48 hours after you left / DJ Renegade
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" / William Shakespeare
Good night / W.S. Merwin


9. Failure to communicate
Never pain to tell thy love / William Blake
You say I love not / Robert Herrick
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot
Adam's curse / W.B. Yeats
Fire and ice / Robert Frost
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes" / Emily Dickinson
"Since the majority of me" / Philip Larkin
The rival / Sylvia Plath
The lost mistress / Robert Browning
Sleeping with you / John Updike
10. Second time around
"Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part" / Michael Drayton
"Sign no more, ladies" (from Much ado about nothing) / William Shakespeare
Sources of the Delaware / Dean Young
December at Yase / Gary Snyder
Freedom / Jan Struther
Good morning, love! / Paul Blackburn
I so like spring / Charlotte Mew
I look into my glass / Thomas Hardy
An answer to a love letter in verse / Lady Mary Wortley Montague
Symptom recital / Dorothy Parker
Index of titles
Index of first lines
Index of authors.