This will definitely be my last list for a while, mainly because I’m running out of things to write lists about, but also because I imagine you must be getting quite bored of them. This is my list of my top 5 favourite romantic poems and sonnets. Enjoy!
5. Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
Favourite line: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom
I love this poem, so frequently read at weddings, it just encapsulates everything that the romantic believes. It says that no matter what the difficulties love with always persevere. It always reminds me of Kate Winslet’s portrayal of Marianne Dashwood who is, in my mind, the ultimate romantic dreamer.
4. Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet 10 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Favourite Line: Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
Ah what a beautiful sonnet about how love makes even the meanest, plainest of things beautiful. Anyone whose ever seen an ugly duckling turned bride will know that’s true.
3. Mariana by Alfred Tennyson
Favourite line: Her tears fell with the dews at even; Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
This poem is just so self-indulgent to me. A girl trapped in a moated building waiting for her love to come and get her but he never comes. It's beautifully written and just so miserable that it feels good if you know what I mean?
2.The Sun Rising by John Donne
Favourite line:To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.
John Donne begins by telling the Sun to go away and leave him and his lover in bed together a bit longer before they have to go on with their day. Then he goes on to say that actually the sun no longer needs to rise and set because there in that room is the whole world and by shining on him and his lover the sun is warming the entire world. I love it, it is so typical of the first flushes of romance to forget the whole world and for your entire universe to circle around you and your lover to such an extent that you find it hard to understand why everyone else's doesn't do the same.
1. She walks in Beauty by Lord Byron
Favourite line: And all that 's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
It had to be Byron didn't it? In my opinion no poem can make a woman melt like this one. Unfortunately gentlemen it's quite well known so I wouldn't try and pass it off as your own, but next February when you're finding yourself stuck for things to say it could come in quite handy with the Valentines' Day card. It is flattery at it's best and it is the way that a woman can look only through the eyes of a man who truly loves her.